It’s 11 o’clock on a Saturday night and London’s drunk.
She gets like this from time to time, usually on the weekend. Sometimes the booze manifests itself in shouts and swagger, in fist-fights spewed out through bar doors onto the pavement. Tonight, though, the city’s wrapped in a gentle sort of inebriation, an exaggerated swaying on the train ride home, her eyes clenched shut with concentration: Down, stomach—down.
The Trocadero, one of the capital’s few remaining amusement arcades, is a short walk from Piccadilly Circus’s bright lights and slogans. A hen party, all crooked tiaras and bleared mascara, totters past the giant double doors: these stretched escalators and polished floors are no place for cocktails on high heels. Inside, rows of arcade machines buzz and bleep, attract mode sequences beckoning the curious with the promise of pixel adventure. Teenagers stand idly by with a studied nonchalance. They glance at player performances here and there with self-conscious dispassion.
Arcades like this are video gaming’s public installations, a shared focal point for performance and drama in front of an impromptu assembled audience. It was in such a venue that the medium made its public debut when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet, Computer Space, in the Dutch Goose bar near Stanford University in 1971. The video game—a homeless invention that previously never had a natural location to call its own—flourished in public. A year after Computer Space’s arrival, Al Acorn, one of Atari’s first employees, was called to Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, where a Pong location-test machine had malfunctioned. On arrival, Acorn opened the coin box to issue himself free credits for testing, only to be showered with coins. The game had proved so popular that the coin mechanism had seized.
The moneymaking heyday is gone. Video-game arcades are dismissed by most as relics of a bygone era, remainders of a pastime that has little relevance to the medium’s contemporary landscape. In a sense that’s true. The value of the arcade was, for many, in providing a road map to interactive technology’s future, a sparkling promo for the destinations to which home-based video games would arrive in a few years’ time. Then, as console manufacturers closed that technological gap, it grew more difficult to draw players from the comfort of their homes. People didn’t get out so much, when it came to video games. Today arcades have mostly vanished, the industry that fathered video games mostly forgotten by young players.
The tragedy is that arcades came to symbolise technical prowess. This focus became their destruction, because it ignored their true power and appeal, their ability to bring a crowd together to watch a masterly performance. Video games are closer to music than film in this regard. Games and music both allow their performers to interpret the experience that the creator devised, adding personal inflections and character to make the piece their own. They allow their players to accent, to flex, to showboat, to be virtuosi. In this sense, arcades were the public venues for video-game performance, where skilled players could show off their talent to a watching crowd.
Upstairs, to the right of the central escalator that runs like a spinal column up from the Trocadero’s entrance to the building’s summit, there is a Dance Dance Revolution cabinet. First released in 1998, this is a game that’s played not with one’s fingers and thumbs, but with one’s feet. Players must step in time to the music that blares from the machine’s speakers, pressing down on one of four arrows on the floor in front of the cabinet, copying the on-screen directions as if reading a formative kind of musical notation. The premise is simple, but mastery is hard-won. Everyone’s first time with the game descends into an awkward tussle of limbs, partly hilarious, partly humiliating. The muscle memory required to conquer the streams of directional inputs extends across your whole body—and until you’ve built the necessary skills, it’s easy to trip over your feet and end up in a heap on the floor.
In London, the machine still holds pride of place, dominating the scene with its bulk and noise. The coin mechanism is yet to jam from overuse, but it must still be the operator’s highest-earning machine to warrant such a valuable location.
On this particular night a crowd of teenagers and young twenty-somethings loiter around the machine. They are not here to play. They are here to perform and to be performed for. The rows of teenagers ripple out from the spectacle at their centre, eyes fixed on the two alpha teens perched with their elbows on the machine’s rest bars. As the flurry of beats stabs the air through the machine’s oversized speakers, their legs spasm, bodies twisting in staccato rhythm with the game’s directional arrows. The game judges their rhythmic timing with on-screen pronouncements: ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect,’ ‘Very Good,’ ‘Perfect.’ It might not be dancing in the strict sense—more foot-controlled Simon Says—but it dazzles.
