Matthew Lee, 20, has been playing the Madden NFL video game for three years. It's an immersive, competitive football game where each person is a player in the National Football League.
Lee goes by the handle MattsterGamer, and travels from his home in Weston to tournaments across the country. He was supposed to be at the Jacksonville tournament where two people were shot and killed Sunday afternoon and a dozen more injured.
"I ended up going to Chicago for Comic Con [at the] last second," he said. "That very well could have saved my life."
When a gunman opened fire at a video game tournament in Jacksonville Sunday afternoon, Lee reached out to some of his closest friends to see if they were okay.Hear how the community inside of the Jacksonville Madden NFL gaming tournament is like family to South Florida's Matthew Lee.
Lee lives 30 minutes away from Parkland, the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in history, in February. He said Saturday's shooting was a different experience because it hit his circle of friends and colleagues directly. Read More: Jacksonville Shooting Witness Recalls 'People Crying' And 'Running For Their Lives'
"Right now, I'm trying to contact everybody who's in the hospital - make sure they're alright...I mean, it's hard," Lee said.
He believes the gaming community can be misunderstood.
"We play this game for eight to 15 hours a day. We talk to these people for eight to 15 hours a day… we meet these people," he said. "This is family."
But this tragedy won't keep Lee from playing Madden NFL.
There is a tournament scheduled for next week in Virginia, which he still plans to attend, to honor people he believes died doing something they were passionate about.
"It's not like some kind of minor thing, it wasn't some kind of local tournament that nobody really knew each other and they were just going to have fun," Lee said. "This is something that people were doing for their lives and...paid the ultimate price."
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