What draws people to e-Sports?

Now that I've convinced you video games should be considered a sport, I'll talk about what draws people to play these video games beyond a casual level. You might be wondering, if e-Sports is so similar to real sports, why doesn't everyone just play the real thing?

They do
Many professional video game players were once involved in sports, including myself. The story for several gamers is that they played some sport for a few years, got hurt, had to find something to do that didn't involve a lot of physical activity, so they turned to video games. I just read an interview for a player that has recently found success in Counter-Strike, and his story is exactly that. "After I had a bone contusion in my ankle from playing basketball, I was pretty much disabled for a good 8 months after a week of just sitting around reading and watching TV. I wanted to find something that would entertain me. I called my good friend and neighbor shoutz because I knew he played Counter-Strike."

I gained interest in football when I was very young probably because of the success of the Dallas Cowboys in the early nineties. I told my dad I wanted to play football, and my love for competition began with the next season in the SVAA league playing flag football when I was in second grade. I loved flag football, I was good and it was fun. After three years of flag I decided I was ready for tackle football. After adjusting to the increase in violence and pain, I thought I could handle it. Although those things didn't bother me, the coaches did. The coaches decided I was not good enough for offense, so they put me at safety. I never played defense, and the coaches did not teach me how to play at all. On top of that, they felt yelling fixed everything, and that me calling them "sir" would make me a better football player. I didn't call them sir, I didn't like any of my coaches, and I hated football; something I never thought would happen. A year later my dad pointed my competitiveness to video games, and here I am today.

Why Counter-Strike?
Competition, winning, and showcasing your skills are some of the reasons you might want to play Counter-Strike. People start out playing it because it is a video game, and it's fun. Once they realize they are actually pretty good, they continue to play it. After a while they might look around to join the community the game has. Then they discover the whole world of e-Sports. People have leagues for this game? I can join a team and play a five versus five?  The desire to compete and win drive people to play Counter-Strike as competitively as they do. After all, the people that play it are just boys, they like to talk trash to their buddies telling them how much better they are than each other.

The rush begins...

Besides that though, Counter-Strike is the purest first person shooter out in the game world. It came out before all the fancy Modern Warfare games did where realism is important. Many things you see in Counter-Strike can never happen in real life, but that's what people love about it: it's a game. If you aim at a head and shoot it, it explodes. If you shoot faster than your opponent, you win. If you aim better than your opponent, you win. If you throw a flash bang that blinds your opponent and you correctly take advantage of that, you win. The guns all shoot straight unless you are waiting for the recoil from shooting to simmer down. Counter-Strike is one of the best indicators of how close one is to being the ultimate gamer.

Imagine what it feels like to win some sort of competition against people; it can be in tennis, cards, video games, running, whatever. Hey, you like winning, why not try to win as much as possible? Now imagine the feeling of winning when you practiced hard in order to keep that winning feeling going. Imagine the feeling of winning a scrimmage as a team against another team. Imagine the feeling of winning a match you had to pay an entry fee for. All of these feelings combined come close to the feeling of winning a match at an event where there are potentially thousands of people watching you. Thousands of people just watched you win a one versus four. It might be mentally and emotionally draining after the fact, but all of this winning provides an adrenaline rush, and that's what we live for, right? We live for excitement, fun, trash talk, and the celebration afterwards.

If you like video games, and you haven't tried Counter-Strike, I strongly recommend it to you. If you have never wanted to play a first person shooter game before, neither did I before I tried it. It is a video game that goes beyond the guy in the basement playing by himself; it has a massive community where people have made lasting friendships. Beware though: it is a drug. If you are a competitive person, you will not be able to stop. I haven't been able to.

Economic Value of e-Sports

E-Sports is more than a community of gamers that like to compete against other gamers; there is a lot of money floating around, and it has become a business similar to how other sports are a business. The players and organizations might benefit, but computer hardware manufacturing companies like nVidia benefit greatly as well, if not more so.

