Sophomore Micaiah Asriel has 30 seconds left in overtime. He’s hiding in a Panamanian slum, gripping an MSMC submachine gun, waiting for his teammates to do something.
When all three of his teammates are killed, the camo-clad character sprints across the screen and grabs the other team’s flag with 20 seconds left. Asriel is hunched over his controller in his dark room on a bright June afternoon afternoon playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II. He’s in Xbox Live league play, engaged in mock firefights and strategy-filled missions, dodging shots and evading missiles in this high-stakes game of capture the flag.
Back at his base with six seconds left, his teammates are dead again and his flag has been stolen by the other team, Asriel gets a triple kill and secures his team’s victory.
Since that afternoon, Asriel has played in more than 15 online competitive Black Ops tournaments. He plays with his team, a group of four people that have never seen each other face-to-face. He’s part of a growing worldwide community of competitive and professional gaming, and knows that he could play this video game as a career.
“I was really proud of that,” Asriel said. “[Winning that Capture the Flag game] is one of the things that got me into it and made me start playing competitively.”
Asriel started playing Call of Duty in 2008, when the first Modern Warfare installment was released. He had a kill-death ratio of 5.88, meaning that, for each of his lives, he had almost six kills. According to Asriel, most players average a ratio of one.
After playing only in Xbox for a couple years, he was introduced to gamebattles.com, a website hosted by Major League Gaming (MLG). It’s a forum where any user can make an account for free to play different video games for cash prizes.
“[Competitions] are usually relatively quick,” Asriel said. “Single elimination, kind of like March Madness in basketball.”
Players compete in teams of four with one captain. They work out game strategies, have team practices and get used to eachothers’ playing style. Asriel, as captain, has the ability to choose who will be on his team. With the only other permanent member of his team, a 12-year-old boy in Michigan, Asriel has been been trying out different prospective teammates, looking for the best match. He looks for communication, teammwork and skill in potential teammates.
He sets up team practices using Twitter. By tweeting @MLGscrims and getting retweeted, he can connect with another team online to set up a game in Xbox Live. This lets his team work together on their gameplay and strategies.
After a team is established, they sign up for a competition online and are placed into 16-team pools according to their win/loss record. In each game, two teams usually play three out of five rounds in one of three game modes: Search and Destroy, Hard Point and Capture the Flag. If they reach the top 32 out of the 120-plus teams, they go to a land tournament. At these centers, Xbox consoles are already set up and players just have to bring their controllers and headsets and play in one room. Winning enough high-level tournaments is how gamers become professionals.
“The closest we got was the 50s,” Asriel said. “For an amateur team, that’s pretty good. And for a team that had only two months of practice prior.”
MLG and GameBattles hosts competitions for players at all skill levels, from amateur to professional. At the professional level, MLG hosts championship tournaments for each season as well as smaller pro-level tournaments throughout the year. The winning teams will walk away with up to $50,000 to split amongst themselves.
Championship tournaments operated by MLG draw thousands of spectators to watch the action on 100-foot screens stretches over players’ heads on a stage. They also live broadcast the game play online, complete with commentators and chat rooms where viewers can discuss what’s going on.
Because young generations are growing up in such a technology-filled world, Asriel says that it’s only natural for them to try to find new things to do with it. Because of this, he says, competitive gaming is going to grow among younger kids.
“So this is going to be something that they’re growing up seeing and say ‘This is a probably a good way to go’,” Asriel said. “Because you can make so much money off this if you’re good enough.”
He compares gaming to chess. As opposed to being all about your kill/death ratio or from how far away you can get a headshot, he says that it’s more of a game of the mind.
“It’s all about knowing how the game works and using your mind to figure out ways to beat your opponent,” Asriel said.
He knows that, if he didn’t have school, football practice or his injury to worry about, he could devote enough time to gaming. Enough time to get to the next level and really compete. The professional gamers that he follows on Twitter have made their livings out of the competitive gaming circuit, and he thinks he could too.
But he isn’t sure if he wants to pursue it that far. Until then, he will continue to play, and with more and more people that are going to be getting interested in competitive gaming.
“I honestly just like having fun playing competitively,” he said. “I always try to win, but I have fun doing it.”
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