However, television coverage of the event was almost non-existent. Although many media outlets did a story on QuakeCon, and taped a few interviews with competitors at the event, none covered the finals in a play-by-play fashion. It's a far cry from the gaming scene in Korea, where several television stations are dedicated to gaming coverage, regular pro gaming events fill stadiums, matches are broadcast with insightful commentary, and the great players are media celebrities.
Here at GameSpy, we'd all love to see gaming competitions, as events, get serious airtime and exposure.
The question this week: Is America ready?
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So Close, But We're Not There Yet Dave "Fargo" Kosak, Executive Editor |
Damn, QuakeCon was exciting. The crowd was going nuts. Presentation of the finals had a few flaws (the game sound had to be turned down to not tip off the players, and the video for the DOOM 3 match kept clicking out), but overall the setup looked great: Two players, one stage, two giant monitors, and one HUGE check. What more could you ask for? Why couldn't people at home watch the event as it unfolded, as we in the audience could?
I just don't think we're there yet. A couple things need to happen before I think gaming-as-sports coverage can really take off here in America. For one, we need "THE GAME." Deathmatch as we know it just isn't it yet. Visually it isn't too sexy if you're not, yourself, a hardcore player. A game needs to be created with the spectator in mind, where you can see the computer avatars doing incredible things and a camera is always able to catch the best part of the action. It might also be necessary to tweak the rules so that when one player has a huge lead, he's not encouraged to hide for the final minutes of the game. I suppose this happens in other pro sports (football teams grounding the ball at the end of the game for instance), but it sure kills the excitement of a pro gaming match when the greatest player in the world crouches in the shadows because he'd be a fool not to.
The QuakeCon tournament finals were a spectacle
Pro gaming is gigantic in Korea, and it's worth it to compare cultures. It gives you an insight on what needs to happen here in the 'states for something like the QuakeCon finals to start appearing on cable. In Korea gaming evolved as a social medium, growing out of PC Baangs (LAN centers) where people would game together. Every local Baang had its own regular tournaments and hometown champions, and competition in larger and larger tournaments grew naturally from there. Density is the key: Over five million people own and play StarCraft in South Korea - five million people in an area no larger than the state of Indiana! Men and women alike play games together, and PC Baangs were seen as a great place to hook up. Your average young person was constantly exposed to great players, watching great players play, rooting for great players in tournaments - a gaming culture was born, one where it would be natural to turn on the TV and see the country's best going after each other on a digital battlefield.
North America is too big and diverse to expect a PC Baang culture to bloom. Our Internet infrastructure already supports people playing games from the privacy of their home computers. But, it's not hard to imagine that games themselves can create that kind of culture online. They just need to be built for it from the ground up: we need a game that is relatively unchanged from year to year (think Unreal Tournament), with built-in tournament mods and rankings and ladders (no downloading special patches or finding special servers), that groups people together in small communities each with its own "hometown" champions. It should be visceral and visual, built for television, with easy-to-use observer modes. You should be able to jump in and see replays of big matches whenever you log in. Some sort of central authority needs to track the champions and post their story online for every gamer to see whenever they start the game. It needs to be fast and easy to play - mainstream. It shouldn't require custom configs and tweaking or obscene hardware requirements. It needs to create a culture, online, that Korea enjoyed at the dawn of its gaming boom.
