Confession of a gamer

You may not know Sean Plott, and you will probably never know this dude.  He is a professional gamer living in LA, he won some international gaming contest back in 2005-2007, and started his own edutainment video on youtube under the name Day[9] Daily.

It is a little hobby of mine, to watch his youtube video from time to time, even though his videos are about Starcraft 2, a game that I don't own nor play.  His videos are entertaining nevertheless.

I just thought of him as a nerd who plays too much video games living in some basement in LA while trying to get his Master degree.

Then I saw a video of him talking about his experience of the game he is playing.

Born and rasied in a small town in Kansas, he and his older brother started playing Starcraft in their early teens.  When their single mom told them not to play video game before 3pm, they would obey and went to the mall and looked at the box of the game, discussed strategies under an escalator.

They would play together, as they only had one computer, one of them would be a backseat gamer.  Then when things got more serious, they would drive hours to join a regional tournament.  It was pretty amazing that their mother was very supportive of what they do, she would even buy tickets for them to fly to another part of the country to compete, and asked the school for a week off to compete.

During the time of his pro gaming, he got to meet people from Russia, Canada, Korea, Germany... and became really good friends with them.  Through out these tournaments, his brother and mother would be right beside him, either over the phone or in person, supporting him.

Over the years, he learnt to be less serious about the win and loss, but more on what he can learn from them.

You can just see the passion in his eyes, if he is talking about another hobby, you might feel more proud for him and even moved by him.  But, he plays video games as hobby.

But he made friends all over the world and have actually met them in person, he learnt valuable lessons in life and he loved his family... That is a better hobby than someone who collects expensive watches but has no friends.

It reminds me of the time when I played computer games with my brother, one of us would be playing, the other would be watching.  We played hours of Romance of Three Kingdoms, Starcraft, and other games.  For us, it was the pass time during the time when we were worring about school and being in a different country.  Of course, we were never as passionate about the games we played, but my brother and I still developed something we shared together as siblings.  And that was irreplaceable...