Video Games in Television and Film
Games based on television shows or movies and vice versa are a great way to milk all the money out of a franchise as possible. Tomb Raider as a video game franchise is one of the best selling video game series of all tim. The original Tomb Raider was one of the first games to be released on the PlayStation, so it is partly responsible for the console's success. Because of that popularity, the movie had an instant fan base. The appeal of a female Indiana Jones also helped with its popularity. Resident Evil is another example of this. The movie and game franchises of Resident Evil each have several installments that people have enjoyed over the years. Other than that, movies based on games have largely been a failure. Super Mario Bros. may have been a great game, but it translated to one of the worst movies ever.

The reverse is also true. There are many video games released simultaneously with movies to simply try to make as much money as possible. However, the quality of these games seems to be something the game creators forget about, as they never seem to live up to the movies. I honestly can't think of a single game based on a movie or television show that is good. All I can think about are the extremely vulgar reviews by the Angry Video Game Nerd.



No matter how bad these games or movies based on each other are, they somewhat boost the economy. The people that work on these projects, theaters that sell tickets, and game stores that sell games all benefit from these mostly bad projects. Reputations may be ruined, producers might lose money, but for the most part they keep money moving.

Hardware Manufacturers
There is no doubt there are companies that have benefited from e-Sports being as popular as it is. Companies like SteelSeries and Razer that make gamer specific mice, headphones, keyboards, and mousepads wouldn't have a market without e-Sports. They make high quality products for gamers that require the best peripherals possible.

Video card companies have also benefited, not only from advancing computer game graphics, but also gamers that want the most powerful computer as possible. Companies like nVidia and ATI have continued to manufacture video cards tailored for gamers for years. Not only do they manufacture these great pieces of hardware for gamers worldwide, they also sponsor professional video game organizations. They allow organizations to travel around the world to compete.

Tournaments
Video game tournaments like the CPL need an area large enough to hold hundreds of gamers and computers, and these areas are typically in the bottom of hotels. These tournaments make a lot of money for hotels. Not only does the tournament holder have to rent out the space, but gamers usually stay at the hotel, so the hotel gets money for rooms, food, and drinks.

The Electronic Sports Entertainment Association  is run by a few business minded people that have a passion for the advancement of e-Sports. It is now the number one place to go for competitive Counter-Strike in the United States. They charge about five dollars per month for membership, and about six dollars to play in their league per season. These guys are probably making a lot of money from running the league, but they continue to improve their league and everything they do for Counter-Strike and e-Sports in general.

References:
Weprin, Alex (2010). Syfy Expanding Video-Game Business. Broadcasting & Cable, 140(17), 23. Retrieved from Communication & Mass Media Complete database. 

Is it a Sport? - Other Sports

So far, I have only written about Counter-Strike on the video games side, and football on the physical sports side. I believe they are the best examples of their categories, but there are other comparisons to be made. There are a few games that are considered sports that are more similar to video games than you may think.

Motorsports
Auto racing, motorcycle racing, motorboat racing, air racing, just about any racing qualify as a motorsport. The ones that have become accepted as a sport are the car races like NASCAR or Formula 1. They are aired on television, and they might have a more dedicated fan base than most other sports. I have family in Wisconsin that are huge fans, and they will travel around the country just to follow the races.

But all they do is drive cars, right? In NASCAR all they do is turn left and stop in for a Gatorade once in a while. Like Counter-Strike, Quake, and StarCraft II, NASCAR is more complicated than that. These racers are not a one man team, they have a team, just like Counter-Strike. The racer does have to be a skilled driver, and he has to know how to react to weather changes and the position of his opponents. But, he does need a good pit crew for when he and his car need some Gatorade. They must be extremely efficient with everything they do: deliver fuel, change tires, a tire pressure change, or any other tiny adjustment. They must also know how their car will perform on different tracks.

The cars are plastered with company logos that sponsor them, similar to the t-shirts of e-Sports players. Just like e-Sports, many things would not be possible without sponsors in NASCAR. Teams in Counter-Strike without a sponsor typically can't afford the plane tickets to make it to an event, and teams without sponsors in NASCAR simply don't exist because it costs about twenty million dollars a year to run a NASCAR team.

