Alan Hatfield, a white bandana strapped across his forehead, had broken out into a fine sweat. The 16-year old gamer was deep in concentration at one of the extended trestle tables, one hand on his keyboard and the other frantically flicking a mouse.
His five-man team — or clan as they call it in his world — was in the middle of a virtual warzone; the popular first-person shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was the game of choice.
While the rest of Jo’burg was browsing for dildos at the Sexpo, Hatfield and his clan were battling it out with 2000 other mostly teenage gaming geeks at one of the biggest multiplayer gaming set-ups or LANs (local area networks) held in the southern hemisphere.
Every October for the past eight years, tens of thousands of gamers have gathered for rAge — the “Really Awesome Gaming Expo” — at the Coca-Cola Dome in Northgate.
This year the R300 tickets for the big attraction LAN event, which ran a marathon 54 hours from Friday to Sunday in an effort to beat the Guinness world record, sold out in less than 36 hours.
It’s one of many of the highlights of the event, in which everyone from Dell and Asus to Microsoft and EA Games peddles the latest hardware and software to gaming freaks in search of bargains and the latest video games on the market.
With more than a million consoles, never mind PCs, in circulation, South Africa takes a respectable slice of the burgeoning $50-billion global gaming market, which includes interactive online multiplayer games like Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike and Halo.
Last year in the United Kingdom game sales beat spending on movies, both in cinema and on DVD, and a recent report on global media and entertainment by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the video game segment would outstrip the global consumer magazine segment by 2014.
According to Trevor Henry, events coordinator for Incredible Connection and Gaming Inc, who sponsored the LAN’s Call of Duty 4 tournament, South Africans spent almost R2-billion on video games and consoles last year.
Hatfield is a solid contributor to those growing figures. He’s been playing videogames for, literally, half his life. “I’ve been playing since I was eight. I originally started playing with my step-dad,” he says.
Things got serious soon after, when he played his first competitive game. “Once you play your first competition it gets so addictive, you just have to play another one.”
It’s those gaming friendships that drew Hatfield to rAge.
“You’re playing against people you’ve been playing online with for maybe two or three years. You’ve never seen their face, you don’t know what they look like, you don’t know their personalities. A lot of these LAN events are to meet and greet,” he said.
And, of course, to play.
When there was a break in the action, Hatfield would take a swig from his two-litre Coke or dry his sweaty palms with a facecloth.
The players on his team wore matching black t-shirts, with the clan name Aura scrawled on the front in red and their chosen names listed on the back – eXploZ, vaMpz and for Hatfield: K1ddo. Food takes a back seat.
For 18-year-old Kirsten McIntyre, who drove down from Pretoria with her older brother to attend the LAN, that meant a steady stream of Fizzers, lollipops and breath mints.
“I’ve been living off all the free sweets they give out on the exhibition floor. I had a packet of jelly beans for breakfast,” she said.
McIntyre, her hair pulled back into a functional ponytail, wore a baggy black t-shirt, comfortable track-suit pants and sandals.
Though she comes from a gaming family (her dad works in IT), she’s not a particularly competitive gamer. “I’m not the best there is by far, but I’m not as bad as people expect me to be,” she said.
Like Hatfield, she came mostly to meet the people she’s built relationships with through gaming.
Gamers wear mics and headsets when they play; they constantly speak to each other or send instant messages back and forth during the game.
Keeping the lines of communication open is essential if you’re going to formulate a strategy for taking down the enemy or call for help when you’re in trouble. And in between all this shoptalk, conversations and friendships form.
“I have a group of friends that have been playing together since last year,” she said. But they’d never actually met until last weekend.
By Sunday afternoon, McIntyre was bleary-eyed.
She’d had only a few hours of sleep, stolen between games in the early hours of the morning. “I slept here, on the floor,” she said, gesturing to a quiet nook in the corner.
In spite of the pillows, blankets and sleeping bags that were scattered around the Dome, sleep is the last thing on the mind of many. Some simply don’t sleep, subsisting on Red Bull and Power Play, and showers are strictly optional.
After hours of concentration and eye strain, a crash is inevitable for most. “You literally wake up with keyboard marks on your face,” says McIntyre.
At 3pm on Sunday, after more than 50 hours of play, only two teams were left: last year’s finalists: Bravado and =BFB= muPtarDs, known as BFB or Big Fat B*stards.
Ultimately, Bravado prevailed, beating BFB 13-4 and 13-8 in two rounds of Call of Duty 4.
They won modest prizes — gaming headphones, vouchers and an external hard drive — but more precious than that, of course, was the bragging rights.
After all, these gamers are no mere gaming geeks.
Now they are the country’s best clan, with a gaming marathon of sweat and bullets to prove it.
What the kids will be playing:
Dead Rising 2
Though there is a plot that involves protagonist Chuck Greene offering himself up to a reality TV show in order to save his daughter’s life, it really comes down to one thing: How creative can you get as you mow your way through a zombie horde? The promotional pictures for Dead Rising 2 show a blood-spattered Chuck wielding a kayak paddle that has chainsaws strapped to each end. Need I say more?
Dead Space 2
Sneak previews of this game, which is due out in a few months, were hair-raising enough in a crowded exhibition hall.
Play it alone in the dark if you dare. After the events of the original game, its protagonist is mentally ill and suffering from post-traumatic stress. He’s also stranded on a space ship full of people who have “necromorph” infection. Yep, you guessed it, zombies in space.
These gory monsters jump out at you as you turn corners and try to rip your throat out, and the only way to kill them is by dismemberment.
Gran Turismo 5
A game that has long been in production and is due to be released next month, GT5 promises the same feel and attention to scenery as its predecessors, but with 70 different tracks, more than a thousand cars and weather effects. A bonus for rAge attendees was the chance to play in 3D.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
Ezio Auditore, the hero of Assassin’s Creed 2, is back, this time in Rome. It’s the usual hiding, killing and bouncing off walls intermixed with an attempt to find out about an ancestor’s past, but this time with a multiplayer component.
Brotherhood may fill a niche for gamers dying to try their assassination skills against savvy humans instead of artificial intelligence.