DEC 14 ­— In primary school, there was a child the class had long labelled as “naughty.” He would sit at the very back determinedly scratching his pen knife onto the surface of the desk while the rest of us were suffering with fractions.

The teachers too had embraced that he wasn’t one for learning and so they too accepted his “failure” because he couldn’t sit up straight and remain quiet.

And I would have carried on having never spoken to Jeremy except following one ambitious growth spurt, I found myself in the seat ahead of him and I remember chatting with him and being incredibly surprised that this boy we’d all come to associate with “unintelligent” was anything but.

He liked to draw and had filled pages of an exercise book with detailed sketches of his toys on imaginative adventures. I was 11 but I remember being in awe of this hidden world.

I have no idea what happened to that boy at the back of my class with the purple backpack. Post PSLE I wandered off and hardly ever thought about the childish characters of my school days — except this week  when Singapore’s online ecosystem has been buzzing with the tale of First Departure’s non-departure.

And I suddenly found myself thinking of Jeremy again and how, when we focus on one kind of smart, we miss a lot more.

First Departure is a local gaming team who were unable to participate in an international gaming championship — because they were denied leave from their school and National Service commitments.

Gamers Chan Jun Jie and Wilson Koh were told that no exemption could be made for their polytechnic exams while another team member was told he could not defer his National Service. 

This meant the team had to pull out of the Summit 2 Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) championship — and miss taking their shot at US$300,000 (RM1.04 million) in prize money.

Online, the gaming community reacted with a barrage of blog posts decrying the fact that the relevant authorities did not make the allowances they might have made for conventional sportsmen or artists. Older people and non-gamers however often responded with bafflement — why should children expect time off for playing games?

It seems clear to me, however, that the young men in question worked hard and for several years to become one of the leading teams in Asia.

Members of Singapore’s First Departure gaming team are unable to participate in an international gaming championship as they were denied leave from their school and National Service commitments. — Picture courtesy of First Departure’s Facebook page

DOTA has over seven million active players and to be among the top contenders in the world at anything with millions of players is a real achievement.

To qualify for the summit, the team first had to be crowned South-East Asia champions, which is no mean feat, and the finals in Los Angeles were clearly a serious event with big prize money. Very big money for poly-aged boys plus the organisers had already offered them flights and all their expenses.

Even as a total non-gamer, I can see why the team might have warranted special consideration. But of course that’s not what the boys received.

Instead, like most other local teens, they ended up sitting exams and doing NS. While you can argue there are worse things in the world than teenagers not being able to attend video game summits, for today’s Singapore, this is a relevant issue.

The broader point is the need for our society as a whole to acknowledge that achievement and value are diverse. That it’s not just exam grades that matter but passion, commitment, skill and well... things like online games. 

Gaming today is worth billions of dollars with millions of people spending hundreds of thousands of hours gaming, and a great deal of value is placed on these online worlds, so it follows that achievements in this field should be acknowledged.

Also for a small country that has a tougher shot at becoming a major power — in the sports world or popular culture — you’d think the authorities would take these shots with a little more consideration.

But more important than dollars or national pride is the fact  that these boys worked very hard to achieve what they did.

They were clearly successful on their own terms and weren’t asking for any sort of grant or stipend, just a little bit of flexibility. At the end of the day, their commitments could be rescheduled by a community that supported our youth’s skill — in their various forms.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.