NEW YORK -- Anne "Lilith" Chang is now officially one of the baddest babes in cyberspace. Just don't tell her mom.
Shortly before shredding her final opponent in the Female Frag Fest '99 -- the women-only Quake II tournament that reached its bloody conclusion Thursday night -- Chang confessed that she hadn't exactly gotten around to letting her parents in on her gaming success.
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"My parents don't know I'm in New York. I told my roommate to tell them I'm out studying or at a movie," the 20-year-old University of Colorado student said.
What she did at the tournament won't appear on any report card. The Frag Fest is a series of frenzied, 20-minute, one-on-one battles of the kill-or-be-killed game, Quake II.
The rules are simple: Every time you slay (or "frag") your opponent, you get a point. Accidentally killing yourself - by falling into one of the lava pits which often dot a Quake landscape or by detonating your rocket launcher in overly cramped quarters - costs a point. At the end of 20 minutes, whoever has the most points wins.
Lose twice, and you're out of the tournament.
Chang never lost, and beat one opponent by 24 points. "Quake II is my game," she said. "I've been playing since two days after it came out."
And she's been playing against pretty stiff competition, too. One of her gaming groups ("clans" in Quake lingo), Quake Girlz, boasted three of the six Female Frag finalists. Another one, Rasczak's Roughnecks (named after the ultra-tough battalion in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers), has an even nastier opponent: her boyfriend, John "Enertia" Yeung.
"He's better than me," Chang confessed. "But he's more into Quake III now."
Yeung - who made the trip to New York to cheer Chang on - met her after an email invitation to start a Quake group on campus.
Soon, she was up to her neck in rendered blood.
All the while, she kept up her interest in rock climbing and swing dancing. "Makes you wonder how I have time to play Quake, huh?" she wrote on the Quake Girlz Web site. "My grades are wondering the same thing...."
But now that school has started again, she claims, she's not playing that much -- maybe five hours a week. "There's a direct correlation, an inverse relationship to GPA," she said.
That obviously weighs heavily on Chang, a high school valedictorian, National Merit Scholar -� and now a full ride scholarship winner in a five-year, double-major program in chemical engineering and computer science.
"Everyone always asks [me] about a professional career in gaming," says Chang. "But I want to do something totally different, to be able to go to work, and come home and play."
Mom and Dad, no doubt, will be thrilled.
