TOW 2 - Team Ben: A Year as a Professional Gamer

Team Ben: A Year as a Professional Gamer is about Chris Fabiszak, or as he is known in the competitive gaming world, "Wife", and his experiences as a professional gamer. He was, and still is to an extent, a professional gamer, and this is his memoir as both one of the driving forces behind and a participant in the "golden age" of Super Smash Bros. Melee. The book is mostly aimed at members or potential members of the competitive Super Smash Brothers scene, but can also be appreciated and understood by those who aren't really a part of the competition. Wife's purpose in writing the book is to tell his story while giving readers a little more understanding of just how technical Smash is. He achieves this by using a mainly narrative tone and having didactic interludes with frame data about the game - describing what exactly happens in the game is it happens, frame by frame - one sixtieth of a second at a time. This frame data provides much to his argument that Melee is an extraordinarily technical game, giving a strong backdrop of Logos to his argument. He tells the story as if it were an annotated paper - all of his thoughts about the situations he was in are on the page in front of you, giving you a truly first-person look at competitive smash through his eyes. Everything is thoroughly described, and we can feel his mind racing when he's in a match, and his mind wandering into realms unknown when he fantasizes about what smash could become. All in all, it's a great book that puts into words Smash's deep complexity and the wonderful experiences that one can have at the many tournaments that are hosted worldwide. I know this because I have lived a lot of what he talks about, and I feel that he puts the thoughts and feelings of a Smash player on paper better than I ever could.