One more night, A Jaedong story
When we talk about esports, there is a belief that anyone can compete if they tried hard enough. In a sense, that is correct. There are no physical limits as to what you need to play. Anyone can click the buttons on a keyboard, mouse, or gamepad. There is a large cross section of video games to choose from to be excellent in: FPS, RTS, MOBA, Battle Royale, Fighting games, etc. The ecosystem is such that tournament organizers try to create as much equal opportunity as is viable. They try to make sure there are no barriers to compete. So long as you are good enough you will find your way to the top. In another sense, it is the height of the Dunning-Kruger effect. There is a lot of work and sacrifice to becoming an esports player and this is the opportunity cost that comes with it.
To understand what I mean, first I’ll explain an average day of practice. It can vary from game to game, tournament to tournament, but the general average I’ve found has been somewhere between 6–12 hours a day, usually 5–6 days a week. Depending on the scene, a pro player can end up practicing somewhere between 9–12 months a year. What makes this more daunting is that is isn’t just playing ladder games. It’s about going over replays, comms, strategy, personality conflicts, motivation, and burnout. Every person has a set amount of mental energy in which they can exert on one activity for a long period of time. If you go at something too long, you start to burn out and can no longer practice. Practical examples of this are Brood War or League of Legends where the average player careers can be a quarter or half as long as a CS:GO, Dota 2, or FGC player.
Then we come to the opportunity cost. With 6–12 hours a day practicing and 8 hours a day sleeping, you have little to no time to do anything else. On top of that, a pro player can have sponsor obligations, team obligations, or streaming obligations. We have yet to even include time needed to play official matches (online in CS:GO or in the league format of Overwatch or League of Legends). Then there is the travel time which messes up your biological clock and rhythm. When you travel, you’re more susceptible to sickness, you sleep worse, and for players it is a much more tense as the LAN competitions are the ones that everyone wants to perform in.
On top of that, when we talk about esports the norm is to get younger players. Younger players just learn faster than their older counterparts and are less set in their ways. It’s why we see young talents and prodigies rise up in healthy scenes. The problem though is that this all comes at a cost. When a young person is doing all of these things to get better, it comes at a sacrifice. They lose out on studying or socializing. It’s why we see so many shy or awkward pros, when everyone else was living a normal life, they were focused on becoming the best at their craft. Maintaining a relationship is even harder as they don’t have the life experience to balance it out with their job, so they focus on one or the other too much.
Even if you do all of that, you may not succeed. This is what happened with Shawn “witmer” Taylor. Witmer was an NA CS:GO pro, but recently announced his retirement from competition. You can read his blog here. In it, he describes his love for the game and how much it taught him, but also the pains he had to go through, especially because he never got the success he was hoping for. In the end, he understands that life is more than just about competing and he is looking to make a transition as a streamer, analyst or coach.
He’s one of the luckier ones as he seems to have a solid plan as to where to go from here and what to do after his days of competition are over. For a player from a smaller game, this is a much harder transition to make. Park “Rain” Seo Yong was a Starcraft 2 player. While not well known now, he had a career from 2010–2012 and was someone who once made it into the GSL Finals in 2010. Soon after he retired and 6 years later he wrote a blog about his life after pro-gaming here.
It’s an incredibly insightful and honest blog. He is a player who moved over to America after his time in pro-gaming, but he is also someone who never thought what he would do after it. He was able to get into the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne and is studying to become a programmer. But even now, years later he is plagued by the choice he made to become a SC2 pro-gamer. He sounds like he chose to study out of a random guess and is now struggling with motivation and drive. He has yet to take the Korean military service and the younger Koreans he meets constantly makes him think what he is doing with his life.
“All the Korean kids I met here are younger than me, and finished their military service. And it makes me ask myself what I have done with my life. Yea. I wasted too much time trying out new things and see if I can do well. I did internship in WCG for 6 months, and I found out working in a Korean company would not work out for me, I tried to be a LOL player right after I retired, and that did not work out either. I even took a semester off to become a pro poker player. I should have realized that I am not young enough anymore to mess around with my life.
Someone asked me what do you really wanna do after you get a degree, and I was not able to answer it. I just vaguely answered I wanna work in the lab, and I know that is a total bs.
Yea I feel lost these days. I don’t even know what I really wanna do or I can do. I don’t have motivation for anything. Starcraft was the only thing I truly enjoyed, and I don’t wanna think I wasted my life on playing Starcraft. It is still one of the best experiences in my life. “ — Rain
This is the price that players have to pay in their chase to become the best. Rain is just one of the few to be so candid and honest about his experiences and hopefully his words can explain the dangers of such a career.
Even if you are able to get to the top of the world, you could be left unsatisfied with the result. Lee “Crown” min-ho is the mid laner of KSV Esports, the team that won Worlds in 2017. That is the highest accomplishment you can get in League of Legends, but when he was interveiwed after the victory, he was morose.
“Being completely honest here, after Worlds, I was considering the idea of retiring because I was not satisfied with my own performance. Despite winning… how do I put this… it didn’t feel like I deserved it? It didn’t feel like I had won with my own skills. My team had won, but I have lost. I can’t describe how I felt, and to be honest, I don’t know what made me think that way. It felt as if the team had won the game for me. “
Crown was a player who had initially gotten into esports to become a Brood War player. He was one among many players who was inspired by Jaedong, a legendary Zerg player. He considers Jaedong to be his role model and someone he should aspire to, but his dreams of becoming a Brood War pro failed. Crown continued his life doing the only thing he knew how, playing games and eventually found himself playing League of Legends. Despite getting the biggest victory in the League of Legends, he has yet to feel the jubilation he was hoping for when he first started the journey.
Jaedong himself is one of the most celebrated and accomplished players in any game. But even he has paid a price. In his case it was physical. As ESPN reported, his body is breaking down. His doctors have told him he should have already quit, that the damage he is doing to his wrists will be irreversible. But he cannot as he is someone driven in a way we rarely see from and he will break before he bends to fate. Even some of the greatest of all time have a price to pay whether that is emotional like Crown or physical like Jaedong.
So before taking the journey to become a pro gamer, understand that there is sacrifice. That there is a price to be paid in your personal life and your work. This isn’t for the faint of heart. Daigo Umehara once said this from his book The Will to Keep Winning,
“I don’t want prospective gamers to be dazzled with the prospects of status, honor and prize money; I want them to honestly experiences the wonder of esports without making it out to be something it isn’t.”
If you take this journey, understand that there is a higher chance of failure than success. For every successful story we hear, there are hundreds of broken dreams in its wake. But even in those failures, even in those losses, that competition, that experience, those moments are meaningful. The decision to take up a competitive discipline changes us in ways we cannot fathom and can make it all worth it or it can be one of the big regrets of your life. That is the opportunity cost of becoming a pro, it demands so much from you and guarantees you nothing.
*This article was originally published on slingshotesports.com
