CHENNAI: I’m carrying the bomb…cover me, dude!’, ‘I knew it!’, ‘Kill him, just kill him.’ No, these are not the voices in our head but what can be heard at LXG gaming centre, where we sit down to have a chat with 22-year-old gamer Sriram Vishal. “I started gaming when I was in class 12, but it became an obsession in college. Since we had a lot of free time, my friends and I would go to the gaming cafe and play for hours at end,” he says. The BCom graduate from Loyola College goes by the name Tango in gaming circles. “There was a game where, when the player died, he’d shout ‘Tango down’. And I thought ‘Why not take up this name?’ It sounds cool.”
Sriram claims that playing against some of the good players at the gaming parlour is what eventually got him addicted to gaming. He then initiated his friends, who got together and formed a professional gaming team. “I used to play four to six hours a day when I was in college, but that gradually decreased to two to four hours ever since I started organising tournaments.” His team, NoS Gaming, was formed in 2013 and has conducted around five to seven tournaments in Chennai since then. “We have gone to many tournaments conducted by universities like VIT and SRM in the past.
What I noticed at most of these events was that all the participants were professionals — therefore I took it upon myself to give amateurs a chance.” The team even bagged sponsors for their tournaments. “Initially, our sponsor was Nmedia. And for our CS event, ‘Elite Hamers’ teamed up with us — they sponsor bootcamps and similar events. We have even partnered with laser tag places as we also don’t want kids to sit in front of the computer and play all day. They should engage in physical activity.”
Sriram is of the opinion that the view towards gaming has changed drastically in India. “When compared to the situation a few years back, gaming has started gaining momentum — slowly albeit surely — now. Back then people were not willing to risk it. But there are more tournaments now and the sponsors are also good. But I feel the society is still not okay with viewing gaming as a serious vocation. But if you can excel at it, even your parents wouldn’t question you.”
Who inspires him? “Though I don’t play DOTA much, I especially like Natus vincere (Na’vi), a DOTA team whose name in Latin translates to ‘Born to win’, for their consistency. Other teams tend to stop with just one win — but not them. I loved that kind of fighting spirit,”
he smiles.