Professional Video Gamers are becoming our new pro-athletes, our new celebrities. The MLG Pros in this book are gestating zygotes; new to the circuit, or relatively new to the limelight. Organized gaming itself is still young, and televised tournaments are just crowning. But the sponsors are noticing. The fans gather and communicate with a high bandwidth. And the productions are getting larger. It will soon be impossible to ignore the branding and scope of gaming as sports.
Just like pro athletes in established sports, gaming has a spectrum of personalities; the reticent introverts, the bombastic showmen. But the unifying factor in identifying the personalities of pro gaming is that they are honest. There is no tailored smile or magazine cover stance. Pros are noticed by name, or tag, more often than they are by face. And when they are in front of the camera, there is no one they know how to be but themselves. As a gamer, an avatar does the talking for you, with your skills, in the game. But through blogs and chat rooms, message boards on and off league sponsored sites, these “celebrities” are sharing their personal thoughts, feelings, emotions, taunts, apologies, and criticisms of each other, as well as of themselves. This is how they are generating fans. So when it’s time to project themselves, they each seem committed to “keeping it real”. And that means different things for different gamers. But it’s a very human experience. I’ve felt it as an outsider, and it’s compelling and inspiring. Shy, cocky, cynical, disaffected, irritable, skeptical, self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing, gamers are people who relate to others transparently. This frank, honest posturing is so germane to gaming culture and in my opinion it’s the thing that will bridge the gap between people who found the sport through playing, and those who find the sport because of the characters.
Jon Wasserman 2008