The Red Bull NASCAR car
Taken by  Jeff Wackerlin
Source: http://www.jayski.com/schemes/2007/84cup.htm

An Evil Geniuses Counter-Strike player
image courtesy gointernationalgroup.com

And finally, in order to be successful in NASCAR, you need a fine tuned car. This is what they spend night and day perfecting. In e-Sports, you need a reliable computer, made of just the right parts. Without a good computer, the games might lock up at worst moment possible, and it always does. Too many times have I lost matches where someone's computer randomly restarted or overheated or their Internet went out.

Chess
Chess might not be as widely considered a sport as NASCAR is, but it is played around the world by all sorts of people. Just like e-Sports, chess is not exactly physically demanding, but it sure is mentally demanding. Chess requires strategy and the ability to see what moves to make several moves ahead. Chess pits one person against another, so it automatically has many parallels with video games. In video game design, chess comes up a lot in conversation about how game play should be, and many strategy video games use the fundamentals of chess to enhance their game.

An e-Sports example of this is StarCraft. It is almost a futuristic, better imagined, less rigid in movement chess. In both games, you strategically control your army in order to kill the other person. Almost every unit in StarCraft has something it is strong against, and something it is weak against. This is also true in chess. StarCraft players have to be able to predict what their opponent will do, and base their strategy on that prediction. If that prediction is wrong, the player has to quickly adjust and form a new strategy. This is also true in chess.

I hope my comparisons through the last three blogs have convinced you that e-Sports should be considered a sport. The players have the same competitive passion and for their respective games. They both have games people grow up playing and enjoying. And, there are already games that are considered sports that video games have a lot in common with.

References:
Withers, Mark (2010, July 14). Playing Video Games Is A Sport. Retrieved from http://www.platformnation.com/2010/07/14/playing-video-games-is-a-sport/

Jenkins, Chris (2002, June 12). Sponsors make NASCAR's wheels go 'round. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/sports/motor/nascar/2002-07-12-acov-sponsors.htm

Is it a Sport? - The Game

Those that play video games competitively and those that play sports professionally have many similarities, and in some cases they are the same people. A man named Stuart Holden was a professional Counter-Strike player until he decided to pursue a career in professional soccer. He played with the USA team that played in the World Cup this past summer. Now I will compare the play of e-Sports and sports.

Team
Most e-Sport games and sports are team games, and teams are made up of people. People have to get along with each other in order to achieve success in what they do. They require good chemistry and experience playing with each other. The team has to have a unified passion to win.

Team 3D after winning gold in the World Cyber Games.
Source: GotFrag http://www.gotfrag.com/css/story/32907/

In order to be a good team, the team needs a good leader. The head coach, offense and defensive coordinators, the quarterback for the offense and typically the middle linebacker for the defense are the leaders in football. Since there are not as many people involved in a Counter-Strike team, there is generally only one leader. There might be someone who manages the team, but that's not a leader.A Counter-Strike leader acts much like a quarterback; calling plays during matches, making team decisions in the middle of rounds, keeping people focused, motivated, and in high spirits. When the momentum is with the other team, the leader must convince his team they can turn it around.

Both e-Sports and sports have organizations that consist of more than just the players. An organization has a business side of things; handling contracts, salaries, merchandise, travel, advertising, and providing a way for fans to show their support. Organizations have to scout out new talent in order to improve over time.

It's a Game
Sports are games, just like e-Sports. Games are meant to be fun, and people that play these games enjoy them because they provide competition that requires a high level of skill. If you listen to locker rooms before football games, someone will say "let's go out there and have some fun," because after all, it is a game they started playing because it was fun. The same goes for Counter-Strike. If you are having fun, you are calm and relaxed, which gives you a better chance at playing well. My Counter-Strike team jokes a lot during matches because it keeps us in a good mood and focused on the game. Joking around might sound like it would take away focus, but it takes our mind off things going on in the match, like who the other team is. This is especially true if we're playing a team that is in a higher league than us. Some people might just give up, submitting to the better team, but if you keep the mindset that they're playing the same game as you, you can win. We beat a top team in the country in a scrimmage recently just by playing how we normally play and not trying to over-think things.

