I don't play Starcraft (I do play other RTS games) but I really enjoy watching pro-games.
This is a good example of the appreciation that can sink in.
I suggest watching FRAG to see a good history of pro gaming and how it all led up to where it is now and where it's going for the players and the leagues/sponsors. I'm sure you can find it... somewhere online.
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
I will go read the last couple pages, sorry about that.
But wouldn't the GOAL be to get 40 something housewives somewhat interested? If you're simply gunning to get the people who already understand your 'sport', it would never succeed, because you already have them.
mxmarks on
PSN: mxmarks - WiiU: mxmarks - twitter: @ MikesPS4 - twitch.tv/mxmarks - "Yes, mxmarks is the King of Queens" - Unbreakable Vow
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
I will go read the last couple pages, sorry about that.
But wouldn't the GOAL be to get 40 something housewives somewhat interested? If you're simply gunning to get the people who already understand your 'sport', it would never succeed, because you already have them.
Remember, most football advertisement isn't really getting the 40 something housewives. Gaming in the mainstream (again, MLG is doing this well with their gamer house show and gamebattles, as well as WCG with their Ultimate Gamer show) is appealing to kids/20 somethings.
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
I will go read the last couple pages, sorry about that.
But wouldn't the GOAL be to get 40 something housewives somewhat interested? If you're simply gunning to get the people who already understand your 'sport', it would never succeed, because you already have them.
Most sports are only appreciated by the fans who understand it. The barrier to gaming, I would think, is that if you explain football to the 40's housewife once, she'll have a basic understanding of what's going on. If she sees a SC competition online and you explain that game to her, does she now understand Professional Gaming? She won't understand a FPS or Madden or Street Fighter. It's a very nebulous concept to describe. It's like trying to explain the rules of "card games" instead of "no-limit texas hold-em".
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.
If the original point is 'will professional gaming ever be popular' and you're point was 'no' (inferring from 'they are boring to watch' and 'they are decades old'), then can I say that you've disproved yourself by pointing out how much 'competitive' play and competitive leagues have grown since the early day of video gaming?
My own point was that the early days of the arcades and the leagues we see today are on completely different levels, and that it's not fair to say competitive gaming will ever come into its own because its been decades and nothing on the NHL level has come of it. But you've seemed to have come full circle or something
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
I will go read the last couple pages, sorry about that.
But wouldn't the GOAL be to get 40 something housewives somewhat interested? If you're simply gunning to get the people who already understand your 'sport', it would never succeed, because you already have them.
Most sports are only appreciated by the fans who understand it. The barrier to gaming, I would think, is that if you explain football to the 40's housewife once, she'll have a basic understanding of what's going on. If she sees a SC competition online and you explain that game to her, does she now understand Professional Gaming? She won't understand a FPS or Madden or Street Fighter. It's a very nebulous concept to describe. It's like trying to explain the rules of "card games" instead of "no-limit texas hold-em".
And so brings the "One Game To Them All" theory, which I mostly agree with, demonstrated by the "Korea Had Starcraft" example.
It's already really popular, just not where we live. Most western countries only love sports that are really masculine. This masculinity can be achieved through being very athletic or having a fast car. 300 apm does not make you really masculine.
Well, your ad hominem attack doesn't really do much to support your attack 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.
Your response prior to this point didn't warrant anything other than a dismissal, which you received.
Exact dates are less important to the argument than a general time frame. So let's take 1906 as the date of "modern football", and call it about 100 years old. You can't discount that, even at that point, the root form of the game had been around for 30 years, and that its ancestors trace back to the 17th century. So you can clearly see that football itself had been around much, much longer when it became popular than video games are now.
Baseball is another excellent example of a sport that has evolved from its infancy over hundreds of years, so we can use that if you like. Its ancestor sports can be traced back to the 15th century, and in its current form at least as far back as the 1830s. It didn't suddenly appear on the scene as you seek to frame it; baseball, too, was a long time coming.
Do you really think that the rudimentary, early forms of football and baseball drew hundreds of thousands of eager onlookers? Games take a while to settle into the collective conscious, being played by a generation which then teaches it to their children, which will continue to pass the game along. Eventually, the concept is refined to a point - both in implementation and general awareness - where it can be played for an audience.
Not all sports make it. Video games, taken as a whole, might not make it into "sports." But to dismiss it so readily, as you are eager to do, denies the complex history that sporting has in our society.
