My Life with a Singaporean Gaming Celebrity

This is going to be a post about my roommate, Kun He, who I am everyday a little more fascinated by. I sat down to write the second half of my overdue Alexandria post, but I got into a conversation with Kun He that inspired me to write about him instead, because he is a very interesting guy. KH is a tall, skinny guy who wears small, stylish rectangular glasses as has that darkish red-orange color hair that Asians get when they dye it. He's usually pretty quiet, but also has a quirky, almost dry sense of humor that comes out every once in a while. Generally he wears hip, but comfortable clothing, and his sense of humor playing out in the shirts he has with funny phrases like "Voted most likely to kick your ass" that are hilarious when combined with the super skinny kid sporting them. Anyway, he's a cool guy, and as I think I mentioned in one of my first couple posts, he and I are very compatible as roommates. Even though we don't talk that much usually, and we basically never hang out outside of our room, I think this is probably the best of all the possible living scenarios I could have had in here in the dorms. When we do talk though, it's either about his life in Singapore, including his stories from his obligatory military service, or about his main hobby: Starcraft 2.

Now for those of you that don't know, Starcraft 2 is a computer game that came out in the past year to much hype in the gaming world largely because the original Starcraft is very much considered a classic. The new one is almost identical to its predecessor in that you effectively play war on various futuristic looking maps, amassing supplies, creating buildings, training increasingly advanced troops, and executing battle strategies all in real time to defeat your opponents who are doing the same things. You can play against the computer, or especially if you are very good, you can play against other people online around the world. As it turns out, I played the original Starcraft long ago in the 90's and early 00's, and I also played another very similar game when I was in early high school, so I know how it works and can understand a little more than the basics of what is going on in the game. Kun He plays Starcraft 2 basically every day for multiple hours, which is actually kind of nice for me when I just want some good quality mindless entertainment for a bit (I discovered with a very unpleasant shock that you can't watch Hulu, or any of the major network's online TV streams internationally, and while there are other sites you can use to get around this, it's sort of a hassle, and I really only want to watch one show), and it's kind of our way of bonding. As a result, probably once a week or so, I'll sit and watch him play for 20 minutes or so.

Now Kun He plays this game a lot. He's cut back recently, but it still takes up a fair amount of his time. At first, I was kind of horrified that Kun He would be in Egypt and be willing to sit and play computer games for multiple hours a day, but then I found that Kun He is kind of a big deal in the Starcraft world. Turns out he used to play for a professional Starcraft team (yes you read that right) and was at one point the number 2 ranked Starcraft player in Asia (excluding South Korea). He made thousands of dollars doing this. He had sponsors. People know his screenname and often times people walking down the street in Singapore would recognize him just from his Starcraft reputation.

These days, Ke now plays Starcraft 2, which is apparently a fairly undeveloped field of gaming in comparison to Starcraft 1, and although there are not professional leagues yet (Kun He predicts there will be some in the next few years), there are a fair amount of tournaments, and Kun He often gets invited to the top level ones, only to turn them down because he doesn't have the time, nor does he practice the 18 hours a day that professional players do. His refusals notwithstanding, he is, in fact, such a big deal that when there was an online tournament last week that he turned down, they came back and told him he could go straight to the top 16! These tournaments have thousands of contestants and he was offered a fast track to the round before the quarter finals. So yeah, it's kind of hard to begrudge him his playing, because it'd be like getting annoyed with Michael Jordan (ok he's not that elite, but i wanted to use an athlete that everyone knows), for wanting to go and shoot hoops everyday. You wouldn't say, "seriously, Mike, you want to do what? Again? You did that for like two hours yesterday."

And even the argument that I wanted to make for a while that went something like: "Dude. You're in Egypt. EGYPT, DUDE. YOU'RE IN EGYPT. DUDE!" sort of founders, because he is going to be an Egyptologist and will be studying here for at least 3 years. Does he need to rush back out to the Pyramids if he's already been there and will probably be spending most of his life doing stuff with them anyway? Probably not. Nonetheless, a part of me wonders about whether this is actually what he wants to be doing. On one occasion he dismissed getting back into the professional gaming scene, because he implied that doing so would not be substantial enough thing to have done with his life. Definitely respect that, and can certainly relate. And yet, on another occasion when he admitted that he would rather be playing Starcraft 2 most of the time, I could tell how much more he enjoyed playing.

