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Is Gaming Really a Spectator Sport?
njkid1 passed us a link to a GameDaily article on the upcoming DirecTV Championship Game series. There's big prize money at stake, dozens of teams are flocking to the banner of the event, and promoters are talking the event up as something that can't be missed. All of this begs the question: Is competitive gaming a spectator sport? Is the culture of videogaming conducive to mass-market entertainment? Will Counter-Strike matches draw enough of a crowd to maintain advertiser interest at future events? What's your read on this new entry into American gamer culture?
I don't really watch any sport, I find it rather boring to watch.
Sport is something you should do, right? Well if not, then sure, gaming is a spectator sport. Some will like it, other won't.
Honestly, I think presentation matters far more than most people would ever let on ...
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If you only looked at the XFL you'd probably assume that there was no market for professional football in North America
I think (know) you could make 'professional' videogame playing a spectator event but the important part is that the type of game you play must be understandable by the majority of people who have very limited understanding of games, must be fair, and must remain fast paced. I could be wrong, but I suspect that if Blizzard had the option that a person could be a spectator to the Battlegrounds you would see quite a few people watching for reasons other than cheating/
I don't know if it's as much a question of if a game of any type is a spectator sport but more of if the type of person interested in a certain of game is a spectator.
From my experience, I'm not a spectator. Not to say I can't appreciate a good play/move in a sporting/gaming event but the idea of actually watching an entire game doesn't do the trick for me.
Beyond video gaming I've also played paintball and skateboarded for several years. I can't stand to watch either of these. I don't think it has to do with the watchability of the game/sport but rather my ability to watch and not do.
Oddly enough these activities have low draws in TV ratings. Maybe the type of person who skates, plays paintball or plays video games just isn't the same type of person to sit down with a sixer of Bud Light and scream at a TV set.
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There's spectaters for about anything. And sponsors will follow.
People watch bowling. Pool. Pro Paintball. Once late at night I caught a demolition style "race" of trucks pulling campers (the drivers had sponsors).
It doesn't really take much of an audience to get sponsors. The key to lining them up is for the event organizers to make it clear to the sponsors who will be seeing their ads. If the spectaters interests and the sponsors are in agreement, then the deal works. I'd bet one could find sponsors for snail racing because there will be someone watching.
So I see no reason why computer games can't be either.
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PBS, I think, ran a documentary recently that explored the South Korean video game competition phenomenom.
What they kinda found is that you need to know the rules and nuances of the game to appreciate watching it.
If you don't know that, you can't appreciate what's happening before your eyes.
I'm a big sports fan and while I know the rules of practically any competition sport enough to understand what's going on, I have no clue about the finer points of the sports apart from the few sports I watch frequently. The sports I don't know enough about I don't really enjoy watching especially if I'm with someone who does know the finer points. The whole experience just goes right above my head while my friend is hollering about some magical play that just happened.
The same applies to watching video games. I'm a relatively good racing game player and I most definitely enjoy watching the great racers compete against each other, because I "get" how they race so fast. I'm not very good at Halo 2, and I just can't get into watching competitive Halo 2 matches, because I just don't see what's so great about the performance of some of the top players.
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I think gaming has potential as a spectator sport, but I'm not too confident in the ability for it to be presented well. Up till now the only show I know of that ever tried to make a spectator sport out of gaming was Arena and they did a horrible job of it. The matches were always cut down to a couple of minutes, meaning everything tended to be very disjointed.
I'm not sure FPS is the ideal genre for a spectator sport either. The number of players and the limitation of the first-person view make it tough for the audience to really keep track of what is happening and where all the players are.
RTS games may make better viewing. They tend to last longer and the overhead view, coupled with the slower pace should make it easier for an audience to follow what is going on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElsA0rSGqjc
With football, baseball, hockey, etc., I either lack the talent, equipment, playing area, or teammates to frequently play those sports. That's not to say that people only watch these sports because they themselves cannot play them, but imagine if everyone had access to an NFL arena and a half-decent team...and you were 15 years younger with a solid throwing arm. Now, would you rather watch or play football?
