What do your folks think of all this game playing? They’re traditional Asian parents–they were pleased when I went to university at Cambridge and got a City job.
You’re said to have earned more playing videogames than you did at JP Morgan. Yeah. That was really the clinch for me. While I was at Morgan I was offered a sponsorship deal which pretty much doubled my salary without me having to do any work at all.
What kind of money are we talking about? At Morgan, around $50,000 a year. [I] also had all the benefits and an apartment paid for me, and expenses, in New York, which is quite a lot. For the gaming, in sponsorship alone I had $200,000.
You recently attended the World Cyber Games in Korea. How was it? Spectacular. It’s just so unbelievable that a computer-game tournament can be so big. In Korea, football is the biggest sport… next is StarCraft, a computer game. This event was the equivalent of the Olympics for computer gamers–about 400 players from 37 different countries and about 150 different camera crews just recording the whole thing.
How about groupies? In Korea, the star players are getting mobbed all the time. I witnessed a few occasions where screaming girl fans would just go crazy when they saw their star player.
Does this lead to virtual liaisons? I don’t know. I think the Koreans are pretty innocent, to be honest. It’s just a little strange part of society there in Korea. I don’t really know how it works but it really seems to be taking off.
Is gaming a sport? It seems kind of a crazy idea to people who look at sports and consider them to be athletic sports like football, running, all that kind of stuff. But there’s no reason why computer games shouldn’t be sport if you look at what they involve: the competitiveness, the strategy. You’re playing against other people and it’s always a different game. It has all the aspects of a sport.
