Professional Gaming – Pet Rock or Rubik’s Cube?
The pet rock was a fad in the mid 1970s created by ad executive Gary Dahl. The concept was a hit for a few years, making Mr. Dahl millions of dollars before it died out. Pet rocks can be found occasionally on eBay, but they are no longer “manufactured” or sold. The pet rock was a flash in the pan fad. I imagine many of you have never even heard of the pet rock. Conversely…
The Rubik’s Cube is celebrating its 30 year anniversary. It was patented in 1975 in Hungary as the Magic Cube (the same year the Pet Rock came out). In 1980, it was exported to the US and renamed the Rubik’s Cube. Since 1980, more than 350 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold. It is the best selling puzzle game of all time. It clearly has longevity as interest has spanned multiple generations.
So what about professional gaming? Is it a pet rock-like fad, or a Rubik’s Cube like phenomenon with staying power. Thirty years from now, will people sit down and watch the equivalent of Starcraft matches like they watch football or baseball today? Will schools have gaming teams? Will colleges offer scholarships for people to PLAY games? Will there be a market for hundreds, or even thousands of professional gamers to make their entire living just by competing in gaming tournaments?
And for those of you who think the answer to some or all of those questions is yes, perhaps you want to learn how to become a professional gamer. Get training!
I think it probably will get there, eventually. However, to get there, games will need to become more viewer friendly. When some random dude who’s never played a game before sees some people playing it competitively on TV, he should be able to understand the gist of what’s going on, and he should find it exciting.
Good commentary will be VERY important. Look at the UFC, and Joe Rogan’s commentary. Most people really don’t understand the role of grappling in a fight for the first couple of UFCs they watch, but Rogan always explains what’s going on very well, and he’s charismatic enough that his excitement is contagious.
Educated spectators that really get into the games are helpful too. Eg.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtuA5we0RZU
Good point about the need for good commetary to help people get into it.
Shooters might be easiest to come first, since it is pretty easy to tell what is going on in a shooter. For a shooter to have wide appeal, would they have to tone down the gore at all?
I am surprised this topic did not get more interest and comments. Does that reflect on a lack of interest in professional gaming?
Yeah, I agree that shooters are the most likely to make it, as they can be grasped fairly easily. Getting rid of the gore may or may not be neccessary, but many shooters aren’t particularly gory anyways(or maybe I’m just desensitized).
I don’t think there’s a lack of interest in professional gaming, I suspect though that the overlap between competitive pro gaming fans and the readers of this blog is pretty small. The audience here seems to be heavily RPG focused. Alot of rpg players dislike pvp competition, and alot of rpg pvpers find an organised competitive environment to be too stale. Pro gaming is basically a niche within a niche as far as rpg players go.
IMO previous attempts at pro gaming never really caught on because they were aiming at the wrong audience. Gamers might watch a tournament for tips, but by and large I think we’re more interested in playing then being spectators.
I agree with Outsider, the whole experience needs to be packaged with the mainstream viewer in mind including commentators. For games like Streetfighter, adding in a pro-wrestling style storyline and rivalries would help a good deal. The actual competitive gameplay needs to be part of an entire “experience” to catch on.
As for gore, if well done I think it’s more of a bonus then a detriment.
> Pro gaming is basically a niche within a niche as far
> as rpg players go.
True, but the readers here ARE big gaming fans, and if pro gaming cannot even attract the interest of other hardcore gamers – regardless of genre – I don’t see how they could ever reach the masses (like with football, baseball, etc.).
I think another flaw with the gaming leagues so far is that there has been a lot of shadiness involved and a belief they could be instant get rich quick businesses. When someone tries to build something gradually with a good foundation, I think we might see some progress.
Professional Gaming?
My immediate reaction is “Quit trying to legitimise shit by turning it into another fucking sport.”
Of course I’d love to get paid to game, but considering gaming’s usually my down-time activity, there’s something about doing it for a living which just rubs me the wrong way. Of course I’ve got issues with people being paid to play sports too. :Rolleyes:
Hmmm. Interesting Tim. I can tell you don’t like the idea, but I’m not sure what the core of your objection is.
There are certain games that I’ve found are actually fun to watch other people play. I don’t know if it is because I am a game designed and I like to see how the games work from another person’s perspective, or because when it is a game I have played I like learning if people do things different/better than I do.
It seems to me there MIGHT be a market for this, but I’m honestly not sure.
I’ve found some games fun to watch, but in a pretty limited set of scenarios:
- Tag-teaming a single-player game with friends. Even the time spent not actively playing can be fun to watch.
- Checking out novelty videos on YouTube (’100% expert mode on X song in rock band’, ‘beat mega man 2 in 20 mins’, ‘tecmo bo quarter-spanning touchdown run’, etc)
- Watching gameplay footage as part of a trailer/preview/review to get a feel for a game I might want to buy.
I love gaming, but I can’t see getting into professional gaming as a sport. It might be impressive to see people rack up frags in some shooter-of-the-month, but it’d get old fast. While it doesn’t rub me the wrong way to see people doing it professionally, I won’t be a part of it. I’d rather take that time and money and invest it in playing games myself
I don’t see it happening. There are a couple issues holding it down.
The first big one is the fact that it is a gamer fantasy. The people who build and play games would love to see the pipe dream of mainstream acknowledgment of their job/passtime come true, but this is just wishing for self-validation. At some level, people watch sports because they are projecting themselves onto the athletes, who are doing something that the average person can’t do. It’s wish fulfillment. It would be extremely hard to try to put that same mystique on button mashing.