Beating a great team gave us confidence, and we went on to win both our matches this week by huge margins. This is because we practiced a lot. This brings me to my next point: both e-sports and sports require a lot of practice if a team expects to succeed. Football players practice for several hours during the week after games, and much of that practice is making sure new and old plays are executed flawlessly. This is hard to do because there are eleven guys that need to know what is going on, and if even one guy doesn't know what he is supposed to do on a given play, you end up looking like fools just like the Cowboys did in their first two games. We do the same thing in Counter-Strike. We come up with plays to run as terrorists, and they involve precise flash bangs, smoke grenades, as well as perfect timing and positioning. If one person doesn't know what they're doing it's possible the whole round can be lost. When something goes wrong you'll typically hear "well I thought you were watching that!" or "I didn't know I was supposed to throw a flash bang!" To avoid such awful mistakes, we do what football players do: dry runs, where we execute a play against no one just to get the timing down. Quarterbacks and receivers value these because the quarterback can perfectly time his pass with a receiver's route. Certain movements the receiver does when he decides he is turning somewhere will queue the quarterback to throw the ball.

These plays Counter-Strike players and football players come up with are sometimes countering what they think the other team will do, and the only way to know what the other team is going to do is to study their film. Football teams do this, and we do it in Counter-Strike. Knowing the other team's tendencies allows you to recognize things you saw in film study, and take advantage of what they do next. We saw this in the last Super Bowl, where Tracy Porer intercepts Peyton Manning. In film study he saw this play the Colts run a lot, so he recognized it and took a chance, and it paid off. We do the same thing in Counter-Strike, although not to the extent football players do.



Not only are the players in e-sports and sports quite similar, but since they both involve games people play for recreation, there are many similarities. Competition is at the heart of both, but in the end it's all about having fun and truly doing what you love. Being paid to play video games is just as much a dream for many people as being paid to play sports, even if makes thirty thousand and the other makes thirty million. In the next blog I will talk about some of the less traditional sports that have many similarities with e-Sports.

References:
Shields, Duncan (2010, May 28). Ex-CS player makes US World Cup team. Retrieved from http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/29602-ExCS_player_makes_US_World_Cup_team

 Mcleod, Brandon (2006, June 5). Counter-Strike Source: Pbmatrix's Playbook: Team 3D Source. Retrieved from http://www.gotfrag.com/css/story/32907/

Introduction

In this blog, I will explain what competitive gaming is, how it compares to sports, and why it is so important to the people involved. I will use examples from my experiences with competitive gaming to help you understand what I'm talking about.

Is it a Sport? - Players

Now that I've written about what e-sports is, the history of e-sports, and a little about one of the driving forces behind e-sports, I can talk about what classifies e-sports as a sport. I will compare and contrast e-sports with real sports, and by the end of this series of blogs you will realize how many similarities there are between the two. I will begin with the players involved in each.

People who play sports (athletes) and people who play competitive video games (e-athletes) are very similar. In fact, most people who have achieved great success in e-sports once played a real sport. I played football for four years until I decided the coaches were concentrating more on yelling at kids than teaching them how to play the game. Athletes and e-athletes are similar in that they love to win, and they hate to lose. They are afraid of losing, so they try their hardest to win. 

Fitness

A main point against these video game players being considered athletes is that they don't have to do any running around, lifting, or anything that requires peak physical fitness like real athletes. In fact, all they do is sit in front of a computer pressing a few buttons and moving a mouse around from time to time. While this is true, they do need to be in peak mental shape just like real athletes. Both need to be able to make extremely quick decisions based on what their senses. Both need to have extremely fast reflexes to put those decisions into action as quickly as possible. They need to have extremely accurate aim, whether it is throwing a football, shooting a basketball, kicking a soccer ball, aiming with weapons in Counter-Strike, or accurately clicking orders in StarCraft II. In StarCraft, people use something called Actions Per Minute to measure how good a player is, which is exactly what it sounds like: how many buttons or mouse clicks a person does in a minute. This most often translates into better play, but it is not too important to focus on when trying to get better.

