The audience matters
Let me introduce myself. I’m a spectator. In the competitive gaming scene, that’s almost like saying I’m a zebra without stripes. My virtual hands have never brandished an AWP and I haven’t gotten past the StarCraft 2 practice league. On top of that, I am… ahem… let’s just say “well over” the age of the average fan: the last FIFA game I played had a Blur song as part of the soundtrack. Seriously. Imagine that. A rare species.
Why this coming out of the closet? Well, to claim the rights of the most ignored, mistreated and disregarded people in this small, family-like industry called e-sports: the audience.
At the World Cyber Games in 2008
I’ve attended numerous national and international tournaments - some as large as the ESWC, the WCG in Cologne or the Intel Extreme Masters in Hannover. Despite the fact that there are differences between the major world competitions and the modest local or national tournaments, all of them are characterised on the whole by showing that they couldn’t care less about the audience. By way of illustration rather than completeness, I have prepared a list of what I usually find when I go to one of these tournaments.
Misinformation, delays and timetable changes
A classic. These usually go hand-in-hand and cause a devastating effect: the audience doesn’t know which competitors are playing, nor when they are playing. They cannot follow the course of the competition at all and so they cannot get involved and can definitely not enjoy themselves. Seeing isolated matches can be quite good. It can even be incredible sometimes. But that truly epic, dramatic tone can only be created within a well-structured tournament.
The delay issue merits another remark: players can make the sacrifice of enduring a wait of one or two hours or more until the match starts because (we assume) they are playing for something important. But subjecting a member of the audience to the same delay is an outrage.
Tournaments lacking suitable areas for the spectators
No screens, no seats… not even a fence to lean on. The lack of adequate spectator areas is not just a nuisance for the spectators, it ends up bothering the players, too. Surely we have all been at some tournament where the audience is right behind the players, with no physical separation between them, breathing down their necks.
MLG Raleigh's spectator area. Photo source: MLG
Inhospitable LANs
LAN parties are quite unfriendly to spectators who come to watch the tournaments underway: from LANs which do not let outside spectators in to those who throw them out just before the final because visiting hours are over. Furthermore, whoever thinks that e-sports and LAN audiences are the same... think again! I’ve seen some of the best existing Counter-Strike teams (Fnatic, Na’Vi and Frag eXecutors) become the object of mockery or be ignored by the 4,000 people in attendance at one of the biggest LAN parties in the world.
Inept commentators
It’s better to have no presenter than a bad one. A bad commentary can completely destroy a tournament. The most shameful example that I can remember is the last two FIFA Interactive World Cup Grand Finals. The presenters were more suited to a High School Musical production than to a sports event. They knew nothing about competitive gaming or even the game itself. Comments such as “Manchester scores against Manchester”, “Messi steals the ball from Messi” or “45 virtual minutes” turned a world competition into a joke.
E-sports needs more DJWheats and Day[9]s. Photo source: Josh Suth
Thank the lord...
...things have improved substantially for us spectators in the online arena (there are more streams and the quality is increasing), but this is not enough. The world of e-sports has the possibility of becoming something bigger - much bigger. The video game fanbase is growing. Thanks to online console services, social network games and MMOs, never have so many people been playing so much. The potential is there, but it's not being exploited.
The fact of the matter is that in the 21st century, there is no professional sport without spectators. And without professional sport, there is no sport at all, just a mere hobby for us nerds . But competitions are expensive to organise, clubs are expensive to run and the player community in itself will never be big enough to support it all. Expanding the circle is necessary.
It’s true that the path is littered with traps. On the one hand, striking a balance between spectacle and authenticity is taking a risk of not pleasing anyone (think Championship Gaming Series [CGS]). On the other, audience-building is a very complex task. It involves long term planning, offering things which will not be profitable to begin with, with no guarantee on the result. But it is the only way and nothing is achieved from offering nothing - or worse, from offering something bad.
There are those who doubt that a person who is not a competitive gamer could actually like e-sports. Fifteen years ago, there were practically no Formula 1 fans in Spain. In the interim, money and effort has been put in to making it interesting for the spectator and they have managed to make it the most followed sports show after football. I bet my salary that if people are able to get carried away with something as intrinsically boring as F1, then they can certainly do it with Halo or StarCraft. Or maybe that's just me being a fanboy.
Sergi "Sir_G" Mesonero