The song ends with the crack of a processed snare, and both men step down from the platform, sweating and panting but also smirking at their accomplishment and, more important, the attention their performance has received. Both walk away with a kind of slow-motion bluster, seeking to hide any trace of exertion, pretending this is the most natural thing in the world and what-the-hell-are-you-staring-at-anyway?
Now a short, plump man in his late thirties steps forward. He wears tight jeans crowned by a bright orange fanny-pack slung over his hip: a holster for the tools of tourism containing, presumably, camera, hotel key card, and passport.
His walk is affected, as if he’s trying to blend with the group around him, but his awkwardness betrays his otherness. There is an audible inhalation from the crowd as he adds his coin to the line of game reservations resting at the bottom of the screen. Spectators’ eyes meet for the first time: is this guy for real?
Five minutes later, it is his turn. He steps to the platform with a heavy foot and the buzz rises in intensity, the crowd all whisper and jostle.
In Dance Dance Revolution, there are a number of ways you can play. The most straightforward is ‘single,’ during which you step in time to the music over just the four directional arrows of a compass. Up, down, left and right. There is space on the platform for two players to do this simultaneously, playing side by side against each other, each on their own four-arrowed section. For those who are exceptionally talented, rehearsed, or naive, it is possible to play ‘double,’ whereby you must step in complicated patterns over both sides of the platform, with no fewer than eight potential positions for your feet, as if performing the dances of two people simultaneously. In this scenario, the rhythmic shower of directional commands snakes across the machine, and the whole exercise becomes much more physical, as players must move their bodies across a wider area in an effort to hit the pads in sequence.
As the man selects to play across both sets of pads on the game’s toughest song, the crowd’s buzz carries a single question: is this man talented or rash? More than half the watchers presume he’s blindly picking options that he doesn’t understand. No one considers the truth: this fumbling, pausing, and scratching-of-the-head is a kind of pantomime, baiting the audience for a switch that will happen seconds later as he finally begins to dance.
For the next eight or so minutes the crowd watches agog, immovable, exchanging smiles, nods, and head-shaking disbelief with one another. The dancer never misses a beat. ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect,’ ‘Perfect.’ Then, at the climax of his performance, the man, glistening and portly, jumps from the machine with a slim smile and tears off down the escalator.
The crowd dissipates into the cold night outside, smiling to itself, drunk on wonder.
Dance Dance Revolution makes the performative aspect of video games obvious. As players twist and tap in time with the music, their skill is as evident as that of the leaping athlete (and, like the athlete or musician, Dance Dance Revolution masters are not born but made; they too must rehearse and practise behind closed doors, acquiring the muscle memory and technique). But, like any video game that scores players on their performance, Dance Dance Revolution has an element of competition. The high-score table, which ranks players according to their best performance, acts like a thrown gauntlet: play me, get good, and, just maybe, your name will be recorded here, among the greats. Video games, in their scores, levels, and trophies, offer a neat numerical readout of a person’s skill, effort, and achievement. Progress and improvement can be measured cleanly and clearly, as you top the rankings in a Call of Duty match or reach the next level in Space Invaders. And on this battlefield you are able to compete for hours without physically tiring, as you might in a game of football.
The thrill of video-game competition and the quest for glory are what draw millions of players into online video games each day, and keeps them coming back. They’ve been present and enduring since the medium’s emergence.
Founded in 2004 in a former metal shop at 388 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, Barcade is an establishment that expresses its gimmickry through its name with rare economy: a bar themed around 1980s arcade machines. Barcade has little of the grime and grubbiness of its New York amusement-arcade forerunners, whose players would hunch like addicts, swapping tips in whispers as they competed for high-score dominance some twenty-five years ago. For Barcade’s patrons, most of whom are in their twenties, this is, rather, a museum of outmoded technology.
They wear much the same uniform as their forebears: Martin Amis, following his dalliance with an arcade machine in southern France, moved to New York, where he described the wardrobe of the average arcade-goer at the time as: ‘woolly hat, earphones, windbreaker, jeans, moonboots and a Rubik’s Cube key-ring,’ a similar uniform to that of the twenty-first-century Williamsburg hipster. But the majority of today’s clientele come to enjoy the ambiance rather than feed a high-score-chasing habit. They come for this parade of hands-on exhibits, curios whose bleeps and flashes provide an atmospheric link to a past long gone but, through the iconography of Space Invaders and Pac-Man, not forgotten, and even made fashionable. (The chunky pixel aesthetic of 1980s video games is again popular, this time not through technological necessity, but through artistic choice. Many game developers use archaic pixel art as an aesthetic, either to infuse their game with an air of nostalgia, or simply because they prefer to work with these cartoonish sprites.)
