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Is America Ready For Competitive Gaming On TV?
Thanks to GameSpy for its editorial discussing whether America is ready for more TV coverage of competitive gaming, following on from last week's QuakeCon, of which it's claimed: "Television coverage of the event was almost non-existent... although many media outlets did a story on QuakeCon, and taped a few interviews with competitors at the event, none covered the finals in a play-by-play fashion." One editor suggests gaming just isn't appealing enough: ("Deathmatch as we know it just isn't it yet. Visually it isn't too sexy if you're not, yourself, a hardcore player"), whereas a contrasting view is presented by another editor ("The competitive FPS scene in America is also ripe for television. All we'd need to do to get that up and running in the US is copy what the Starleague has done [using StarCraft] in Korea.")
One night on ESPN we saw a Magic: The Gathering. With stats, whiteboard and two commentators
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
...if only they had more than one screen onscreen at the same time, but limited to 4 screens at most. Yes, that would be confusing, but it adds to the watcher's experience to yell "Watch out behind you!" when you KNOW its not going to be any good.
Of course, sound would become bad... really bad. So, 1 screen it is... but whose? The winners, or one of the losers?
You're assuming that TV is the end-all be-all for this format. Why not a television-like production streamed online instead, where your audience is more likely to exist and be more easily advertargeted.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I will make a prediction that the online console gaming networks of Sony and Microsoft will eventually morph and they will look more like media networks with daily programming schedules and that a large portion of the revenues will be derived from advertising. First they will start out with ESPN like interactive coverage of things like Halo3 tournaments, but then the programming will become more varied covering everything from machinama to interactive game-show hybrids (think Doom4 meets Jeopardy or Everquest3 meets Survivor). Remember when MTV was just music videos?
What's interesting is that all the main pieces are there to pull this off. Its just that no one has tried to tie everything together. Good quality video is expensive to broadcast over IP networks currently. The people trying to pull off interactive TV in the mid to late 90's found that out. BUT a spectator stream from online games is very light weight with good image quality that improves with each generation of graphics hardware. So the media/gaming networks will initially be broadcasting spectator streams as opposed to video. Long term though as the pipes get fatter in the last mile, there will be a mix of video and rendered grapics.
Judging by the lousy ARENA show on G4, no it doesn't have a place. Part of that of course being that the people participating in these shows SUCK at the games.
It's really sad to be flipping through TV with some buddies, come across two teams playing a PS2 FPS none of us have ever played before, and the firsty comment out of someone's mouth within 30 seconds is "We've never played this game before and we'd mop the floor with both teams".
Having watched several different "competitive" gaming events on TV, streaming video, and in real life, I think I'm safe in saying that in many cases the best gamers aren't even participating. It's just that sad...
-- Primis.