Hire a Game Coach Online

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Expert videogame players, many of them teens, are forging professional careers as coaches, finding clients — many of them in their 20s or 30s — online, the Wall Street Journal reports. Some gigs pay $65 an hour. From the article: 'Gaming-lessons.com says its youngest "Halo 2" instructor is 8-year-old New Yorker Victor De Leon III — better known by his online gamer name, Lil Poison — who has given several lessons a month since late last year, fitting the classes in after he has done his homework. His father, also named Victor, says his son has used some of the money he earns from lessons (hourly rate: $25) to buy a hamster, named Cortana after a character in the game.'"

community-based and bot-based help

[WinEveryGame]

While 1-1 coaching will always have its place, there is more and more help getting available to on-line gamers in form of communities (gaming help websites) and some automated tools. If you are looking at making this your profession watch out for these help options as your competitors!

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Too bad it's just shooters

[Robotech_Master]

That's really quite interesting. Too bad they only offer classes for first-person-shooter games. I've gotten good enough at City of Heroes/Villains that I could probably earn out some great rates giving hourly instruction in that game. I wonder if there are any other sites where a game guru could offer their teaching skills for hire. (It would certainly be a better value for the money than those "pay-for-PL" sites.)

Wow.

[Rob T Firefly]

I'd laugh at how huge a waste of life this is, were I not actually guilty of calling a Nintendo "game counselor" once during my childhood. Still, this would have been my dream job at that age, and a friend of mine in 8th grade actually made a few dollars selling VHS videos of him beating whatever NES game in his collection the customer wanted to see. Screw selling lemonade or delivering newspapers...

Re:waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

I called that number once for help with the SNES Zelda game. I was living at home but had my own separate phone line which I paid for, so I didn't feel bad about it (I was 16 or so at the time).

Anyway, I remember being somewhat amazed that any human being knew the layout of the land of Hyrule as well as the guy I talked to. I think I was looking for the ice wand or the fire wand or something, and he just rattled it off like he was giving directions to the supermarket. "Oh sure, you just go up past the third palace in the dark world, the one with the grappling hook, make a left on the outer rim of Lake Hylia, go past the Enchanted Forest..." and so on. I remember it being a very surreal experience. It did help me beat the game though.

I didn't get transferred to a Zelda expert or anything either and there was no delay like he was looking it up, so he almost certainly had the same level of knowledge of at least several other games.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how you get good at games, find a way to "win" (in my case kill), get good at it, then learn another way to win. Then another. Until you have a huge bag of winning tricks to pull out against someone else.

Very simple concept, just takes a little bit of time to get there.

That's exactly the point of this service. Except that someone else has already spent hours working out the best techniques. So people who lack the time or inclination to spend all those hours getting to the point where they will really enjoy the game pay someone to teach them. It isn't that different from reading a walkthru or tips/tricks/strategy guide; just more personal, probably more detailed, and of course more expensive.

Fairly useless

[ashman512]

I think that the idea of having a coach for gaming is pretty pathetic, not to mention useless. With the internet, and sites like Gamefaqs and IGN, most strategies and tips are all available free. If there are any special "secret" strategies for a game, they can usually be found for free on the internet. Another thing that is I find useless about coaches is that, if you are already good at a game, you aren't going to be needing a whole lot of help. People that already suck probably aren't going to get a whole lot of help by going to these coaches that just practicing isn't going to get them. I highly doubt an 8 year old is going to be able to actually analyze what it is that make him good, and see how he can improve other peoples skills Also, other sports, like tennis and basketball, often have coaches because they are professional sports, and have athletes competing in prestigeous tournaments, and the athletes are looking for any edge they can to get up on the competition. Video games haven't quite gained that amount of attention(and hopefully, IMO, they never do). Yes, there are tournaments for lots of games like SSBM and Halo, but they usually don't get a lot of attention outside of the inner gameing circles. Slightly off-topic, but it goes along with the above paragraph, I doubt that video game tournaments will ever have much success because in my experience, its not very much fun to watch people play video games. How many times has your little brother or sister bugged you for an hour asking if they can play.