Inside the World of Competitive Gaming

Thursday, May 07, 2015

Brian McIver, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Soccer, rugby, cricket, La Crosse, what comes to mind when you hear these sports? Is it a big healthy snore-fest? And what if I were to mention any of these sports anywhere else in the world? You would likely get a variety of reactions from favorite teams to rivalries to favorite/hated players. The same can also be said of e-Sports. What’s that you say, you’ve never heard of e-Sports? Well let me put it another way, professional gaming, the extremely competitive, extremely lucrative, and hugely popular, version of your Saturday night LAN party.

E-Sports, though not called such at the time, has been around since the inception of video games. One of the first competitions was a Spacewar! battle at Stanford in 1972, where winners would get a years subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Things got real in 1980 when the biggest name in video games, Atari held The Space Invaders Championship. Bringing in more than 10,000 competitors the event was the first to give competitive gaming a real foothold in society.

The following years would bring huge competitions for all of the biggest arcade games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and of course Donkey Kong the last being the focus of the 2007 documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

The games today have changed quite a bit from the old arcade classics. Genres range from first person shooters like Call of Duty and Halo, to real time strategy games like Star Craft and Civilization, and one of the biggest genres currently is what is referred to as a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) with Defense of the Ancients 2(DotA2) and League of Legends (LoL) being the top two of most e-Sports competitions today.

Tournaments for these games rake in an absurd amount of money. The International, a DotA2 tournament started by Valve, the company that created the game distribution software Steam, will bring in a possible $20 - $30 million in revenue. The total payout for this year’s competition is over $10 million, which is more than the Super Bowl, The Masters, or The Tour de France. The winning team from last year’s tournament brought in half of that prize, and this is just one tournament.

According to research the global audience for e-Sports is projected to be over 335 million viewers both active and casual. With all that money, popularity, and history it’s a bit surprising that a recent airing of a Heroes of the Storm tournament on ESPN 2 garnered quite the negative response from not only viewers, but hosts as well. In a recent rant on his radio talk show host Colin Cowherd said "Somebody lock the basement door at mom's house, and don't let 'em out,” and “I will quit this network if I am ever asked to cover that."

That’s a not really a shocking reaction from someone that’s only view of what constitutes sports is limited to American Football, baseball, and basketball.

The truth is that the people that participate in these tournaments have to practice just like any other athlete or team. It’s true that any schmoe can pick up a controller or run a mouse and keyboard, but any schmoe can pick up a golf club or kick a ball that doesn’t mean they are any good at it. And just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean you should shit all over that thing and the people that enjoy it, but then we are talking about radio talk show hosts who only get attention when they say the most inflammatory things.

Many professional gamers live in dorms in order to practice and train so that they can…you know…win $5 million. Beyond that when something is as popular as video games people naturally want to watch how skilled players perform, and showing it on a channel that shows the thrills and spills of bowling, billiards, and poker you’d think that people like Cowherd would welcome something a little different.

ESPN certainly sees the potential in competitive gaming, as does Intel, Coca-cola, American Express, Red Bull and numerous other sponsors looking to cash in on the millions of fans watching on online streaming services like Twitch or the Major League Gaming website.

Regardless of the haters, competitive gaming is here to stay and will continue to grow, and a big part of that is because this isn’t just about being the biggest and the best. It is a social activity that a much larger group of people can relate to than traditional sports. People can watch clips of people playing DotA2 and learn strategies and tricks that they might not have know before, and then share their new best times or best scores in an online video where they can directly interact with their favorite players or teams. There are more opportunities for amateurs and newbies to participate and share their experiences with others making competitive gaming much more accessible and approachable.

Don’t believe me? Load up some DotA2 or some LoL and see if you don’t have fun. See if you don’t have that itch to be just a little bit better. Watch a tournament and see if you don’t get at least a little excited regardless of your knowledge of the game. As always is the case with something that maybe isn’t in the main stream American culture or just not in your main stream, give it shot, try something different if you don’t like it move on, if you do you just added more enjoyment into your life, and who doesn’t like that.