Well, you seem to be dismissing the entire purpose of this discussion by stating that only time will tell. Of course only time will tell, but there's no problem with speculating about how it will progress or how the community will help.
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.
If the original point is 'will professional gaming ever be popular' and you're point was 'no' (inferring from 'they are boring to watch' and 'they are decades old'), then can I say that you've disproved yourself by pointing out how much 'competitive' play and competitive leagues have grown since the early day of video gaming?
My own point was that the early days of the arcades and the leagues we see today are on completely different levels, and that it's not fair to say competitive gaming will ever come into its own because its been decades and nothing on the NHL level has come of it. But you've seemed to have come full circle or something
No, I really don't think I have. I don't think it's gotten that much more popular overall, especially when you look at it compared to overall growth of the gaming industry. Gaming, overall, has grown substantially, with next-gen consoles, MMOs, casual franchises, things like that all showing massively higher acceptance in the "mainstream" and more and more gaming is creeping into the pop culture. However, it seems like professional gaming has not seen anywhere near as much growth. The methods used to promote pro gaming have become much much more complex, with television shows and things like that, but I don't hear about gaming tournaments on the local radio stations or anything like that. I just think the internet and mass acceptance of gaming on the whole have increased awareness of professional gaming, but not it's popularity as a sport to watch, and certainly not when compared to the growth of gaming as a whole. If it really was a contender for people's time, I would think that the pickup on it would be much more proportional to the rest of gaming.
I could be completely wrong about it. Obviously I do find it boring, and so I haven't really done any research on it and I'd love to see some numbers if I'm wrong about it.
I'm not sure about that. Look at pro gaming in the past 5 years, carefully. The CGS proved that gaming could hit the mainstream with their DirecTV partnership, despite its death. It's generally agreed upon, by the way, that the death was a result of them attempting to go international too early.
It's definitely grown, even if you haven't heard about it on the news or Kotaku.
Well, your ad hominem attack doesn't really do much to support your attack 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.
Your response prior to this point didn't warrant anything other than a dismissal, which you received.
Exact dates are less important to the argument than a general time frame. So let's take 1906 as the date of "modern football", and call it about 100 years old. You can't discount that, even at that point, the root form of the game had been around for 30 years, and that its ancestors trace back to the 17th century. So you can clearly see that football itself had been around much, much longer when it became popular than video games are now.
Baseball is another excellent example of a sport that has evolved from its infancy over hundreds of years, so we can use that if you like. Its ancestor sports can be traced back to the 15th century, and in its current form at least as far back as the 1830s. It didn't suddenly appear on the scene as you seek to frame it; baseball, too, was a long time coming.
Do you really think that the rudimentary, early forms of football and baseball drew hundreds of thousands of eager onlookers? Games take a while to settle into the collective conscious, being played by a generation which then teaches it to their children, which will continue to pass the game along. Eventually, the concept is refined to a point - both in implementation and general awareness - where it can be played for an audience.
Not all sports make it. Video games, taken as a whole, might not make it into "sports." But to dismiss it so readily, as you are eager to do, denies the complex history that sporting has in our society.
Well, you seem to be dismissing the entire purpose of this discussion by stating that only time will tell. Of course only time will tell, but there's no problem with speculating about how it will progress or how the community will help.
It seems to me that he wants to include the entire development of similar sports into the record for football and baseball, does that mean we can include computer gaming all the way back to Space Wars! in '62, or the obvious board game predecessors? It would be hard to argue that RTS games of the present did not develop from table-top wargames which probably could draw their influence from chess.
You have to be consistent here. Someone else in this thread is suggesting that we only take competitive gaming into account from 2000 and onward, when it reached it's supposed "modern" form. I think we need to pick one avenue of comparison or the other.
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.
If the original point is 'will professional gaming ever be popular' and you're point was 'no' (inferring from 'they are boring to watch' and 'they are decades old'), then can I say that you've disproved yourself by pointing out how much 'competitive' play and competitive leagues have grown since the early day of video gaming?
