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Master of His Virtual Domain

George Yao spent six months on top of the virtual world of the online game Clash of Clans. “Looking back, I think I must have been insane,” he said of his immersion in the game.Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Last spring, a few months before his eighth birthday, my son announced that he wanted to join a clan.

This is how my wife and I were introduced to Clash of Clans, a real-time strategy game for the iPad in which you design and build your own medieval village populated by bloodthirsty barbarians and wizards. Then, through the wonders of borderless interconnectivity, you can pledge yourself to one of the 40,000 or so active clans that have sprouted up inside the game. Once you’re in a clan, other members will lend you their troops, which you can use to attack players in other clans and bring home coveted trophies and loot.

Clash, to use the shorthand of its devotees, is a quiet phenomenon. SoftBank, a Japanese telecommunications company, plunked down $1.5 billion in October for a 51 percent stake in the game’s maker, Supercell. That came after Supercell, which is based in Helsinki, reported that it was bringing in $2.4 million a day.

Some of that revenue is earned through the company’s other games — like Hay Day, which is a lot like Clash, except that you raise chickens, peaceably. But presumably most of it comes from the Clash players who buy “gems” in amounts up to $100 at a time, in order to speed up the building of defenses or the training of troops.

If you live in a certain tablet-based demographic, chances are someone you see in daily life is secretly raiding villages under a screen name like “King of Secaucus” or “Bob the Skullcrusher.”

It’s the social media component of Clash — a private messaging board, essentially, where clan members can talk to one another — that presents a troublesome issue if you’re the parent of an 8-year-old like my son, Ichiro. I may be a negligent-enough parent to let my kid commandeer the iPad so he can murder little cartoon archers who sigh mournfully when they expire, but I wasn’t going to let him talk to strangers without supervision. And so it was decided that I would build a village and join the game, too.

Eventually, Ichi landed us in a clan called Loyalty, whose 40-odd members were scattered around the globe. Before dinner, I might donate a few battle-ready troops to a clan member in Australia who was just then going off to work, and the next morning some teenager in Abu Dhabi might do the same for me.

It was around this time that the name Jorge Yao became a part of our household. To Ichi and to Lord knows how many other gamers, the mysterious player who called himself Jorge Yao was a hero among mortals. For a time, he dominated the game, leaving everyone else on the planet gasping to catch up. He was the first player to break the 4,000-trophy mark and, for a solid six months beginning last January, held the No. 1 ranking in the world, which had previously changed hands almost daily.

In the process, the 25-year-old who called himself Jorge Yao joined a new breed of virtual celebrity. The first of his seven audio-only interviews with a blogger named Flammy racked up almost 400,000 YouTube views. He has attracted more than 79,000 Twitter followers and almost 30,000 “likes” on Facebook. Videos of his rampages on other villages, or of his troops repelling other people’s invaders, went viral. Sometimes Jorge Yao would make surprise visits to other clans, just to reward the fans who were sending him daily tweets.

Then, at the end of May, the great Jorge Yao abruptly announced his retirement. In a “speech” posted on Facebook, he thanked his fans and clanmates and said he was “going out on top Like Mike,” as in Michael Jordan.

The more I played the game, the more all of this intrigued me. What kind of guy was this Jorge Yao? And why was he so much better at this than the rest of us? What did it take to become the King of Clash?

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Clash of Clans is a real-time strategy game for the iPad in which you design and build your own medieval village populated by bloodthirsty barbarians and wizards.Credit...Supercell

Camaraderie and Red Bull

George Yao — that’s his real name — met me on the last day of September at a restaurant near the San Francisco airport, at a table where we could watch the planes take off and land across a narrow stretch of water. Earnest behind thick glasses, Mr. Yao couldn’t have seemed more ordinary. He brought with him a couple of Supercell T-shirts and a handful of Clash of Clans stickers, which he laid out on the table and thoughtfully autographed for my son.

Mr. Yao told me that his parents had emigrated from China to the suburbs of Philadelphia, where his dad, before his recent retirement, taught oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, and where his mom did research at a pathology lab at Children’s Hospital. George majored in finance at Penn State and worked at Provident, the financial services company, as a compliance analyst on new I.T. projects. “I hate my job,” he told me bluntly when we met.

