As compared to what? "Is too", which is pretty much all you've used to back yourself up. Maybe give a reason as to why it's more meaningful. Or reasonable to accept such.
As compared to what? "Is too", which is pretty much all you've used to back yourself up. Maybe give a reason as to why it's more meaningful. Or reasonable to accept such.
I am not arguing either side. Only pointing out that your side of the argument is really nothing but gainsaying the point that pro-gaming is less meaningful than professional sports. I'm calling you out.
Take your own advice and give your reasoning why you believe either that pro-gaming is as (or more) meaningful than pro sports, or why pro sports aren't meaningful at all. Do that, and maybe Viscountalpha can provide a coherent counter-argument.
And for the record, I believe that the individual decides what is meaningful for themselves, not others. Therefor, pro-gaming can be as (or more) meaningful than pro sports. And pro sports can be as (or more) meaningful than pro-gaming. But I have no dog in this particular hunt.
It's hard for me to watch someone else play a game. I think the only thing that gets me into games in the interaction. If that's taken away from me I just get really bored. It doesn't help that we all look like zombies when we play games. They will show cutaways of the player's faces and it's a bit embarrassing.
I can't even watch a Let's Play unless it has commentary.
Games will never be on the same professional level as say basketball or football for a few weakness tied to the genre.
Games operate on a console or game engine.
Sports operate on a "game engine" known as reality.
The problem with games is that the game engine changes every 8 years or so aside from the PC, but even with something like starcraft, you're seeing them have trouble when it comes to starcraft 2 because they essentially need to create a whole new engine and make the game just as balanced as it was before. Besides the new physics, there are essentially new rules, making it a completely different game that has to be relearned.
I mean, basketball has gone unchanged for years now and will probably remain that way.
Games however are fleeting, and the professionals in them more so. Although, I guess part of the problem is that we look at professional gaming through the lens of professional sports, when it's really it's own beast.
But yeah - it's hard to have something be so popular competitively, only to have it die out because the latest game came out. It's not like that happens to football.
This guy is Denmark's resident pro-gamer. He represented our great nation in some tournament last week, where he got absolutely butchered in Street Fighter. Professional gaming in the Western world often seems like more of a marketing stunt than something that actually accomplishes anything on a competitive level. And it doesn't really work.
But really, isn't he just a "pro gamer" in the sense that he thinks he is?
AFAIK, he's the Danish national champion in Tekken, but I have no idea how they measure that. He's a B-list celebrity in Denmark, and is officially labeled as a pro gamer whenever he appears on TV. But it's not like it's a viable profession here. He probably does make a living off of it, though, due to his status. Apparently he's also an independent wrestler, though i don't even know man
And yeah, he's a complete mimbo/barbie. He always wears pink for some reason, and during this celebrity boxing event he got KO'd in one punch by a footballer.
Edit: Copenhagen eSport Challenge. Apparently there is a real market for pro-gaming over here. I still find it pretty difficult to care, though :P
It's hard for me to watch someone else play a game. I think the only thing that gets me into games in the interaction. If that's taken away from me I just get really bored. It doesn't help that we all look like zombies when we play games. They will show cutaways of the player's faces and it's a bit embarrassing.
I can't even watch a Let's Play unless it has commentary.
I was thinking of doing a LP with my laptop webcam recording the audio (and video, obviously), but I was afraid of what I would look like trying to play a game competently and provide a worthwhile commentary at the same time..
As compared to what? "Is too", which is pretty much all you've used to back yourself up. Maybe give a reason as to why it's more meaningful. Or reasonable to accept such.
I am not arguing either side. Only pointing out that your side of the argument is really nothing but gainsaying the point that pro-gaming is less meaningful than professional sports. I'm calling you out.
Take your own advice and give your reasoning why you believe either that pro-gaming is as (or more) meaningful than pro sports, or why pro sports aren't meaningful at all. Do that, and maybe Viscountalpha can provide a coherent counter-argument.
And for the record, I believe that the individual decides what is meaningful for themselves, not others. Therefor, pro-gaming can be as (or more) meaningful than pro sports. And pro sports can be as (or more) meaningful than pro-gaming. But I have no dog in this particular hunt.
It doesn't work that way, someone needs to demonstrate a reason why sports are any more meaningful as he was claiming.