My own point was that the early days of the arcades and the leagues we see today are on completely different levels, and that it's not fair to say competitive gaming will ever come into its own because its been decades and nothing on the NHL level has come of it. But you've seemed to have come full circle or something
No, I really don't think I have. I don't think it's gotten that much more popular overall, especially when you look at it compared to overall growth of the gaming industry. Gaming, overall, has grown substantially, with next-gen consoles, MMOs, casual franchises, things like that all showing massively higher acceptance in the "mainstream" and more and more gaming is creeping into the pop culture. However, it seems like professional gaming has not seen anywhere near as much growth. The methods used to promote pro gaming have become much much more complex, with television shows and things like that, but I don't hear about gaming tournaments on the local radio stations or anything like that. I just think the internet and mass acceptance of gaming on the whole have increased awareness of professional gaming, but not it's popularity as a sport to watch, and certainly not when compared to the growth of gaming as a whole. If it really was a contender for people's time, I would think that the pickup on it would be much more proportional to the rest of gaming.
I could be completely wrong about it. Obviously I do find it boring, and so I haven't really done any research on it and I'd love to see some numbers if I'm wrong about it.
You're jumping way ahead of the curve if you think we should be hearing about gaming tournaments on the radio
Well, see this is the current situation in Korea with Starcraft, as they have several television channels devoted to the game, but in the North American market games are still very much games or hobbies, and people who devote to them are still nerds.
Does that mean that's it for competitive gaming here? Certainly not. Much as gaming has come into the mainstream, no doubt so will competitive gaming. It's the natural venue into which mass appeal over gaming will go, especially as this current generation of nerds grow older
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.
If the original point is 'will professional gaming ever be popular' and you're point was 'no' (inferring from 'they are boring to watch' and 'they are decades old'), then can I say that you've disproved yourself by pointing out how much 'competitive' play and competitive leagues have grown since the early day of video gaming?
My own point was that the early days of the arcades and the leagues we see today are on completely different levels, and that it's not fair to say competitive gaming will ever come into its own because its been decades and nothing on the NHL level has come of it. But you've seemed to have come full circle or something
No, I really don't think I have. I don't think it's gotten that much more popular overall, especially when you look at it compared to overall growth of the gaming industry. Gaming, overall, has grown substantially, with next-gen consoles, MMOs, casual franchises, things like that all showing massively higher acceptance in the "mainstream" and more and more gaming is creeping into the pop culture. However, it seems like professional gaming has not seen anywhere near as much growth. The methods used to promote pro gaming have become much much more complex, with television shows and things like that, but I don't hear about gaming tournaments on the local radio stations or anything like that. I just think the internet and mass acceptance of gaming on the whole have increased awareness of professional gaming, but not it's popularity as a sport to watch, and certainly not when compared to the growth of gaming as a whole. If it really was a contender for people's time, I would think that the pickup on it would be much more proportional to the rest of gaming.
I could be completely wrong about it. Obviously I do find it boring, and so I haven't really done any research on it and I'd love to see some numbers if I'm wrong about it.
You're jumping way ahead of the curve if you think we should be hearing about gaming tournaments on the radio
Well, see this is the current situation in Korea with Starcraft, as they have several television channels devoted to the game, but in the North American market games are still very much games or hobbies, and people who devote to them are still nerds.
Does that mean that's it for competitive gaming here? Certainly not. Much as gaming has come into the mainstream, no doubt so will competitive gaming. It's the natural venue into which mass appeal over gaming will go, especially as this current generation of nerds grow older
You definitely have some points, but I do doubt it, because I can't see the full-on appeal. Korea is such an interesting case, because it shows it happening, but it could be an abberation and not the norm. I don't know. I just know that even as someone who has played a lot of games for a very long time, I just don't find any appeal in watching other people do it. It's probably just personal bias clouding my opinion here.
A big problem is that gaming tastes are too varied. For example, I'd be all up for pro Pac-Man: CE tournaments & pro Civilization Revolution tournaments, both as a contestant and a member of the audience, but these don't exist. Pro Street Fighter/Starcraft/SSBM tournaments do exist, but don't interest me.
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.
Actually, it functions more as a reality show than a gaming competition. EA forthrightly admits they'll take less-skilled players for Madden Nation if they have more interesting personalities. It's personalities that drive the sport/game, not the other way around.
Take basketball, for instance. The NBA was dying before Julius Erving, and to a greater extent, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan resurrected it in the 1980s. It's not that there wasn't talent before, but the talent wasn't personable. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was... well, he was a grouch - even in Airplane! he's a grouch.
