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The Purposelessness of FPS Professionalism
Doley writes "Over at GotFrag, there's an article discussing the financial and evolutionary problems related to professional FPS gaming. The piece explains: 'Regardless of how many fans exist, how many people play Counter-Strike, how many tournaments take place, or how many sponsors participate, Counter-Strike will never truly be a sport. Never will the players make an excellent living playing the game. Possibly, in time, the top teams from each country will be able to make a decent living - a living that we are all capable of making by simply attending college. However, because the majority of cream of the crop players and teams cannot make Counter-Strike a true career, the purpose of the entire structure and making it to the top is destroyed. Until purpose is put back into our community, the situation will continue to worsen.'"
While I mostly agree that watching people play video games is generally not fun, there are exceptions.
For example, I can't stand playing Final Fantasy games anymore. But watching someone else play is great. I get all the plot without putting in any of the effort.
Also, watching fighting games can be awesome. Lots of ooohs and aaahs when people pull off crazy stuff or weird things happen.
Lastly its always fun to watch stuff like Mario Party because it's crazy go nuts.
Also, Dance Dance Revolution is the major exception. It was designed for spectators and players combined.
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I presume they call it the CPL to mean CounterStrike Professional League, and that's certainly an interesting concept. But aren't most sports leagues amateurs(even the Olympics are technically sponsored amateurs, which is ridiculous on one hand, considering the expenses one has to go through to get there, but makes for less athletes whose biggest claim to fame is the number of logos on their jackets). Now why is it a problem that professionals can't play a game they enjoy, just for money? The article is certainly right about it making no business sense to be a professional in those conditions, but why is it a problem? Is game playing so horrid that you have to pay people to make them do it and get better at it?
Won't admitting that it's not a way to earn money except if you're #1 mean the only people entering will be those who enjoy the game itself, above and beyond? (And who can afford the plane ticket to prove it? Or can find a sponsor to buy them a plane ticket in exchange for a logo on a t-shirt?)
Let me rephrase that, maybe it'll make more sense: Just what does counterstrike gain from having people who earn a living from doing nothing else?
While I'm not a CS player, I do play Socom II Online. It has a spectator mode that includes the ability to toggle between the live players in addition to a free camera and fixed camera angles. You could carry this a step further and show it live if you could produce the show in the same manner as other sports. With a producer directing which camera's or players where shown at any given time. Just a thought.
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He first said that CS would never be a sport, then he said that CS players would never make a good living from it. Two different ideas.
As for why CS will never be a sport, I've already said something about that in an earlier thread.
Rob
I see pro FPSing as being similar to the old Roman sport of gladiatorial matches, with the exception that nobody gets killed and there's no Christians being thrown to the lions. It's a guilt-free bloodsport.
What was old is new again, no?
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E pluribus sanguinem
Debating whether to post anonymously or not.. not that I care what slashdotters think, just that my friends all know this name by now-
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I never attended college. Or highschool. Or a full year of middleschool. I dropped out near the end of 6th grade (about 80% through if you want to get technical.)
I'm currently 17, employed by a euro internet exchange(I'm in the US), making ~$1800/mo, with huge room to grow. I didn't get this job under any false pretenses-- no lying or denying, I even brought it up. I'm sure income wise I'm far from the top of slashdot, but I'd say I'm doing pretty well off.
Life is just a stream of luck, both good and bad. All the biggest and most influential events are usually the ones you didn't plan. (car crash, meeting people, etc). The only caveat to this is that luck is preperation meeting opertunity, but it doesn't change it.
"Some of us would definitely prefer to play computer games all day (and get paid for it!) rather than sitting through another English class.
You'd think that, but eh. Playing competitively really took all the fun out of it. I'll still be competing in the CPL(big counterstrike competition) this year, but after that, I really don't know.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Multiplayer FPS have only been around for 11 years (DOOM). For the most part the games have been designed for the single player experience, multiplayer was not an important part up until 5 years ago. The genre is very young. Professional sports didn't become multi-billion dollar operations in 5 years. There are stories of pro football players having second jobs to survive during the early years.
That said, there are issues with computer games which will need to be dealt with for the popularity to rise to those of sports:
1. High Turnover - As soon as CS2 or something better comes along, everybody will drop CS. Major sports don't have as significant change. You then establish a player legacy, the best will remain the best, people follow careers and teams. If suddenly they changed basketball to have 15' baskets the game breaks, its no longer about players who dunk, its about the purest shooters. The technology needs to get to a point where one game can have decades long legacy.