In 2011, bored with his life in Philadelphia and sensing that his relationship with his high school sweetheart was coming to an end, Mr. Yao accepted a transfer to San Francisco, where he knew almost no one, and where the only apartment he could afford — at $1,450 a month — was barely large enough to accommodate a couch. He tried going out after work, hanging out in bars, but how do you talk to girls about I.T. compliance and mortgage laws? A sometime gamer who liked to play Call of Duty in high school, Mr. Yao was sitting home one night in the middle of 2012, searching the App store for a new pastime, when he came across a brand-new game that piqued his interest.

You can see how Clash instantly appealed to Mr. Yao. Here was a guy who had been the captain of the high school rugby club and served as treasurer of his college fraternity, lost in a new city and trapped in a 300-square-foot studio. Clash had the round-the-clock promise of camaraderie. It made Mr. Yao feel less isolated. The members of North 44 — an elite clan that one can join only by invitation — became a family to him. He will tell you even now that he loves them like brothers.

And for them, as much as for himself, he wanted to rule the game. Playing Clash obsessively — that is, spending many hours a day attacking one opponent after the next, as the most serious players do — is a little like trying to climb a glacier. You can rise higher and higher with every new cache of trophies you win from sacking another village, but one slip, a single moment of distraction, can erase it all. This is what happens to most players who reach Mr. Yao’s exalted level for even a day. They hit the wrong button in the heat of battle or forget to load up on magic spells before invading a village — and, just like that, they forfeit the day’s haul and tumble back into the ranks of the merely good.

Mr. Yao, on the other hand, was almost maniacally focused. If he made a mistake against an opponent that cost him hard-won trophies, he’d respond by playing the game for 48 hours straight over the course of a weekend, fueled by self-loathing and Red Bull, until he won the trophies back.

“What I like to tell people is that there are two keys to the game — patience and focus,” Mr. Yao told me. But he allowed that someone else might use another word, like maybe compulsion or addiction.

In January, he reached No. 1 in the global rankings. A few weeks later, he blew past 4,000 trophies, setting a new standard for Clashers everywhere. By spring, Mr. Yao was finding out what it was to become an Internet celebrity. His mother read about him on Chinese-language message boards. Haters sprouted up to accuse him, speciously, of cheating or of buying his way to the top. When Mr. Yao tweeted about his trip to a Napa winery, some fans came out to meet him in person.

“I never in my wildest dreams anticipated any of this notoriety,” Mr. Yao told me. “The thing I enjoyed most was the effect that I had on kids. When a kid would say, ‘Oh, you just made my day,’ and all I did was come into your clan and say ‘hi’? Wow. To me that was priceless, you know?”

‘My Real Life Was the Game’

There was a price, however, for being the world’s premier Clasher. Part of it was measurable. To stay on top, Mr. Yao was spending at least $250 a week on the gems. By the time he had dominated the leader board for three months, he told me, he had sunk as much as $3,000 into Clash and was running out of money. He feared that he couldn’t keep up with wealthier rivals and threatened to quit.

A clanmate in Turkey, the 38-year-old son of a business magnate who plays under the name Kemal, took pity on Mr. Yao and offered to become his sponsor, buying his gems. In return, Mr. Yao kept Kemal’s account active for him when Kemal was traveling and couldn’t play. But while that stopped Mr. Yao’s financial slide, it could not arrest a deeper erosion that his clanmates couldn’t see, the gradual way in which the game was swallowing Mr. Yao’s nonvirtual existence.

To grasp the extent of Mr. Yao’s immersion in the game, you have to understand a little more about the strategy of Clash. In order to keep your trophy count high, a premier player has to avoid being attacked by other top contenders. You can do this either by staying constantly online or by the protection of a “shield” that usually lasts for 12 hours. You automatically get a shield when an attacker destroys 40 percent of your village or your town hall.

On weekends, Mr. Yao could inoculate himself against attacks by staying online. This meant ordering in meals, when he ate at all, and taking the iPad with him into the bathroom. But come Monday, he needed a shield so he could go to work. So he would rise before dawn and spend hours trying to get the game’s server to pit him against another elite player in his clan, who could then attack his village just enough to trigger a shield, which — assuming he had timed everything right — would last just long enough to get him through the workday without being attacked.

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Detail from the game.Credit...Supercell

“After a while, it felt more like a job than anything else,” Mr. Yao told me. “It really took the fun out of the game.”

