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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.'"
The one problem that will forever doom competitive computer gaming is that gaming isn't meant to be a spectator sport. Since the dawn of sporting events, sports have been designed around the viewer, not the player. On the flip side, comptuer games are soley designed for the enjoyment of the player.
What I don't understand is how it's gotten as far as it has. Probably a lack of understanding on my part as I can barely understand the reason of watching professional sports, but the whole idea of WATCHING someone else play a computer game for fun is just... the funniest thing I've ever heard.
Computer games are infinitely more akin to chess than to soccer or badmitton. Whereas the spectator is a large component of the latter events (which means that people are making money selling tickets) but at a chess tournament only interests an aficianado of the game who can appreciate the sublime situations that are developing on the board, or computer screen. Thats why chess tournaments aren't held in stadiums and they charge the players and admit the fans for free. I suspect that the FPS competition will survive in this form for perpetuity as the game companies will also support it for marketing purposes.
00010111 always try everything twice
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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I used to be head admin of a large, UK-based Counter-Strike league, which contained about 90 different teams from across Europe. The one over-riding message I took away from this is that Professional Gaming is killing the fun in games.
When I first took up my role, in February 2002, Counter-Strike had only made its "breakthrough" into the mainstream comparatively recently. The CPL was still a fairly distant organisation, mostly associated with the Quake series. The league I adminned offered no real prizes, other than the free use of a clan server for a few months, and even at division 1 level, was treated as "fun" by the participants.
I ran the league for about 16 months and during this time, I saw the ethos of the community, as well as any sense of fun, brutally and remorselessly stripped away by a growing focus on Professional Gaming. First of all, there was a growing clamour to adjust our rules and maplists to match exactly those used by the CPL. If we threw a slightly different map into the cycle, we'd get whinged at by teams who claimed that "it wouldn't help them practice for the CPL qualifiers. Worst of all, it wasn't just, or even primarily, the top level teams who were complaining about this. I was never a particularly brilliant Counter-Strike player; I was competent enough, in a mechanical way, but I lacked the reactions and aim necessary to be great at the game. But there were teams who I could have beaten single-handed, from the bottom division of the league, complaining that they weren't getting the practice they'd need to qualify for the CPL.
The next ugly little spawn of pro-gaming to rear its head was sponsorship. At some point in Q4 2002, it seemed that every team under the sun suddely had sponsorship. A few at the top were sponsored by Intel, AMD etc, while the rest were sponsored by Frank's Kebab Emporium or Scunthorpe Tourist Board. With money involved (even though the monthly quantities in many cases were less than I earn in a day at work), teams suddenly started refusing to accept losses, without going through as many rounds of appeals as they could get. There'd always been an element of this; I can kind of understand a team feeling hard done by after losing a very close match in which external factors such as network blips may have caused interuptions, but suddenly, everybody was convinced that if they accepted their losses with good grace, their sponsors would dump them. For the first few season's I'd adminned, I'd done a weekly roundup/commentary for the league's website. This was a pretty inoffensive document; who beat who, how the next week's fixtures might go, details of one or two of the more interesting matches. This had always been well received. However, I started getting an increasing number of complaints from a small, but growing, minority of players. I couldn't comment on a match they'd lost, because their sponsors would dump them. I couldn't comment on a match they'd won and give any kind of credit to their opponents (something I always tried to do, particularly if a team was on a losing streak), as this would diminish their victory and their sponsors would dump them. So the roundups were discontinued. Of course, this trend intensified and, before I knew it, teams were refusing to show up for matches they thought they'd lose, as they figured a default would upset their sponsors less than an actual loss.
By the time I'd been running the league for 12 months, I'd had enough. The mature, fun community I'd once known had evaporated; all that was left was a bunch of wannabe-pros, who were all convinced they were going to make a living off playing games. I was, at this time, coming to the end of my period as a student and getting ready to start a full-time job, so I was starting to understand how the "real" world worked a bit better. In a couple of cases, I actually tried to suggest to players of a similar age to myself that maybe pro-gaming wasn't going to work as a career. This didn't win me many friends.
I'm always wary of the modern trend towards e