2. Following the action - the technology needs to be developed for good spectator views. There just hasn't been any focus for developers to work on this. Hockey is a sport that suffers on TV because its hard to follow the action. If things aren't presented well, it just becomes confusing.
3. Widespread play - People like to watch what they play. There is a small population that has a good computer, broadband access, and enough money to dish out on a $50 game. Compare that to spending $20 on a football/basketball/soccerball and going out to the park. As technology becomes more widespread the number of people interested in FPS games will rise and so will the fan base.
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Brombing run in UT2k3 does this well, we have a ball, set a camera to track it and some clever camera work you could have quite an entertaning show.
Of course there is still the problems of walls... hmmm. Jet pack like in tribes on rolling hills.
Fun to watch but lame to play, age old dilema.
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I attended an organised LAN in England recently as a spectator. It was badly run. We had to wait 30 minutes before any gaming was done. When the gaming was on all we could hear was some idiot commentator who hadn't grasped that you can't commentate on a Counter Strike match, it's unnecessary and embarrassing. Because we couldn't hear any sound effects from the game it felt like watching some weird silent movie. 10 minutes in to the match the server crashed and we had anther 30 minute wait for them to fix that. Once that was fixed and the matches started again they decided to have a 30 minute gap between each map. I decided to leave at that point. Maybe Counter Strike will have a better chance of being consider a sport when the events actually show some of the game rather than a blank projector screen.
Maybe so, maybe not. Build a time machine and travel 50 years into the future. Maybe playing computer games has become a sport. Playing with a skateboard wasn't a sport either in the beginning. And apperently these days people can make a living out of that.
But why would computer gaming have to be one sport.
New sport are created all the time, not as often as computer games though.
I don't see people abandoning the world's biggest sport, football, even though it's like 500 years old and lots of sports have evolved since.
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I accept your point that computer games are a moving target, but that has a lot to do with it being a money making industry increasingly styled after the music and film industries. The original motivation of seeking the best design, or forging a new genre has fallen a distant second to generating income and growing the market.
This industry model works mainly because the market continues to grow, and as the years pass there will always a new set of youngsters that haven't experienced the games of the past. However apart from increasing graphic detail, the basic mechanics of most games in each genre share a high degree of similarity.
Were we instead to say 'lets make the Go or Chess of the FPS genre', allow for continued graphic improvements, and set its' mechanics in stone, then you'd have a fixed basis.
Whether we could ever agree on the ideal mechanics is obviously one issue. It is something which may develop naturally given sufficient time, and would in that way probably be a more complete solution.
This whole article is based on a false premise. "If we can't earn our living solely from the game, it isn't a sport." Frankly, that is pure garbage.
Most athletes earn their money not from salaries or tournament prizes but from sponsorship. This applies as much to athletes in highly-popular sports as to any others. There's a reason why Anna Kournikova made a fortune in spite of being a frankly indifferent tennis player, and that's bcos she used her looks to get massive sponsorship deals. I wouldn't need to take my socks off to count the number of tennis players who've made a million bucks from tournament prizes in their entire lives, but the top 20 players will be getting way more than that a *year*, courtesy of Nike, Reebok, Slazenger and the rest.
The only exception to this is in sports where the athletes earn their money through wages - football, baseball and soccer, for example. In these, wages are covered by tens of thousands of people paying to see them play each week. Until you can get tens of thousands of people to watch CS tournaments, you can forget this.
So only those guys who get sponsorship are likely to make a living out of it. That means either you get sponsored, or you cut your standard of living until unemployment benefit or some part-time job can finance your life while you devote your time to your sport, or you live off savings in the hope that you'll get sponsorship before they run out (ie. "burn rate" like a startup business), or you go work for a company that produces stuff for that sport and get your practise time as "product testing". In *every* minor sport, these are the available options for aspiring athletes.
To the author of this article: I suggest you go and talk to some rock climbers, hang-glider pilots, cross-country runners, parachutists, motocross riders, skaters (street or ice), discus/shot-put/hammer throwers, rowers, swimmers, or simply female athletes in traditionally-male sports (like soccer). Go whine to them that CS can't succeed as a sport bcos it's *so* hard to make a good living out of it. And when they've laughed in your face (or kicked the living shit out of you), maybe you'll have some perspective on your situation.
Grab.