Playing Out of the Closet

‘I am not wasting my life! I promise an opportunity will arise and something good will come of this!’ This is what I told my mom throughout high school as I “wasted” hours of my life playing competitive video games online. Jesus, I still feel like I’m coming out of the closet every time I bring up my favorite past time to somebody who doesn’t know I game. All I’m ever told when playing is “Why don’t you go outside?”, “You nerd”, “Haha, I wouldn’t tell people about that”. Am I such a freak to view my gaming hobby as a legitimate sport?

I am part of a team (clan). The sport we play is Team Fortress 2. The field we play on is the PC. My team runs practices organized by a team captain who calls the shots. Everybody on the team constantly works together towards a common goal. We scrimmage against other teams testing different strategies and mechanics in our gameplay, constantly improving ourselves and preparing for our upcoming games (matches).

We form pickup games or “pugs” when we don’t have enough of our members around and play with a few random friends outside our clan. Often times in pugs, teams are picked in the very same manner as a group of kids lining up along a fence on the baseball diamond with captains picking teams.

These are all characteristics and qualities of a legitimate sport that not surprisingly, are shared among E-Sports as well. In fact much of the terminology used remains unchanged.

Some people will go outside to shoot the basketball around by themselves for fun. This would be the equivalent of a player joining a public server and doing what is called “pubbing” (derived from public server) for fun. Actually no I am wrong; pubbing is much more social then one person shooting a basketball around because they are playing against and alongside other, real people.

I understand that when somebody sees me sitting at my computer they don’t know if I am watching youtube videos, looking up random websites, playing flash games, or competing against the best players in the game for a top tier league. They cannot see past what immediately meets their eyes; me, physically in a room, sitting at my computer, with the lights off. They don’t see the people I am playing against, they don’t see the people I am voice chatting with. They don’t see my team playing alongside me developing cohesion and teamwork required by any team.

I really see no difference between a group of friends shooting the shit on Ventrilo (a live voice chat or voip software) and a group of friends hanging out in someone’s living room. The social gratification gained from both are identical.

Call it strange but before a LAN (a buncha people playing video games against each other in a warehouse) this past weekend, I had not met many of the players in my clan. I‘d hung out, strategized, talked, played alongside and won with them over the past few months. I spent more time with them online then most of the people I know in real life (rl). Despite the fact I had never met them, I consider them to be among some of my best friends. After meeting them for the first time at the lan, this bond was only solidified.

It helps to be good friends if we want to play well together. The teamwork must be cohesive and the gameplay efficient. Again, this is common among ‘real life’ sports teams.

I am not going to deny it, playing these games with my team brings great meaning to my life. The same way running a marathon will catalyze a revelation in a runner’s life, or making it to the super bowl will make a grown man cry. While I can’t say I have cried after winning a tournament, the elation I feel after playing a great match alongside my teamates at a lan is unsurpassed by much of anything else.

I am very competitive so if we win it will likely affect my mood the rest of the day, the same way the weather affects people’s moods. This could easily be held true for a player of any real life sport so long as he takes it seriously.

What I do is a sport and that is incontrovertible. You can play games professionally just like any other sport. Just talk to Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel who has amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars dominating E-Sports tournaments. People laugh when I tell them I won my iphone at a video game tournament but this is reality ladies and gentlemen.

“Wasting my life” or “hanging out with friends”, however you choose to view it, the time spent at my computer playing with these friends of mine have been some of the best times of my life.

More pictures of me and my team can be found here