And I actually pretty much agree with you, each is of whatever worth the individual holds for it in so far as it makes them and others happy.
You're always going to get unexpected events when watching human actions. Its plenty entertaining if you understand whats happening.
Someone playing a fighting game jumps in and attacks. You dont know whats going to happen. It could be one of several things. He could also mess up and do something outside of that range. The response from the other player is also going to be interesting.
You're right in that you don't know exactly what player A might do, or how Player B will respond to it, but the choices will be limited. They will always be limited. In sports, anything really can happen. A pigeon could fly in front of the pitch and get exploded in a baseball game. A football player could duck under to tackles closing in from opposing sides, causing those two other players to collide with amazing force, severely injuring themselves. These are real examples. I can't think of any scenario like this in a video game setting. Only what's been scripted/coded in.
Here is another issue that adds to the fact that watching people play video games is horribly boring. Nothing unexpected ever happens. (I'll add that this is why, in my opinion, games like chess, poker, etc are also extremely boring to watch.)
In physical sports there is chaos. A wind gust knocks down a field goal. A baseball hits a divot and takes a bad bounce. In hockey tempers flare and we get fights and penalties. None of this ever happens in gaming. I have never seen a terran marine trip over a hole in the ground or miss a shot. I have never seen a counterstrike player lose a target in the sun. Gaming is predictable.
Considering most competitive Smash Bros. players would rather eat their own arms than enable items or final smashes and play on only the few most predictable stages during competition, I find this funny.
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Dr Mario KartGames DealerAustin, TXRegistered Userregular
You're always going to get unexpected events when watching human actions. Its plenty entertaining if you understand whats happening.
Someone playing a fighting game jumps in and attacks. You dont know whats going to happen. It could be one of several things. He could also mess up and do something outside of that range. The response from the other player is also going to be interesting.
You're right in that you don't know exactly what player A might do, or how Player B will respond to it, but the choices will be limited. They will always be limited. In sports, anything really can happen. A pigeon could fly in front of the pitch and get exploded in a baseball game. A football player could duck under to tackles closing in from opposing sides, causing those two other players to collide with amazing force, severely injuring themselves. These are real examples. I can't think of any scenario like this in a video game setting. Only what's been scripted/coded in.
Sounds like a purer test of skill to me. I dont want a pigeon messing up a baseball game.
Some people in this thread and others like it on different forums mentioned having too many games or gametypes, where football/soccer only have one. As much as I don't like it (being a fan of competitive gaming in almost every form) I sort of agree.
The problem is a split community with each game, making the whole 'pro gaming' thing look like a huge cluster of tiny niche markets arguing with each other. CS players hate Quake players hate Halo players hate WoW players. In addition, a lot of these games have a huge stigma attached. Even on this forum, or Kotaku. If somebody brings up pro Halo/SC/CS/whatever, people pounce on them to shout that games are incomprehensible to spectators and a waste of the gamers' lives, etc. The one exception is definitely Street Fighter (and some other fighting games). There was an article on Kotaku about Daigo winning the SF4 international finals and everybody was happy and positive about the whole thing. There are also threads on almost every forum with the word "game" somewhere in it relating to some sort of SF4 tourney. Not to mention, I've never seen a crowd as enthusiastic, diverse, or friendly as a fighting game crowd. I don't need to repost the evo videos to prove my point.
This is in North America, mind you, so I think the bridge to peoples hearts with competitive gaming is going to wind up being console fighting games, at least here. From there things can move on to the games more hardcore audiences really like, similar to how, thanks to Starcraft, Korea is one of the only places where you can watch a Diablo 2 1v1 competitive loot-off on TV.
On the topic of playing for fun vs. competition, David Sirlin makes a good point. For a lot of people, competition is just as friendly and a lot more fun, even with a potentially more restrictive rule set. It's a matter of opinion and I don't think it's particularly fair to claim that they are too serious/don't have any fun.
FINALLY, Starcraft (probably more than most games) changes in several ways while maintaining the same ruleset and general gameplay techniques, but adds new maps and strategies (effectively counters to counters to counters to counters) that spawn more strategies which leads to more counters... etc.
I would think the biggest issue being that the most people only have passing interest for individual games. Games just change too much.
In contrast, sports hardly ever change.