In time, he found another, simpler way to shield himself. When a member of North 44 would quit the game, Mr. Yao would take over his account. Then Mr. Yao would use one of his multiple accounts to attack himself when he needed a shield. In order to pull this off, though, he had to keep all of these other accounts highly ranked, which meant playing as many as five accounts at the same time, around the clock. Another wealthy clan member in the United Arab Emirates bought Mr. Yao three iPads to make this feasible — but even then, it was feasible only in the technical sense. At one point, he was bringing five iPads into the shower with him, each wrapped in a plastic bag, so that none of his accounts would go inactive.

During this period, while children like Ichi were dreaming of becoming the next Jorge Yao, George Yao himself lost 20 pounds, almost without noticing. The only time he left his apartment was to go to work, where none of his colleagues knew that quiet, competent George was also an international gaming sensation. When we talked, Mr. Yao called the office his “Clark Kent life,” the implication being that his true identity resided in a world of elixir pumps and flying minions. “My day job was a means to an end, paying the bills,” Mr. Yao told me, “and my real life was the game.”

This is more common than you might think at the highest levels of Clash, and probably in other games, too; Kemal told me that he had heard multiple stories of couples getting divorced or players going bankrupt because of their obsessions with Clash of Clans. All of which presents something of a quandary for a company like Supercell, whose executives declined repeated requests to talk to me about Mr. Yao. As Frank Lantz, director of the New York University Game Center, explained it to me, gaming companies focus on “widening the funnel” — that is, building games for as broad an audience as possible.

“Then they realize that they have a handful of players who are like Bobby Fischer — crazy, obsessed,” Mr. Lantz said. “And I don’t think they know what to do with these guys. They don’t want to promote an image of their game as being hard core and super-intense and bizarre on some level. They would just as soon this kind of high-level play didn’t exist, because they don’t control it.”

At some point, it occurred to Mr. Yao that he didn’t really have control of things, either. After six months plugged into to Clash, he decided to put the iPads down and accompany some friends on a trip to Las Vegas, while leaving his account in the hands of a clanmate in Florida. The experience was like detox. When he came back, he decided to withdraw.

In the farewell speech he posted online, Mr. Yao very deliberately made mention of pursuing other opportunities as a gaming consultant. The speech, in other words, was also meant to be something of a job interview — and it worked. When we met, Mr. Yao had already agreed to promote a game called Samurai Siege, which is similar to Clash, in exchange for stock options from the game’s British maker, Space Ape. Earlier this month, Mr. Yao took a job marketing games for Space Ape and relocated to London.

As for Clash, Mr. Yao told me, “Nowadays I can’t even stand opening the app, the sight of it.” In October, about five months after Mr. Yao walked away, a player from a powerhouse clan called Vietnam Flag finally surpassed his record for total trophies, followed by a stampede of other gamers. But Mr. Yao, who still holds the probably unbreakable record for the longest streak at No. 1, refused to be lured back.

“Looking back, I think I must have been insane,” he told me, with a mix of pride and revulsion. “I was so immersed in it at the time. I knew it was abnormal, but never to the extent that I see it now.”

And What of Rolomuffin?

As it happened, on the day I met George Yao, Ichi and I were unexpectedly kicked out of our clan. The elders of Loyalty were making an ill-fated push to become one of the game’s top clans, and apparently we had been dragging them down. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of loss and rejection. After all these months, was that the last I would know of mates like Wooobeee and Rolomuffin? Would Gemka get that new job he’d been hinting at? Would I know what time it was in Melbourne anymore?

To those of us raised in the world before social media, it is a given that the “real” world is the one in which you sit in traffic on your way to pick up the dry cleaning. Our connection to this world is the chief measure of our sanity. But if we’re honest about it, reality is hardly so simple now. When a guy like George Yao can plow through an anesthetizing day of mortgage regulations only to return at night to a digital fraternity where he is loved and celebrated, with friends who share his daily experience, who’s to say which is real and which is illusory? If a game can make you famous, if it can yield genuine friendships and even a new career, then why shouldn’t it become, at least for a time, the epicenter of your life?

You have to at least consider the possibility that, dropped into a claustrophobic apartment in the middle of a large city with nothing to bind you to it, you, too, could seek refuge in the pursuit of belonging and greatness, until one day you woke up to find yourself showering with a couple of iPads.

To my relief, Ichi accepted our abrupt dismissal from the clan with admirable stoicism. By the time I returned from San Francisco with Jorge Yao’s autographed memorabilia, Ichi had already found a new clan, and he restated his ambition to become the highest-ranked player in the world, perhaps by 2015. This is one dream I do nothing to encourage. I understand now what it means.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Master of His Virtual Domain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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