:) But we're all in the same room, drinking and cursing when we lose a level. It just wouldn't be the same if I watched the match on television from hundreds of miles away.
Why would I want to sit around watching other people play Counter-Strike when I can go into the other room, fire up the PC, and play the game myself? I can watch the best players duke it out after I've been killed and sent to spectator mode. I imagine gamers would initially be the largest audience for these things...and gamers want to play games.
Gaming *can* be a spectator sport; I love watching my friends play games that I suck at
A lot has to do with how the event is presented to the person's interested.
1. Firstly, you really need people that are interested in the sport. If there are 5 people that still play doom, it may not be the best candidate for a media event.
2. Once you have a loyal throng of fanbois just waiting to absorb all the godliness of the event, you still need to present the event in a way that attracts them to it.
A very classic example of how NOT to present sports coverage was when Fox started to broadcast hockey. If there are any Hockey fans out there, you know what kind of unmitigated disaster that was. The camera work was bad, the glowing puck was really annoying and it just didn't have the same feel that more traditional hockey broadcasters had already learned to do right (at least in Canada, eh?).
Find a format that people seem to like. Be flexible in the beginning allowing for glaring problems that fans may have. Once you get that winning format, tighten it up so that people watching from event to event will feel comfortable with how the program flows. This will go a long way in encouraging existing viewers to tune in again, and it allows those viewers to effectively talk about whats going on without them having to second guess themselves.
3. Choose your medium carefully
Can anyone here see a problem with video game championhips being broadcasted over the internet? Wouldn't one assume that it is: 1. cheaper, 2. reachable by nearly 100% of anyone that would care to watch it anyways.
Just putting it on the idiot box doesn't automatically make the event any more attractive to watch. I tuned into the spike VG awards one time and I couldn't watch 5 minutes of it before being so repulsed I had to kill it. It just seems that the plain text end-of-year awards on web pages holds my attention longer than their monkey show.
Thats about all I have to say about that. In conclusion, yes it -can- be a good idea, but make damn sure that what you're selling is something that your fans would actually watch.
Bye!
Not just the game but I think it would also depend on the editing. If you consider a typical FPS match there's lots of things happening at once. How is that presented to the spectators? do we get the same First person tunnel visions that the gamers get, are there fixed cameras that we view?
IMO if you want it to work right you have to take a look at the level design and ensure you can capture all of it and still see the action that's going on. I also think you need to have dedicated "camera men" that can go anywhere to help capture the action with an editor dictating which action to follow. I also think they need to put small Picture in Picture windows of the players faces so we can see their facial and body language. And theres no reason we can't have slow motion replays as well as commentary by people who understand the tactics, strategies, and the background of the players other notable games and records.
I think to get a feel for it a few games would have to be recorded with some time spent editing it for spectator consumption, and once they start to understand what works and what doesn't they try it live.
Some genres would work better then others, racing games for instance would be much easier to show considering it's a real life sport and they can use the same techniques used for showing the sport in real life. Most single player or turn based games would be fairly simple, as well as fighters and other games where the players share a single screen. but IMO stuff like MMOs, RTSs, Shooters, or anything where the players have their own display would take some getting used to before it would be something easily shown on TV.
The problem I've seen is that in prior attempts the producers and editors weren't gamers so they weren't really showing what people were interested in seeing. They'd show the peoples faces, or a close up of the controller, or a quick clip of the players screen and it was more of a nonsensical collage then anything else. The in game action is the most important, but you need to see a good overview, you need to see what all the different players are doing at the same time. the players faces are secondary, you need to see the person behind the on screen character but it shouldn't detract from the on screen action, just give a small view into the emotions their going through, a determined look, a look of disbelief when they die, or excitement when they score a point etc.
