2005年NPR美国国家公共电台十一月-Gamer 'Fatal1ty' Makes a Living by Winni

Anchor: This is DAY to DAY, I am Alex Chadwick.

Coming up the culinary challenges of defending prisoners of the war on terror. First, this pro 1 basketball, pro baseball, football, even chess, all these games have superstar players who become the public face of their games. But what about electronic games?

Until recently, the stars of video games have been the virtual characters inside, Super Mario, for instance, or Pac-Man, that's changing, and the name of the first superstar electronic player is, well, his game name is FATAL1TY. Here with more is the co-editor of BoingBoing.net and DAY to DAY tech contributor Xeni Jardin.

Xeni Jardin: Twenty-four-year-old pro gamer Johnathan Wendel is better known by his gaming alias-FATAL1TY. That's spelled in all caps with a number 1 replacing the letter 'I'. The road to cyberstardom began in his room at his family's Kansas City home.

Johnathan Wendel: It was very hard, you know, growing up at the house, everything and, constantly getting grounded all the time from a computer for just the littlest things in the world. Through ideal to give what I have gotten, I had to make the stand and move out. I mean, this is a similar story of a lot of other athletes, a lot of other people that have taken their passion to the extreme.

Xeni Jardin: You may have noticed, he calls himself an athlete, not a gamer, and he is no amateur. He won four grand at his first pro tournament when he was 15, and he has earned more than $85,000 in prizes this year. Not bad considering it all began as just a way to chill out.

Johnathan Wendel: I have been playing sports all my life and I just wanted to play, do something else just competitive and I found Gaming , first-person shooters to be very the same skill set I used in real sports.

Xeni Jardin: That skill set, and the impressive winning streak 2 has resulted in bigger pop culture appeal than any gamer before him. Fans mob him for autographs wherever he goes and when he is behind the console at a tournament, the house is packed. Just before the match starts, Fatal1ty props 3 a lucky stuffed tiger on his monitor and puts on headphones. He listens to techno, hip-hop and hard rock, anything with the throbbing 4 beep that insulates him from distractions 5.

Prepare for the battle.

Johnathan Wendel: When I get in the game, I mean, I really, you know, sink into the monitor, sink into the game, I mean, I actually become the person in the game. It gets almost to it's, where you don't even think about it, because you just, you are so, so easy to get into zone, and so easy to get focused, because you know what you have to do to win it and you have to go on, you need accomplishment 6. If you are not focused, you are not ready to go, you are definitely gonna lose.

Xeni Jardin: Gaming is big business, by some estimates, in the billions worldwide. Tournaments are increasingly important promotional tools for the game industry and they are drawing larger crowds than ever online and in person. One recent match in Singapore, which FATAL1TY won, drew an estimated 30,000 viewers on the Internet. He himself has blurred 7 the line between athlete and entrepreneur by promoting his own line of hardware and gaming accessories. So were all those fans really just cheering for a superstar huckster?

John Borland: I don't think they are any more pawns 8 than, say, Tiger Wood is.

Xeni Jardin: CNETnews.com writer John Borland, co-author of the gaming history book "Dungeons 9 and Dreamers" believes money affects gamers only as much as it affects athletes and any other professional sport.

John Borland: There is just no question that they are being used by the game companies, then by the computer companies who sponsor this. But that said, what FATAL1TY and other gamers were doing is, you know, an active skill that is separated from marketing 10, I mean, they inspire people ,it may seem weird 11 to somebody who doesn't play video games, so watching them play is a very inspiring thing, they are very, very good at what they do.

Xeni Jardin: But there is a difference, nobody owns the sport of tennis or swimming, but a specific company does own Painkiller 12. One of the five games in which FATAL1TY is considered the world champ.

.....be a painkiller.

Xeni Jardin: Some say that if a company owns the game, they also own the gamer, and that makes it less of a true sport. Not so, says Borland.

John Borland: But those companies that own the games are little like the, you know, the NBA, or the NFL or even the folks who own, you know, the sports stadiums , they provide an environment for people to play, but they don't actually control the people who are there.

Xeni Jardin: It may be impossible to control gamers, but it is getting easier to watch them. There is already one 24-hour gaming TV network--G4 TV, and this month, the high definition digital network HDNet will televise matches for the Cyberathlete Professional League or CPL. FATAL1TY has won this tournament 5 times before and will compete for $150,000 prize there on Nov 22--the largest single prize in gaming history. For FATAL1TY, winning is a matter of pride.

Johnathan Wendel: The money is great, I want to win 150 grand, at the same time, my destiny is to be first.

Xeni Jardin: And to gaming fans around the world, those don't sound like the words of a pitchman; they sound more like the words of an athlete.

Xeni Jardin: For NPR News in Los Angeles...