Regardless of the zeitgeist that gathered these machines today, there’s something transporting about their physicality. Stare into the Asteroids field, face lit up white and fixed five inches from the screen, and the experience is no less mesmerising than when it rolled out of designer Ed Logg’s mind and into bars in 1979. Barcade offers a glimpse of how things once were, when the video-game industry was still in its mewling infancy. Grasp an arcade stick here and you shake hands with one of the medium’s proto-Adams, that which begat Galaxian, which begat Defender, which begat Elite, which begat Super Mario World. Here you can reconnect with that past.
Then there are those who come here not for nostalgia, or for a beery lesson in interactive history. Rather, they come for something more alive and current. Because here, in the monolithic permanence of the high-score table (many of which still proudly display the three-letter initials of players who recorded their scores in years gone by), some of the video-game form’s primal appeal can be found.
Hank Chien is a plastic surgeon from New York. He specialises in reshaping his patients’ eyes to create a crease in the upper eyelid. He first heard about Barcade when browsing the Donkey Kong world leaderboard, an online list of the highest scores ever recorded on the formative arcade game. Unlike other patrons, he comes to Barcade not to soak up the beer and atmosphere, but to compete.
A few months before he found the global Donkey Kong leaderboard, Chien had watched the Seth Gordon documentary King of Kong, a film that documents the rivalry between two of the arcade game’s best players, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, as they compete for the world-record score in the game. Chien, curious about the game (he was seven when it originally launched in 1981; the Taiwanese national had never played it before), loaded a version onto his home computer only to discover a natural, latent talent for the game. Each night when he returned home from his private practice in Flushing, Queens, he would play Donkey Kong.
Donkey Kong was the first video game designed by the medium’s most famous and storied designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, shortly after he joined Nintendo in the mid-1970s as an artist. Initially the young designer was told to devise a game featuring the cartoon character Popeye. Nintendo, however, was unable to obtain the rights to the American comic strip, so Miyamoto was instead asked to invent his own character for the game. Drawing inspiration from the classic 1933 film King Kong and the fable Beauty and the Beast, he constructed a simple story involving a gorilla that had escaped from its cage and kidnapped the player character’s girlfriend, Pauline. In the story, the gorilla climbed to the top of a seven-storey construction site and began to hurl barrels at his pursuer below.
Nintendo’s president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, asked Miyamoto to choose an English name for the game. Miyamoto used a dictionary to look up the words he wanted: ‘Donkey,’ as a synonym for ‘Stubborn,’ and ‘Kong’ for gorilla. The gorilla’s master, the player-character, was just known as ‘Jumpman.’
The game was a sizeable success and sold more than 67,000 machines in the United States. Following the success, Nintendo changed Jumpman’s name to Mario in honour of the company’s U.S. landlord, Mario Segale, who had generously agreed to give the company’s American office more time to pay its rent prior to Donkey Kong’s release. Super Mario was born.
The game’s vital place in the medium’s history is clear, and its success was no fluke. Donkey Kong has endured not only for its memorable characters (and a high-profile legal case brought by the film studio Universal, which claimed that the game was based on its seminal film King Kong) but for its allure as a competitive game, a place where players are able to showboat and quest for glory, competing against both the titular gorilla and other players who seek to demonstrate their dominance through the high-score table’s resolute verdict.
Chien grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, and attended Stuyvesant High School and then Harvard, where he was a math and computer science major. He graduated from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Donkey Kong quickly became the ideal way for the young doctor to relax, even though the precise twitches and jolts of play mimicked his day job.
The surgeon soon realised he had a talent for the game. After three months of concerted effort, he managed to reach the ‘kill screen,’ a notorious threshold for any player of the game: the point at which Donkey Kong freezes owing to a programming bug, after which it is impossible to progress.