Secondly, as already brought up, it would be hard to translate into something that people would want to watch. Commentary aside, how do you present it? Surely you don’t want to show some gamer staring mindlessly at a monitor while he pounds on a keyboard. Show it from an in game perspective? Makes for better television, but divorces itself from the person actually doing the gaming. Cut back and forth? Annoying, at best. And don’t forget that sporting events are just that, events. They attract large live audiences. It doesn’t just need to translate to a television show to succeed, it has to work as a live event as well. I don’t know how that would even begin to work.
The last critical point that I see is that games simply aren’t designed for it. Every game on the market is still essentially designed for solo play. While many more incorporate co-op and/or group mechanics, I don’t know of anything outside of FPS style games that has any sort of actual team play. I think that we would have to see a radical redesign of game construction to make this even a remotely viable idea. And don’t forget that most video games are here today, forgotten tomorrow. It would be hard to build brand loyalty to a ’sport’ over time if you had to change the played game every other season. Even if there were such a game, and it remained consistently popular, it will eventually fall behind current technology and have to be revamped or replaced to avoid looking dated, running into the same problem.
So I would expect that we should continue to see a few tournaments on off-mainstream cable, but I don’t see consistent regular team/league style professional sport.
Gamer Fantasy: Like it or not, gaming is becoming mainstream. Within a couple of decades it will be mainstream enough to support this kind of thing. The question to me isn’t really whether or not this is going to happen, it’s who’s going to be the first to get the recipe right, and what that recipe will be.
Validation: I hear this argument about pro gaming alot. I also hear it come up in “are games art?” discussions. Games don’t need to be validated. It’s simple fact that a) video games often are a legitimate competition on the level of sports/chess/poker and b) video games are art. I don’t care whether non gamers agree or not.
Televising: I meant to touch on this topic. The viewer’s perspective should switch from the players, to what the players see, to in game cameras of sorts that aren’t actually connected to a specific player. This is one of the areas games will have to advance in. When somebody decides to make a serious push into this area, they should look at recruiting some people that are involved in televising sports. Knowing what the viewers should be seeing at any time, especially at a live event, is an art form and they should really get experienced tv pros handling this sort of thing.
Live Audience: This will be very important as well, and certain styles of competitive games already have this. For example, in the Street Fighter community, the big annual tournaments have a pretty high turn out, and the spectators can get pretty boisterous at times. Hell, the tournament organisers actually make money off of selling DVDs of tournament recordings to people who can’t attend.
There’s alot of reasons why pro-gaming isn’t making it big right now. I don’t think any of those reasons is so fundamental that they can’t be overcome. I just don’t think that the guys trying to make money off of pro-gaming right now are doing it right. Eventually, somebody will combine the right game with the right televising strategy with a big enough wallet, and this will happen.
Gaming already is mainstream. A huge percentage of households already have a computer or a set-top box. But yes, the next ten to twenty years will be critical as the newest generation of gamers reaches adulthood. Will they stick to their games and expect sports media to cater to them, or will they transfer their loyalties to established sports? Honestly, the established sports have the marketing advantage in that fight.
I think you mistook my argument on validation. I’m not saying that the games need to be validated, it’s the gamers themselves seeking validation. They want to see what they are doing as not just normal, but special. Having it widely recognized as a professional sport would fulfill that desire, but it might just be fantasy. I would like to see it happen as well, but I would also like to win the lottery.
Chess might be an unfortunate choice of comparison though. It’s been around for thousands of years, has broad support, and is even well organized at the professional level, but you’re still not going to hear “Coming up next on ESPN… Grandmasters duke it out for the world title!”
I think chess has the inherent, huge limitation that a “good match” goes on for hours if not days. Gaming definitely has the potential to be faster and more exciting.
One really good point is that you aren’t going to have the same game for 10+ years. So what’s the solution to that? Or does it matter? Perhaps a gaming league would be formed with the idea that the specific game would change on a yearly basis.
Perhaps a modular solution.
The game itself would be made of different phases. Say for example… A maze section, a timed section, a puzzle solving section, and a boss section. Each part would keep the same principle from season to season, but the sections themselves could be swapped out or revamped each time. New maze, different path/obstacles for the timed event, new puzzle, different boss with different minions/powers, etc.
The skills required would remain the same from year to year, but game itself could be revamped over time. Even the rendering engine could change without losing the core of what the competition is about.
This would be a pretty specialized thing though. While it might be based off an existing commercial product, it might have only limited tie-in value if any at all. That might limit its acceptance to fans and/or the game makers.
Right. I think that’s the sort of thing that could work. You’d devise certain categories, and competitions would involve playing that year’s game of that type.
Watching people who are being paid to PLAY A GAME is retarded, whether regarding conventional pro sports, or video gaming. What a bloody waste of money. If pro gaming does endure for more than the next few years, I don’t think I’ll be able to stomach the gaming scene at all.
As a gamer, I can understand the passion for gaming, particularly in aspects that films and literature can’t reach:
-Immersion and interactivity
-Competition and challenge
-[etc.]
But none of this applies if I’m not actually playing. I can appreciate the skills of people who dedicate themselves to a game, but I wouldn’t want to watch them play it.
How exactly does pro gaming contribute to the rest of society in any meaningful way? I’ve heard the argument that the people who watch and follow the sport get something out of it, but there are already enough useless things to waste time on, and there have been for years.
The ’societal value’ argument isn’t unique to competitive sports or anything, but I think it highlights how effete the idea is, and it sickens me.
I guess my problem is largely that how gaming is going more mainstream, and the ‘eternal september point’ of children and retards with nothing to do with their lives has passed. My fondest competitive memories are shared between informal Doom deathmatches amongst coworkers and informal competition over who was better at Rogue.
Does entertainment need to have “societal value” for it to be entertaining? I would think not. And surely watching people play an exciting video game is at least as intellectually stimulating as your average reality tv show, no?
SSF4 arcade select screen has two new open spots! I hope its Rolento and Elana