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Eurogamer. Kotaku. GamesRadar. EVO 04 - Justin Wong vs Daigo. Old but fantastic article on gaming. Modern video games mean big business, and big controversy. Yet most of the charges levelled against games—that they stunt minds and spark addiction—are based on an outdated understanding of what gamers do when they sit down to play Discuss this article on First Drafts, Prospect ‘s blog Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70.

It’s not that he has lost interest—just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. When Mogwai isn’t online, he’s called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. It’s an eloquent self-justification—even if some, including Adam’s partner of the last ten years, might say he protests too much.

This lack has become increasingly jarring, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big news indeed. Daigo Umehara: The King of Fighters Interview | Eurogamer. "Right now, there's nobody younger than me that I feel threatened by. I haven't met anyone that I felt possesses the skill to surpass me in the future. I'm not over-evaluating myself. I can analytically see their weakness, their ineptitudes.

" Daigo Umehara is better at Street Fighter than you and he knows it. Daigo Umehara, it turns out, is better than everyone at Street Fighter. This victory was just the latest in a long line of high-profile competitive achievements that Umehara (Ume, to his friends) has to his name, the most famous of which is his astonishing comeback against Wong during the 2004 Evolution loser's bracket final. The chances are that if you don't recognise Umehara's name, you will have seen his most famous victory. Since then, Umehara's fame and reputation has spread through the fighting game community and beyond. But his own understanding of his supremacy comes not from the vanity of world championship titles but rather from the measured perception of a giant.