Full-time gameplay: young people turn video games into a lifetime job

[Love Pulse]

In a small furnished apartment in Amman, Omar al-Adwan and his brother Muhammad wake up every morning to do their unconventional work from behind their computer screens and play video games until the evening. Although these games may seem like a hobby for leisure and vacation, their role as a profession is growing in many parts of the world at a very rapid pace. Like traditional sports such as basketball and football, e-sports have in recent years hosted international tournaments and competitions that attract tens of millions of viewers and offer prizes of millions of dollars. With this unexpected change, video games have become a stand-alone career for many talented young players, who live in an unfamiliar way: literally, they make a living.

The life of a professional player

Omar, 21, and his brother Mohammed, 26, have been passionate about video games since their childhood. Omar's experience with video games began when he was in the first grade, where he began with his brother to go to Internet cafes where many young people spend their time playing video games. In fact, it was their father.

Fearing for his sons playing on the streets where he could not watch them or know their news, their father found that he preferred to keep them in the “safe” Internet shop next to their home, where he paid a monthly payment to the shop owner and left his sons to spend long hours each day in front of video game screens. "He gave my parents to my brother Muhammad how many dinars and his brother Khoudh put him in a spirit," Omar said. Instead of taking me to the Dream Park or the garden, he was telling me his side and playing on a computer. I just brought him from morning to night. ''

But the two brothers were soon drawn into video games in a way that the father could not have expected. When he was eight years old, he started competing in the internet cafe's pioneers, although he could not do well. A few years later, his passion for a video game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, is now one of the most po[CENSORED]r video games in the world.

After graduating from school, almost three years ago, he and his brother began taking video games seriously, as they moved to a small apartment above their family home, where they could focus on sharpening their skills with their friends interested in video games. The family was receptive and supportive of this strange passion, as long as it did not affect the academic and practical life of the two brothers, but no one was expected to come out with any real result. Therefore, the father was very surprised when the brothers received invitations to travel to countries such as Lebanon and the UAE to participate in regional video game competitions.

“We once went to Dubai, and you always know parents to be wary,” he says of his first gaming experience behind the games. “When we came back from Dubai, we were awarded $ 10,000. We returned from Dubai and my parents Bkli «Adesh Vztwa?», Say «10,000» Bkli «and insult?», Saying «Yaba I returned from Dubai, still Ihttolna Ohm». The first day and the second day and my parents fried «« And insults? "You are liars, no idea, there is no Masari, you are not playing." They went to purify me for a month.

Playing may have been a source of fun and time for Omar, but it is now much more serious, a career and a source of livelihood. For him and his brother, playing became a serious undertaking requiring full-time and long-term commitment.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which specializes in Omar, his brother, and their colleagues, consists of a virtual battleground between two teams: one terrorist group and the other a police squad. The aim of the terrorist group is to plant and protect a bomb until it explodes, or to hold a group of hostages, while the police aim to stop them.

Each game consists of several short rounds (about five minutes), repeated for about an hour, until one of the teams wins enough rounds to be considered the winner.

In practice, the game turns into a competition between the two teams that depends to a large extent on the speed of attention, the ability to use complex weapons, such as smoke and light bombs, but also the ability to anticipate and respond to the opponent's movements under the pressure of play. The life of each team member, within the game, is very valuable, as the team is basically composed of only five people, and the loss of attention or make any mistake of any of them - even for a moment - can lead to a huge loss. "The text again about us in the game is dispersed," says Omar. "It could be a trivial or very simple reason, just one member of the team is 10 seconds late."

While this may sound like a big amount, this category of awards has become very familiar in the world of electronic sports. It is now common for the world's most skilled players to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in video game competitions, and even a single game prize could be as much as $ 1 million.

In addition to these awards, many players, according to Omar, earn monthly salaries in thousands of dollars. These salaries come from support and welfare organizations, but this type of support is not available to players in a country like Jordan. “From four months we played against a Russian team, Vega Squadron, [powered by] a frightening organization with a salary of four thousand dollars each, and we won them against everything,” says Omar, citing the difference between supported and unsupported teams. When people intervene against their salaries of 50 and 60 thousand [dollars] per year, this brown man, whose salary is the heck of him, he will be playing with you.

Despite continuing his academic studies, where he has been studying for a bachelor's degree in business administration for three years, he devotes his entire life to the e-sports profession. Omar could not live his day comfortably if he did not play for “at least six hours”, but on a normal day he could spend up to ten hours or more of near-continuous play. Currently, he has about 5,000 hours in the game - according to his computer data - in just the last three years.