Raindrops glide down and crash onto the hard-buckled asphalt. The wet streets glimmer and give a rich reflection of the South Of Market Area’s steel and glass landscape. Near the Metreon and Moscone Center, men in business suits and tourists seek shelter underneath awnings and alcoves.

Amidst the sea of windowpanes at the Metreon Center, a large Canadian flag is taped. It conceals the lobby area of Jillian’s Billiards, a swanky sports bar and restaurant, and hides the hundreds of patrons inside.

“I’ve been gaming for at least twenty years,” calmly explains a man in a black suit, leaning against the lobby wall. “I love the hands-on storylines and it has certain features that are unique.”

Armand Pilotin, an associate producer at Tecmo, a game publisher based in Torrance, California is in San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference hunting for the next “big thing” in video games. Tonight, he and his colleagues are invited to Jillian’s for an event hosted by the Consulate General of Canada, showcasing video games developed by Canadian companies.

Across the city, on a tree-lined street in the Mission district, a small-framed woman rips on a guitar. Moving wildly in front of her living room television set, she plays The Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” feverishly.

Cherryl Llamas, an art history major, is not strumming the all-too-familiar lead on an electric guitar like Keith Richards. Rather, she is playing like there’s no tomorrow on a three-foot piece of plastic with five buttons.

“It’s addicting…brain numbing, but addicting,” explains the giddy twenty-three-year-old, who has also been playing a real guitar since high school. “They’re both totally different—Guitar Hero serves a different purpose.”

Guitar Hero, an interactive game developed by Activision, follows the same concept as the once popular game, Dance Dance Revolution. Using a guitar-shaped controller, players need to hit the color-coded buttons on the guitar, as the colors scroll down the screen. It’s like Dance Dance Revolution, but for the fingers.

Pong, a simple game consisting of a dark screen with two light green sticks and a ball that bounced back and forth, is a game that people primarily played as children. While Pong is probably the first game people remember playing, the first video game was actually Tennis for Two, created in 1958 by physicist William Higinbotham, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

“I knew from past visitors days that people were not much interested in static exhibits,” says Higinbotham, in a 1983 interview with David H. Ahl. “So for that year, I came up with an idea for a hands-on display—a video tennis game.”

Today, those simple sticks have morphed into virtual reality. The days of silly rectangle with an arrow pad and two red buttons has transformed into fake guns, tennis rackets, and even guitars.

According to the Entertainment Software Association, U.S. computer and video game software grew six percent in 2007 to $9.5 billion—more than tripling industry software sales since 1996.

But remember—in the gaming world, PC games are different from console games, which are different from cell phone games. There isn’t a hierarchy in games, but there is a huge difference between the two.

While PC games began on the premise of games Spacewar and Centipede, they were catapulted into fame after the release of Doom. Today, graphics and faster processors have enabled game makers to create more in-depth and detailed games.

Marketing on the highly popular PC game, World of Warcraft, “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone poked fun at gamers with an episode entitled, “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” in which the main characters get obsessed with gaming.

“You could just hang outside in the sun all day tossing a ball around,” says the obnoxious and hateable Cartman. “Or you could sit at your computer and do something that matters.”

“I think gaming is bad if it’s not taken in moderation—but that’s true with almost everything,” explains James Victoria, a twenty-two-year-old student at UC Davis. “But there’s a sense of camaraderie between people when they socialize, may they be your friends in real life or online.”

Victoria, who has been gaming “since the first Nintendo,” was addicted to playing computer games last semester–to the point where he skipped classes. Aware of this alarming behavior, he sold his World of Warcraft account and began to divert his attention back to his studies.

“If I wasn’t able to sell the gaming account I would probably still be playing,” explains Victoria. “Just because my real life friends were still playing, including my roommate.”

In a top floor Victorian apartment at the edge of Noe Valley are two young men whose eyes are fixated on the forty-two inch LCD flat screen television. In each of their hands are wireless controllers and on the screen are men fully clad in armor, wielding deadly weaponry.

“From the moment I got my first regular Nintendo, I’ve been gaming ever since,” explains twenty-year-old Greg Roses.

Roses, a business major at SF State, enjoys playing console games and has Super NES and Xbox 360 at his apartment. While he says he is not a gamer, he questions the definition of gamer.

“You can say I’m a gamer, but what is a gamer?” asks Roses, sitting on his couch. “It can be what they make it to be on TV, with Cartman on South Park, but to be honest, everyone loves to play.”

Originally from La Crescenta, Roses believes playing video games isn’t entirely bad if it’s played in moderation. “Gaming is just an extension of the imagination, and imagination isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

Cherryl Llamas agrees. “Socially it’s a good thing. If you’re an introvert, it benefits you more ‘cause you can network with different kinds of people at home,” she says. “Just don’t get lazy and lose track of reality.”

While people may think of gamers as being acne-ridden geeks who throw LAN parties with an unimaginable supply of Mountain Dews and Doritos, the face of gaming is changing. It’s not just for so-called losers who are Trekkies at heart lost in the fantasy realm. They are regular people who enjoy the feeling of playing guitar, without really playing.