Far From The Madding Crowd
I believe in innate talent. I believe that had I grown up with endless training, the best possible coaches and a driving desire to succeed I would still not be a professional football player or, for that matter, competent at Calculus. I am comfortable in not believing that I can actually be anything I set my mind to, that I lack the fundamental capacity for either catching footballs or knowing what the hell an integral is. And, having seen players like Fatal1ty ply their digital trade of death or that eight year-old who can play Guitar Hero like his fingers were built with the appropriate muscle memory, I’m equally convinced that there exists innate video game talent, which is why I buy into the basic concept of the cyberathelete.
Ok, I would probably call them something else like Controller Artists or Sofa Stars, something that denotes skill but, for reasons obvious, avoids the implication of physical prowess. Cyberathletes sounds like something from amateur William Gibson fanfic, and I’m no more inclined to hand over that mantle to video-gamers than I am NASCAR drivers – seriously, don’t even get me started on how not an athlete those guys are. But, what they do possess is an ability to operate video games at a professionally competitive level, and the difference between the abilities of, say, Dennis “Thresh” Fong and myself is the difference between Tom Brady and Ryan Leaf’s infirmed grandmother. Unfortunately, like intramural Lacrosse at a community college or quilting bees, competitive gaming has no discernable future as a spectator sport.
Last week the Cyberathlete Professional League shut down its operations, and the reaction was so non-existent that it made the closure of the XFL look like a day of national mourning. Even gamers, the hard-core gamers who plumb gaming news sites and populate gaming forums barely allowed the news to blip upon their radar screens, and those that did often did so purely as an opportunity to make jokes. Despite being in operation for more than a decade, the CPL was never really able to make professional gaming particularly interesting even to gamers much less the population at large. Despite occasional flirtations with popular media, wherein third-rate ex-rock-stars – I’m looking at you Vince Neil – judge Guitar Hero tournaments where pasty college kids with poor stage command flail about mocking all that made rock great, it would seem that nobody really wants to watch someone else play a video game.
So much for my fantasy professional gaming league!
The problem is not that the competition itself is illegitimate. I recall an E3 not too long ago where I watched as Fatal1ty dominated any who dared to challenge his clearly superior play as casually as you might eat a PB&J sandwich while watching Maury Povich, and while “pwning noobs” was not a terribly surprising result for the spectacle, in watching him it was clear that the man-boy operated on a different level than I could easily conceive. He didn’t just know the map or have a clear understanding of the timing of the game, but he understood the psychology of his opponents. He would fire rockets into empty corners where artillery and opponent would suddenly converge moments later. He knew what you were going to do before you did. It was a demonstration of dominating skill.
The problem is that no one wants to watch. It’s not that the intensity of the action itself isn’t significant, but that it’s virtually impossible to devise a compelling broadcast for spectating a video game. The medium is fantastic at presenting a personal experience when playing, but for the most part it falls flat at being a spectator sport.
If you can put together a significant broadcast audience for golf, then you might reasonably assume that fans of sport will watch just about anything. So, if even that ancient Scot art of hitting a small ball across a field can make for compelling enough television to sell cars and erectile dysfunction medication, then why can’t the violent virtual shooting of terrorists manage to generate an audience? The trouble isn’t the accessibility of the game, but the technological difficulties in generating a narrative for the action, and in the end that narrative is as important in compelling viewers as an appreciation for the skill of the players. Simply put, video games lack the stories that make sports worth watching.
Sport is all about narrative. The final games of a legend; the David vs. Goliath underdog story; the rivalries; the villain chasing records who everyone loves to hate; the Cinderella story; the kid phenom crashing and burning in the majors; the guy who was hauling garbage last week and is now playing quarterback; the comeback story of a fallen hero; the overpaid salvation to a cellar dwelling team; and, of course, the hero, the best that’s ever lived dominating the competition, the idolization of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or John Elway. Sports is all about stories and only tangentially about the actual skill of its players. It’s why we deify and vilify indiscriminately, so that we can generate the protagonists and antagonists of our competitive soap operas. And, the best sports to watch are those easily contained within strict borders over set periods of time, those that can generate the classic narrative arc where we are the omniscient viewer enjoying the climactic struggle.
