The Life of a Professional Gamer. David Leavitt(Blog 4)

One T.V. show I want to talk about. It’s MTV’s True life. On this certain episode of True Life, they follow around 3 “professional gamers” from around the country. Now when I say professional gamers, I mean people who play video games for a living. As in they sign a contract with a certain company and then get paid to play video games at tournaments where they compete against other professional gamers. They even have training sessions where they play up to eleven hours of sweet video games a day in order to stay at the top of their game. The show follows around three pro-gamer athletes, all at the top of their games. You will never see a set of fingers move quicker on a video game controller in your life. My favorite part of this show is that MTV was able to find three pro-gaming Titans who they were able to depict as your ordinary teenagers. In other words, they found three kids who play an insane amount of video games that weren’t morbidly obese, and full of zits. One of them is a white kid from Florida who dropped out of high school to play video games full time. What’s unique about this kid is that he actually has a girlfriend, with MTV trying to show that you can play video games thirteen hours a day and still somehow get pussy. Another gamer is a black kid from Harlem, who’s only on the show because MTV doesn’t want to lose their black audience. Unfortunately, MTV never got the memo that BET exists. The third person they follow around is a skinny Asian girl who plays Counter-Strike, a game that probably has about five female players, one of which is this skinny Asian girl. All of these gamers train there asses in order to be video game champions of the world.

Now I don’t want to send off the wrong message here. I don’t have anything against video games or video game athletes. I love video games and pro video-gamers. I just think the whole, signing a “contract” and “training” and ‘game-planning” thing, is a little much. Then again, all three of these pro-gamers each make around 60,000 dollars a year, which is about 58, 000 more than I earn. Professional Gamers 1, David 0.