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05/29/2007When Playing Games PaysLocals using FragFest party to plug into lucrative careers
Adam 'NiXOn' VanBerlo, 23, of Traverse City, plays Call of Duty 2 on a modified personal computer at home. VanBerlo is the administrator of the annual FragFest LAN party at the Grand Traverse County Civic Center. TRAVERSE CITY — Jasen "Pip” Hutchens can attribute the eighth-floor desk in downtown Chicago and more than $30,000 annual salary at JP Morgan Chase, in part, to video games. Hutchens, 23, is a 2002 graduate of Traverse Bay Area Career-Tech Center. He's also one of a handful of locals who have plugged into success in the information technology field on the laurels of an annual Local Area Network (LAN) party called FragFest. Started in 2002, FragFest is gathering of local video gamers who show up with a modified computer, plug into an ad hoc network sprawling over folding tables in the Civic Center's Howe Arena and spend the weekend immersed in virtual combat. Far from slothy kids with excess free time, the party founders have found plush jobs as IT professionals locally and around the country. One runs his own Chicago consulting business at 23; another is the computer guru at Aurora Oil & Gas Corp. in Traverse City. The big name on their resumes: FragFest. "In the computer business, what they teach in class is mostly the basics,” said FragFest administrator Adam VanBerlo. "You don't really learn what you need to know in the real world.” In addition to running FragFest, VanBerlo, 23, makes "good money” as the Webmaster, developer and server administrator at Village Press in Traverse City. His LAN experience was the dealmaker on the resume, but in the IT field, certification is still king. "It's your proof that you know what you're doing,” said Shea Bonhag, a local business consultant who sits on the advisory board at the Career-Tech Center's Information Technology Academy. The two-year TBA program provides optional A-plus and N-plus certifications for high school students headed into computer fields. It was developed by instructor Chris Korbel and debuted in 1999. Korbel remembers FragFest founder Fred Kilbourn scrimping for spare parts to launch the initial party. "Fred saw things well beyond, 'Let's get together and play games,'” Korbel said. "He thought, 'Let's get some sponsors so these costs can be underwritten by someone else'.” The event took shape on the fly. Founders Kilbourn, Hutchens and friend Corbin Tarrant spent long nights assembling network cables, securing equipment and sponsors and making a Web site for the March 8, 2002, debut. "This was not very pre-conceived,” said Kilbourn. "As something came up, we took care of it.” Because so many different machines must patch seamlessly for gameplay, an array of technical problems inevitably arose. "What you saw there was some early help desk-type activities taking place, and that's where Hutchens came in,” Korbel said. He cited several levels of applied learning, from infrastructure maintenance — hubs, hardware, switches, power, patch cords, cabling — to public relations and customer support. "The organization of it all was actually much harder than the computer issues,” Hutchens said. Each founder pulled some strings to obtain things like free soda and pizza for the gamers. The mantle eventually was passed to VanBerlo and Matt Wiersma after Kilbourn got a full scholarship to DeVry University in Chicago and the founders moved there en masse. Wiersma runs the IT department at Aurora Oil & Gas, a local publicly traded energy company. He's a year shy of a bachelor's degree from Ferris State University, and got the job in 2004. "I'm kind of a one-man shop here,” Wiersma, 23, said. "We have about 60 employees and it basically all falls on me.” He said the FragFest LAN training was something he couldn't have found outside of a job, but cautioned that the gameplay aspect should be regarded as a hobby, not career path. "What runs FragFest, the networks and the servers and such — that you can take as experience,” Wiersma said. "But, 'Oh, I have this awesome score at Counterstrike' — that's not going to get you a job.” Kilbourn said getting a degree is necessary; he's working on a graduate degree from University of Illinois in Chicago. But it's not essential to break into the business yet. For now, he works about 10 hours a week running Kilbourn Consulting, maintaining networks and other IT tasks for about 15 clients in the Chicago area — a better-paying gig than his previous employer, Geeks-On-Call. "I really have no desire to get back into the corporate world because I can make my own hours and write my own check,” he said "And I like that a lot.” On the Web:
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