Video gaming has none of this. Just try and watch a dozen people play an FPS, and even if they are phenomenal at their craft, odds are that at any given moment the action is happening where you aren’t looking, and even if you happen to be watching the right place at the right time there’s usually a flurry of action performed by avatars of competitors you don’t know or care about and then someone gets a point. To the viewer it is entirely meaningless. It doesn’t move us, inspire us or write its own story. Hell, even half-pipe skateboarding has more narrative than competitive video gaming. The “athletes” are unknown quantities manipulating virtual selves in a chaotic space where stories can’t be told so much as experienced.
The fact that its players are so detached from the competition further serves to detach the observer from an already distant concept. Even if you couldn’t tell the difference between a Quarterback and Nickleback, you can still see the story of the game on the faces of players and fans. Even if racing is just guys in cars turning left, there is a visceral reaction to the speed and the clear conflict between racers. But, for video games, it’s like watching competitive book reading. It doesn’t matter if the players are reading Tom Clancy or Nicholas Sparks, the levels of detachment for the experience makes for poor viewing, and without an audience even from amongst gaming’s faithful Professional Gaming is an experiment that is alive only because it hasn’t realized it was dead on arrival yet.
A shame, because as I said at the start, these are talented people. They have earned the right to think of themselves as professional gamers, even if that means nothing to anyone who isn’t one.
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Nice analysis, Elysium!
I wonder, though--if it were possible (as I imagine it in some sense already is possible) to put the spectator inside the game, wouldn't that make it very much more involving than watching sports? I know I love to spectate inside epic games of Halo.
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Maybe they should have each player playing over a pit of doom and whoever loses gets dropped in like the idiot who volunteered to sit in the dunk tank at the carnival. That would add a lot of drama!
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Good post, but I have to disagree. I think the success of e-sports in South Korea, to name one example, suggests that it's possible e-sports could succeed here (in the US & Canada).
I just think no one's done a very good job of doing it yet.
The challenges you're talking about - attracting an audience, reporting on games in an entertaining way, etc. - have all been solved in South Korea, so who's to say it can't happen here?
ps. Check out the videos here: http://gsi.gomtv.com/# Not sure how I ended up there yesterday, but apparently these are some entertaining Starcraft match videos.
pps. Ten years ago you probably would have said competitive cooking wouldn't be a good spectator sport!
ppps. You know I love you guys.
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Just wait until Blizzard pulls the trick right out of their brilliant asses!
Like KingMob said, e-sports work in South Korea. I think that what's needed is a really popular game, that everybody knows, with simple rules, yet a lot of depth to start things up; and then the good players need to show up as public figures. Aspects of their lives must become known to the public, things that sell tabloids. There has to be more to a great gamer than a name or a nickname. There has to be a story behind him. Things that relate him to the rest of us.
It wasn't non-existent; I started a thread just to gloat over it.
It may not be universal, but in my experience it's mostly seriously hardcore players that are interested in watching the replays of entire matches that they did not personally participate in. Probably because it helps their own game by deducing strategies.
Fedaykin98 wrote:
Some interesting thoughts there. I wonder how different professional gaming might be if we had broadcasters/announcers who intimately knew the game (like Madden) and also had a way for the audience to objectively view the action. In comparing games to a sport like football - with a FPS shooter, I'm forced to watch gameplay from the player's perspective, but with football I am watching an overview of the entire field of play.
It seems to me that in order for professional gaming to become a spectator sport, the games themselves must be designed with a non-playing audience in mind, both from a gamplay and visual standpoint.
The Starcraft example above solves the graphical and gameplay viewpoint, but doesn't necessarily meet the requirement of having some kind of engaging story about the players. It seems a quandary - in football the story IS the players and the team, but in gaming the story isn't the players, but rather the game that the players are playing. That simply doesn't seem personal or compelling enough to generate a viewing audience...
Sir,
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Thank you.
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I think this attitude is stemming from a lack of familiarity with the sport. Of course you don't see a David vs. Goliath story in a Quake 4 Deathmatch if you consider the players involved "unknown quantities". If you follow the matches at all, there's some very dramatic games in the competitive FPS tourneys.
Also the reason nobody cared about the CPL is because they became irrelevant a long time ago, there's many competing tourneys out there and WSVG seems to be the top contender right now.
I'm frequently fascinated by the level of commentary and drama evoked from Starcraft and Warcraft III tourneys held in Korea by Blizzard.
If you really want to know whether or not professional gaming can be entertaining, I'd suggest actually following a game for a season. I think actually following the game would be a very different experience than you describe here.
Though I'm not much of a sports guy so I can't really compare the two. I just know watching pro-gaming tourneys is usually very entertaining to me.