Emotion

The players have to be able to control their emotions. A football player can't let a little smack talk cause him to  push somebody around after a play and cost his team fifteen yards. A Counter-Strike player can't let the same kind of smack talk get to him and make him question his skills, causing him to play differently than he is accustomed to. Communication between players is a huge part of sports and e-sports, because they are, for the most part, team games. If a player isn't performing well they might be down on themselves and not communicate as much, and that hurts the team. On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, there are the effects of adrenaline. When a football player is running with the football they have massive amounts of adrenaline flowing through them, and this causes them to run faster, make decisions quicker, be more nimble, or be stronger than they usually are capable of. These effects are seen in video games like Counter-Strike too. When a player gets a nice shot or hears several people rushing toward him, he will get excited and shoot more precisely, move his mouse around faster, pick up on visual or audio clues better than he usually does. This also causes a player to resort to their secondary weapon sooner than they should, which is when their primary gun runs out of ammo. However, since he just killed two players he feels he can take on another two with just a pistol, and he will overall play much more aggressive than usual.

There are intense moments in both real sports and e-sports. A close match coming down to the last second is moments away from one party screaming in joy, and the other sadly disappointed at the close loss. After a loss in football, teams will begin to think about those few key mistakes in the game that could have caused them to lose, like a missed field goal, or a failed fourth down conversion. Similarly, Counter-Strike has those moments. After a loss my team will usually go back and talk about what happened on certain key rounds that could have turned it in our favor, like a strategy executed poorly or someone was too impatient and left their position. One versus one situations are often another "what if" scenario, and they can have long term effects in the match.

Ego 

Athletes have massive egos. This is just as true, if not more true, with e-athletes. E-athletes have the advantage of being safe in their own home behind a computer when they talk smack. They, just like celebrities and athletes, let their fame and skill go to their head and they seem to forget about friends from their past. I barely talk to the few people I knew that are successful in e-sports anymore because I guess they feel they don't need to respond to me since they are such a greater person than I. There is a lot of smack talk that goes on between players on a football field, and there is just as much going on in the servers of Counter-Strike. They can both be equally as brutal and hurtful, but they provide for some interesting entertainment. 

Counter-Strike

Without the games these professional gamers play, e-Sports would not exist, so I'm going to take this time to talk about one of my favorite video games of all time, Counter-Strike.

How I Got Started
I got into video games with the Nintendo, Sega, Super Nintendo, and PlayStation, but once I found out about computer games I never looked back. Blizzard games were all I knew in the computer game world, and I had a lot of fun playing them. While playing StarCraft, many people would talk about this game Counter-Strike and I always wondered what it was. Why I didn't just look it up on the internet I do not know, perhaps I was too young to figure that out. A few years later, many people I played StarCraft with were starting to switch over to Counter-Strike. I was curious, so I asked one of my friends to burn me a copy of it. The first night I had the game, I played until five in the morning. This was the latest I had ever stayed up and by the time I decided it was time to sleep I realized this was the best game I had ever played, and all I was doing was running around shooting at people. That night I had the ambient noise from one of the levels in the game ringing in my head, a noise you can hear in the movie OldBoy in a scene at a LAN center. I enjoyed the game on a non competitive level for almost a year until one of my friends convinced me to play a two versus two with him. He was the one that taught me about competitive play, and once I got over the fear of not doing well in these informal matches I got the hang of it. About a year later I was ready to compete in the Cyberathlete Amateur League with a group of people I met online. The game was still extremely fun at this point, so I didn't realize I was way better than the guys I was playing with. Several teams, leagues, and years later, here I am today, still playing.