Very true; basketball, football, etc can and have gone years between rules changes, and when they do have changes, they aren't fundamentally altering how you perceive the game.
Meanwhile, we've now had three Halos, with significant weapons rebalances, additions, and removals, not to mention other general rules. Smash Brothers is on it's third itheration as well, with sweeping roster and item updates since it's first edition.
The only really popular competitive game that's stayed fairly consistent is Starcraft, but now that audience is about to be split.
I think we basically need technology to hit some sort of plateau before we see a game that can stay with us for long enough to become a competition staple. Like, decades.
So you take a game that has consistent rules all the time.
And when the rules change, it's not a big deal because the audience, which follows the actual sport the game is based on, already knows the updated rules.
ESPN2 (subscribed to by 89 million US households) has aired Madden Nation for the past 4 years, with the 5th season slated to premiere in October. So someone's watching it. I wouldn't be shocked if it pulled better ratings than the NHL, which is considered one of the 4 "major" North American sports (even though golf and NASCAR both dwarf it).
The NFL loves the show and the game, which serves as one of the league's most effective tools (along with fantasy football and gambling) in building new audiences both inside and outside the US, and often makes high-profile players available for appearances on the show. Not that the players mind all that much, since a ton of them play Madden themselves.
BubbaT on
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SixCaches Tweets in the mainframe cyberhexRegistered Userregular
edited April 2009
Madden Nation works as a goofy glorified commercial for the league and the game, and that's about as big as it will ever get. People watch it because the market for NFL content is so big that there will always be people who will watch anything NFL-related, especially in the off-season.
People watched quarterback skills competitions too. That doesn't mean that throwing a football into a hamper is a viable professional sport, otherwise Bernie Kosar would still be relevant.
I think a purer way to look at this as competetive recreation as a viable means of entertainment, because if you try to define games in terms of sports, athleticism begins to arise in opposition to the idea, as well as the argument that the reality of it is the overall arbiter. The point is, if there's a viable audience for it, there will probably be a place for it. I guess I see competetive gaming as more of a mental competition than a physical one, though there are physical components involved(reflexes in FPS, micro in RTS), there is more of an emphasis on the mental play between people. I have to ask though, do some of your really believe that if you played Street Fighter all day, you'd be able to play against Daigo and win consistently?
Also, in response to those people who are saying that it is boring to watch, I personally find sports boring to watch, but this is mostly because I don't know the rules besides "put this object into that other object", and therefore there is no thought in my mind as to who's doing better and why, or what they could do in order to achieve their goal better. I think a certain level of understanding has to be reached in order to gain some enjoyment from it.
People will see games as sports as soon as there is major money to be had in it.
Once that is accomplished, which is its own problem, it will no longer be a waste of time to parents, girlfriends, and so on.
Watching it and engaging in it then becomes vastly more acceptable. Though it might be a chicken and egg process.
This too. If you're involved with the media aspect, you can find out a lot about leagues dying, growing in sponsorship, and changing leadership a lot. The MLG in particular is growing very well and managing their money and viewership beautifully, even if the game choice is less than ideal for a hardcore crowd. Plus, gamebattles gets the viewers involved, similar to fantasy football but with more competition.
I agree with DuoRCN as well, there's still talent involved (seriously, watch Daigo play or slayers_boxer micro) and I really don't even find it worth arguing with somebody who says something like "there's no skill in just pushing buttons."
Here is another issue that adds to the fact that watching people play video games is horribly boring. Nothing unexpected ever happens. (I'll add that this is why, in my opinion, games like chess, poker, etc are also extremely boring to watch.)
In physical sports there is chaos. A wind gust knocks down a field goal. A baseball hits a divot and takes a bad bounce. In hockey tempers flare and we get fights and penalties. None of this ever happens in gaming. I have never seen a terran marine trip over a hole in the ground or miss a shot. I have never seen a counterstrike player lose a target in the sun. Gaming is predictable.
I've seen too many SC and CS matches get turned on their head due to chance or skill on one player's part for this to be completely not true
Ace rounds and a few choice comebacks aren't anything like tripping or losing sight, but they're just the same factors
People talk about a lot of them being boring to watch, but Street Fighter is absolutely clear (health bars, dudes fighting) and people who have played or watched a friend play only once or twice can get into it.