Eager to take his newfound talent on the road, but unsure of where he might find a working Donkey Kong cabinet in the wild, Chien logged on to the Internet and visited Twin Galaxies, a Guinness Book of World Records–endorsed website that collates the world’s highest recorded scores for a slew of arcade games. Chien wanted to know whether there was another top-flight Donkey Kong player in New York, someone with whom he might share tips and secrets and, if he got lucky, who owned a working cabinet on which he could practise. Almost immediately Chien found his man: Benjamin Falls, one of the top Donkey Kong players in the world.
‘I contacted him through the site and we immediately became friends,’ Chien tells me. ‘Now I would consider him a mentor to me.’ Falls introduced his new protégé to a number of other top Donkey Kong players. They invited him to Barcade, the only bar in New York with a working Donkey Kong cabinet.
‘Naturally Donkey Kong was the first game I played on my initial visit,’ says Chien. ‘What grabbed me about the game were the constant improvements in your scores and the long learning curve. No matter how good you are, there are always ways to improve your game.’ Donkey Kong also appealed to Chien as a game that dynamically creates its challenge. Players have to learn its concepts, rather than merely memorising the precise moments at which to jump. ‘People talk about patterns in Donkey Kong when really they are just guidelines,’ he says. ‘There are no patterns in Donkey Kong, and the ones people refer to as patterns frequently fall apart.’
After another few months of playing at Barcade under the tutelage of more experienced players, Chien was able to reach the kill screen consistently. ‘At that point, I decided I would buy my own machine, record a score, submit it to Twin Galaxies, sell my machine, and be done,’ he says. ‘However, I was still improving, and by the time I got my machine I wanted more than to merely reach the kill screen: I wanted a million points. At the time there were only two official scores in excess of a million points, so it was an ambitious goal.’
The first time Hank Chien broke a million points, he was killing time in his small apartment in midtown Manhattan before a flight. It was a victory, but somehow it didn’t satisfy in the way that he had hoped. He had reached his ambitious goal but, with all the drawn-eyed hunger of the glory addict, he decided it wasn’t enough; he wanted more.
Chien had his chance to improve upon his feat a few weeks later, in February 2010, when a snowstorm forced him to cancel his surgery schedule for the day, allowing him to sleep in.
‘I actually tried to go to work that day,’ he recalls. ‘When I reached my car, it was engulfed in snow up to the side-view mirrors. I called my office and cancelled everything for the day. Being locked at home, I decided to make some world-record attempts.’
Chien switched on the Donkey Kong cabinet that stands next to his television. At first, he found that he ‘couldn’t get a game started,’ as he puts it. The game’s first few levels are more random than those that follow, and frequently players will take more risks since the stakes are lower. ‘This is why you’ll see even the top players dying very often in the early stages and sometimes taking hours before they play out a game,’ says Chien. ‘I took frequent breaks and caught up on sleep throughout the day.’
That night, well rested and relaxed, Chien sat down for a final attempt of the day. Two and a half hours later, moments after the stroke of midnight, Chien stood to his feet, shouting the proclamation: ‘New world record!’
‘It is a good feeling to know you’re the best in the world at something,’ Chien told The New York Times shortly after his victory, ‘but one thing about Donkey Kong, you know there are people out there trying every day to break your record.’ Indeed, Billy Mitchell, the previous record holder, wrested the title back five months later with a score of 1,062,800 points. Steve Wiebe, the other major Donkey Kong competitor featured in Gordon’s film, set a new record with a score of 1,064,500 points the following month. Then, in February 2011, Chien set another world record at the Funspot arcade in New Hampshire. This rapid leap-frogging demonstrates the vibrancy of competition within the game, the draw for competitors to prove their dominance at a game that, in technological terms at least, has been outmoded for decades.
The quest for glory through the lens of public performance has always been a part of the video game’s appeal. Video games are like musical instruments, but that is only half of the truth. They are also very often like sports, constantly gauging the player’s performance in words or numbers. They are competitive, driving players to strive for domination. They are a challenge, and one that most obviously accounts for the acts of human obsession and commitment to their simulated bounds, even, as in Donkey Kong’s case, decades after their invention. For many players, video games offer the same thrill and appeal as sports: an opportunity to prove oneself, to measure oneself against others, a focal point for aggression, rivalry, and battle within a simulated domain.
