So I just woke up in a foggy daze from an incomplete night of sleep, but regardless of the way I feel my brain is insistent on serving up frequent, wild ideas concerning what to do with eSports.
Most of the ideas aren’t great – yet – but over the course of my life I can conclude that it takes a while for seeds to grow – some take longer than others but if you put enough time and care into fostering the growth of a concept you can make it a reality.
I suck at Starcraft (I can conclude this easily and obviously), but I have a pretty decent grasp of the genre and can easily draw parallels between it and other games or sports. As a play-by-play commentator it’s important for me both to play the game and to listen the voices outside of the game (with many filters and grains of salt). To the evidence I’ve consumed, I perceive eSports as a very real thing with numerous human beings within the ecosystem that are able to create astonishing, incredible acts with a mouse, a mind, and a keyboard – what is true in most cases is that not everyone is getting paid nearly what they deserve.
High level competition drives growth of meta game play and rewards the more talented, better prepared players. Properly played games at the highest level of competition are ridiculously entertaining – we can only assume the players have seen the scenarios they confront play out time and time again in his or her mind or on previous battlefields. The preparation time and mental capacity required to stay calm and to execute is unmatched by few things in this world.
Competitive circuits have served as the main vein of eSports revenue, allowing both individuals and organizations to accumulate fans, sponsorship, and cash, but we have to ask ourselves if this the only possible path to accumulating wealth for players and teams?
Cheating, of course, is something that comes with any competition. Match-fixing, a tactic that has cropped up in games such as Broodwar and most recently League of Legends (this is still being debated), involves planning the outcome of a match while making it appear you have won or lost legitimately. I will state for the record that I do not advocate match fixing in competitive play – period – but this topic intrigues me as something with potential to grow eSports.
Fact: Professional eSports players have admitted it would be easy to match fix in Starcraft 2.
Choreography – a pure form of entertainment – takes practice, focus, and determination. It pays to behold these qualities and those with an eye for entertainment should be able to see where I’m going with this.
With more and more games joining the fray, there’s huge potential to set up live events with multiple levels of entertainment story lines, all occurring within the spectacle of eSports.
Without speculating too much, think of the circus or the WWE. You may not like the content, but now put your favorite eSport in that template and think – are you catching my drift?
Take a minute to stop, smell the roses, and give this seed some time to grow.
Tweet @DOOMSC2 with your thoughts on this, and we’ll keep the conversation going.