WCG 2009

Hi readers, been a while since I last blogged huh? Well anyways, I will be writing on WCG. I know Aaron has blogged about the WCG event he attended however, I would love to share my experience with you too. I was given the opportunity to be a student helper for WCG during those 3 days. So I was there practically the whole day, from early morning to night. The event stretched from 10am to 10pm for the first 2 days so it was really tiring since I had to be there even earlier and leave later to be debriefed for the next day. The last day ended at 7pm but I still had to stay behind to help in “teardown” in the convention hall which took about 3 to 4 hours.

I was in charge of various positions but mainly for Alienware booth during the 3 day span. So basically, my job was to promote Alienware laptops with the use of games. The two games available were Call of Duty 4 and Grid. It was a really nice experience although it was tiring to be standing around and helping out those who were playing the games. We had an hourly competition going on everyday to encourage people to try the laptops with the winning prize being a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook.

What caught me by surprise was this young boy who was in his school uniform, dropped by to WCG, decided to play Grid for fun and walks back home with a Netbook. He apparently had the fastest time in the Grid challenge and no one else was able to beat his timing. After that I saw a trend slowly emerging, it seems that more and more younger gamers are getting better at games then those who have been playing it far longer then they had. Probably a stereotype but I always assume younger kids to be a “noob” at playing games like COD4 for that matter. Our competition for COD4 was based on team death-match whereby 2 players would versus another 2 players. And on one fine afternoon, two really young boys approached me wishing to join the competition and people were staring at them amused thinking they could never beat the other 2 players who were in their 20’s perhaps. Boy were they wrong, everyone watching  (including me) were shocked at how well they were maneuvering around in the game and eventually won the match. It was really cool haha.

Oh I had another surprise too, our very own course manager for GET, Mr. Peter Choy, was there playing COD4 on the second day. Hope you had fun Mr Choy!

I was also able to catch a glimpse of the main WCG event and have seen the amount of hard work and dedication both players and organisers had put in to make this event a successful one. It was really an eye opener too as being part of the team had made me realise and personally experience the difficulty in organising a big event such a this, especially with the case of H1N1 going around and the fact that visitors from all over Asia were there. I would really love to be part of WCG again, probably opt to be a game marshal and who knows you might just see me next year watching over you during your DOTA match.