This would have been a significant factor in keeping Chen Rong-Yu at his keyboard the night that he died. League of Legends, the game that he was playing, is so effective at drawing its players into the cycle of sport and improvement that there are now training houses around the world whose residents live together only to improve at League of Legends.
One such group lives and practises less than an hour’s drive from the Internet café in which Rong-Yu died.
The Taipei 101 skyscraper’s stratospheric tendrils stab at the Taiwanese capital’s skyline. This was the first building to break the half-kilometre mark, its towering silhouette an exclamation point to mark modern man’s obsession and achievement. The 101 floors inside provide office space to many of the world’s largest investment banks and corporations, including Google and Starbucks. It’s filled with the pungent aromas of money and success. The surrounding area is some of Taipei’s most expensive real estate, home to well-to-do bankers, lawyers, and the like; it’s a seat for the city’s mayor.
It’s also home to five young men who, in 2012, left their homes and moved into a penthouse apartment within the Taipei 101’s shadow. The friends are unlikely neighbours to the other Xinyi District residents. They don’t have high-powered jobs in industry or technology and, at the time they moved in at least, none could be considered rich.
Chen, Alex, Stanley, Toyz and Bebe are the Taipei Assassins, a professional eSports team who, for two years, used this spacious house as their headquarters, home, and training facility.
In January 2012, the training began in earnest. The days started at 9 a.m. and lasted for thirteen hours. During this time the young men played League of Legends almost continuously, trying out new techniques, then refining them, watching replays of their mistakes and victories and poring over footage of other teams’ matches in an effort to discern their rivals’ idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses.
‘TPA,’ as its fans would later affectionately refer to the team, spent two hours each day exercising and taking English classes; an education to produce a PR burnish. This dual focus on inward and outward professionalism was no coincidence: Garena, a private company based in Singapore, paid for the house, its twenty computers, food and weekly cleaners. Garena’s directors hoped that their investment might be recouped in tournament winnings.
On October 13, 2012, in front of eight million viewers at the Los Angeles Galen Center, the gamble paid off: the Taipei Assassins won the League of Legends world championship final. Their winnings totalled $1 million.
So-called ‘gaming houses’ are not a new idea, Michael O’Dell, manager of Dignitas, one of the oldest and largest professional eSports teams in the world, tells me.
‘Since the very first professional video-game tournaments I became involved with in the early 2000s, teams have lived together in order to spend more time practising,’ he says. ‘Although I suppose until recently they functioned more like a boot camp before a large tournament—a few weeks of intense training in hired accommodation.’
Today, gaming houses are year-round arrangements, perennial exercise camps for professional young teams to train in, away from distraction.
‘Living together changes everything,’ says O’Dell. ‘When my teams practise remotely over the Internet I don’t know what’s going on in the background. Are they concentrating properly? Is the television on? Is the girlfriend there interfering? But when you’re in a gaming house—especially when you have a manager and an analyst there with you, looking over your shoulder—nobody’s mucking around. They’re fully focused.’
eSports—the business of professional competitive video-game playing—is still in its infancy. But what has been something of a cultural sideshow has begun to grow into a major commercial concern, fuelled by corporations such as Garena, who scout and hire talented young players, provide them with food and a dedicated training facility and, naturally, take a healthy cut of any winnings (O’Dell: ‘The team receive the majority of the prize money in the event of a win; but of course we take a cut too’). The first League of Legends grand prize amounted to $50,000. In 2012, that grew to $1 million, and in 2014, it was more than $2 million. As the size of the prizes increases, so too do the professionalism and dedication of the competitors and the interest of the entrepreneurial businessmen who support them. Money changes sport, even virtual sport.
Dignitas now employs seventy players in eighteen different countries around the world, all managed by O’Dell from his home office in Surrey, England. Each player on the team earns a basic salary of $25,000 a year, but this can increase drastically with sponsorship deals and winnings. The multimillion-dollar-prize pots make attractive headlines for young game-players. But the steady salaries offer a chance to turn a hobby into a profession.
