Nyegh. So I’m stuck without my trusty old Xbox 360 once more, which really helps to pass time these days. I won’t get into the reasons, but it’s more due to confiscation than the somewhat clichéd “red ring of death/darkness/doom/oh shit no moar CoD lolz”. The fact that the red ring, which simply signifies that you’re going to have to be without your console for a couple of weeks, is described so extravagantly, is actually quite worrying.
I’ve said since way back that I enjoy video games immensely, but could see that they’re often viewed as sad and a bit of a niche interest. However, there is something that has occurred to me over the past couple of days, and I thought I’d look into it – the legitimacy of professional gaming as a career path. This is something that has been going on for about 10 years now, to my knowledge anyway, but has only recently begun to become lucrative for the best players, and has begun to break into the mainstream.
There are two main types of professional gaming: competition gaming, and video making, which roughly constitutes someone playing a game, making videos of their gameplay, and posting them online for others to view. This becomes a money-earner when combined with advertisements, or when done as part of a company that makes money this way, Machinima being the most obvious one.
However, whilst I will write briefly later about this side of the scene, I’m more interested in the competitive side, as this to me feels like an arena that is more likely to guarantee a constant, reasonable – if not better – income. Whilst there are many aspiring professional gamers – one only has to look at the high levels of traffic through the Major League Gaming (MLG) and Gamebattles websites to see that very few actually put in the time and dedication to get there.
Tom Taylor is known to have several sponsorship deals, in addition to prize money.
But would you want to? Whilst other sports were initially designed as a primal test of ability, video gaming, right back to Atari and Pong, was designed as a pastime, and only really became competitive with the dawn of the first person shooter (henceforth FPS) as people started playing against one another and teaming up to create giant orgies of dextrous fingers and tactical brains.
However, this seems to be to be a pointless exercise. Whilst snooker, which similarly requires dexterity of the arms and use of the brain, has the added aesthetic values, and indeed slight innuendos, of putting round, shiny balls into holes, video gaming, particularly in the FPS genre, seems to be largely a projection of fantasy (and sometimes real life) onto a screen, and it could be argued that in this way all video games are role-playing, an activity that is generally associated with lots of sad nerds gathering in lifeless dungeons and projecting some fantasy and dream onto their sad, lonely lives.
It has no higher meaning, no aesthetic value beyond what is instantly in front of the player, and so investing too much time may seem like a sad and pointless exercise. And I agree; if one was to base one’s whole life around it, then it would be pointless. However, most players just use it as a pastime, and believe it or not obliterating hundreds of pixellated men can be incredibly relaxing. I myself game in this way, and in doing so have clocked up 11 days of playtime on the popular Call Of Duty series alone merely by using it as a pastime, albeit my main one.
When it becomes more than that though, we have to look at whether the person is being damaged by the video games. Some who aspire to play professionally spend all day, every day video gaming; indeed, it is not unheard of for people to have 200 days (4800 hours) playtime on a single game. I’m not including actual professionals in this, as many people do jobs that they get nothing out of, and it pays the bills for them, so they are somewhat exempt. Indeed, certain pros have gone to greater heights, for instance, Tsquared, or Tom Taylor, is known to have several sponsorship deals, in addition to prize money.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against video games; indeed, I spend more time on them than most people I know, it’s just that they are designed to be a pastime. People who don’t play professionally sometimes spend hours ‘working’ on new strategies, and I don’t see how that can possibly be interpreted as fun, rewarding, fulfilling, or indeed constructive. So, while video games are awesome, they do have to be taken in relative moderation.
This post was originally written for Joe’s blog.