Look at professional poker. No one cared about it until it got personalities, like Phil Helmuth. Before Bobby Fischer, only chess nerds paid attention to chess.
Personalities will drive viewership. Actual charisma, as opposed to robotic jargon mumbled into one's chin. I suppose FragDolls are an attempt to create such a media-friendly gamer, albeit a crass and superficial likely doomed to fail.
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.
Actually, it functions more as a reality show than a gaming competition. EA forthrightly admits they'll take less-skilled players for Madden Nation if they have more interesting personalities. It's personalities that drive the sport/game, not the other way around.
Take basketball, for instance. The NBA was dying before Julius Erving, and to a greater extent, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan resurrected it in the 1980s. It's not that there wasn't talent before, but the talent wasn't personable. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was... well, he was a grouch - even in Airplane! he's a grouch.
Look at professional poker. No one cared about it until it got personalities, like Phil Helmuth. Before Bobby Fischer, only chess nerds paid attention to chess.
Personalities will drive viewership. Actual charisma, as opposed to robotic jargon mumbled into one's chin. I suppose FragDolls are an attempt to create such a media-friendly gamer, albeit a crass and superficial likely doomed to fail.
Yeah, this rings true in my head. Korea had Slayers_Boxer really lifting up the early StarCraft scene, and Counter Strike (at least for me as a swed) had Heaton as a front figure.
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.
Actually, it functions more as a reality show than a gaming competition. EA forthrightly admits they'll take less-skilled players for Madden Nation if they have more interesting personalities. It's personalities that drive the sport/game, not the other way around.
Take basketball, for instance. The NBA was dying before Julius Erving, and to a greater extent, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan resurrected it in the 1980s. It's not that there wasn't talent before, but the talent wasn't personable. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was... well, he was a grouch - even in Airplane! he's a grouch.
Look at professional poker. No one cared about it until it got personalities, like Phil Helmuth. Before Bobby Fischer, only chess nerds paid attention to chess.
Personalities will drive viewership. Actual charisma, as opposed to robotic jargon mumbled into one's chin. I suppose FragDolls are an attempt to create such a media-friendly gamer, albeit a crass and superficial likely doomed to fail.
You want personality? Fuck boxer, check out FireBatHero. FireBatHero
However, things like pro poker existed in some form long before ESPN thought it'd be a good idea to broadcast it. That only means charisma/personality is only important for television. The respective sport/game can still continue so long as there is enough interest in keeping it going. With or without a marketable personality. Hell, badminton and jai alai have organised leagues, but it doesn't mean they're particularly popular on a wide basis.
Well, it's all semi-tied together. I hadn't ever thought of Pro Gaming as more than "Those assholes on XBL that I hate." from what I'd seen. But then I saw "King of Kong" and honestly am pretty excited about the re-match they announced for this years E3. I know for sure I'll be following it throughout the day.
Because now I'm a "fan" of Steve, and like his story and will be rooting for him. I'll be bummed if I see he lost a life early on, and stuff. Hell, even my girlfriend, who's video game expertise is Tetris, Dr. Mario and possibly Wii Sports, has actually asked if they're having a re-match, because she loved that movie too, and actually understands the 'goal' of Donkey Kong, so she can understand when the score is close how tense it gets.
I would have had below zero interest in a public Donkey Kong match before, and now actually have looked up when different people are trying for records.
Personality becomes a factor because it acts as a gateway. If you don't know about, or care about, a sport, you can find yourself following it just because of a good story about a person. And it works in both directions - you can have a 'villian' that draws people to learn more and watch more just because they want to see if he/she can be beaten.
mxmarks on
PSN: mxmarks - WiiU: mxmarks - twitter: @ MikesPS4 - twitch.tv/mxmarks - "Yes, mxmarks is the King of Queens" - Unbreakable Vow
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.
One thing about video games being "professional" is that there's a problem with video games that doesn't happen with any other sport: becoming obsolete.
No matter how much technology Speedo puts into its LAZR suit, swimming is still swimming. The biggest e-sport out there is Starcraft, but by game standards it's ancient (zomg 10 years!!!), and naturally, soon to be replaced. Video games aren't like sports where the rules remain the same but people can put money into buying new equipment or playing on different courses... instead, there comes a point where people just want to play wholly new games, or wholly new games come onto the scene.
While for spectators and casual players, following a few different sports is no big deal, there seems to be an inherent propensity for fragmentation that would go against the establishment of games as a kind of professional sport.