‘Last year we decided to rent a house full-time and do it properly,’ says O’Dell. ‘A gaming house is where the players live and train so they think about the game twenty-four-seven. It makes everything more cohesive.’ Initially O’Dell settled upon a large house in Beverly Hills, close to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. But when the team moved in, they found that the landlord had exaggerated the speed of the Internet connection. In online eSports, a house’s network connection speed is a far more important selling point than a spacious kitchen or a downstairs bathroom.
The team broke off the contract with the landlord and, after a few weeks’ searching, settled upon another extravagant mansion, this time overlooking Long Beach, California.
‘We wanted a gated community and somewhere pretty remote,’ says O’Dell. Why did the house need to be remote? ‘Because the team has got a hell of a lot of fans. We didn’t want them being distracted all of the time. That said, we’ve already had a couple of people find out where they’re based and come knocking.’
Riot Games, League of Legends’ developer, is intimately involved with these teams. Indeed, in many cases the studio is directly paying for their houses. For the makers of competitive video games, a vibrant eSports league is a key ingredient in a game’s potential success, bringing a different sort of profile, interest, and drama to the game.
‘A healthy league is a great asset to the developer and builds interest in their game,’ explains O’Dell, ‘but it also adds an element of aspiration for many fans.’ Brandon Beck, Riot’s founder, admits that the studio was reluctant to turn its game into a sport: ‘We never fancied ourselves as league commissioners,’ he says. ‘I don’t think it was on anyone’s Top Fifty list of things they wanted to do—it’s not a core competency of any game developer. But we get it. When you’re creating a professional sport, it’s part of the job.’
For this reason, in 2013 Riot began to pay each of the top professional teams a salary, thereby ensuring that no player ducked out mid-season owing to failing interest or team squabbling, legitimate risks in a sport populated by relative youngsters (Dignitas’s five League of Legends players range in age from nineteen to just twenty-three). Combined rent and bills on the Team Dignitas house is around $5,500 per month, most of which is paid for by Riot. It’s no great surprise. This sort of property is out of the price range of most people of their age. Indeed, for many players in the league who have moved into gaming houses, it’s the first time they’ve lived away from their parents.
Despite the players’ youth, there’s little in the way of carousing for these devotees.
‘Our guys are not party animals,’ O’Dell says. ‘They are professional. They know that this is a training camp. They know what they are playing for.’ With so much money at stake, small wonder the team skips partying. ‘Anyone who doesn’t take it seriously is crazy,’ O’Dell says. ‘In my mind there’s no difference to a professional sport. You have to make sacrifices to be the best. That’s what these guys do. And they get paid a lot of money to do it.’
Ostensibly, gaming houses are about a sport (or, perhaps, a hobby with ambitions to become a sport) beginning to take itself more seriously. Footage of the occupants’ daily routine may make for an uninspiring training montage in a sports movie—the grim clicking in front of the milky glow of a screen, surrounded by a shantytown of headphones and fast-food cartons—but the aim is shared with traditional athletes: to close out the world in order to fully focus on one’s chosen talent.
More generally and perhaps more pertinently, gaming houses are about a sport beginning to be taken more seriously. In July 2013, O’Dell hired an immigration lawyer who successfully campaigned to have one of Dignitas’s players issued with a U.S. athlete visa, a move that effectively sees the game recognised as a professional sport. For the managers who pull the teams together and pay for their lodgings and the developers who organise the championships in which they participate, gaming houses are a way to legitimise or formalise a sport that might otherwise appear to be transient and of-the-moment. These residences offer a badge of authenticity scrawled onto the landscape: look, they proclaim, we have training facilities just like the real sports. We, like bricks and mortar, are here to stay.
It’s telling that the gaming house’s purpose is, in no small part, to ensure that the young players don’t quit a league mid-season, distracted by any one of the scores of tantalising teenage diversions. These are, after all, not young athletes who have worked their way up through clubs, sacrificing weekends at the gym or grimly practising in harsh weather. They are video-game players, who discovered that they could click and blink more quickly than their rivals. For all the spectacle, the silver championship cups, the inconceivably large online viewerships (in 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitch, a website that broadcasts online eSports matches, accounts for more U.S. Internet traffic during peak usage hours than any other company apart from Netflix, Google, and Apple) and the money-spinning corporate sponsorships, eSports wears its name awkwardly. A day’s work that begins at 1 p.m. and ends at 10 p.m. might be considered gruelling to an adolescent, fatigued by hormones and growth, but it’s hardly the schedule of the athlete.
