Armchair Gunslingers
Computer gaming tournaments offer
fame (sort of) and fortune (more than you think). There
may be an elite 'athlete' in the cube next to you.
By Jessika Bella Mura
digitalMASS © 2000
December 14 2000
Chances are, you're headed to another
holiday party this weekend. But a talented few are
forsaking the buffet dinners and drunk coworkers for a
weekend of adrenaline-wracked fragging in Dallas. The Babbage's/Cyberathlete
Professional League Tournament began there yesterday
and runs through Sunday, drawing 512 of the world's top
gamers, including a handful from Massachusetts.
Grigori Jevdokimov, soft-spoken
sophomore from Endicott College, will be there, even
though he should be studying for finals. Dana
"Indio" Shetterly of North Adams is taking a
couple of days off his job at BFI to see if he can be
one of the top 64 Quake
3 fanatics to share in $122,000 in prize money. And
14th seed Paul "CZM" Nelson of Framingham
thinks he might have a shot at first place in the
one-on-one competition, even though the field includes
teammate Jonathan "Fatality" Wendel, champ of
the recent CPL Europe tourney and winner of more than
$100,000 in prize money this year.
"We are at an embryonic stage,
but we think that we are growing at an exponential rate
that is unheard of in sports," says CPL founder
Angel Munoz. After a quiet start in mid 1997, the CPL is
making a big splash this year with a high-profile slate
of tournaments, picking up where the dormant
Professional Gamers League left off. The CPL has lined
up sponsors eager to showcase their hardware under the
extreme conditions of competitive gaming: for the Dallas
event, Gateway
is coughing up 160 1.4 gigahertz Pentium 4 computers, NetGear
is providing $30,000 worth of switching equipment, and
the whole shebang is being strung together with 4 miles
of Monster
Cable .
As the heaps of equipment might
suggest, the participants are predominantly and
predictably male. But the sisters of Lara Croft will be
there too. Female first-person shooters are encouraged
to play in the general competition, but haven't yet
cracked the top 10 percent of players. So, Munoz says,
"We had to manage the demographics." While
Munoz says he feels uneasy about offering a separate
women's category, he also admits that the female-only
events are the most watched. "There is an
entertainment quality to watching two women basically duke
it out ."
Ahem. But as with the much-maligned
sweet science, people have been asking if competitive
gaming indeed constitutes a sport. With sponsorships,
prize money, and stars that trot the globe a la Tiger
Woods and Pete Sampras, the trappings are there, but
gaming maintains its image as the geeky pastime of a
bunch of armchair gunslingers. "There's a lot of
stigma to it still," says Munoz.
Could it be the lack of overt
athleticism required? Then again, think archery, or
maybe curling. Give humans any task, and someone will
take it to an absurd level of achievement. Remove any
practical application, and it becomes sport (either
that, or one of Martha
Stewart's many pursuits).
Munoz's favorite analogy is to auto
racing, which he calls "another technology-based
sport." While absent the risk to life and limb,
gaming capitalizes on the same sharp reflexes and
pinpoint control. Besides, says Munoz, "what's
missing in reality we present virtually" -- large
projection screens at this weekend's event will
emphasize what the gamer is seeing, much like a camera
positioned on a racer's helmet.
Paul Nelson likens computer gaming to
chess, for its strategic nature and for the
"killing" that takes place. Nelson, a
16-year-old high school junior, had to have his parents
sign a release
allowing him to squeak under the age restriction for
mature-rated games. However, he dismisses any negative
impact the grislier games might have on his youthful
psyche. "If you have a firm enough grasp on reality
you don't have to be worried too much about being
affected by these games," he says briskly.
Of greater concern to Nelson is how
he'll adjust to LAN-based play, which lacks the delay
inherent in the Internet-based arena. Grigori Jevdokimov
might have an even bigger adjustment to make. He says
his connection at school is so bad that sometimes he
gets up at 5 a.m. to play and even then is sometimes
disappointed.
Gamers don't necessarily have to go
far to overcome technological hurdles. Check out your
local LAN
party . David "Rooster [3D]" Crowell,
founder of 3Demons CyberArena, says that at party
number 5 , to be held this February in Framingham,
earlier bandwidth bottlenecks will be eliminated with a
fully switched network. LAN parties are a growing
phenomenon, and while the competition is still pretty
healthy, Crowell says that "people from all walks
of life are involved in this stuff because it's just a
lot of fun."
Even in the upper echelons, money
hasn't poisoned the atmosphere as it arguably has in
more established sports. Some gamers I spoke to said
they'd be happy simply to recoup expenses at this
weekend's tournament. Paul Nelson says that, if
anything, he's playing for the recognition. "I
don't even think about the money, to be honest, when I'm
playing. I'm just playing for the title."
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