(bells chiming)
Just imagine living
in this 15 million dollar home.
You're paid a steady salary,
supported by a whole team of staff
whose sole purpose is to get you to play at your best.
Alright fellas, let's go.
And if you don't perform,
you're cut from the team.
Here we go, round three, round three.
Keep it going, no breaks.
If you think this sounds like the life
of a pro athlete, you'd be right, kind of.
Stop your bitchin'.
It's the life of the sports player
of the future, lived by the lucky few today.
(fun electronic music)
As technology replaces old jobs,
it's also creating new ones.
I'm Aki Ito, and I'm here to show you
the jobs of the future.
(fun, upbeat music)
My name is Michael Schmale, I'm a professional gamer.
(guns firing)
For someone who's uneducated in the e-sports scene
and doesn't understand how it works,
the way I would describe it is, it's kind of similar
to a professional athlete.
It's a lot of preparation, hard work, and team effort.
I think one guy's above me.
Nah, trust me, he's not.
Ghost Gaming pays players like Mike
to compete in video game battles.
And yes, that is a real job now.
(guns firing)
More people watch video games than Netflix,
Hulu, ESPN, and HBO put together.
And e-sports is already a billion dollar industry.
(upbeat, energetic music)
That's how Ghost can afford to shower players
with all kinds of perks, like this team house.
It's a ten bed, 16 bath mansion overlooking Hollywood.
And it houses 10 players at a time,
all in their late teens and early 20s.
So when most people just take a quick look
at the house we're living in, it's a bunch of teenagers,
and it's a lot of us, so you would think
it's rowdy, we're just reckless,
but we're professional e-sports players.
(loud alarm ringing)
Here's the day of a professional gamer.
(fun, playful music)
I wake up nine, 9:30, breakfast.
Chest up, chest up, let's go.
11 a.m., we have workouts.
That lasts for an hour to an hour and a half.
There you go Mike,
push it straight into the ground.
Eight, nine and ten.
After we do that,
we hit the film session, and we watch film
on other teams to see what they do.
Just taking his time, make sure you guys take your time,
you don't need to be fancy with it,
just need to make sure to hit the shots
you need to hit.
Oh man, after lunch, we play from 1:30 to 7:30.
(upbeat, energetic music)
(guns firing)
One's gonna be, ladder, ladder, ladder, problem.
Bomb is really one shot.
Oh my god, push that, one got pushed up.
And that's just a long grind
of playing against other talented teams.
(gasping)
Good job.
We play from lunch to dinner.
We have a wild lobster with chive butter.
I put it on Twitter.
(playful, fun music)
How you doin', Mike?
It's amazing.
(slow, entrancing guitars)
Mike's been playing video games since he was five,
but when his parents got divorced,
that's when he really buckled down on gaming.
I would just get in my desk, turn my game on.
It's like I would disappear
and go into another world and forget about all that.
When he was 13, Mike qualified in the pro-league
of the popular video game, Call of Duty.
He became the youngest professional player in the game.
When I first walked into the event,
I was just amazed and just fell in love with it.
That's when I knew this is what I wanted to do.
(slow, entrancing guitars)
That conversation with his parents,
telling them he was pursuing a career
as a professional video gamer, well,
imagine your kid telling you that.
There was a lot of arguments and late nights.
But Mike promised to put school first,
and his parents eventually came around.
Well, as a single parent, it wasn't easy.
In my mind, I really couldn't foresee it as a career,
but we were at the mall and some young boy came up
to Mike and he said, "Excuse me, are you SpaceLy?"
And Mike said, "Yeah," he goes, "Can I have your autograph?"
And I started to cry, and I'm like, "This is crazy."
I'm like, "He recognized you, Mike?"
And that was instrumental for me, as well,
realizing how this has taken off.
I started earning money at these tournaments
after my third local event.
That was like one of the best feelings ever,
being able to go home and like, "Look, Mom, look, Dad.
"Today I got paid for playing."
I wasn't just wasting my time,
and I wasn't just making up stories and fairytales
just so I could play video games more.
Mike didn't wanna discuss his contract,
but when he joined Ghost, it was reported that he
and his teammates shared a 50,000 dollar signing bonus
and were each offered a 4,000 dollar months' salary.
On top of all that, Mike also earns money on the side.
Fans pay to watch him play on the popular streaming site,
Twitch, and he also sells his own line of apparel.
(fun, victorious music)
That all makes for a pretty good living by the standards
of any 20 year old, but it's even better
when you consider that almost all of his expenses,
from his rent to his food to his training
to his gaming related travel, is all paid for,
which leaves a lot of room for shopping.
Can I take them off?
Sure.
Alright, we got the Yeezys, moon rocks.
I've been a fan of shoes forever, so there's
a lot of times where I spend
an insane amount of money on shoes.
(chill pop music)
But like professional sports, gaming is not
a life long career, and there's a ton of turnover too.
Three months after I met Mike, Ghost dropped him
from the team, and he's now back home in New Jersey.
This sounds very tragic and could nearly end
a player's career, but this is
a very common thing in the scene.
And players get released and switched around all the time.
My advice to young gamers that wanna play professionally,
you gotta stay patient, you gotta stay dedicated
and understand that it's gonna take sacrifice
because there's always another person out there
trying to take that spot.
But I don't have any plans to give up the gaming career.
I'm gonna bounce back from this
and make my mom and dad proud.
(chill pop music)
(mysterious synths)