Streets run with virtual blood as gaming goes Olympic

Wired on Friday: For now, the terrorists appear to have taken the upper hand. They'd taken a strong early lead in seizing many of the best strategic positions, and were now attempting to secure their holding by picking off the unprotected snipers of the government forces.

Welcome to the all-comers Counter-Strike championship at the World Cyber Games (WCG). Counter-Strike is a popular brand of online video game for PC, where terrorist and counter-terrorist teams battle it out in a series of evenly balanced missions.

Usually no one sees these scenes of carnage except the players. Here at the WCG, it's a spectator sport. The battle is displayed on two large screens with eager commentators sandwiched between.

As sporting events go, the pacing is a little like that of cricket. Long periods of little interest but much fidgety concentration, followed by the sharp crack of gunfire, followed by sharp inhalations or shouts of relief from the small crowd.

Counter-Strike is one of the official sports of the WCG. The others include a driving game, Need For Speed; a strategic space battle environment called StarCraft; Unreal Tournament, a straightforward kill-or-be-killed shooting game; and, incongruously, FIFA Soccer 2004, a footballing simulator.

The conceit of the WCG is that these video games are growing to be sports in their own right; and that the time is right for a global Olympics. The whole show is presented with all the razzmatazz of an Olympiad, from dancing cheerleaders at the spectacular opening ceremony, to a "player's village" at a hotel down the road.

There's one key difference between the Olympics and the WCG, though. The Counter-Strike game I was watching was a friendly, where all comers play.

Serious players competing in the main arena are rather more professional. The WCG pays out more than $400,000 (€325,000) in cash prizes. The top player at Counter-Strike will take home $25,000.

Six hundred players from 55 countries have all come to San Francisco to battle it out, twitching over their customised PCs, spraying data packets across the high-speed networks to defeat or deflect their international opponents.

The WCG has had a lot of publicity, and this is definitively a city that likes it spectacles digital. Wandering around, the venue looks like the virtual setting for one one of those 3D shooter games - lots of large empty areas filled with crates and empty barrels of caffeinated soft drinks.

Plenty of deserted elevators and corridors to skulk and plan your assault. Few annoying bystanders to get in the way.

This is the first WCG to be hosted outside South Korea. One suspects that the organisers have, as so many foreign sports organisers have done before them, overestimated the US public's interest in or knowledge of a world championship.

America's teenagers love the world of computer games - it's a $10 billion market. But in the popular imagination here, gaming is still seen as a lonely, bedroom-confined practice.

In the WCG's original home of Seoul, South Korea, in Singapore (next year's venue), and in Shanghai, that might not seem such a hubristic gesture. In the West, computer gaming is generally portrayed as a pale, antisocial and unhealthy opposite of sport.

But games in the Far East are primarily social, fought almost exclusively in the public gaming cafés where banks of PCs, just like the battle arena here, are filled with a generation of players, playing and socialising as part of a wider community.

It's the equivalent of going off to watch the local football game - and, for the spectators at least, probably as healthy.

It's healthy, too, for the digital economy as a whole. Wide acceptance of gaming has been one of the drivers of broadband expansion in South Korea and the rest of the Far East.

One of the more successful IPOs (initial public offerings) on the technology stock market Nasdaq was for Shanda, a Chinese company that runs subscription versions of many of China's favourite PC games.

Income and earnings doubled this year for Shanda; it has been a hot stock pick for some time.

Another, far more sedate conference is taking place in San Francisco at the same time as the WCG. Called "Web 2.0", it is a mingling of Silicon Valley geeks and the old venture capitalists that fuelled the last boom.Together, they struggle to construct business models for the next tech upswing.

Among the polished presentations from Google, Microsoft, IBM and other familiar faces, veteran venture capitalist Bill Gurley squeezes in a 10-minute description of what's happening three blocks east and a continent away.

The audience is rapt: for many of them, you can tell that they've never heard of such a thing. The stock-price chart for Shanda in particular raises a lot of eyebrows.

I nip back to see how the WCG is progressing. The final results place the US team third, with South Korea second and the Netherlands first. And in the Counter-Strike tournament I was watching? Seems like the terrorists had already won.