The gamer who retired with a thumb injury

Hear why one gamer has retired at the age of 25 with a thumb injury
21 January 2021

GAMES CONTROLLER

GAMES CONTROLLER

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How can a gamer retire with a thumb injury at the age of 25? And what next for ZooMaa? Chris Berrow explains.

It sounds a bit silly, doesn't it? That a thumb injury could take you out from playing computer games, but actually it's quite an interesting story. And this guy had a really interesting career. Imagine playing computer games with a controller for eight hours a day. So it's not just like sitting at a desk, you can have a little screen break, these elite athletes, and they really are. Elite athletes have been training on a computer, sitting there on a video game console for eight hours a day.

Now imagine the strain on your thumbs, particularly cause this "ZooMaa" he's a controller player and he plays one of the biggest games of all time Call of Duty, which is a first person shooter. And how that works is you're in a team of people, let's say six people in some competitions, you're going head to head with other, uh, other teams and you need to have the reactions of a cat. You need to be able to move out the way, dodge, run, you know, snipe people from a distance. It's all about having extremely quick reactions. Now he's a very elite player. He's been training for eight years, which is actually quite a long time. And this thumb injury is exactly as you might expect. It's a repetitive strain injury that he's had for many years, actually he's even had surgery on his thumb in order to actually get himself back to the top level of competition. So I think he struggled back and came back to kind of, uh, approaching the top of his game, but this problem just simply hasn't gone away. So sadly today, at 25 years old, he's retiring from professional gaming,

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