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Become a Professional Gamer
introverted writes "An article in the Wall Street Journal covers events in South Korea, where, even more so than the U.S., there are increasingly highly paid professional teams competing in games such as Blizzard's StarCraft. The article notes: 'Last year, [pro StarCraft gamer] Lim Yo-Hwan made about $300,000 from player fees and commercials. Another top earner, Hung Jin-Ho, whose fingers are insured for $60,000, recently signed a three-year deal with telecom provider KTF Co. that will pay him $480,000 altogether.' So now you can claim your time gaming as 'job skills training'!"
This is true, as a former pro-Counterstrike player I can vouch for this. We would practice daily up to 6 hours, just so we could get down a strategy juuuust right. Then you would be constantly in practice so that you had recoil figured out. Getting guaranteed headshots 100% is a challenge. But making it work also made it not fun. The stress involved to perform was intense. It started taking priority over other parts of my life like school.
Every now and then I play for fun, and that's what it is.
It is nice though in that becoming a professional gamer doesn't have any limits to it like the physical barrier in becoming a football player.
Most people aren't thought about after they're gone. "I wonder where Rob got the plutonium" is better than most get.
In the article, the author noted that the top player(s) can reach upwards of 400 APM.
This needs clarification about exactly what's going on here.
First off, this number is derived out of all the combined actions over the course of the game and divided by how many minutes the game was. There is a simple program created and written for this that analyzes each game through the replay details. If _anyone_ here plays StarCraft or it's younger brother WarCraft 3 (as both are considered professional games in Korea with WC3 becoming more and more popular) then you will know it's damn near impossible to accomplish anything efficiently with that high of an APM in the early game for about the first 2-4 minutes. To get that APM, keep in mind, he has to be clicking away approx. 6 times a second for the WHOLE match.
Yes, players can do this, but we gamers give it a special name: Spam clicking. As an avid gamer, spam clicking is one of the most obnoxious ways to show off your 1337 skills.
How do I know that 400 APM isn't possible, or at least where every click actually does something? Very simple, I've seen these replays, and by comparing top replays of players who spam click vs. those who don't, the highest _most efficient_ number is more are 150-175 APM, well below the 400 number the author glorified these players with. As you can probably tell, this works with marketers and advertising business, because I once tried to spam that much myself, and couldn't get higher than 250. People think it's supernatural.