Sports?

               After the large discussion sparked in class last week, I decided I would create my blog post this week with a focus on eSports and the effect video games have had on competition in various regions. Competition in video games has always existed as an alternate purpose for video games besides entertainment; from the early days of high scores on arcade gaming machines, to the heyday of Counterstrike and the current crop of competitive games such as Starcraft 2 and League of Legends.

               Competition in the realm of video games started at the average arcade, where high scores were the true test of skill (besides perhaps the 1v1 fighting games like Streetfighter and Mortal Kombat), and were a precursor to competition in the future. The era of the first computer games and early consoles came next, which is where the important starting point of eSports came about. The first huge game to start competitive eSports as a competition was also the first serious and somewhat criticized game, Doom. As a first-person shooter about demons and monsters and violence, there was a lot of criticisms launched toward the Id Software game. Multiplayer using dial-up was a feature of the game, and team deathmatch (involving two teams where the first to a set amount of kills wins) and capture the flag were prominent game types.

               The two major genres for competitive gaming became the team-based FPS (such as Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament and Counterstrike) as well as the real time strategy genre (such as Starcraft and Age of Empires II). The team-based FPS games still to this day follow a similar model as the earliest days, with the majority of FPS game competitions based on team deathmatch with some capture the flag depending on the tournament or game. The current crop of games for FPS players tend to be Call of Duty and Halo, which offers the difference between a realistic game and a sci-fi game depending on the player’s taste. Starcraft became a huge force in the eSports world and would only be dethroned today by the ever expanding League of Legends style game.

               Starcraft was a huge force in the all the way up until the release of the second part of the sequel. Starcraft competitions took place in many places across the world, with a huge focus in Korea. Due to rampant ease of piracy, South Korea had a large amount of Starcraft players, and it soon became both accepted and common to play Starcraft. As more and more tournaments were created, teams started forming (Starcraft is a 1v1 dueling Real Time Strategy game) in order for players to receive money from sponsors to attend tournaments and even receive a consistent salary and personal coach. Unlike the rest of the world, Starcraft became the “big thing;” players would train 16 hours a day, working on mechanics and strategy and compete in tournaments sponsored by the Korean Esports Association (KESPA) who had a channel dedicated to 24/7 tournament streaming. It became acceptable to eat dinner and then watch Starcraft on television with family akin to sports gathering here in America. The South Korean players largely outplayed the rest of the world, having an average actions per minute of 300-400 (actions per minute are numbers of key strokes and mouse actions) and a large advantage in strategy due to their training regimen. At the major international tournaments for Starcraft, the players were usually defined as either Korean or foreigners (i.e. anywhere not South Korea) and almost every tournament had the majority of the top 8 players hailing from South Korea.

               Starcraft is still a dominant force, with a large portion of South Korea split between Starcraft and Starcraft 2. There is a lot more money in Starcraft 2 for the “average” pro players, but the absolute masters of the original Starcraft players up until recently still made more money playing the old version of the game due to their obscene skill level. Starcraft 2 has had a lot closer gap between skill levels of Koreans and foreigners, but there is still a difference between the two that can still be attributed to the difference in training and the use of training houses in South Korea (which is an idea that has been gaining traction in Europe and North America lately). The game that has dethroned Starcraft in the past year or so, though, has been League of Legends; with more prize support, more players (over 5 million, with 1.3 billion hours logged) and more viewers, this MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) has become the largest game in all of esports. Currently, the world championship for League is occurring, and so far the teams from many different places (America, Europe, China, Korea, and even the Philippines) are more evenly matched than first thought. Indeed, such a tournament led the United States to recognize League of Legends as a sport so that international teams could get their visas to attend the tournament in Los Angeles for the weeks that it takes place.

               Overall, the history of eSports is fascinating to long-time gamers like myself, and the influence of eSports is growing daily. I would not be surprised to start seeing a game of Starcraft or League of Legends next to a football game at a sports bar, or for private parties on weekends where everyone crowds around to watch their favorite players duke it out in a game of League as opposed to a game of hockey. There are already a few “barcades” in America where drinking and watching eSports occurs, and I feel like this will only become more normal in the future.