CHENNAI : Dhanush Srinivas believes that he is able to channelise his mechanical skills through e-sports. He was introduced to gaming as a seven-year-old by his uncle, a software engineer. The first games he played included Halo One and NFS 2 before he started exploring other games.“I’ve played nearly 13,000 hours of Call of Duty and that’s when I realised that first person games (FPS) were my favourite,” Dhanush said. He spends around eight hours gaming every day and is currently into Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, an FPS that includes strategy and creativity.
He aims to rank Gold 1 in the game in order to be selected into the Paradox e-Sports team. “I play a lot of FPS games and I believe goals are very important. Before playing a ranked match, warming up with bots or playing casual matches prove very useful,” he said.The 19-year-old gamer is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Applications in New Shores International College, Bengaluru, and hopes to develop games in the future.
According to Dhanush, juggling college and gaming is not too hard. He believes that Indian parents are very conservative when it comes to concepts like gaming. But, since he allocates his time carefully, by setting aside three hours daily to study, his parents have come to understand his passion despite initial apprehension.
So much so, his parents even helped him build his own gaming PC for which he chose to use an AMD RYZEN 7 1800X processor, an ASUS ROG STRIX motherboard and a 16 GB of RAM. “It has six fans, three for intake and three for exhaust. This is because ventilation in a gaming PC is very important. Lower the temperature, higher the performance,” he said, adding that he learned how to build a PC on YouTube.
As India is still developing in the field of e-Sports, many gamers feel disheartened when they don’t make it into a team. Dhanush also thinks there are many who give up either because they find a game too difficult or simply because they don’t understand how it works. “I have around 300 hours on DOTA 2 and I didn’t even know how to play until 250 hours into the game,” he said, adding that he believes patience is the key to reach the top.