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The World of Competitive Gaming
cphilo wrote to mention an article in the AP about the world of competitive gaming. From the article: "Welcome to the basement lair of the 24-year-old Wendel, the man known and feared by aficionados of multiplayer games across the globe as 'Fatal1ty.' If you deign to think of video games as simply a childish pastime, consider this professional game player. He collects a six-figure salary, has his own brand of gaming merchandise and travels the world to compete - regarded by those in the know as one of the most gifted players of his kind."
I very much doubt he's the best gamer ever as they try to make out. "Pro gaming" is based on abusing bugs, short cuts and general lamer tactics. The type of people who bunny hop around maps using the rocket launcher to frag you as you spawn, collecting all the weapons before anyone else can get to them.
I don't care how much people get paid, I refuse to play with people who abuse these bugs (and trust me, they all do. It's become socially acceptable) and I outright refuse to call any of these people "pro".
I like muppets.
Humans are physical creatures. We touch, smell, feel, and love. I participate in teleconferences all the time, even some with video. Something is lost when you can't reach over and whisper a snide remark in someone's ear.
I am a book collector, and have many old books. Something about the fact that many people have touched them and loved them makes them all the more special. I have about 10 copies of the Rubiyat of Omar Kayyan - none any less than 80 years old. Something about the different artwork, leather covers, hand-written notes that conveys a continuity, a chain of humanity to them.
Shaking the hand of the world's best gamer is really no less.
Is this gamer real? Is he a person or a bot that a marketing exec thought up to encourage the Future Gamers of the World to play more games in the hope that they too can make money by sitting on their arse? Never underestimate the phyiscal world and our need to *physically understand* something.
Everyone is going to attack him so I'll add some perspective
1. How many people on earth can do this successfully? [hint: think of a dream career in the NBA]
2. Think about WHY they are paying him?
3. If gaming is so successful why does he have a clothing line?
4. What does he produce that we need in say a recession?
My point is careers like this are not sustainable. While the getting is good it's probably a dream. But once people stop buying the games in droves or someone 1% better shows up he's done for.
So hey congrats, if you can sucker people into paying you for playing video games, then all the power to ya. But I wouldn't say it's a good career choice if you don't want to worry about what you'll be doing in 10 years [hint: 43 yr old gamer == teh lame]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Ok I admit it is a bit sad making a living from playing games, but if you could do it im sure you would, i know i would! it must beat working in IT support...
I mean, if he stepped into a pot of gold...Hey great for him. I've been playing videogames since my folks brought home an Atari 2600 back in the day. (Yow....That's like 20 years ago) Now, I'm more ancient than this fellow and I certainly can't make a living at gaming even with 20 years under me.
I can see it now...Sitting in the Guidance Office, looking the counselors in the eye, and stating that college is not need because I am leet at CounterStrike.
Thank God the kid's investing instead of Viper-crashing.
Scott
I am extremely envious that this person is capable of doing this for a living, and making a good amount of money for it also. I am aware that professional gaming is no walk in the virtual park, but still it's something that I would absolutely love to do.
And for all the people who complain about it not being a sport, or it not being fair, you're all just as jealous as myself that you can't play computer games for a living...
I'm just saying.
C17H21NO4
An athlete is someone who participates in sports. Sports are activities that require you to do something, have some skill, and there must be a defined ruleset. Usually they're competetive. Since playing computer games fit into the deffinition of a sport, Fatal1ty is an athlete and gaming is a sport. Just because it doesn't fit into your idea of sport, doesn't mean it's not a sport.
I question the need to remove physical interaction. Big example: given the choice, would anyone here really chose cybersex over sex in person?
Or brought down several notches, I suspect that most people would prefer to be in person for basic conversations whenever reasonably possible. Telephones, VoIP, video conferencing are all simply second-rate substitutes that come on for convenience's sake when the expense of being in person isn't possible or justiable.
Conferences and trade shows are great if you can go, they are great ways to build a social network, great ways to actually try things out in person rather than trusting text descriptions and photos on the web.
Last I checked, athlete was defined as: a person who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina. While you can make arguments that there is a physical component to gaming, it isn't their central feature. I'd be included to agree with the parent on this one.
There's online competitions, but cheating and latency are big issues. A LAN setting is required when money is at stake.
eSports also suffers from the stigma of being crushingly boring for any non-gamer to watch for the most part.
I agree that this is currently the case; however, I also think that much of that can be remedied.
For example, take football. I don't play football. Unlike a lot of people, I don't follow football. This makes a typical football game on TV completely boring to me. To help deal with this, the sport's presentation has been highly tuned. There are rapid transitions, never focussing on one thing for too long. There are sportscasters that act excited, to help get you in the mood. There is a running stream of patter and anecdotes going on, interesting factoids, and an explanation of what's going on. I have no idea what, beyond the basic rules of football, someone should do. The sportscasters explain this.
As a result, while watching football may not be my favorite thing in the world to do, it's certainly a viable form of entertainment if there's nothing else on.
Another problem is that it takes people a while to appreciate the higher levels of play. You can't do this with the current video-gaming world, because each new game that comes out changes the rules. You have to have a basic game created, one that keeps being playable for many, many, many years. Sure, you can change the graphics and whatnot, but the rules cannot change aside from minor tweaks (such as those that are occasionally made to football). I don't see any reason that someone couldn't create such a game.
