Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline by Simon Parkin
Authors: Simon Parkin
Ads: Link
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, orwhether 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 ina 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
‘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, orwhether 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 ina 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
Similar Books