Also, take a look at Korea's Starcraft community. These fangirls haven't touched a Command Center in their lives and they scream and cry when Jaedong drops a whole pack of marines and medics with 4 mutalisks. The game sinks in, pretty fast, as long as it gets some attention and money.
If there ever is pro gaming with awesome million dollar contracts, I want in on that shit.
I mean, getting paid to play games? That's awesome. I have to practice 5 times a week for soccer and paintball, and I only make enough to break even in one of those.
By and large, video games are still in their infancy.
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
I don't think you can compare games pre-2000 to the explosion in graphics and (arguably) gameplay we have today
Of course you can.
You can't say that the thing is evolving and therefore perpetually young.
Ahh, what? Don't think I've said that
Video games are really only coming into their own in recent years due to exposure and the level of advancement we've reached. It's unfair to say that games are decades old and haven't done anything yet when more than half of that decade was ruled by games like Space Invaders or Pac-man and was a very very niche market
This discussion is really to early. Starcraft 2 is really the first game designed as an e-sport (by a competent developer) out of the gates.
I think CSS or TF2 have very friendly competitive modes that came with them, and certainly with CSS it was designed out of the gate with competitive play in mind
By and large, video games are still in their infancy.
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
I don't think you can compare games pre-2000 to the explosion in graphics and (arguably) gameplay we have today
Of course you can.
You can't say that the thing is evolving and therefore perpetually young.
Ahh, what? Don't think I've said that
Video games are really only coming into their own in recent years due to exposure and the level of advancement we've reached. It's unfair to say that games are decades old and haven't done anything yet when more than half of that decade was ruled by games like Space Invaders or Pac-man and was a very very niche market
30 years old is not old at all. It is very, very young.
By and large, video games are still in their infancy.
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
I don't think you can compare games pre-2000 to the explosion in graphics and (arguably) gameplay we have today
Of course you can.
You can't say that the thing is evolving and therefore perpetually young.
Ahh, what? Don't think I've said that
Video games are really only coming into their own in recent years due to exposure and the level of advancement we've reached. It's unfair to say that games are decades old and haven't done anything yet when more than half of that decade was ruled by games like Space Invaders or Pac-man and was a very very niche market
30 years old is not old at all. It is very, very young.
This discussion is really to early. Starcraft 2 is really the first game designed as an e-sport (by a competent developer) out of the gates.
I think CSS or TF2 have very friendly competitive modes that came with them, and certainly with CSS it was designed out of the gate with competitive play in mind
TF2 is not even close to competitive on a level approaching CS or SC. Also, if CS:S was designed with competition... why does NOBODY play it competitively?
Also, Quake Live was designed with competition in mind.
Competitive gaming ranks up there with competitive sports for me. I find them both equally boring to watch, unless of course the teams are comically bad at what they're doing.
This discussion is really to early. Starcraft 2 is really the first game designed as an e-sport (by a competent developer) out of the gates.
I think CSS or TF2 have very friendly competitive modes that came with them, and certainly with CSS it was designed out of the gate with competitive play in mind
TF2 is not even close to competitive on a level approaching CS or SC. Also, if CS:S was designed with competition... why does NOBODY play it competitively?
Also, Quake Live was designed with competition in mind.
Not saying it's on the same level, but saying SC2 is the first game designed with it in mind is just not fair
And there was much hubba-baloo in the early days when CSS came out. 1.6ers didn't like it because of perceived changes in firing models and such, whether real or myth. Thus it never really caught on with that crowd. 1.6 is still played pretty extensively.
I didn't follow the development of CS:Source, but it does seem to me that if any game has a chance of breaking into the mainstream outside of Korea it's Starcraft 2. Especially with how well known blizzard is now.
However I don't know if RTS pro level play could ever be popular with non-RTS gamers, because it is so ridiculously hardcore.
By and large, video games are still in their infancy.
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
Good job commenting out the important bits, tard.
American Football has only been a national sport for maybe 50 years. It spent nearly a hundred years slowly growing in popularity.
But way to be myopic.
Well, your ad hominem attack doesn't really do much to support your point and your facts are vague, cherry-picked and insubstantial. If you are referring to the NFL specifically, as the dominant professional football league, the so-called "Greatest Game Ever Played" that put the NFL on the map was 61 years ago, not 50. That, of course, leaves out college football, which had been around and popular longer, and if we are sticking purely to professional sports, which makes sense when comparing it to professional gaming, it completely misses the fact that modern American football is only about 100 years old total, which makes it difficult to spend that much time gaining popularity and still spend 50 years in the limelight.