Next, the rules have to be fairly simple. Football is already, IMHO, too complicated for someone to just drop into, and it is still much more straightforward than most of the video games out there. Chess is an immortal game because it's easy to learn. Age of Empires is just not going to work for televised viewing. Also, simple rules make it easier to ensure that your game has no "easy" loopholes or ways to win. Complex rules, sets of fixes upon fixes for loopholes in a game, mean that "cheap" ways to win probably exist.
Next, the game has to be visually pretty (and probably improve each year). Note that visually pretty does not mean technically impressive. It just has to be attractive to watch. Perhaps really good art and design work is important. You have a large number of people watching who have to be entertained not by *playing* the game, but by merely watching it and appreciating the strategy -- they aren't experiencing the actual gameplay component.
Next, I think that team-based play is probably important. In the world of lucrative professional sports, everything is team-based. Football, basketball, soccer, hockey, baseball...fans like being able to speak with knowledge about how well a team is doing, what the trades of various players mean, and so forth. Watching one random guy play doesn't provide that. Also, people can empathize with a team ("I live in New York, and so I want the New York Mets to win!"), but if there's only a single player, the side becomes a hard-to-empathize-with-player. If my *town* had a clan, I might be able to get interested in what they're doing.
Next is the biggest one. Almost all games these days have a twitch component. In FPSes, reaction time is crucial. My first reaction was that this wouldn't work. I've changed my mind. You can have twitch games, but there has to be more-slowly-changing state (other than the score, which changes too slowly). That state has to favor one side or the other, and should be able to completely change within a minute, and at least sometimes stay in one position for several minutes. In most sports, this is handled by the field position of the ball or puck. Why is this important? It's too hard to watch a really good FPS player unless you're equally good and can anticipate to some degree what they're doing. There's too much rapid movement. A kill is in the blink of an eye -- that doesn't build tension. Capture the flag might be more reasonable -- I could see watching a capture the flag game bec
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I think by saying he is a pioneer he's referring to the fact that he's the first to make a steady living off of competitive gaming. Thresh was probably equally dominant, but there just wasn't the corporate interest in gaming that there is now.
Also, there are plenty of people who dedicate huge amounts of time to these games, and very few are anywhere near his league. You can't discount his talent by writing it off as just time spent playing. That would be like claiming that Tiger Woods is just good at golf because he practices more than anyone. There is definitely an element of talent involved in playing these games.
All the things you talk about (spawn camping, etc) are things that can be frusterating. Nobody wants to have frusterating things done to them.
There are two classes of these kinds of things:
1) Unfixed problems in the game. If there *really is* a single, simple strategy, using knowledge of the game's rules that lets you easily beat anyone using any other strategy, then the game is simply broken. On the other hand, very, very few people play games like this.
2) Strategies that you are not willing to counter. Most people don't mind rocket-jumping in Quake -- it's part of the *game*, a strategy (and one that allows interesting tradeoffs made in real-time -- do I trade some health for an item or a potentially less-guarded route?) On the other hand, I never learned to rocket-jump -- as a result, games where one had to rocket-jump to counter rocket-jumping were frusterating to me. However, most players didn't mind learning to rocket jump. I just wasn't willing to learn how to counter in. I think that what you're thinking of are simple strategies that a newbie may not know how to counter -- and this lack of knowledge means that he will always lose to them. Nobody wants to *lose* all the time, so they call the game stupid and stop playing. People that really immerse themselves in heavy playing often *like* multiple layers of strategy.
I do think that there are some games that do a better job of dealing with this than others. One of my favorite games from this standpoint is Soul Calibur II. A first-time player can sit down, whack buttons rapidly, and probably beat some not-first-time-but-still-newbie players some decent percentage of the time. Plus, their character will do neat things on the screen. Each time someone learns a new feat, the new feat doesn't make them unbeatable -- it just improves their play by some percent. Say you learn your character's throws really well, and can hurl people out of the ring based on where each throw sends them -- that may be a disadvantage to another player, but it isn't going to result in you winning every match. All game designers should keep this sort of thing in mind -- have a learning curve that stretches off into infinity (or something like it) so that the players are always learning something new to get better. On the other hand, make each degree of improvement only help the character sometimes -- it can work splendidly sometimes, but that new strategy can't be simply applied over and over.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Which doesn't matter at all to anyone
And gaming is bound by the very dynamics of the game.
And the best gamers are those who can best take advantage of their abilities and knowledge withing the boundaries and limitations of the game (cheats aside).
But you can use steroids or other body-enhancing drugs. Your point?
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
I went to high school with some very talented professional atheletes. One guy was a pro-snowboarder and skater. The guy was good at every single sport he tried. At the local cafe/video game parlor he got the highest score anyone had ever seen on 720 and he didn't even play that often. I spent a lot of time at this particular cafe and had never seen anyone even get close to matching his performance.
Another example, the wife of a friend of mine who's a native born Czech went target shooting and on her first try she had almost perfect aim.
So the moral of the story is, stop being envious, look for your natural talents, and develop them.
Guillaume Patry is another professional gamer who was a StarCraft champ in South Korea. We did an interview with him last year and his view was particularly interesting as someone who was nearing the end of his gaming career.
The thing that I find interesting is that like Wendel/Fatal1ty, Patry/Grrrr was also an athlete before he got into gaming. In Patry's case, he was a competitive skiier.