Games as e-sports

[Don]

So the other day I heard that they found a scandal in the professional Starcraft league in Korea because people are betting on games and losing on purpose. So that made me think of wrestling, and then I realized most games will be a lot more entertaining if it's obviously rigged like wrestling. Aside from platformer, FPS, and possibly shooters, I don't find most games to be entertaining to watch. If you watch a high level Street Fighter anything that's not versus it's not really going to look too much different than 2 guys that are just throwing fireballs at each other. Yes I understand if you're into that thing there's a lot of things behind the scenes but it simply doesn't look too impressive. RTS like Starcraft/Warcraft 3 just doesn't seem to work well to be watched (when's the last time you heard of anyone watching Starcraft games unless it's Korea?) MMORPGs also don't really work well, and even games like WoW didn't have too much success hosting PvP tournaments since I'm sure it will just look like a bunch of guys jumping around trying to get behind each other.

So this is where wrestling comes in. I remember in EQ, one of the biggest controversery on my server was a PvP tournament, and while the GM had his back turned 2 guys who were supposed to be spectators jumped in the ring and killed the last 2 guys there and won the tournament. Now I think you can find something like that in wrestling every other episode, but you know, that was what made that tournament memorable because I believe the last 2 guys standing are all heal+tank combo classes and they are probably just going to bore each other to death. It's pretty clear the two guys jumped in had classes that'd be no ways competitive in a PvP tournament but since they got the guys unaware they won. So for example you could have a mysterious player show up in Starcraft with 20 Carriers from nowhere! Or you can have a rogue player in a MMORPG that's trying to work against the raid!

Now I don't know if I'll actually want to watch games that are like wrestling on TV, but I know I sure won't watch most games on TV in their current form, and since I don't actually see people televising games on TV, I'd assume most people feel the same way.

[Flip]

I always liked to DL the replays for warcraft 3 and watch them. Some nights, i would simply watch replays for hours... But maybe thats because i had control over what i could watch, if it was on TV i doubt it would be as interesting.

[Don]

The RTS replays might be good if you want to learn how to get better at a game but they sure aren't very useful as a source of entertainment. I mean most of the time even if you see someone pull off something crazy, generally speaking it's only working against someone who isn't as good because if you've two guys roughly equally good they'd know what kind of crazy stuff the other guy can do. This is sort of like how a high end Street Fighter tournament ends up looking like something any newb can do because they're not going to try to do some fancy combo that would never work against a pro anyway so it's just going to be a lot of hadokens and throws and stuff.

[Kupek]

Watching any skill-based activity takes on new meaning when you are familiar with what it takes to do it well. If both of us watch a high level submission grappling match, we won't see the same things. I'll probably be more impressed because I'm intimately familiar with how hard it is. It's the same thing with what's successful; just like in SF, people win high level submission grappling competitions with the same moves that white belts are taught - these people are just much, much better at it. The fancy stuff isn't as high percentage.

I have no interest in watching SF matches, but I also have no interest in watching golf. In other words, I think your disinterest has nothing to do with the fact that the skill-based activity is a videogame.