Either way, it is only one comparison, picked because it supports your timeline. Modern professional baseball was being referred to as the National Pastime only a decade after its creation. If you use that example, gaming is way behind.
But none of it matters, because we aren't talking about national acceptance as a dominant sport. We are talking about whether or not people enjoy watching it. Baseball and football in their modern forms and the games that they evolved from have always drawn a crowd and proven to be exciting entertainment to a wide cross-section of the public. Games, in any format, have only drawn niche crowds, usually of the lower level players of the same game. That's what can't be explained away by claiming infancy for gaming. It's still boring to watch, and your argument seems to infer that time will somehow make it better. A football game was just as fun to watch in the 50s as it is today. That is something intrinsic in the sport that doesn't exist in watching people play Counter-Strike.
This discussion is really to early. Starcraft 2 is really the first game designed as an e-sport (by a competent developer) out of the gates.
I think CSS or TF2 have very friendly competitive modes that came with them, and certainly with CSS it was designed out of the gate with competitive play in mind
TF2 is not even close to competitive on a level approaching CS or SC. Also, if CS:S was designed with competition... why does NOBODY play it competitively?
Also, Quake Live was designed with competition in mind.
Not saying it's on the same level, but saying SC2 is the first game designed with it in mind is just not fair
And there was much hubba-baloo in the early days when CSS came out. 1.6ers didn't like it because of perceived changes in firing models and such, whether real or myth. Thus it never really caught on with that crowd. 1.6 is still played pretty extensively.
You're right that SC2 was not the first game designed with competition in mind, but remember that CS was patched after a certain point with competition in mind, Starcraft too. Quake Live was also developed competitively, and Quake 3 had a lot of competitive focus from id. Look at Quakecon. The point is, when a game is developed for pro gaming, it usually fares much better with viewers.
With CS:S... I won't get into it. The changes are absolutely real, it's been proven ad nauseam for the past 5 years. 1.6 has been kept for competitive play and Valve has done very little to change that. They don't care, nor do many developers. Sidetracked development like that is also a reason competitive games aren't as good and exciting as they could be.
Ill admit I kinda skipped to the end of this thread, so if this has already been discussed, forgive me, but the biggest reason I feel that the vast majority of games have no potential to become a "sport" - in the sense that people will gather round and watch it - is because it's so impossible to follow whats going on.
Say it's pro Halo. What are you watching, as a viewer at home? The guy in first place's screen? A massive grid of split screens? Is a technical director cutting between different feeds as a commentator describes whats going on? Are you just watching the room of people PLAYING?
Most games are just not easy to play on one screen, and that kills the ability for anyone to watch it and follow whats going on.
mxmarks on
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Ill admit I kinda skipped to the end of this thread, so if this has already been discussed, forgive me, but the biggest reason I feel that the vast majority of games have no potential to become a "sport" - in the sense that people will gather round and watch it - is because it's so impossible to follow whats going on.
Say it's pro Halo. What are you watching, as a viewer at home? The guy in first place's screen? A massive grid of split screens? Is a technical director cutting between different feeds as a commentator describes whats going on? Are you just watching the room of people PLAYING?
Most games are just not easy to play on one screen, and that kills the ability for anyone to watch it and follow whats going on.
Please read at least the last few pages for a good perspective on this. Starcraft, by the way, does it very well with exciting commentators who explain the depth of what's going on (<3 Tasteless) and a spectator mode that sees everything that's going on.
Ill admit I kinda skipped to the end of this thread, so if this has already been discussed, forgive me, but the biggest reason I feel that the vast majority of games have no potential to become a "sport" - in the sense that people will gather round and watch it - is because it's so impossible to follow whats going on.
Say it's pro Halo. What are you watching, as a viewer at home? The guy in first place's screen? A massive grid of split screens? Is a technical director cutting between different feeds as a commentator describes whats going on? Are you just watching the room of people PLAYING?
Most games are just not easy to play on one screen, and that kills the ability for anyone to watch it and follow whats going on.
