Competitive FPS Gaming Documented, Exposed

Simon Bysshe writes "I've just released the latest freely downloadable film in my series charting competitive FPS gaming. This film, shot in more of a TV show style compared to my previous Slashdot-featured documentaries, features a Counter-Strike match between the UK 4Kings team & the French Armateam. This time, the film was sponsored by Intel, who also flew in the star Quake3 player Cyrus Malekani (aka proZaC) to present the show. The 24 minute, 185mb WMV movie includes in-depth interviews with the players, extended coverage of games with commentary & post-match tactical analysis covering the key rounds."

Comments

I am very pleased with this.

[GearType2]

His previous videos were very... amatuer at best. I remember one of my biggest peeves of them being the voice and music. It was always the blaring techno in the background that would be thrown in and the terrible mics used to get voice. You would hear maybe, 3 words and the rest would be muffled.
Another qualm I had with his earlier works was that these are supposed to be videos of how these events draw crowds and how that this is in fact a sport now, but what he would do is talk to the players and ask them *why* they are playing and how they like to play. Newsflash: they get paid for it.

But, this video is top notch. The sound is so much better. It's obvious he put a lot of work into making it *sound* better. The quality is very high, although I would like it to be nativly louder, as I had to turn up my speakers quite a bit to hear their voices, but that's not a big deal, as the background music was lower than the voice. The presentation of the entire video itself was very great. If I had not seen the earlier videos I would think this was done by a great studio. It looks like TechTv had a special on e-gaming. I am very pleased with this, and hope we see much more.

Why Team FPS isn't a good spectator genre.

[Prien715]

I watched the video and it was really entertaining...but that's probably because I love counterstrike.

I kept wanting to watch some other perspective but instead had to watch whoever the camera crew was watching. This made me wonder: how do more traditional sports deal with this problem? They don't. In every other sport, there's a ball of some sort. If you follow the ball you follow the action.

In counter-strike, there is no ball. It's harder to present a visual image that captures the beauty of a well-executed pincer attack or the stealth of a hiding sniper.

I think this perspective problem could doom pro-gaming. The only suggestion I have is to provide audio commentary while allowing the viewer to switch perspectives at will or else follow the producer's.