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.
Quake has GTV which is basically like you joining the server and spectating the match live. You see the game with your settings and what not and you can also chat with whoever else is on the server watching with you. So YOU dictate what to watch and who to watch at any time, any angle. The difference for this application is that you need the game. There have also been additions like showing timers for armor, health, etc. while spectating using GTV, to make it easier to see how the players are controlling the map. It is great.
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G RolDorsia? Nobody goes there anymore...Nell'sRegistered Userregular
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.
You hurt my heart a little with this line.
Go Browns
Kosar had the craziest throwing motion I've ever seen in a quarterback. Sidearmed? That's nuts.
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I'm a competitive fighting game player and I have a library of fighting game videos that I watch on a regular basis, but I can understand why everyone else in the entire world would find that boring.
I mean when I see Alex Valle crouch twice before throwing somebody, I think "Oh he faked a super to get a walk up throw for free". I'm sure everyone else is just wondering when the match is going to end. And they also wonder who the fuck is Alex Valle?
And even then, sometimes the games I love are still boring to watch. So if a guy like me that knows the ins and outs of a game can't stand to watch people play, why would anyone else?
I wouldn't mind seeing the top players of games playing different games than just the ones they play competitively. Get the Starcraft guy playing Civ4 and the Streetfighter guy in Supreme Commander and the CoD4 guy playing DDR.
That would be a show that would almost be interesting enough to watch.
1: No faces, this has been mentioned. At the end of a tournament I'll be able to differentiate between DInOT[XIDNF] and ZLNGMUTE[SNUT], but fuck if I'll be able to tell one gamer from another tournament to tournament.
2: Even with really good commentators, no one fucking knows what "Surprise move on the 5-hatch-lurk-spire move with the zling flank against the pylon-nexus-rush" means. You have to know the game to understand what the players are doing, and when you do, it's incredibly awesome to watch. With English-commentary I enjoy watching SC tournaments because I have enough knowledge of the game to understand what a 5-hatch-lurk strategy is. A basic understanding of the rules is important, and there isn't a game people care enough about to get that understanding of yet in America's mainstream.
Anyone who's trying to argue things like "Well they have a controller so they're not really doing anything" is just completely deluding themselves as to what makes something popular or enjoyable to watch.
I think some people might be overstating the popularity of Starcraft in Korea. A good comparison of the popularity of Starcraft in Korea is the popularity of the Professional Poker in the States. Sure, both enjoy some level of mainstream recognition, but one would be hard pressed to call them a widely followed national event. Most people on the street would probably have trouble naming more than 1 or 2 Starcraft pro-gamers. It would be akin to asking someone who doesn't follow Professional Poker to recognize Doyle Brunson or Phil Ivey. This isn't to say that the level of popularity that Starcraft attained here isn't impressive, but it still has a long way to go.
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I'm a competitive fighting game player and I have a library of fighting game videos that I watch on a regular basis, but I can understand why everyone else in the entire world would find that boring.
I mean when I see Alex Valle crouch twice before throwing somebody, I think "Oh he faked a super to get a walk up throw for free". I'm sure everyone else is just wondering when the match is going to end. And they also wonder who the fuck is Alex Valle?
And even then, sometimes the games I love are still boring to watch. So if a guy like me that knows the ins and outs of a game can't stand to watch people play, why would anyone else?
I disagree that fighting games are boring to the onlooker. I know I used to watch that crazy capcom fighter that was like onscreen chaos (what was it capcom vs. everything?!) and I had no freaking clue what was going on. But it was intresting and you could pretty much tell if someone was decent or a scrub. FPS's I can find respectable when someone with skill plays and I guess I could see how they might be intresting, but I dont find them intresting to watch. WoW arena, starcrap, and any other games really are like watching for paint to blister in the artic if you dont know whats going on; and even then they are about on par with watching a magic the gathering tournament.
I'm a competitive fighting game player and I have a library of fighting game videos that I watch on a regular basis, but I can understand why everyone else in the entire world would find that boring.
I mean when I see Alex Valle crouch twice before throwing somebody, I think "Oh he faked a super to get a walk up throw for free". I'm sure everyone else is just wondering when the match is going to end. And they also wonder who the fuck is Alex Valle?