Please read at least the last few pages for a good perspective on this. Starcraft, by the way, does it very well with exciting commentators who explain the depth of what's going on (<3 Tasteless) and a spectator mode that sees everything that's going on.
To build on this, watch any telecast of a pro-match. This 'hard to follow' is really only an applicable argument if we're dealing with 40 something housewives and trying to get them to watch the game
By and large, video games are still in their infancy.
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
I don't think you can compare games pre-2000 to the explosion in graphics and (arguably) gameplay we have today
Of course you can.
You can't say that the thing is evolving and therefore perpetually young.
Ahh, what? Don't think I've said that
Video games are really only coming into their own in recent years due to exposure and the level of advancement we've reached. It's unfair to say that games are decades old and haven't done anything yet when more than half of that decade was ruled by games like Space Invaders or Pac-man and was a very very niche market
I don't think it's fair to say "I'm going to exclude this portion of gaming's history because gaming wasn't very popular back then" when the real question of the thread is "will professional gaming ever be popular?"
That was the point I was trying to make. And there have been plenty of contests involving early arcade games. Most people who were tracing the history of competitive gaming, I think, would start at the high score charts of old arcade cabinets. That's where it really began.
Posts
I am not arguing either side. Only pointing out that your side of the argument is really nothing but gainsaying the point that pro-gaming is less meaningful than professional sports. I'm calling you out.
Take your own advice and give your reasoning why you believe either that pro-gaming is as (or more) meaningful than pro sports, or why pro sports aren't meaningful at all. Do that, and maybe Viscountalpha can provide a coherent counter-argument.
And for the record, I believe that the individual decides what is meaningful for themselves, not others. Therefor, pro-gaming can be as (or more) meaningful than pro sports. And pro sports can be as (or more) meaningful than pro-gaming. But I have no dog in this particular hunt.
I can't even watch a Let's Play unless it has commentary.
Games operate on a console or game engine.
Sports operate on a "game engine" known as reality.
The problem with games is that the game engine changes every 8 years or so aside from the PC, but even with something like starcraft, you're seeing them have trouble when it comes to starcraft 2 because they essentially need to create a whole new engine and make the game just as balanced as it was before. Besides the new physics, there are essentially new rules, making it a completely different game that has to be relearned.
I mean, basketball has gone unchanged for years now and will probably remain that way.
Games however are fleeting, and the professionals in them more so. Although, I guess part of the problem is that we look at professional gaming through the lens of professional sports, when it's really it's own beast.
But yeah - it's hard to have something be so popular competitively, only to have it die out because the latest game came out. It's not like that happens to football.
AFAIK, he's the Danish national champion in Tekken, but I have no idea how they measure that. He's a B-list celebrity in Denmark, and is officially labeled as a pro gamer whenever he appears on TV. But it's not like it's a viable profession here. He probably does make a living off of it, though, due to his status. Apparently he's also an independent wrestler, though i don't even know man
And yeah, he's a complete mimbo/barbie. He always wears pink for some reason, and during this celebrity boxing event he got KO'd in one punch by a footballer.
Edit: Copenhagen eSport Challenge. Apparently there is a real market for pro-gaming over here. I still find it pretty difficult to care, though :P
Edit the second: Haha
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZMVn-NDjPc&feature=related
I was thinking of doing a LP with my laptop webcam recording the audio (and video, obviously), but I was afraid of what I would look like trying to play a game competently and provide a worthwhile commentary at the same time..
It doesn't work that way, someone needs to demonstrate a reason why sports are any more meaningful as he was claiming.
And I actually pretty much agree with you, each is of whatever worth the individual holds for it in so far as it makes them and others happy.
You're right in that you don't know exactly what player A might do, or how Player B will respond to it, but the choices will be limited. They will always be limited. In sports, anything really can happen. A pigeon could fly in front of the pitch and get exploded in a baseball game. A football player could duck under to tackles closing in from opposing sides, causing those two other players to collide with amazing force, severely injuring themselves. These are real examples. I can't think of any scenario like this in a video game setting. Only what's been scripted/coded in.
Considering most competitive Smash Bros. players would rather eat their own arms than enable items or final smashes and play on only the few most predictable stages during competition, I find this funny.
