Team 3D vs. CompLexity - a Yankees vs. Red Sox for the new millenium?

Michael Kane is not a gamer.  The 39 year-old New York Post feature writer knew very little about the world of videogames until fairly recently, as a matter of fact, and he admits it freely.   “I knew zero,” he said in a recent telephone interview concerning his forthcoming book Game Boys (Viking Press, $24.95 US), a look at the world of professional Counter-Strike players.  “I remembered the Atari [2600 console] and Pac-Man,” he continued, but those names represented nearly the sum total of his gaming knowledge aside from being simply aware that videogames still existed.  He certainly never imagined that there were people out there that literally played games for a living.

“It’s a good visual,” he said of learning that there were pro gamers who made as much as thirty or forty thousand dollars per year playing games, “but that’s not three hundred pages.”  Instead it seemed perfect for a Post feature story, a small blurb about young adults who were taking part in the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) winter tournament.   “There were a few different games there,” said Kane of CPL, “but when I was told that one was a five-on-five team game, it caught my interest.”

The five-on-five game Kane referred to was, of course, Counter-Strike, Valve Software’s massively popular team FPS originally based on the Half-Life engine.  The team aspect to Counter-Strike is what really made Kane take notice because if these guys really were “Cyber Athletes” then Counter-Strike was their Olympimad.  A classic CS map like Dust (familiar to this writer and most if not all of this website’s readership, but totally foreign to Kane at the time) is the Meadowlands or Yankee Stadium.

In fact, after looking at various games, Kane realized that Counter-Strike works as a perfect model for gamers to test their mettle against one another.  “In Counter-Strike,” he noted, “No one complains about getting ‘screwed’ by the game.  A Counter-Strike map is equivalent to a basketball court.  It’s even and balanced and the players make all the difference.”

“The realization that [Counter-Strike] is like a sport made it worthwhile,” said Kane.  And his Post feature article eventually gave way to Game Boys.