And even then, sometimes the games I love are still boring to watch. So if a guy like me that knows the ins and outs of a game can't stand to watch people play, why would anyone else?
I disagree that fighting games are boring to the onlooker. I know I used to watch that crazy capcom fighter that was like onscreen chaos (what was it capcom vs. everything?!) and I had no freaking clue what was going on. But it was intresting and you could pretty much tell if someone was decent or a scrub. FPS's I can find respectable when someone with skill plays and I guess I could see how they might be intresting, but I dont find them intresting to watch. WoW arena, starcrap, and any other games really are like watching for paint to blister in the artic if you dont know whats going on; and even then they are about on par with watching a magic the gathering tournament.
you really need good announcers to make an RTS seem exciting to the spectator.
I'm a competitive fighting game player and I have a library of fighting game videos that I watch on a regular basis, but I can understand why everyone else in the entire world would find that boring.
I mean when I see Alex Valle crouch twice before throwing somebody, I think "Oh he faked a super to get a walk up throw for free". I'm sure everyone else is just wondering when the match is going to end. And they also wonder who the fuck is Alex Valle?
And even then, sometimes the games I love are still boring to watch. So if a guy like me that knows the ins and outs of a game can't stand to watch people play, why would anyone else?
I disagree that fighting games are boring to the onlooker. I know I used to watch that crazy capcom fighter that was like onscreen chaos (what was it capcom vs. everything?!) and I had no freaking clue what was going on. But it was intresting and you could pretty much tell if someone was decent or a scrub. FPS's I can find respectable when someone with skill plays and I guess I could see how they might be intresting, but I dont find them intresting to watch. WoW arena, starcrap, and any other games really are like watching for paint to blister in the artic if you dont know whats going on; and even then they are about on par with watching a magic the gathering tournament.
you really need good announcers to make an RTS seem exciting to the spectator.
I find Starcraft matches pretty interesting, actually, and I haven't even played it myself in years. A good match has this level of fast, precise tactics that I find impressive. It's like real-time chess. I don't watch very often, though, and I couldn't name a tournament player if my life depended on it.
I mean, as a spectator event, it certainly has more going on visually than, say, American football. Three-quarters of football is fucking downtime.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but I suspect the biggest reason pro gaming will never take is the stupid fucking names people give themselves for these games. You honestly believe the general public will take something seriously when they see what a pro halo guy will call himself? It looks like written diarrhea. If they use their real names, then it would be taken a bit more seriously.
I think some people might be overstating the popularity of Starcraft in Korea. A good comparison of the popularity of Starcraft in Korea is the popularity of the Professional Poker in the States. Sure, both enjoy some level of mainstream recognition, but one would be hard pressed to call them a widely followed national event. Most people on the street would probably have trouble naming more than 1 or 2 Starcraft pro-gamers. It would be akin to asking someone who doesn't follow Professional Poker to recognize Doyle Brunson or Phil Ivey. This isn't to say that the level of popularity that Starcraft attained here isn't impressive, but it still has a long way to go.
You're actually probably understating the popularity of SC now, but I agree that SC isn't that big in Korea. It just is relative to everywhere else.
Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but I suspect the biggest reason pro gaming will never take is the stupid fucking names people give themselves for these games. You honestly believe the general public will take something seriously when they see what a pro halo guy will call himself? It looks like written diarrhea. If they use their real names, then it would be taken a bit more seriously.
Yeah. It's been mentioned earlier that in Korea everyone refers to progamers by their full name. A lot of people in Korea actually know players only by their real name and not their gamer ID. Outside of Korea it's just easier to use the gamer ID because of the language difference.
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This is a good example of the appreciation that can sink in.
I suggest watching FRAG to see a good history of pro gaming and how it all led up to where it is now and where it's going for the players and the leagues/sponsors. I'm sure you can find it... somewhere online.
I will go read the last couple pages, sorry about that.
But wouldn't the GOAL be to get 40 something housewives somewhat interested? If you're simply gunning to get the people who already understand your 'sport', it would never succeed, because you already have them.
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Remember, most football advertisement isn't really getting the 40 something housewives. Gaming in the mainstream (again, MLG is doing this well with their gamer house show and gamebattles, as well as WCG with their Ultimate Gamer show) is appealing to kids/20 somethings.