The problem is a split community with each game, making the whole 'pro gaming' thing look like a huge cluster of tiny niche markets arguing with each other. CS players hate Quake players hate Halo players hate WoW players. In addition, a lot of these games have a huge stigma attached. Even on this forum, or Kotaku. If somebody brings up pro Halo/SC/CS/whatever, people pounce on them to shout that games are incomprehensible to spectators and a waste of the gamers' lives, etc. The one exception is definitely Street Fighter (and some other fighting games). There was an article on Kotaku about Daigo winning the SF4 international finals and everybody was happy and positive about the whole thing. There are also threads on almost every forum with the word "game" somewhere in it relating to some sort of SF4 tourney. Not to mention, I've never seen a crowd as enthusiastic, diverse, or friendly as a fighting game crowd. I don't need to repost the evo videos to prove my point.
This is in North America, mind you, so I think the bridge to peoples hearts with competitive gaming is going to wind up being console fighting games, at least here. From there things can move on to the games more hardcore audiences really like, similar to how, thanks to Starcraft, Korea is one of the only places where you can watch a Diablo 2 1v1 competitive loot-off on TV.
On the topic of playing for fun vs. competition, David Sirlin makes a good point. For a lot of people, competition is just as friendly and a lot more fun, even with a potentially more restrictive rule set. It's a matter of opinion and I don't think it's particularly fair to claim that they are too serious/don't have any fun.
FINALLY, Starcraft (probably more than most games) changes in several ways while maintaining the same ruleset and general gameplay techniques, but adds new maps and strategies (effectively counters to counters to counters to counters) that spawn more strategies which leads to more counters... etc.
So you take a game that has consistent rules all the time.
And when the rules change, it's not a big deal because the audience, which follows the actual sport the game is based on, already knows the updated rules.
ESPN2 (subscribed to by 89 million US households) has aired Madden Nation for the past 4 years, with the 5th season slated to premiere in October. So someone's watching it. I wouldn't be shocked if it pulled better ratings than the NHL, which is considered one of the 4 "major" North American sports (even though golf and NASCAR both dwarf it).
The NFL loves the show and the game, which serves as one of the league's most effective tools (along with fantasy football and gambling) in building new audiences both inside and outside the US, and often makes high-profile players available for appearances on the show. Not that the players mind all that much, since a ton of them play Madden themselves.
People watched quarterback skills competitions too. That doesn't mean that throwing a football into a hamper is a viable professional sport, otherwise Bernie Kosar would still be relevant.
A) It's hard to tell whats going on
C) it's not athletic
D) it had a "nerd" stigma.
GM: Rusty Chains (DH Ongoing)
Once that is accomplished, which is its own problem, it will no longer be a waste of time to parents, girlfriends, and so on.
Watching it and engaging in it then becomes vastly more acceptable. Though it might be a chicken and egg process.
Also, in response to those people who are saying that it is boring to watch, I personally find sports boring to watch, but this is mostly because I don't know the rules besides "put this object into that other object", and therefore there is no thought in my mind as to who's doing better and why, or what they could do in order to achieve their goal better. I think a certain level of understanding has to be reached in order to gain some enjoyment from it.
This too. If you're involved with the media aspect, you can find out a lot about leagues dying, growing in sponsorship, and changing leadership a lot. The MLG in particular is growing very well and managing their money and viewership beautifully, even if the game choice is less than ideal for a hardcore crowd. Plus, gamebattles gets the viewers involved, similar to fantasy football but with more competition.
I agree with DuoRCN as well, there's still talent involved (seriously, watch Daigo play or slayers_boxer micro) and I really don't even find it worth arguing with somebody who says something like "there's no skill in just pushing buttons."
I've seen too many SC and CS matches get turned on their head due to chance or skill on one player's part for this to be completely not true
Ace rounds and a few choice comebacks aren't anything like tripping or losing sight, but they're just the same factors
Why do people keep saying this? Video games are decades old.
They aren't young, they are just boring to watch.
This is true.
HOwever, they are great fun to play.
GM: Rusty Chains (DH Ongoing)
I don't think you can compare games pre-2000 to the explosion in graphics and (arguably) gameplay we have today
Also, take a look at Korea's Starcraft community. These fangirls haven't touched a Command Center in their lives and they scream and cry when Jaedong drops a whole pack of marines and medics with 4 mutalisks. The game sinks in, pretty fast, as long as it gets some attention and money.
