Cyber Athlete 'Fatal1ty'

Steve Kroft On The Rise Of Professional Video Game Players

(CBS) 
He says competitive video gaming is like playing chess on caffeine. An exhibition he played against a local challenger in Sweden is a good example.

You have to strategically maneuver yourself though a three-dimensional maze, using the controls to collect weapons and ammunition while executing precision moves to evade, trap and corner your opponent before splattering him all over the dungeon – a detail some people find disconcerting.

Wendel spends hours each day trying to kill people in the virtual gaming world. Does he think that is a good thing?

"Well, I don't think it's a bad thing," he says. "I mean you're trying to get the point. Like, I mean, football. Why are you hitting the guy? That's not right. But people will pass it, because that's part of the game."

"I consider him an athlete because marksmanship is an Olympic sport, right? That's twitching the fingers as well," says Edward Castronova, a professor at Indiana University who studies and teaches the economics and sociology of video games.

"The average age of a video gamer is now 30. And you're getting to a point where the number of people who could pay money and spend time to watch is getting big enough to support a spectator sport," says Castronova.

Parents all over the country watch their children play video games and Kroft notes he doesn't think it's that exciting.

"Well, baseball's not exciting to somebody from France, either. It's the kind of thing you have to know what's going on inside the game to really appreciate why getting onto that ledge and getting that power up at the moment was just an awesome move that nobody's ever able to do. It's a skill that 30 years from now a lot of people will understand," says Castronova.

They already get it in South Korea. A video game tournament in the country’s second largest city drew a crowd of 100,000 people last year, and regular matches draw big ratings on national television. The top Korean players make hundreds of thousands of dollars, date movie stars, and need bodyguards to protect them from their overenthusiastic fans.

And a lot of people are betting that it’s only a matter of time before the same thing happens in the U.S., and that pro video gaming will eventually take off, like skateboarding and extreme sports did a decade ago. Because of the Internet, players from all over the world can meet and compete, and it’s all happening in real time.

"Our reigning stereotype of video gamer is a 16-year-old kid who is alone in his basement. And that's not really true any more," says Castronova.

Does Castronova see it as social intercourse?

"Yeah, I see it as a very, very broad communication phenomenon. The parallel would be phones, radios, movies, TV," he says.

60 Minutes caught a glimpse of it in late 2004, when we followed Fatal1ty to the frozen hinterlands of Sweden to witness a digital version of Woodstock called a "LAN Party." Nearly 6,000 young people lugged their desktops through the snow to a convention center, where they hooked them up together and played video games for three days and three nights, with only occasional breaks for sleep.

What does Wendel think is the attraction?

"The reason why these events happen is because you want to meet the person in real life. You play on the Internet all the time and you see their name. But you don't know what they look like," he says. "You don't know what they're really like in person."