Most sports are only appreciated by the fans who understand it. The barrier to gaming, I would think, is that if you explain football to the 40's housewife once, she'll have a basic understanding of what's going on. If she sees a SC competition online and you explain that game to her, does she now understand Professional Gaming? She won't understand a FPS or Madden or Street Fighter. It's a very nebulous concept to describe. It's like trying to explain the rules of "card games" instead of "no-limit texas hold-em".
If the original point is 'will professional gaming ever be popular' and you're point was 'no' (inferring from 'they are boring to watch' and 'they are decades old'), then can I say that you've disproved yourself by pointing out how much 'competitive' play and competitive leagues have grown since the early day of video gaming?
My own point was that the early days of the arcades and the leagues we see today are on completely different levels, and that it's not fair to say competitive gaming will ever come into its own because its been decades and nothing on the NHL level has come of it. But you've seemed to have come full circle or something
It's already really popular, just not where we live. Most western countries only love sports that are really masculine. This masculinity can be achieved through being very athletic or having a fast car. 300 apm does not make you really masculine.
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Well, you seem to be dismissing the entire purpose of this discussion by stating that only time will tell. Of course only time will tell, but there's no problem with speculating about how it will progress or how the community will help.
No, I really don't think I have. I don't think it's gotten that much more popular overall, especially when you look at it compared to overall growth of the gaming industry. Gaming, overall, has grown substantially, with next-gen consoles, MMOs, casual franchises, things like that all showing massively higher acceptance in the "mainstream" and more and more gaming is creeping into the pop culture. However, it seems like professional gaming has not seen anywhere near as much growth. The methods used to promote pro gaming have become much much more complex, with television shows and things like that, but I don't hear about gaming tournaments on the local radio stations or anything like that. I just think the internet and mass acceptance of gaming on the whole have increased awareness of professional gaming, but not it's popularity as a sport to watch, and certainly not when compared to the growth of gaming as a whole. If it really was a contender for people's time, I would think that the pickup on it would be much more proportional to the rest of gaming.
I could be completely wrong about it. Obviously I do find it boring, and so I haven't really done any research on it and I'd love to see some numbers if I'm wrong about it.
It's definitely grown, even if you haven't heard about it on the news or Kotaku.
It seems to me that he wants to include the entire development of similar sports into the record for football and baseball, does that mean we can include computer gaming all the way back to Space Wars! in '62, or the obvious board game predecessors? It would be hard to argue that RTS games of the present did not develop from table-top wargames which probably could draw their influence from chess.
You have to be consistent here. Someone else in this thread is suggesting that we only take competitive gaming into account from 2000 and onward, when it reached it's supposed "modern" form. I think we need to pick one avenue of comparison or the other.
You're jumping way ahead of the curve if you think we should be hearing about gaming tournaments on the radio
Well, see this is the current situation in Korea with Starcraft, as they have several television channels devoted to the game, but in the North American market games are still very much games or hobbies, and people who devote to them are still nerds.
Does that mean that's it for competitive gaming here? Certainly not. Much as gaming has come into the mainstream, no doubt so will competitive gaming. It's the natural venue into which mass appeal over gaming will go, especially as this current generation of nerds grow older
You definitely have some points, but I do doubt it, because I can't see the full-on appeal. Korea is such an interesting case, because it shows it happening, but it could be an abberation and not the norm. I don't know. I just know that even as someone who has played a lot of games for a very long time, I just don't find any appeal in watching other people do it. It's probably just personal bias clouding my opinion here.
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Actually, it functions more as a reality show than a gaming competition. EA forthrightly admits they'll take less-skilled players for Madden Nation if they have more interesting personalities. It's personalities that drive the sport/game, not the other way around.
Take basketball, for instance. The NBA was dying before Julius Erving, and to a greater extent, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan resurrected it in the 1980s. It's not that there wasn't talent before, but the talent wasn't personable. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was... well, he was a grouch - even in Airplane! he's a grouch.
Look at professional poker. No one cared about it until it got personalities, like Phil Helmuth. Before Bobby Fischer, only chess nerds paid attention to chess.
Personalities will drive viewership. Actual charisma, as opposed to robotic jargon mumbled into one's chin. I suppose FragDolls are an attempt to create such a media-friendly gamer, albeit a crass and superficial likely doomed to fail.
Yeah, this rings true in my head. Korea had Slayers_Boxer really lifting up the early StarCraft scene, and Counter Strike (at least for me as a swed) had Heaton as a front figure.