Nevertheless, O’Dell views his team as sportsmen and the game as a sport just like any other. Team Dignitas has about sixty players, who play across nine different video games. More than half of them draw a salary, derived from tournament winnings, sponsorship deals, and, most recently, advertising revenue earned from Twitch. The best players can earn up to $200,000 a year (O’Dell estimates the average annual salary is currently around $60,000). With so much at stake, he has hired a life coach to spend time with his players.
‘They’re able to open up to him about their problems, both personal and professional,’ he says. ‘Last week he took them to the beach and they built sandcastles together as a team-building exercise. It has to be like a family, a team, otherwise it doesn’t work at all.’
The recent rise of gaming houses emphasises the sport-like aspects of the medium. But they’re not necessarily a poor cousin to football, tennis, et al. Video games have added advantages over traditional sports. They are regulated and refereed by an omniscient and fair computer. There is no doubt over whether a goal was in or not, or whether one player fouled another. It’s all there, in the watching code, which guarantees unimpeachable fairness (indeed, professional sports increasingly rely on computerised referees). Secondly, they do not demand physical fitness or prowess. Sure, the quick reactions of youth offer an advantage, but video games are a sedentary pursuit. They offer all of the psychological benefits of sport—the excitement, the fervour, the racing pulse, the strategy—without the lactic-acid chaser. Indeed, for a certain type of person, a video game can be played almost indefinitely without the need for rest or interruption.
This is their great benefit, but it’s also their great peril. For some people, devotion to improving at a video game begins to mimic the unbreakable grip of substance addiction, if not the chemical dependence.
Matthew Boyle began playing the online role-playing game World of Warcraft when he was nineteen years old and working a night shift in a factory. At first playing the game was a hobby, a way to pass the afternoons before he left for work. But when Boyle lost his job, the focus changed.
‘I didn’t go balls-to-the-wall right away,’ he says, ‘but I did become severely addicted. The real transition happened when the exploration and thrill of this new world faded. Now the goal was to become better than the next person.’
It was the friend who first introduced Boyle to World of Warcraft who taught him a more ‘hardcore’ way of playing. ‘We were on a levelling binge,’ he says, ‘and instead of taking turns playing, we would take turns sleeping. After that the average day involved waking up to log in, and playing till I couldn’t stay awake any longer. Sometimes this went on for days at a time till I’d fall asleep in a puddle of drool, and wake up with a waffle print in my face from the keyboard.’
Boyle’s impoverished circumstances fuelled his interest in the game. He had no job, a ‘horrible girlfriend,’ and a ‘slum of an apartment’ with no heating or windows. ‘I would skip showers because the place was so horrendously cold,’ he recalls. ‘I’d rather deal with the discomfort of being filthy. But in the game I was in the top five hundred players worldwide. I was a success. So there was more of a motivation to better my avatar and go for numbers in rankings than there was to further my education. When achieving an ultra-hard kill, or getting rare loot, I could only compare that feeling to what I would assume achieving something great within a team might feel like.’
Justin Edmond, another self-professed ‘powergamer,’ also plays World of Warcraft with the focus and enthusiasm of an employee working for a promotion. ‘At first I started playing World of Warcraft with the sole aim of the final boss at the time,’ he tells me. ‘Killing him was such a huge event: we had tried for weeks, and when he finally dropped I screamed in excitement. After that it was a case of trying to recreate that thrill.’
Edmond, who lives in Alberta, USA, and his friends attempted to recreate the thrill by chasing ‘world firsts.’
‘When the game’s next chapter launched, we set our alarm clocks for three in the morning, in order to wake up before school to play,’ he says. ‘Wanting to be the best, and wanting our guild to be the first, is what motivated me. It was exciting to reach an encounter and figure out how to beat it so you could say you were the first guys to do so. Not only were you praised for your speed by others, but you had the enjoyment of figuring out how to beat the challenge.’
