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Game Boys: Professional Videogaming's Rise From the Basement to the Big Time

Professional gaming is always on the cusp of hitting it big. Dazed by the status of Korean StarCraft players and impressed by the huge numbers of people who regularly game online, entrepreneurs, players and wannabe sports moguls have been trying to convert LAN parties into computer sports leagues for years. Michael Kane's "Game Boys: Professional Videogaming's Rise From the Basement to the Big Time" covers a couple of very important years in the life of professional gaming -- from 2005 to 2007, the sport saw the collapse of the Cyberathlete Professional League, the appearance of the World Series of Video Gaming, and finally the founding of the Championship Gaming Series.



Kane writes about the sport through in depth reporting on two Counterstrike teams. 3D is the heavyweight in the sport, sponsored by Intel and NVidia and managed by Craig Levine, a 20-something go-getter who can use his deep pockets to keep his players away from real jobs. Levine sees great promise in the professionalization of gaming and emphasizes media-friendly gamers who stick to the plan. Team CompLexity is managed by Jason Lake, who funds the team entirely out of his own savings. Composed of castoffs, hired guns and one preternaturally gifted sniper, Lake spends much of the book struggling to get any sponsor interest at all and chasing 3D for a big-money showdown that, he hopes, will justify the strain on his marriage.

As you can see from the description, Kane is writing a traditional sports story about a favorite and an underdog, someone to root for and someone to root against. Though Levine pitches the rivalry to a broadcaster as the New York Yankees versus the Bad News Bears, Lake resists and resents this portrayal -- confident that his team is better. Kane, clearly fond of Lake, seems to have bought into the underdog narrative, though, and it colors every chapter.

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It may not look riveting, but Kane's book makes it sound great. (photo: Championship Gaming Series)

In this way, it's not far removed from last year's "The King of Kong," the movie about the quest for the top score in Donkey Kong that pitted a smooth-talking villain and the high score establishment against a plucky newcomer who only wanted to be the best. But Kane is perceptive enough to see what the polished media mind of Levine can bring to the sport -- that only someone with his vision and business acumen can lift professional gaming to the level of Texas Hold'em.

Kane's observations on the management of the sport are particularly interesting to those of us whose knowledge of pro gaming is limited to the occasional human interest story on the local news. Even up to last year, there were few guarantees that prize-winners would ever see much of their winnings; unscrupulous promoters or Byzantine claim policies could erase whatever pot was due. Female clans are invited for promotion or sex appeal more than for any interest in their gaming abilities or equity, and some clan organizers are fine with that; the PMS clan has more luck with sponsors than Lake's much better team for the media-friendly reasons that Levine promotes.

Most importantly, Kane emphasizes that if professional gaming is going to catch on, attention needs to be paid to the game as much as the players. He faults much coverage of the sport as dwelling on particular competitors (Fata1ity, for example) in an effort to create stars instead of explaining what these people are stars at. The obvious complaint that people don't want to watch other people play games is met with the reply that they do, however, want to watch games being played. All it takes is knowledge of the sport.

Kane proves to be adept at explaining Counterstrike, the focus of his subjects' attention. Through constant repetition he explains why certain maps emphasize some skills instead of others, how play calling works, and why Danny "fRoD" Montaner's skills are exceptional even at his high level of competition.

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Blake Peebles recently made news when his parents let him quit school for Guitar Hero. (photo: Corey Lowenstein and The News & Observer)

The outline of the book stacks the deck a bit. By ending the story when and where he does, Kane gives you the impression that, in fact, the sport is on the cusp of something big, that corporate investment in pro gaming will redeem Levine's ambition and Lake's squandering of his family resources. (It's reminiscent of the 2005 pro bowling documentary "A League of Ordinary Gentlemen," which also traced a sport's efforts to make itself relevant.) We are still too close to the book's conclusion to fairly judge whether pro gaming has, in fact, come out of the basement, but ending on a high note keeps "Game Boys" firmly in the tradition of sports literature and movies.

For the most part, pro gaming is still covered by the same people who covered it before it "made it big." Specialized sites with Internet streaming commentary have been there since the beginning of pro gaming. No mainstream gaming media sites have much interest in the sport, nor do mainstream sports sites. It's not in your sports page or on network TV. Kane leaves open the question of what it means to hit the "big time," and it seems like many of the players would be happy to simply make a few bucks in a stable professional environment, the big thing that the CGS brings to the table.

Kane is less interested in some of the more obvious barriers to pro gaming's rise to prominence. Just like gymnastics, there are many different events in pro gaming, not all of which are under one rubric. The CGS has four events covering four genres. Rival pro gaming outfit Major League Gaming, which is supported by ESPN, has three shooters and World of Warcraft. The World Cyber Games change events annually. In short, there is no consistency from one league to the next or one year to the next, and this leads to a fragmentation of whatever audience there is.

If Kane is right that an audience needs to appreciate the games in order to appreciate the sport, then there is clearly a problem with investors scattering their efforts across games as different as Defense of the Ancients and Guitar Hero. Coming at the sport from a mainstream background, as Kane does, leads him to emphasize how similar Counter-Strike is to a traditional team sport, while missing all the gaming going on around his chosen subject. The longevity of CS as an online and LAN game is outstanding, but what happens when it gets superseded, as seems to be the case in many leagues?

Kane's curious optimism about the future of pro-gaming doesn't take anything away from the story he is telling. Everyone gets their chance to shine, though not everyone takes advantage of it. Read as a sports book, "Game Boys" does not disappoint. There are heroes and goats, surprises and expected outcomes, appeals to fairness and outrageous referee decisions. It is your standard athletic narrative, with rich characterization and clear subplots. Who will jump teams? How will players react to their new captain? Will Lake ever find a sponsor? It is, by no means, the final word on the future of the sport, but "Game Boys" is a good introduction to a world that even many gamers know nothing about.