Of course you can.
You can't say that the thing is evolving and therefore perpetually young.
I mean, getting paid to play games? That's awesome. I have to practice 5 times a week for soccer and paintball, and I only make enough to break even in one of those.
GM: Rusty Chains (DH Ongoing)
Ahh, what? Don't think I've said that
Video games are really only coming into their own in recent years due to exposure and the level of advancement we've reached. It's unfair to say that games are decades old and haven't done anything yet when more than half of that decade was ruled by games like Space Invaders or Pac-man and was a very very niche market
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I think CSS or TF2 have very friendly competitive modes that came with them, and certainly with CSS it was designed out of the gate with competitive play in mind
30 years old is not old at all. It is very, very young.
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That's what I'm responding to yes
TF2 is not even close to competitive on a level approaching CS or SC. Also, if CS:S was designed with competition... why does NOBODY play it competitively?
Also, Quake Live was designed with competition in mind.
Not saying it's on the same level, but saying SC2 is the first game designed with it in mind is just not fair
And there was much hubba-baloo in the early days when CSS came out. 1.6ers didn't like it because of perceived changes in firing models and such, whether real or myth. Thus it never really caught on with that crowd. 1.6 is still played pretty extensively.
However I don't know if RTS pro level play could ever be popular with non-RTS gamers, because it is so ridiculously hardcore.
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Well, your ad hominem attack doesn't really do much to support your point and your facts are vague, cherry-picked and insubstantial. If you are referring to the NFL specifically, as the dominant professional football league, the so-called "Greatest Game Ever Played" that put the NFL on the map was 61 years ago, not 50. That, of course, leaves out college football, which had been around and popular longer, and if we are sticking purely to professional sports, which makes sense when comparing it to professional gaming, it completely misses the fact that modern American football is only about 100 years old total, which makes it difficult to spend that much time gaining popularity and still spend 50 years in the limelight.
Either way, it is only one comparison, picked because it supports your timeline. Modern professional baseball was being referred to as the National Pastime only a decade after its creation. If you use that example, gaming is way behind.
But none of it matters, because we aren't talking about national acceptance as a dominant sport. We are talking about whether or not people enjoy watching it. Baseball and football in their modern forms and the games that they evolved from have always drawn a crowd and proven to be exciting entertainment to a wide cross-section of the public. Games, in any format, have only drawn niche crowds, usually of the lower level players of the same game. That's what can't be explained away by claiming infancy for gaming. It's still boring to watch, and your argument seems to infer that time will somehow make it better. A football game was just as fun to watch in the 50s as it is today. That is something intrinsic in the sport that doesn't exist in watching people play Counter-Strike.
You're right that SC2 was not the first game designed with competition in mind, but remember that CS was patched after a certain point with competition in mind, Starcraft too. Quake Live was also developed competitively, and Quake 3 had a lot of competitive focus from id. Look at Quakecon. The point is, when a game is developed for pro gaming, it usually fares much better with viewers.
With CS:S... I won't get into it. The changes are absolutely real, it's been proven ad nauseam for the past 5 years. 1.6 has been kept for competitive play and Valve has done very little to change that. They don't care, nor do many developers. Sidetracked development like that is also a reason competitive games aren't as good and exciting as they could be.
Say it's pro Halo. What are you watching, as a viewer at home? The guy in first place's screen? A massive grid of split screens? Is a technical director cutting between different feeds as a commentator describes whats going on? Are you just watching the room of people PLAYING?
Most games are just not easy to play on one screen, and that kills the ability for anyone to watch it and follow whats going on.
Please read at least the last few pages for a good perspective on this. Starcraft, by the way, does it very well with exciting commentators who explain the depth of what's going on (<3 Tasteless) and a spectator mode that sees everything that's going on.
To build on this, watch any telecast of a pro-match. This 'hard to follow' is really only an applicable argument if we're dealing with 40 something housewives and trying to get them to watch the game
I don't think it's fair to say "I'm going to exclude this portion of gaming's history because gaming wasn't very popular back then" when the real question of the thread is "will professional gaming ever be popular?"
That was the point I was trying to make. And there have been plenty of contests involving early arcade games. Most people who were tracing the history of competitive gaming, I think, would start at the high score charts of old arcade cabinets. That's where it really began.
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