NASHUA – Robotics, computer games and a tech-friendly college are an obvious mix. Add thousands of dollars in prize money and things get, well, more interesting.

“There are a lot more gamers out there than actually admit it – it’s not necessarily just 14-year-old kids – and the money factor really gives it some legitimacy,” said Joe Donovan, director of information technology systems at Daniel Webster College.

The school plans to test that legitimacy this weekend by hosting the first of what it hopes will be a regular series of computer- and video-gaming tournaments, with a $2,000 first prize offered to the winning team, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard.

DWC hopes to make a bit of money from computers sitting unused in the summer – “We bought them with gaming specs in mind,” said college Chief Information Officer Heidi Crowell – as well as draw some attention to its continuing efforts to expand degree offerings of interest to the tech community, including a new major titled Gaming, Simulation and Robotics.

It may also be a way for a Seacoast robotics firm, hurt by low-cost competition from China, to make itself known in the Nashua area, as it tries to create what might be called the Chuck E. Cheese of the Xbox universe.

“We plan to roll out at least 160 facilities around the country, perhaps starting within a year. We hope to be public in a very short period of time . . . with an initial target of $10 million to $15 million,” said Kit McKittrick, chief executive officer of Hampton-based HoloDek, which will run the DWC tournament.

HoloDek is an unusual adjunct of a company called Parallel Robotics, which for a decade made robots for the machine tool industry.

“We made a very strong, very fast platform designed, among other things, to cut various metals into parts at very high tolerances,” said McKittrick. “When most of the business of machine tooling went to China, we had to reinvent ourselves, selling into the defense, biomedical and entertainment areas.”

At HoloDek, the robots operate platforms for gamers, so when their on-screen character moves, their chair moves, too. This has obvious applications with flight simulator software, an area of interest to Daniel Webster College, where 60 percent of the 600 undergraduate day students are in aviation programs.

HoloDek has even built something it calls The Sphere, which encases gamers in a mobile, tilting globe. The computer game is projected onto the inside of the sphere, providing a sort of immersive experience.

Even with traditional computers, HoloDek has a lot of experience running what are known as LAN, or local area network, tournaments, usually involving around $6,000 in prizes, at its Hampton facility.

Those tournaments use computers that are directly connected to each other in the same room, rather than being remotely connected over the Internet. This provides faster play and a communal atmosphere for people who enjoy battling their pals via multiplayer games like Halo 2 or Counterstrike.

LAN gaming has been around for a decade or more, but tournament prize money only entered the picture in recent years. There is a small but growing contingent of professional gamers who travel to tournaments around the country, and a New York-based professional league called Major League Gaming has attracted several thousand spectators to watch players sit on a stage and maneuver control pads while the actions of their computerized heroes are displayed on huge screens above them.

And while prize money is new for Daniel Webster College, LAN gaming isn’t: The campus has been hosting such get-togethers since 1996.

“Every Saturday night, they’re open to students on campus,” said Donovan, who added that between 25 and 40 people show up.

There’s enough interest that DWC is even trying to set up an inter-college league for gamers – which would be a first in the nation – and it offers non-credit strategy classes for people who want to learn about how to succeed in various games.

The tournament run by HoloDek could raise the level.

“This is kind of a test to see if this will work in this area,” Donovan said. “If we could do it every month, we’d love that.”

A couple of attempts to establish private, commercial LAN gaming in Nashua have fizzled. The closest is currently Area 51, in a Londonderry shopping mall.

McKittrick said HoloDek has thrived, despite being in a faceless industrial park with “negative walk-by traffic,” because it has upped the ante, providing a “country-club-type atmosphere” as computer gamers have gotten older and pickier.

With its plan to start a national chain that includes “a retail component, a hospitality component, and a gaming component,” HoloDek hopes it can spread that vision.

And even if that doesn’t work, McKittrick said having a gaming offshoot has helped Parallel Robotics.

“The robot business has improved as a result of it. The potential buyers get a real kick out of walking through the video-game aspects, and see the application as to how we can really make that robot work very deliberately,” he said.