Edmond was a keen sportsman and musician at school, but the thrill of acquiring a world first in World of Warcraft offered, he says, a far greater buzz than ‘beating another group of sixteen-year-old kids from a small town.’ Edmond was an accomplished student. He was active in the science fair and regularly entered national school jazz band competitions. But something about competing on an international scale within World of Warcraft offered a greater thrill than anything he had yet experienced.
‘I was into spreadsheets and mathematics, so I did a lot of the strategising for the group,’ he says. ‘I loved trying to find the optimal solution to a problem. I could use logic, math, and problem-solving, and I could find answers that would cause people all over the world to change the way in which they approached the game. To be admired by so many people was a great feeling. It started to get more serious once I took on more of a role in the guild. We were popular in this online world, and the power and attention was an amazing feeling for a sixteen-year-old kid from a small town.’
As Edmond’s role in the guild expanded and he developed leadership qualities, he found that the way in which he interacted with others outside of the game began to subtly shift.
‘It was hard for a shy kid like me to stand up and boss people around,’ he says. ‘As I started to develop this assertiveness, it caused me some problems at school as I went from somebody people listened to and respected in the game world to just another kid in a sea of schoolchildren. At that age it was really hard to keep both worlds separate. It was easy to want to value the game world more than the real world as I felt more appreciated there.
Powergaming is the pursuit of the time-rich, the domain of students and the unemployed, those who are able to dedicate the swaths of time necessary to master the game and then maintain their mastery. But this approach to playing games also demands a certain type of player, the kind of human who can maintain focus on a single goal at the expense of all others. For Edmond, the dedication he gave reflects the part of his personality that wants to compete and to become the best.
For Boyle, however, the obsession reflects something that he views as a negative aspect of his personality.
‘It was an absolute loss of time,’ he says. ‘I took nothing good away from it. Instead I lost several years of my life I could have done something else with. It was a cause of concern and disgust for my family, like a bad drug addiction where you would sacrifice nearly everything for the monthly subscription and Internet access. Those days were far from glamorous, and what money was made from playing got dumped back into the games to fuel the addiction. It took boredom for me to finally break the cycle.’
While many powergamers set aside the pursuit of in-game excellence as they grow older and the demands of adulthood squeeze free time and energy, the inner mentality developed through these experiences is not so easily discarded.
‘To this day I still enjoy playing games at the top tier,’ says Edmond. ‘When you’re just a casual player you muddle through. When you’re at the top level, you have to experiment and truly understand the concepts. This gives you more freedom in a way. Most of us still enjoy the challenge of figuring out a game and getting to the top, but we no longer desire the stagnant gameplay of remaining there.’
Today Boyle warns others away from this mode of play. But Edmond is more pragmatic.
‘Don’t listen to all those horror stories about people who ruined their lives this way,’ he says. ‘People ruin their lives with partying. People ruin their lives by trying to be professional athletes. You can find scare stories about people destroying their lives doing almost anything. Setting a goal and accomplishing it is one of the greatest things a person can do.’
For each of these players around the world, video games provided a clear and, crucially, an achievable goal—one that came with the promise of peer approval and kudos. Whether you’re being applauded for your performance on the Dance Dance Revolution machine, for your world-record-breaking high score in a thirty-year-old arcade game, or for your character’s hard-won cloak in an online game, these video games provide an accessible route to glory. In reality, success is rarely reported so straightforwardly. Virtual attainment is an illusion we willingly serve, sometimes at the cost of genuine personal, professional, financial, social, or spiritual progress and, more pertinently, as a dependable stand-in when those things prove elusive. Video games give us a sense of achievement that is, in the moment at least, indistinguishable from success outside the game.
And on the leaderboard, that semi-permanent record of a person’s achievements, there is a kind of immortality, a reassurance that, contrary to what many might believe, this wasn’t a waste of time, an endeavour that will be lost the moment the machine is switched off.
Video games record our achievements (the modern consoles even use the terminology, recording in-game achievements as part of an enduring player’s profile that, presumably, they will carry throughout their lives). We talk of ‘saving’ our progress in a game, making a permanent record of what we’ve done within their reality. Video games are perhaps a kind of immortality project, a way to save the memory of our progress in life, a way to find glory through victory in competition and, ultimately, a way to somehow endure.