Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (6 page)

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.