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Except the WSVG shut down six months ago.
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oh
As for cyberleagues, I honestly can't offer an opinion as I don't think I've ever been slightly interested in following any. Much like most accessible sports it's far more fun to participate than to spectate.
I totally get off on cevo / cal.
The type of game and the level of abstraction I think is the determining factor for failure. The examples above, korean model etc. would be interesting to see over here. (Do we have pro rts gaming here even?)
Would an rts viewpoint for the non-player be good for spectating an fps (with good commentary)?
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I'm speaking here mainly from a Western point of view, and I'm increasingly skeptical that "It's popular in Korea" or "It's popular in Japan" has any kind of meaningful translation to our particular gamer culture. I don't really take much away from an argument that because professional gaming is big in the East that it can therefore be even marginally significant here, and I think the slow burn of western professional gaming sadly bears this out. Like I said, I'm not trying to steal anything from the actual competitors; I just doubt they'll ever be able to get very many people over here to care.
- Elysium
This totally destroys a huge business plan I wrote up 5 years ago.
Excellent article.
(hmm those sentences don't really match up)
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Another big difference between watching nascar and watching someone play counter-strike is that I have counter-strike on my computer. If I feel like it I can just load up a game and get playing, like anyone else can. I can't walk outside and go around in circles really fast.
You can, you're just unwilling to accept the consequences.
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I agree with you whole-heartedly. I think one of the main reasons that professional gaming isn't enjoying as much popularity is because the games they compete in (excluding Starcraft and CS) change almost yearly. I don't think Baseball or Football would be nearly as popular if every year they either changed the rules or added rules which made the game significantly different. People like watching competitive sports they can understand, because they can follow the action on the field and know what's happening. When an outfielder misses the cutoff man or a Linebacker misses his coverage assignment I know the reasons why the runner made it home or the tight end gained 30 yards. I still have no idea why most other gamers kill me twenty times to my one kill.
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Of course. Anyone who couldn't foresee this is a moron.
The solution is simple, too. The match needs to be recorded. Then it needs to be analyzed, and a proper, exciting replay needs to be cut together from multiple, cinematic camera angles, explaining, foreshadowing, pausing, slowing down, rewinding, and making it into an exciting, tense thing to watch.
It cannot be done in realtime. Nobody should've ever bothered trying to do it in realtime/raw/from player's POV.
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Played Smash Brothers Brawl yet? The Spectator mode is curiously engrossing. Maybe not to the level of selling ED "medication", but very easy to fall into the "one more match" trap. I think if there was some commentary along with the saved battles, it could be elevated into something more people could enjoy watching.
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I beg to differ. It can be done in real time. With several people in spectator mode who had full control of their camera and a director who knows the game well enough you can most certainly do it in real time. For example if TF2 had a free roaming spectator mode and you had several people doing this with a director who was able to watch all the feeds from those spectators (camera men) s/he could choose which areas to focus on, tell the camera to pull in or out, or follow someone, etc. During a lull if there was a fantastic moment the announcers wanted to replay they would just call for it and the scene could be replayed and slowed down within seconds. They do this all the time in sports, it takes a large crew of people who know what they are doing and the best of them do an amazing job.
I believe that as far as covering something like this, the only way to do it is like the sports teams on TV do for professional sports. Otherwise here in North America it would be a bust.
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Completely agree. A director who knew how the game is played would be able to make such a broadcast incredibly exciting.
It would be even better IMHO to let the spectator direct his own broadcast, but I'm sure no server currently in existence could handle it.
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http://livingepic.blogspot.com: where Classics and gaming meet
Or, you could have a small crew of people who know what you're doing, and they'll accomplish a much better job by forgoing the realtime gimmick.
You cannot fake proper foreshadowing when you don't know what's going to happen in advance. Also, creating cinematic camera angles, picking just the right way to portray something ? Best case scenario, you get it half-assedly the first time, then you do a mediocre job in a replay. Overall it only wastes the viewer's time.
And what about putting a proper music for dramatic effect ?
If you ask me, btw, professional sports would be a lot more exciting to watch if they decided to forgo realtime and gave the raw footage to Michael Bay. But that's just me.