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I think the biggest show-stopper currently is simply that games are not designed to watch. With first person shooters you end up with watching the game out of the perspective of a single player, so you have zero overview of what is actually happening, having the moderator switching camera perspetive to other players increases confusing even more and the simplistic overview map that you got in games like CounterStrike is totally boring to watch. Now if you watch a demo inside the game engine itself this is not that much a problem, since you are the one doing the switching, but for a TV broadcast where somebody else does the switching, it is simply not very well suited at all.
With RTS games the situation doesn't look much better, while the top-down view clears up some confusing, only having a tiny view on the whole map adds enough back into the mix to ruin the fun. That the minimap of the game and the units itself end up being a unwatchable blurry mess on a TV screen doesn't help either.
So while all this isn't an issue for gamer, since they can just watch the demo recordings in the engine itself, it makes games quite unsuitable for broadcast. That games have quite complicated rules makes things only even more complicated.
For video games to become a spectator sport they simply have to be designed to be more watchable. What might also help is if the demo playback would become easier, i.e. say you could download them on XBoxLive without a need to buy the game itself or keep it manually at the right patch level that is able to actually play the demo, just click&watch.
I've done competitive gaming for Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source (currently in the Cyberathlete Amateur League Invite division for CS:S), and I believe that its proven that gaming can be a spectator sport. I've watched big matches via SourceTV, seen them broadcasted with commentators over the Internet through sites like http://www.egln.net/, http://www.source-radio.net/, and http://www.fragtv.net/ and have been seen spectators in the triple digits connected to the same medium to watch that match. However, I know that almost all of these are gamers, and most play that specific game itself. While that's somewhat true of real spectator sports (almost all sport spectators have played one sport or another in a league, and a lot of football fans at one time played football), it not nearly as extreme. Thus, there's a lot larger market for real life sports. Not to mention that watching real life sports can be social, such as going out to a ballpark with friends or even watching the big game around a TV. Watching e-sports over the net on your computer, even sitting in a voice chat with your friends who also are watching, isn't all that social. Also, you usually have to be pretty involved in that game to truly appreciate the depths of a team and the skill of the players. On the other hand, gaming has many of the same fundamentals of what make popular pro sports good spectator sports. Take a game such as Counter-Strike: Source at the top levels. You have a strat caller (quarterback) that calls plays at the start of a round and audibles during a round, you have AWPers (flashy like homerun hitters), assault riflers (get the job done, like grinders in hockey or like playmakers that set things up), and even managers that handle all the out of game operations and sponsorships. Teams also need strong teamwork, chemistry, and a good playbook to be great at the top level, just like pro sports teams won't do well with just a collection of skill (i.e. Detroit Red Wings). The potential is there for gaming to become spectator oriented, but due to the limited scope and diversity (Quake isn't anything like Starcraft and likely won't share many spectators) it won't become huge like real life sports. Even without massive spectators, professional gaming will exist due to the ability of sponsors to concentrate on some pretty specific demographics. If you look at current gaming sponsors, its pretty easy to get a big return on a small investment advertising your hardware, new games, delivery food, energy drinks, LAN center, etc. to gamers and their spectators.
If they can make a fucking card game a spectator's sport then surely watching video games can be a spectator's sport.
Depending on the game, there are some people I prefer to watch than play the game myself. A friend of mine is a killing machine in Halo - I'm good, but I've watched him play for hours online and not die. That's good TV.
But I'm not going to watch someone roll their Katamari into the same wall five times in a row without bitch slapping the controller out of their hands.
Likewise I'm not going to watch someone build a city. Nor am I going to watch someone ride their pet tiger across a green landscape.
It has to be fast paced and action packed. First person shooters with good viewing perspectives, real time strategies with massive battles, possibly even head to head puzzle games, but they'll all need constant stats, and really aggressive players.
How about the lumberjack competitions? It's a guy chopping down a tree. WTF. But it's how it's presented and all the information they give with it.
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