Hoops Springs Eternal

How a video game brought about an NBA revolution

- Tim Marcin

BOSTON CELTIC JAYSON TATUM, ONE OF THE top young players in basketball, stood out in the cramped, humid room in midtown Manhattan. It wasn’t just his 6-feet-8 inch height; Tatum, along with several other NBA stars—including C.J. McCollum of the Portland Trail Blazers and Brooklyn Nets guard D’Angelo Russell—was moving through a crowd of fanatic basketball fans, relatively unbothered, as if they were soccer players.

It was disconcerting but easily explained. The event wasn’t about the actual game of basketball, it was about its virtual counterpart, NBA 2K. Booze flowed from a bar in the back, and TVs lined the room’s length, momentary distractions for a crowd waiting for the chance to man the joysticks. And the gamers, here to test the latest iteration, 2K18, were too focused on describing its new features, beat by beat, to millions of the video game’s followers, who were watching via live streaming.

Forget that stereotype of gamers as pimply basement-dwellers. These were assured, relentlessly cheery young men, social media stars with followers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. One of them, 23-year-old Artreyo Boyd (aka Dimez)— one of the best 2K players in the world—recently helped his team win $250,000 in a tournament. (Gamers are organized into teams of five people who each control a virtual player.) When Dimez describes the tournament, he’ sounds like a pro athlete doing a post game TV interview: “I took a lot of losses,” he says earnestly. “But ultimately, that made me better. In order to get to where I’m at now, you have to play the better people.”