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I like your article, but I disagree and would say that stories do exist. I used to play Smash competitively (Melee GC) and the high profile players more often then not had some kind of drama with them. I was 7th best in Arizona consistently for two years(Tag:Enix) and was pretty close with some top players in AZ and in California. While yes, many of these good players may be your average upper middle class children with to much time on their hands, other players, more often the "pros" that take the game to the next level before the rest of the group have a unique quality or trait about them. The best player in AZ has a family that is surrounded by casual/hard drug use and siblings that don't want to make anything of themselves.For 6 months he also flew from state to state playing smash, originally with a grand he had saved up, but mostly payed hes upkeep with winnings. Coincidently he's also one of the smartest people i know.
On my arrival to tournaments in the Mid-west/East Coast I could distinguish the "pro" players from the "scrubs" almost on sight. Most pro's have an aura of confidence that other players simply don't have, and I don't believe it's simply because they win more often, but because they understand the game they are playing to the point that it becomes a science. They are confident because they know what to expect from their opponents, what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are. Everyone else there is simply hoping that they'll win, either luck out or that a random strategy will be successful.
Once you're in a professional gaming scene you begin to meet a number of professional gamers, you'll come across more and more of them and many of which have some kind of story to tell.
I speak however completely on the off-line console gaming end of the spectrum, but I don't know why online would make anything different.
One example for Smash: I'm not sure if anyone that goes here keeps up with pro Smash players, but I think Mew2King is a pretty good example of someone that has a story, he comes from a rich family and looks like your typical 14 year old nerd with glasses, but he sat down, and wrote down ALL of the frame data for every move belonging to every character in Melee, then released it on Smashboards.com for every player to learn from. He didn't simply keep it to himself, he gave it to everyone else while using it to rise to top of the scene.
This makes him like able, but also dynamic. Some people love to see him win, other people hate to see him win and it comes down to play style preference. Do you like watching someone perform perfectly? And is it okay that he looks like a super nerd? Is it fine that by perfectly I also mean, really f*cking cheap? Mew2King managed to take the game to an even further level, but what he also did, was create a whole new wave of players, players that had terrible mind games, but could control certain characters so well off the frame data and by watching M2k's work that they could win with technical skill alone.
Everyone has drama and stories to tell, I don't think gamers are any different. Perhaps instead of just showing the game play footage, a certain section of the screen (If something like MLG is broadcasted) should be used to show the player's face and the crowd behind them.
I was going to argue with you for a bit about improving a broadcast by pre-recording it, but I see now that we have no common ground on which to stand and so it's best if we just pass by one another with a cordial nod.
- Elysium
For crying out loud, Elysium, it's the area under the curve. This is why we can't have a lovely Math and Beers Wednesday.
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I enjoyed watching the WSVG shows on CSTV.
I also enjoyed watching Arena (as horribly goofy as the show was) on G4.
I'm all for watching competitive gaming. With well-directed spectator modes, it's fun to watch.
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Even though it wasn't about any professional gaming competition, I thought the King of Kong had a *great* narrative - one that I feel would be accessible to non-gamers. I can imagine that broadcasts of professional gaming *could* be structured in a way to appeal to a broader audience, but then maybe they wouldn't be deep enough for the "hardcore" viewer?
Before you write professional gaming's epitaph, you might want to take a look at what EA is doing with C&C3 matches. While their monthly video broadcasts are a bit shlocky and over the top, I think they're really on to something with the way they approach commentary and presentation of top player replays on C&C TV.
Check out "Battlecast Primetime" at commandandconquer.com.
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But, that's just the thing. I don't know that they're doing that, and I'm reading video game news and commentary every single day. Maybe in a couple of years I'll be eating crow, but it's been a decade and there's just no buzz.
- Elysium
Look I see what you are saying here, but do Joe and Jane Sixpack care? The basic argument is that the 'sport' needs to be accessible to people who don't know the background.
I know nothing about football, the game has no history in my country, but if I'm channel hopping and come across a game on ESPN there is a level at which I can grasp it that pro-gaming lacks. The story Elysium is referring to is not the players background, but the ebb and flow of the game on the field. I don't need to know that the 7' black guy grew up in a broken home and washed cars to be able to afford his shoes. I just need to know that he hit another guy who doesn't seem to be getting up.
I agree that there needs to be an improvement in the standard of direction to the materials that we are expected to watch. I feel that live isn't necessary yet, but the highlight reels released for download and review need to be far more dynamic.
Novin wrote:
The appeal of spectator sports is and always will be the thrill of living vicariously. No one lies awake at night dreaming of one day playing Guitar Hero like Jimi Hendrix could if he had played Guitar Hero instead of playing guitar.
Ken Levine wrote: