Video games a lucrative business for some gamers

Extensive playing leads to skill, profit for professionals

April 22, 2009
By Armando Vega
Staff Writer

Photo by Blizzard Entertainment “Starcraft” has sold over nine million copies worldwide.

It is fast fading, that old stereotype- video-gamers being excessively nerdy.  You can thank the likes of “Madden,” “Halo,” the plethora of racing games, Nintendo’s ubiquitous consoles, and now “Guitar Hero” for that.  Yet, even as videogames become accepted into the mainstream culture, this paradigmatic shift seems only to have engendered an even more dedicated core fan-base.

There is one game in particular most suited toward this discussion.  “StarCraft,” a real-time strategy game released in 1998, is the only videogame in history to remain so wildly popular over the world, a decade after its release. 

Every day, tens of thousands of people still log onto the game’s servers where every year millions of games are played.  Professional leagues (especially prevalent in South Korea) are sponsored by multi-billion dollar corporations; tournaments are telecast and can reward in excess of $20,000, drawing crowds in the tens of thousands.  The best players, pushing themselves to upwards of 10-hour practice-days, make salaries in the six figures based off these winnings and sponsorship deals.  It becomes a job—a profession—to these players; it is much more than a mere hobby.

Late last year, a pair of psychologists from Urbana-Champaign conducted a study which measured the effect of cognitive functions on older adults after a day’s worth of play on a strategy game called “Rise of Nations.”
“You need merchants.  You need an army to protect yourself and you have to make sure you’re spending some of your resources on education and food,” said Chandramallika Basak, one of the study's authors.

Compared to a control group, subjects of the study experienced markedly improved increases in their reasoning, working memory, and ability to switch between tasks.  The significance of this study is that these improvements are not limited to the game.  Not all games are the same, and such benefits certainly vary.  A game like “Halo” exemplifies conditioned, reflexive responses—fingers twitching in centi-seconds in finely calibrated movements.  Games within the RPG genre might engender creativity at a young age, akin to fantasy novels, albeit in a different medium.  Even so, it would be difficult to maintain that these genres provide anywhere near the same level of cognitive benefits for young teens and adults as tactical and strategic genres.

“When you train somebody on a task, they tend to improve in that task, whatever it is, but it usually doesn’t transfer much beyond that skill or beyond the particular situation in which they learned it,” says Arthur Kramer, the UI-study’s co-author.

Yet if “Rise of Nations” is regarded as a prototypical strategy game, “StarCraft” is not only a progenitor of sorts for the genre, but epitomizes that genre on steroids.  To witness a professional player in action—nailing strokes on his keyboard in a fashion similar to a piano maestro, donning headphones and wearing glossy attire with sponsors’ logos—makes for good spectacle. In the years since the game’s inception, play has evolved from an art into a science, and then into a sort of hybrid.  The best players standardize processes as much as possible, squeezing out what inefficiencies in time and money they can, but innovate when necessary as the situation on the ground changes.

When National Geographic hosted a documentary trailing one pro-gamer, after placing him into a medical imaging terminal for a brain scan, they found that not only did his frontal lobe, which is largely responsible for reasoning and decision-making, light up, but so did the player’s limbic area, where memory and instinct kick in (radioactive glucose was injected into the players, highlighting parts of the brain receiving blood-flow).  In other words, it had become second-nature.

“Playing 'StarCraft' to Jihoon [the professional] feels almost like typing to a secretary, the fingers instinctively finding the keys,” intones the narrator.
That is probably evidence of a dedication to videogames that the rest of us are not all that interested in pursuing.  But it is still enough to make you wonder if in the future, tactical warfare will be engaged via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other drones by intense teenagers stationed at remote terminals, à la “Ender’s Game.”  If that is true, we probably need not worry about their competence.  To the professionals, it is not a game—and theyare not playing around.