The Game
If you watched the CPL video in my last blog post, you got a glimpse of Counter-Strike, but it probably wasn't enough for you to know how it is played. I will explain how it is played from a competitive point of view, since it is much more organized and generally isn't just chaos. It is a first-person shooter for the computer. There are two teams: the counter-terrorists and the terrorists. The terrorists are trying to blow up one of two bomb sites with C4, and the counter-terrorists are trying to stop them. The terrorists have one designated bomb carrier on the team. If he falls, the bomb is dropped and another terrorist can pick it up. Once the terrorists plant the bomb, the counter-terrorists have thirty-five seconds to defuse it. If the bomb explodes, the terrorists win the round. If the counter-terrorists defuse the bomb, they win the round. Alternatively, the teams may simply eliminate everyone on the opposing team to win the round. Rounds have a time limit of one minute fourty-five seconds, and if the terrorists have not planted the bomb by then, they lose the round. After each round, everyone is respawned in their designated team spawn area, and given fifteen seconds where no one can move to purchase gear. In competitive play, matches are split into halves; each team plays one half as a terrorist, and the other half as a counter-terrorist. Halves last fifteen rounds. The first team to win sixteen rounds wins the match.

End of first half screenshot
Source: my computer

End of second half screenshot
Source: my computer

There are many weapons in Counter-Strike, but only about nine of them are actually used in competitive play. They can be split into three categories: pistols, rifles, and the sniper. There are high-explosive grenades, flashbangs, and smoke grenades. Armor and a helmet are also required as it reduces the damage you take from bullets and grenades. A helmet can keep you from being killed by one shot to the head with many lower damage weapons. Since you have to buy all of this gear, much of the game is based on the economy. Everyone starts with eight hundred dollars on what is known as the pistol round because no one can afford anything other than a pistol. On the pistol round, players can buy either grenades, a pistol, or armor. Whichever team loses the pistol round has to save up their money for the next one or two rounds in order to buy rifles. Players will often drop their teammates weapons so everyone has a weapon. Knowing when the other team is saving is very important for choosing what strategy to use for that round.

Strategies
Counter-terrorist strategies are generally not as complex as terrorist strategies. The counter-terrorists simply have to know where to wait for the terrorists in order to get the jump on them. Generally they will have two players in each bomb site, and one somewhere in the middle providing support. Terrorists have to have perfectly placed flashbangs that blind the other team for easy frags, they have to know where to place smoke grenades for safe passage. They have to work together to take down the one or two guys trying to keep them out of a given bomb site. Since sound is the key to determing where your opponent is, many players who do not want to lose the advantage of being sneaky will walk around the entire level and waste a lot of time. These players will crouch and wait for the counter-terrorists to get too aggressive, and just pick them off. On the opposite end of the spectrum, are very fast paced strategies that take advantage of different spawning positions, attacking a bomb site before the counter-terrorists can get in position. Teams use voice over IP programs like Ventrilo to call out things that are happening such as the whereabouts of the other team, or calling out where to go. Because of this, the terrorists sometimes take advantage of counter-terrorists that leave their bomb site quickly to help the other bomb site by using fakes. They will run around making a lot of noise, throwing flashbangs and smoke grenades and then run away and go to the other bomb site. Strategies can be simplified down to three categories: rush, walk, and fake. However, the timing of everything is what makes the difference.

This video shows the first person point of view of every player during one round. It might be hard to understand what's going on, but it shows how dependent they all are on each other and how perfect the timing of everything is.


Strategies can only get a team so far, however. Individual play is a huge part of the game. A player has to have great aim, great movement, know how to outsmart his opponent, be able to throw all types of grenades, and know how to handle one versus one, two, or three situations. A player has to be able to overcome unfortunate things happening to them, and not get so upset that it affects his play. A player has to get along with his teammates, and be able to play well with them. Being patient is also a large part of the game, being aggressive because nothing is happening usually ends up costing the team.

The Heart of e-Sports
Counter-Strike has driven e-Sports over the years because of its popularity and the community that has supported it. The amount of players still playing the game has decreased slightly, but according to Steam's stats, 67,406 people were playing Counter-Strike at some point today. [1] That's impressive for a game that came out almost ten years ago.

References:
Valve Corporation (2010, Sep 13). Steam & Game Stats. Retreived from http://store.steampowered.com/stats