Playing for pay
Former State Department staffer quit his job to play NBA2K.
WASHINGTON — It’s hot and muggy outside, but fortunately this basketball game is indoors and the players all seem pretty locked in. The one they call “Boo” is particularly chatty, talking his team through an intense weekday scrimmage.
“Good ‘D’ there,” he calls out. “Gotta get a stop. ... Alright, good board . ... Yo, everybody stay home on your shots.” And so on.
Even as the score tightens and the players look winded, he never breaks a sweat. Austin “Boo” Painter plays basketball five days a week alongside his teammates, all lined up against one wall, all facing oversized screens and holding video game controllers. Painter is the leading scorer for Wizards District Gaming, which is in the midst of its inaugural NBA 2K season, a fledgling league that’s backed by the NBA.
The upstart is trying to capitalize on the esports explosion — big-name investors are lining up to get involved in various teams and leagues and even the International Olympic Committee has taken an interest — and in the process the new NBA 2K League has helped carve out unlikely career paths for sports gamers, perhaps few as improbable as Painter’s.
The 24-year old graduated from Old Dominion last spring. He almost immediately accepted a job with the State Department, underwent two months of training, received his security clearance — and then walked away from it all to play video games full-time.
“I get housing, everything’s paid for and I get a good salary,” Painter says, by way of explanation. “I mean, I’m playing video games every day. So the decision was: stand up and walk around the State Department all day or play video games?”
He has what is essentially a 9-to-5 job, reporting each day to the Wizards District Gaming facility in Chinatown, where he sits side-byside with teammates and plays one NBA 2K game after another, prepping for the weekend competition in New York.
Painter is from a nostoplight Virginia town called Stanley, located in the shadows of the Shenandoahs and about eight miles from the Luray Caverns. He grew up playing both sports and video games.
“I was probably like most parents — ‘You need to get off that game and get outside,’” his mother, Lori Painter, says with a chuckle.
There were times, she says, she’d even cut off the internet to compel a mandatory video game break. No one, of course, knew where it might lead. Painter enrolled at Old Dominion and doublemajored in criminal justice and sociology. He always preferred sports games and kept playing whenever time allowed, winning a few dollars here and there in online tournaments.
“I kind of took a step back at one point because I was in school and it was like, I can’t play video games all the time,” he said, “and I had a girlfriend at the time.”