Pro gamers lure fans by getting cyber-killed

Thursday, Jan. 11, 2007 | 7:02 a.m.

Amy Brady, professional video gamer, has just lost two rounds, lost them to amateurs, to people who practically walked in off the street and into the World Series of Video Games tent at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

She says it wouldn't have happened if she had been playing right at the start of the rounds instead of helping the amateurs get set up on one of the eight high-end Dell computers. And she usually plays on an Xbox, not a PC. Also someone - one of the amateurs - had changed the map. It was too big, she couldn't kill fast enough. They shouldn't have been allowed to mess with the map.

She stops. She looks at my notebook. She looks up.

" I shouldn't make excuses," Brady says. "But I hate to lose."

Pause.

"And I wasn't playing playing, you know."

Which is true. Most of the time she was paying attention as she ran her counterterrorist commando through a casino vault or around the innards of the Hoover Dam in "Rainbow Six: Vegas," dealing digital death with a combat shotgun and proving a dab hand with grenades, lobbing them right onto the noggins of her unsuspecting opponents - boom!

But when she wasn't doing that, she was answering her cell phone or chatting with one of her friends or fans.

Chatting with fans is a big part of being a pro gamer these days, as the sport tries to convince the world that it is a sport. Players are expected to chat up gamers and make them fans. They're expected to be personalities, ambassadors of their sport.

Top players, like the No. 1 and No. 2 players in the world, 22-year-old Johan "Toxic" Quick of Sweden and 20-year-old Alessandro "Stermy" Avallone of Italy, can make up to $100,000 a year before endorsements. They were here, too, playing with amateurs. But they were playing playing, defending their reputations with brutal efficiency and not once allowing an opponent to kill them while they killed their opponents over and over again. Especially the kids.

"It means a lot for them to play you," Quick says, "because they look up to you."

And the kids knew they were playing Toxic and Stermy, which wasn't always the case with the people playing Brady.

"I didn't know who I was playing against," says Justin Cunningham, an 18-year-old employee of Compu-Cave in Los Angeles, who outkilled Brady by four.

And if he had known?

"I would have used a machine gun with a scope instead of a sniper rifle."