I once heard an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, that author who wrote those popular pop-psychology-ish books ("Blink," "The Tipping Point," "Outliers"), where he asserted his belief that so-called geniuses are not just people with a huge reservoir of inherent talent and skill in a particular pursuit, but rather they are those with talent AND a powerful, driving love for doing something. So maybe I'm saying Kun He's a Startcraft genius. After watching Kun He play, and having him get into some of the insanely creative strategies that are considered common practice among the elite players like him, I'm sort of inclined to say he is pretty darn close if nothing else. He would say he's not, that the super elite Korean server has hundreds of players who are better than him (apparently South Korea is beyond obsessed with both Starcrafts, and the level of play there is in a totally different ballpark from anything anywhere else in the world), but Kun He doesn't play nearly as much as they do, and he really truly seems to enjoy and appreciate the game. I'm not trying to argue that I think he should be a gamer, but I just don't see that same passion for Egyptology with him, and I find that a little sad, since I was pretty into what I was studying in college. I wonder if I'll be lucky enough to be that passionate about whatever I end up doing with my life.

At the same time, Kun He also gets animated about talking about his home country, the island nation of Singapore. Generally the first thing he always says is that he hates it, but I suspect that that is not totally the case. He complains about the crowdedness of his country and he scorns the one-party pseudo-democratic government that has controlled it for the past couple decades (not unlike Egypt, though I don't think Kun He is up enough on Egyptian current events to know that). He tells of municipal duties blatantly looked over for years at a time only to have some official come by and fix everything conveniently just before he or she is up for reelection. According to KH, nearly all of Singapore's youth are completely plugged out of their country's politics, dismissing it as an exercise in frustration.

He also has some funny stories from his time in the army. He told me that every able-bodied male over the age of 18 must serve for 2 years in the army, which made me ask him why Singapore even needs such a proportionally large standing army, given it's small size and largely inoffensive relations with the rest of the world. The answer was, basically, it's all about Malaysia. I don't even really remember what issues they tend to fight over, but it's a longstanding mistrust that exists between them, and that plays itself out in kind of funny ways with Singaporean military, said Kun He. For instance, in their fitness test during training, Singaporean soldiers have to be able to run a distance of something like 1.5 miles which happens to also be the length of the bridge connecting the island to the Malaysia. In addition, the bulk of Singapore's armed forces are stationed at the tip of the island closest to Malaysia. Nonetheless, it doesn't seem like a pressing international crisis, and Kun He seemed unphased and even amused when talking about Singapore's Malaysian paranoia.

KH also has some funny stories about the training exercises he had to do when he was a scout. Most of the exercises were basically mock fighting scenarios during which the goal was to sneak up on the other side without being snuck up on first. As a scout, Kun He was usually out by himself closer to the "front lines," and they are thus expected to be especially good at not being found by the enemy given that that would be there primary function in an actual war. So one time, Kun He was out in the middle of the jungle in full camo, doing his best not to get caught, when out of nowhere his commander pops through the trees carrying a cake for him because the day before she had denied him leave to go celebrate something. He maintains that no one should have even known where he was, and was too surprised to ask how she had found him so easily, but he does remember the first thing he said to her. Instead of thanking her or asking her how she found him, he said only "Can you please put out the candle? I'm in the middle of an exercise." He also told me about a time when his battalion had to start an exercise over because the opposing side had gotten lost and driven into his Sergeant's camp--the camp they were supposed to be trying to capture--to ask for directions. Apparently there is a saying in the Singaporean army that goes, "for every clown in your unit, there is one your opponent's." I always think of military forces being so swift and effective, but he's right to point out that militaries are nothing more than their component troops, and you can't train clownishness out of every soldier.

Hopefully neither of us gets offed by a miffed Singaporean special forces soldier for me sharing this stuff. I just thought those were some fairly amusing stories. And if you're wondering, yes, I do feel a little weird going into such detail about just one person, especially considering that I know I would never do the same with some of my good friends here. All the same, he and I lead such separate lives that I'm confident he'll never read this and be weirded out by it, nor do I think he would care. Furthermore, he's just such a character, and is one of the interesting aspects of my time here in Egypt, so I thought I'd share it with you here, as that is what my blog is supposed to be about.

In other news, I'll post about Alexandria soon, and I've got some thoughts about Arabic and Cairo roiling around in my head that I'm hoping to get the time to write about soon. It's midterms week of a sort here so probably not until the weekend though.

Finally, these past two weeks I've been hammering out some of the details of life post Egypt, and I'm getting excited. I'll write about those as soon as I have them decided a little more concretely.

And here's a picture of me at the Egypt-Tunis soccer game to make this post more visually interesting: