In the news: professional game players

Malaysia‘s Star Online has an article up about professional game players, a breed of gamer different from the ones you might encounter in professional gaming leagues. These guys take it upon themselves to earn cash by playing online games for other people.

Leon Jalleh, 27, turned from delinquency to online gaming as a way out. Now he makes a living by levelling up other people’s characters for them in World of Warcraft, Blizzard‘s massive online game. Like him, there’s a growing community of gamers who engage themselves in the games to make up for their own inability to finish schooling, or for other similar reasons.

While Jalleh might be doing something many gamers frown upon, he does have his scruples about it, opting to study the game and play all of it himself, taking his time while doing it. In fact, he says he’s opposed to using programs like WoWGlider to get the levelling job done. “If a game is dominated by bots,” he laments, “then who are the real players supposed to talk to and interact with?”

Of course, there’s still a wrinkle in all this talk. While Jalleh does take a certain high road ethically speaking, the article fails to mention that even lending your account to another person is itself grounds for account deletion. As for whether or not he happens to be an antihero of sorts, we’ll leave that up to you. The only thing we can say is, paying bills is the same wherever you go, even if you do happen to work a different sort of job from the norm.

Malaysia‘s Star Online has an article up about professional game players, a breed of gamer different from the ones you might encounter in professional gaming leagues. These guys take it upon themselves to earn cash by playing online games for other people.

Leon Jalleh, 27, turned from delinquency to online gaming as a way out. Now he makes a living by levelling up other people’s characters for them in World of Warcraft, Blizzard‘s massive online game. Like him, there’s a growing community of gamers who engage themselves in the games to make up for their own inability to finish schooling, or for other similar reasons.

While Jalleh might be doing something many gamers frown upon, he does have his scruples about it, opting to study the game and play all of it himself, taking his time while doing it. In fact, he says he’s opposed to using programs like WoWGlider to get the levelling job done. “If a game is dominated by bots,” he laments, “then who are the real players supposed to talk to and interact with?”

Of course, there’s still a wrinkle in all this talk. While Jalleh does take a certain high road ethically speaking, the article fails to mention that even lending your account to another person is itself grounds for account deletion. As for whether or not he happens to be an antihero of sorts, we’ll leave that up to you. The only thing we can say is, paying bills is the same wherever you go, even if you do happen to work a different sort of job from the norm.