While I think there's work to be done with making games more spectator-approachable, I still believe that the main way forward is simply through more players and the average person being more...
While I think there's work to be done with making games more spectator-approachable, I still believe that the main way forward is simply through more players and the average person being more genre-savvy with the kinds of games that become esports.
I think they're giving the approachability of traditional sports a bit too much credit. For the most part I can understand soccer by just watching, but (American) football? That was a hell of a learning process...it's my favorite traditional sport, but it really is a mess of arbitrary rules that you'd never figure out on your own. Even just how downs work is freaky. Sure, the author says, you can figure out that they're trying to go in one direction and doing [unknownskillfulstuff] to get there, but then they go on to say that a similar level of understanding in StarCraft (bigger, better armies fight...but how did they get there?) or Street Fighter (people fight...but how is this more than button mashing?) doesn't cut it.
Introduce spectator tools, have more beginners streams, do all of that for sure, but I don't think there's something inherently harder to understand in esports. It's a process that takes a long time to move on from the initial people playing to the public at large, and imo esports are far ahead of schedule. This current wave of esports interest started around 2009-2011, it's been almost no time whatsoever. Once we get to the point where we have a large population of adults who, as children, had their parents show them Dreamhack or Evo and talk them through what's happening, we'll see esports generalize a bit. Football is massive while being absolutely arcane to someone not talked through it or at least having cultural knowledge / genre savvy for ball sports, there's no reason games can't do the same.
There's a bit of an extra hurdle since we have very few games which stay competitive in the same form for years, but really it isn't that hard to generalize within the same series or even whole genre. If you understood Third Strike, you probably understand SFV. If you understood CS, you understand CSGO. This is all stuff that beginner streams and such address perfectly.
I actually think he's misdiagnosing the complexity problem with Starcraft 2 here. As a spectator you can pretty much glean what you need to know about how a battle is going. Within the same race,...
Exemplary
I actually think he's misdiagnosing the complexity problem with Starcraft 2 here. As a spectator you can pretty much glean what you need to know about how a battle is going. Within the same race, stronger units tend to be visually larger and more imposing in appearance than weak ones. It gets a little more complex between races, when you compare a zealot to a bunch of marines, but it still makes logical sense visually. Blizzard did a good job with that. What complexity is there is not much more complex than understanding why you can't do forward lateral passes in football or how 'traveling' works in basketball. It's not like DOTA or LOL where basically the entire game is a byzantine maze of counter-intuitive rules.
Where things get messy is that the game design in SC2 over-emphasizes interface and mechanical skill as a differentiator of ability. Watching humans pull off athletic feats is impressive because we can see it being done in front of us. A fast runner just leaves their competition in the dust. Watching an athletic feat that involves virtuoso feats of keyboard-fingering, on the other hand, is harder to appreciate because it's largely invisible to the audience.
A skilled Zerg player can maintain their macro while fighting. This manifests as having a bigger army and production that's better optimized for the army composition they're facing while also being able to maneuver your army with skill rather than letting them die wastefully. But you can't really see that happening on screen unless you have pretty deep knowledge of the game and infer it from watching what they're spending on. This is also where a lot of the "nothing is happening" phases of the game occur. All the actual gameplay is functionally just grinding through rote mechanics or trying to interfere in your opponent's ability to grind through their rote mechanics.
There is a lot of setup time during which everyone is kind of bored. This is unlike most sports where the second the whistle blows or the bell rings the excitement starts. Even in golf, the most boring of spectator sports (don't @ me), the first play of the game has the player doing exactly what all of golf is about: hitting a ball with a club in the direction of a hole. Even in a largely cerebral game like chess, the very first move is legitimately petty exciting. It signals a ton of things to a seasoned player. In SC2 the very first move is to click on your workers and then click on your mineral patches, click on your home base, and produce a worker. Every. single. time.
The complaints with fighting games I really don't see applying. On those it's pretty readily apparently what's happening. There is a learning curve to figure out the capabilities of the characters, but being exposed to new, cool things a character can do is actually fun. I think what stands in the way here is that the characters themselves have so much personality designed into them that they overshadow the actual players. They're more dynamic, you see more of them on the screen, and they're better looking (as far as animated characters go) than the actual people involved. As a new person who knows nothing about the scene, you are more likely to want to root for or against Akuma than for or against Tokido.