You want personality? Fuck boxer, check out FireBatHero. FireBatHero
Because now I'm a "fan" of Steve, and like his story and will be rooting for him. I'll be bummed if I see he lost a life early on, and stuff. Hell, even my girlfriend, who's video game expertise is Tetris, Dr. Mario and possibly Wii Sports, has actually asked if they're having a re-match, because she loved that movie too, and actually understands the 'goal' of Donkey Kong, so she can understand when the score is close how tense it gets.
I would have had below zero interest in a public Donkey Kong match before, and now actually have looked up when different people are trying for records.
Personality becomes a factor because it acts as a gateway. If you don't know about, or care about, a sport, you can find yourself following it just because of a good story about a person. And it works in both directions - you can have a 'villian' that draws people to learn more and watch more just because they want to see if he/she can be beaten.
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No matter how much technology Speedo puts into its LAZR suit, swimming is still swimming. The biggest e-sport out there is Starcraft, but by game standards it's ancient (zomg 10 years!!!), and naturally, soon to be replaced. Video games aren't like sports where the rules remain the same but people can put money into buying new equipment or playing on different courses... instead, there comes a point where people just want to play wholly new games, or wholly new games come onto the scene.
While for spectators and casual players, following a few different sports is no big deal, there seems to be an inherent propensity for fragmentation that would go against the establishment of games as a kind of professional sport.
Quake has GTV which is basically like you joining the server and spectating the match live. You see the game with your settings and what not and you can also chat with whoever else is on the server watching with you. So YOU dictate what to watch and who to watch at any time, any angle. The difference for this application is that you need the game. There have also been additions like showing timers for armor, health, etc. while spectating using GTV, to make it easier to see how the players are controlling the map. It is great.
Kosar had the craziest throwing motion I've ever seen in a quarterback. Sidearmed? That's nuts.
What makes the current crop of TV hoggers worthy of praise?
I mean when I see Alex Valle crouch twice before throwing somebody, I think "Oh he faked a super to get a walk up throw for free". I'm sure everyone else is just wondering when the match is going to end. And they also wonder who the fuck is Alex Valle?
And even then, sometimes the games I love are still boring to watch. So if a guy like me that knows the ins and outs of a game can't stand to watch people play, why would anyone else?
That would be a show that would almost be interesting enough to watch.
1: No faces, this has been mentioned. At the end of a tournament I'll be able to differentiate between DInOT[XIDNF] and ZLNGMUTE[SNUT], but fuck if I'll be able to tell one gamer from another tournament to tournament.
2: Even with really good commentators, no one fucking knows what "Surprise move on the 5-hatch-lurk-spire move with the zling flank against the pylon-nexus-rush" means. You have to know the game to understand what the players are doing, and when you do, it's incredibly awesome to watch. With English-commentary I enjoy watching SC tournaments because I have enough knowledge of the game to understand what a 5-hatch-lurk strategy is. A basic understanding of the rules is important, and there isn't a game people care enough about to get that understanding of yet in America's mainstream.
Anyone who's trying to argue things like "Well they have a controller so they're not really doing anything" is just completely deluding themselves as to what makes something popular or enjoyable to watch.
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I disagree that fighting games are boring to the onlooker. I know I used to watch that crazy capcom fighter that was like onscreen chaos (what was it capcom vs. everything?!) and I had no freaking clue what was going on. But it was intresting and you could pretty much tell if someone was decent or a scrub. FPS's I can find respectable when someone with skill plays and I guess I could see how they might be intresting, but I dont find them intresting to watch. WoW arena, starcrap, and any other games really are like watching for paint to blister in the artic if you dont know whats going on; and even then they are about on par with watching a magic the gathering tournament.
you really need good announcers to make an RTS seem exciting to the spectator.
Or a visually dynamic and interesting to watch RTS, but those are really only made by Relic and their balance is terrible so it will never be.
I mean, as a spectator event, it certainly has more going on visually than, say, American football. Three-quarters of football is fucking downtime.
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You're actually probably understating the popularity of SC now, but I agree that SC isn't that big in Korea. It just is relative to everywhere else.
Yeah. It's been mentioned earlier that in Korea everyone refers to progamers by their full name. A lot of people in Korea actually know players only by their real name and not their gamer ID. Outside of Korea it's just easier to use the gamer ID because of the language difference.