Until last week, I thought I was coping quite nicely with the ever-changing 21st century. Having single-handedly installed a Bluetooth connection on my computer so that it could communicate with my mobile phone, I knew I had conquered the heights of modern technology.
I even thought I had made progress in convincing my eldest son, 14 going on 15, that a career in law or investment banking may be a better choice than the injury-prone and less financially certain world of professional soccer, on which he seemed to have his heart set.
Then came the bombshell, spotted by the aforementioned son and pointed out to me with eyes the size of saucers: professional video-game playing has become a viable job option.
This should not have surprised me: professional poker, chess and pool players abound. Yet there I was, agog at the revelation that there is a US-based organisation called the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL); and that there is an Olympic Games' equivalent of what some term 'e-sports', run by a rival South Korean group.
American Johnathan Wendel, who goes by the name 'Fatal1ty', on Tuesday won the US$150,000 first prize at the CPL's World Tour Grand Finals in New York. In Singapore, the champions - among the more than 700 participants from 67 countries at the World Cyber Games - took away US$435,000 during the four-day event, which ended on Sunday.
People can apparently make US$300,000 and more a year doing nothing but playing video games. In South Korea, professional games players have a stature bigger than the country's top movie and pop stars, with fan clubs and groupies to boot.
Deeper reading taught me about APMs - actions per minute, the average number of manoeuvres a player can execute in 60 seconds. On games with names like Starcraft and Counterstrike, a novice can apparently perform between 50 and 60 of these, but professional players can blur up to 400.
