Adventures in Middle-Aged Gaming: Professional Gaming? Hopefully Not For my Kids.

While life has been very busy as of late for your resident old fart and insulter of morons, one bit of gaming news that kept my attention recently was the Evo fighting game tournament in Las Vegas. Thanks to Nukezilla staffer, and all round sexy beast, Justin, we were all able to vicariously enjoy some highlights from what was by all accounts a great tournament and a really well run event. In the main event final Daigo “The Beast” Umehara repeated as Champion in the Street Fighter IV tournament.

A news story that broke later in the week following the tournament also caught my eye. In the piece on Kotaku “What is Daigo’s Day Job?” we discover that life away from game tournaments involves a lot of menial, unskilled work for one of the best videogamers in the world. It got me thinking. I know that my tone is going to come across as elitist, but this feature is usually about the impressions an older gamer gets from following the gaming community and I couldn’t shake the notion that this very talented young man is essentially wasting his life. Is he one of the best in the world at what he does? Clearly, but who cares? If Daigo spent maybe a fraction of his gametime on university or a trade, then he might be able to accomplish more in life than simply wiping old people’s bums for a living.

Try to remember here that I’m not writing as a gamer, I’m writing as a parent. When I sat down and really considered the significance of the piece on Kotaku I really started to wonder about the effect that competitive online gaming has on a segment of the market. If I’m being a dick, frankly part of me is glad that being phenomenal at videogames requires so much work and talent. It will keep me comfortably in reasonably priced house-cleaners, fast food attendants, and personal support workers, should I ever succumb to Alzheimers. I do acknowledge how much of a nasty ageing troll I’m being here, but I defy anyone out there of parenting age to disagree with me about whether they want their children to be great at games at the cost of being great at life.

Is Daigo happy? I don’t know, I’ve never met him. I assume that he is a very happy young man, who is content to do something that he absolutely loves while nobly working in a nursing home for the aged. You might then ask who am I to judge him? The world is filled with aspiring actors, football players, and *ahem* writers, who are likely never going to become successful or rich from their endeavours. Where do I get off questioning the way in which complete strangers spend their time or how they choose to live their lives?

As I said above I’m a parent, and if we are being completely honest I want my children to accomplish more with their lives than sacrificing personal success for the mere acknowledgement of other videogamers. This would be different if becoming the best at your given game or genre meant that you could hang out with Lebron James, or Ronaldo. It doesn’t. The corporate support for professional gaming is not sufficient to adequately reward the elite. Wiping asses and mopping floors can be as rewarding as anything else, especially when they involve assisting the aged and the infirm. However, I want my children doing more with their lives than that. If they have the potential to be the best at a videogame, then they clearly have the skill-set to be great other more lucrative endeavours. Videogames need to be kept in perspective and I think that is getting lost in the discussions about videogame culture in the name of marketing.

Like many others around here I’ve seen the pieces on X-Play that MLG superstar T-Squared does and it seems like he is doing all right financially. However, some less gracious scribes out there might imply that MLG has less to do with elite competitive gaming, and more to do with promoting Microsoft products. Maybe Capcom might want to help Daigo Umehara out a bit? Maybe? Don’t get me wrong I am not anti marketing or games publishers. I do not hate Activision of EA for trying to make more and more money. Money makes this industry flow, period. On the flip-side though, I can get frustrated with publishers for manipulating the stupid into not keeping them accountable, but I certainly don’t begrudge anyone making money.

There are obviously a lot of maybes in this discussion. Maybe Daigo is saving his money from tournaments and professional gaming as a launch pad to bigger and better things? Maybe I’m literally getting too old to be relevant in any discussion about videogames, careers and culture? But maybe, just maybe, when it comes right down to it in the discussions about whether games can be art, whether competitive e-sports can be successful on a mass market scale, or whether gaming journalists are in fact journalists, we have lost track of the fact that videogames are simply leisure and recreational pursuits? That there is a reality to being successful at videogames and that reality is that it involves incredible personal sacrifice with little potential for personal gain. Simply put, the personal economics of professional gaming rarely translates to success, rather it translates to lives wasted in pursuit of meaningless accolades.

In the end, I hope that I can play videogames with my children for decades to come. When I look at what I hope for them, it doesn’t involve specific professions or definitive financial success, it does involve the power to choose one’s own way. Hopefully I can convey to them the perspective that is necessary to really enjoy videogames for what they are.