I was kinda thinking that of all the esports that could make the jump to mainstream, Rocket League would be the one when it had it's hot minute, but that never really happened, I guess for the...
I was kinda thinking that of all the esports that could make the jump to mainstream, Rocket League would be the one when it had it's hot minute, but that never really happened, I guess for the reason the article said. Maybe competitive Splatoon might have a better shot or a fighting game?
I think From Software missed a major opportunity to bring Dark Souls into esports by not including a separate tournament mode allowing players to build characters at an arbitrary level, pick a...
I think From Software missed a major opportunity to bring Dark Souls into esports by not including a separate tournament mode allowing players to build characters at an arbitrary level, pick a gear loadout, and choose between duels, team melees, and battle royale using existing areas.
Other than esports versions of real sports, I just don't see it happening. A lot of modern shooters have a 3rd person or spectator view camera meant for esports competitions. If those were going...
Other than esports versions of real sports, I just don't see it happening. A lot of modern shooters have a 3rd person or spectator view camera meant for esports competitions. If those were going to catch on, I think they already would have. They are probably a bit too violent, or people just aren't interested enough in watching someone run around and shoot other people.
However, I do think there's an opportunity for VR games to fit into the niche somewhere within the next few decades. If someone can perfect a good fighting game in VR, I think people would have a real appetite to see some VR gladiator style fights as that would allow people to see a kind of violence that we already know humans have an appetite for but within a "safe space" in which no one is actually killed. Plus, you have a larger pool of people who would be good competitors, since actual strength wouldn't be a factor.
Esports are actually just too fast for most viewers. If there were a more leisurely game, where one thing happened at a time, then it could catch on just fine.
Esports are actually just too fast for most viewers. If there were a more leisurely game, where one thing happened at a time, then it could catch on just fine.
I think one thing an interesting esport would need would be some form of emergent behaviour in the game. If all that makes the possible moves interesting is built into the game that just isn't...
I think one thing an interesting esport would need would be some form of emergent behaviour in the game. If all that makes the possible moves interesting is built into the game that just isn't interesting to watch over and over again.
I am thinking of something similar to the effects we see in Dwarf Fortress, only obviously in a much approachable way. If you don't know the game, I am thinking of e.g. the bug where the combination of multiple manually programmed behaviours lead to unexpected results
dwarfs spill beer while drinking in a tavern
creatures walking through puddles carry some of the liquid with them on their body
cats lick themselves clean and ingest whatever they licked off their body that way
creatures can die from too much alcohol
lead to the unexpected behaviour that cats would die of alcohol poisoning after walking through a tavern and cleaning themselves afterwards.
Obviously for esports it would have to be more obvious what is happening and ideally the players would deliberately combine easily understood game mechanics in clever ways.
While I think there's work to be done with making games more spectator-approachable, I still believe that the main way forward is simply through more players and the average person being more genre-savvy with the kinds of games that become esports.
I think they're giving the approachability of traditional sports a bit too much credit. For the most part I can understand soccer by just watching, but (American) football? That was a hell of a learning process...it's my favorite traditional sport, but it really is a mess of arbitrary rules that you'd never figure out on your own. Even just how downs work is freaky. Sure, the author says, you can figure out that they're trying to go in one direction and doing [unknownskillfulstuff] to get there, but then they go on to say that a similar level of understanding in StarCraft (bigger, better armies fight...but how did they get there?) or Street Fighter (people fight...but how is this more than button mashing?) doesn't cut it.
Introduce spectator tools, have more beginners streams, do all of that for sure, but I don't think there's something inherently harder to understand in esports. It's a process that takes a long time to move on from the initial people playing to the public at large, and imo esports are far ahead of schedule. This current wave of esports interest started around 2009-2011, it's been almost no time whatsoever. Once we get to the point where we have a large population of adults who, as children, had their parents show them Dreamhack or Evo and talk them through what's happening, we'll see esports generalize a bit. Football is massive while being absolutely arcane to someone not talked through it or at least having cultural knowledge / genre savvy for ball sports, there's no reason games can't do the same.
There's a bit of an extra hurdle since we have very few games which stay competitive in the same form for years, but really it isn't that hard to generalize within the same series or even whole genre. If you understood Third Strike, you probably understand SFV. If you understood CS, you understand CSGO. This is all stuff that beginner streams and such address perfectly.
