The virtual grandstands of professional video gaming By Brendan Keogh Tue 3 Jun 2014 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-03/keogh-videogames-as-a-spectator-sport/5495870 http://www.abc.net.au/news/image/4760064-3x4-340x453.jpg We're not likely to see a report on the 6 o'clock news about the latest League of Legend tournament, but with the help of services like Twitch, professional gaming is already a spectator sport, writes Brendan Keogh. The idea of watching someone else play a videogame is pretty odd to a lot of people: videogames were made to be played, to be interacted with - why would you want to watch someone else play? Yet, it wasn't that long ago that videogames were a very social, very local activity. We would go to friends' houses or sit in the lounge room with our siblings and pass around the controller, happily just watching and cheering (or jeering) from the sideline for a while. A generation before that, you would join the ring of people around the arcade cabinets, watching the lone player race up the high-score leaderboard. But then, in that Janus-headed way that technology functions, high-speed internet came along and made videogames more social and, consequentially, a more solitary activity. We no longer needed to go to that friend's house: we just had to log into the same server and we could go fight goblins together without ever needing to see each other. The need to watch someone else play, or to have to share a single screen as we played together, was a limitation that videogames felt had to be overcome and, with high-speed internet, overcame it. But something was lost. It became easier for people to play with each other across the world, but there were unique pleasures in watching other people play videogames - pleasures that are beginning to be rediscovered. This is most visible in the rise of 'e-sports' (professional, competitive videogame play) alongside the parallel rise of 'streaming' play on websites such as Twitch. Combined, these trends point towards the rise of videogame play as a spectacle, as a performance worth viewing in its own right, just like any other sport. E-sports themselves are not a new phenomenon. Back in 1983, David Sudnow was already talking about the possibility of being a 'microathlete' at the game Breakout! in his book Pilgrim in the Microworld. Go back another decade, and we encounter an 'Olympics' tournament organised around the first videogame ever made. In South Korea in particular, where high-speed internet was adopted early, professional competitive play around the strategy game Starcraft was for years an almost mythical legend among Western gamers. When I say 'professional', I use the word no differently than I would if I were to refer to professional soccer or professional cricket: there are sponsoring deals, celebrity players, signature strategies and personalities. Arenas are filled with fans before a stage of the players sitting at their computers. Commentators move a spectator camera around the virtual battlefield and communicate with the players. It is, by all accounts, a virtual, professionalised sport. But it is no longer just in South Korea that this happens. In the West, Riot Games's League of Legends in particular has a massive following among both players and spectators, with 67 million people playing monthly, and up to 32 million people tuning in to watch various championship games. Tournament news and a schedule of upcoming games to watch feature prominently on the game's website. Watching League of Legends is considered as an equally valid and worthy choice as playing. This ability to watch competitive games from a distance, over the internet, has been a significant stepping stone in normalising e-sports. Spectators don't have to go to the grandstand (though that certainly still happens); instead, they can log into Twitch and watch a game play out in real-time, chatting to their friends in a chat window or on Twitter at the same time, while professional commentators breakdown each play. It's the equivalent of broadcast television discovering sports, and is really no different from watching the cricket on TV. Recent years have not seen the birth of professional videogame play; they have seen its normalisation. Though, the idea of videogames being a sport is still a concept that many would balk at. For most sceptics, it is the supposed lack of physical exertion that makes the idea of videogames as a sport difficult to parse. Yet, as TL Taylor points out in her book Raising The Stakes, we have no issue considering chess, snooker, lawn bowls, and even poker as sports: many of which requiring less physical exertion than the professional e-sportsperson whose fingers are flying and tapping with the skill and attention of a virtuosic pianist. The physical exertion criticism conceals a much more significant issue with videogames becoming a 'mainstream' professional sport: incoherent rules. For most videogames, unless you play them first, it can be difficult to really appreciate what, exactly, is going on. I can watch a game of AFL on TV and even if I don't know the rules, the leaps and kicks and marks are impressive enough in themselves for me to get something out of it as a spectator. In videogames, unless I have played League of Legends myself, it is much more difficult to really appreciate why that hero knocking that monster on the head with a staff 10 times is impressive at all. Beyond e-sports, even streaming single-player videogame play online has created mini-celebrities out of many players. They will play through the newest blockbuster releases, or maybe an obscure indie game, or, more often than not, a particularly frightening horror game. Often, their face will be in the corner, captured by their webcam, and for the audience watching from home, the stream is as much about the player's performance as it is about what happens in the game. Of course, for every professional, successful live streamer, there's a hundred more with only one or two viewers, as Maddy Myers rightly notes in a recent article. But not all of them want to be professional - sometimes it is nice to just play games with one or two friends (or strangers) and recapture that local, social sense of play. If e-sport is akin to seeing The Ashes at the MCG, then casual live streamers are pulling the bat and ball out at the family picnic. We could ask whether or not videogames will ever become a 'mainstream' spectator sport, but the reality is that they already are. We're not likely to see Channel Nine report on the latest League of Legend tournament after the State of Origin on the 6 o'clock news, but across the internet we are already seeing the professional and amateur networks and practices we associate with other sporting cultures. Videogames have always been spectacular; now they just have spectators. Brendan Keogh is a PhD candidate at RMIT and a freelance videogame critic and journalist. Follow him on Twitter @brkeogh. -- Cheers, Stephen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
