Big Games Hunter

CS is a strategy shooting spectacle, a warfare game that pits terrorists (T) against counter-terrorists (CT) in rounds of intense gunplay. Your mission is to "frag," meaning to kill off, as many enemies as you can. When it comes to fragging, Ksharp is precise, aggressive, cunning. He's a clutch player; playing against him, his competitors will tell you, is like playing a pickup game with Michael Jordan -- you'll hardly score a basket, they say. Miller, however, tends to shrug off his prowess and resist analyzing his talent and skills.

But there is this: As a boy, he moved around a lot. His father, Russ, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency; over eight years, the family lived in Greece, Bahrain and Costa Rica. Miller, a black belt in karate by 11, played basketball and football, but once he'd make the school team, the family would pack up.

"Video games, from Final Fantasy to Mario Kart, were my extracurricular activity," says Miller, who has owned about every game console, from Sega to the original PlayStation, and is never seen without his SX66 PDA Phone.

School never absorbed him. "I was one of those B students," Miller says, "who could have gotten A's if I tried harder." He downloaded CS the day it was released in 1999. His parents didn't know what to make of his passion for it, but his mother drove her son to his first big tournament away from home.

When the family was living in Memphis, Ksharp turned pro while still in high school. He got accepted to the University of Tennessee, but when the family moved again, to Reston, he decided to go Northern Virginia Community College. After a year, the tournament schedule conflicted with his classes, and he dropped out. This all took quite a bit of understanding from his parents, but his father now says, "If I were his age doing what he's doing now, I'd been bragging about myself."

Over the years, the tournament schedule has grown along with Ksharp. Next month, MTV will broadcast live highlights of Cyberathlete Professional League finals at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square.

Russ Miller, now a government contractor, doesn't much understand the game -- "I get sick watching it, the fast motion of it," he says -- but when he heard his younger co-workers, engineers at Science Applications International Corp., talking about CS, he asked if they knew who Ksharp was. Sure, they said, and Russ said, "That's my son."

Virtual Scrimmage

It's a few minutes after 7 p.m., and Mikey "Method" So, who lives in Orange County, Calif., is running late, which isn't all that unusual.

"Does anybody know where Mikey is?" Ksharp says into his headset.

Ksharp is ready to scrimmage. The fingers of his left hand are landing fast and furious on the keyboard's W, A, S and D keys, which guide the character's movement. His right hand grips the mouse, used to aim the weapon. CS is a first-person shooter game, meaning the screen shows only what your character sees, unlike third-person shooter games, which give you an omniscient view. The game requires exacting hand-eye coordination and mental dexterity: Stay ahead of your opponent. Think on the fly. Strategize.

Created by Jess Cliffe and Minh Le when they were students at Virginia Tech, CS now has at least 70,000 people playing it at any given moment, clocking in more than 4.5 billion player minutes per month, says Cliffe.

A team game, five-on-five, CS is a tournament regular, along with Halo and Painkiller. In pro gaming circles, Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, 24, is dubbed "the Painkiller guy"; Matt "Zyos" Leto, 21, is "the Halo guy"; and Miller is "the CS guy." CS, in sheer numbers, attracts the most fans.