I actually think he's misdiagnosing the complexity problem with Starcraft 2 here. As a spectator you can pretty much glean what you need to know about how a battle is going. Within the same race, stronger units tend to be visually larger and more imposing in appearance than weak ones. It gets a little more complex between races, when you compare a zealot to a bunch of marines, but it still makes logical sense visually. Blizzard did a good job with that. What complexity is there is not much more complex than understanding why you can't do forward lateral passes in football or how 'traveling' works in basketball. It's not like DOTA or LOL where basically the entire game is a byzantine maze of counter-intuitive rules.
Where things get messy is that the game design in SC2 over-emphasizes interface and mechanical skill as a differentiator of ability. Watching humans pull off athletic feats is impressive because we can see it being done in front of us. A fast runner just leaves their competition in the dust. Watching an athletic feat that involves virtuoso feats of keyboard-fingering, on the other hand, is harder to appreciate because it's largely invisible to the audience.
A skilled Zerg player can maintain their macro while fighting. This manifests as having a bigger army and production that's better optimized for the army composition they're facing while also being able to maneuver your army with skill rather than letting them die wastefully. But you can't really see that happening on screen unless you have pretty deep knowledge of the game and infer it from watching what they're spending on. This is also where a lot of the "nothing is happening" phases of the game occur. All the actual gameplay is functionally just grinding through rote mechanics or trying to interfere in your opponent's ability to grind through their rote mechanics.
There is a lot of setup time during which everyone is kind of bored. This is unlike most sports where the second the whistle blows or the bell rings the excitement starts. Even in golf, the most boring of spectator sports (don't @ me), the first play of the game has the player doing exactly what all of golf is about: hitting a ball with a club in the direction of a hole. Even in a largely cerebral game like chess, the very first move is legitimately petty exciting. It signals a ton of things to a seasoned player. In SC2 the very first move is to click on your workers and then click on your mineral patches, click on your home base, and produce a worker. Every. single. time.
The complaints with fighting games I really don't see applying. On those it's pretty readily apparently what's happening. There is a learning curve to figure out the capabilities of the characters, but being exposed to new, cool things a character can do is actually fun. I think what stands in the way here is that the characters themselves have so much personality designed into them that they overshadow the actual players. They're more dynamic, you see more of them on the screen, and they're better looking (as far as animated characters go) than the actual people involved. As a new person who knows nothing about the scene, you are more likely to want to root for or against Akuma than for or against Tokido.
Edit: Grammar
Here's Shamus's typical companion post on his own site, where he talks about Starcraft 2 specifically from a spectator's point of view.
I was kinda thinking that of all the esports that could make the jump to mainstream, Rocket League would be the one when it had it's hot minute, but that never really happened, I guess for the reason the article said. Maybe competitive Splatoon might have a better shot or a fighting game?
I think From Software missed a major opportunity to bring Dark Souls into esports by not including a separate tournament mode allowing players to build characters at an arbitrary level, pick a gear loadout, and choose between duels, team melees, and battle royale using existing areas.
Other than esports versions of real sports, I just don't see it happening. A lot of modern shooters have a 3rd person or spectator view camera meant for esports competitions. If those were going to catch on, I think they already would have. They are probably a bit too violent, or people just aren't interested enough in watching someone run around and shoot other people.
However, I do think there's an opportunity for VR games to fit into the niche somewhere within the next few decades. If someone can perfect a good fighting game in VR, I think people would have a real appetite to see some VR gladiator style fights as that would allow people to see a kind of violence that we already know humans have an appetite for but within a "safe space" in which no one is actually killed. Plus, you have a larger pool of people who would be good competitors, since actual strength wouldn't be a factor.
Esports are actually just too fast for most viewers. If there were a more leisurely game, where one thing happened at a time, then it could catch on just fine.
I think one thing an interesting esport would need would be some form of emergent behaviour in the game. If all that makes the possible moves interesting is built into the game that just isn't interesting to watch over and over again.
I am thinking of something similar to the effects we see in Dwarf Fortress, only obviously in a much approachable way. If you don't know the game, I am thinking of e.g. the bug where the combination of multiple manually programmed behaviours lead to unexpected results
lead to the unexpected behaviour that cats would die of alcohol poisoning after walking through a tavern and cleaning themselves afterwards.
Obviously for esports it would have to be more obvious what is happening and ideally the players would deliberately combine easily understood game mechanics in clever ways.