Screams come from the crowd, players hold their head in their hands as the challenger reluctantly picks up his … GameCube controller?
Strange though it might seem, high-level video game competitions, called “eSports,” are on the rise and have the potential to become as widely accepted as traditional sports.
The numbers look good so far. Information analytics firm IHS Technology reports people watched 2.4 billion hours of eSports online and on TV in 2013, and it’s expected to more than double by 2018. It estimates the video market for eSports will be worth $300 million annually by that year.
eSports is still a fly on the wall when compared to traditional sports like football and soccer, though. ESPN was valued at over $50 billion last year, and unlike the oil market, sports entertainment is booming. It doesn’t help that ESPN president John Skipper compared eSports to checkers and said he’s “mostly interested in doing real sports.”
If eSports is ever going to become a “real sport,” the scene will have to model itself after South Korea. There, fans regularly fill stadiums to watch the top Starcraft players go head-to-head in matches that are as entertaining and unpredictable as football.
Things are moving along for the fledgling communities. Last week was Apex 2015, the largest Super Smash Bros.
tournament in history. More than 1,000 entrants showed up to play Super Smash Bros. Melee and around 100,000 people tuned in at 3 a.m. to watch the grand finals.
Smash Bros. can’t compete with the big players in eSports, though, with games like League of Legends and DotA 2 reaching tens of millions of people. Last year these games had multiple million-dollar prize pools, with 32 million people tuning in for the championship events.
Those numbers have to start somewhere. To see what all the fuss was about, I went to see what a grassroots video game tournament looks like.
The smell of Chick-fil-A and determination was in the air Saturday afternoon in the Atchafalaya Room of the Student Union for Smash Club at LSU’s monthly tournament. Gamers of all stripes and smells packed the room, where old-school CRT TVs sat alongside HD displays. The tournament pitted seasoned veterans against newcomers across four different Smash Bros. games.
Despite the level of success gaming tournaments have generated, I don’t see eSports getting to the level of traditional sports anytime soon. The real roadblock to video games becoming a competitive, watchable event lies in the relative lack of mass appeal.
Physical sports have their roots in the Olympic Games and other really old traditions. They’ve been in our culture for so long, it would be unfair to expect something like video games to catch on so quickly.
The next problem is understandability. If I turn on March Madness and see some skyscraper of a human being dunk a ball into a hoop, I understand it pretty easily. He scored points and the other team will beat his team if it can score more points by the end of the game.
This is not always the case for eSports, where a much larger part of the fanbase actively plays the games they watch andwhose intricacies they understand.
Try explaining the nuances of a 3 teleport roving gank squad composition in League of Legends to somebody who still can’t figure out how to send an email, and you’ll quickly see my point.
Another problem is more apparent at the events themselves. There was a distinct lack of female representation at the Smash Bros. tourney. I’m not going to get into the myriad of societal factors that subtly influence women to dislike video games, but let’s just say the only girls I saw were taking pictures of the event.
Traditional sports at least make an attempt to market themselves towards women. Did you really think Katy Perry was dancing awkwardly with people in shark costumes at the Super Bowl to attract male viewers?
The fighting games community in particular, which plays arcade-style games like Soul Calibur and Street Fighter, has a bad reputation when it comes to gender equality. Prominent female members of the community regularly speak out against the harassment they field everywhere they turn. Women are regularly called out for not being a “true gamer,” and that they’re only in it for the attention.
While I saw none of the misogyny exhibited Saturday at the tournament, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed. eSports will only overcome the social stigma of a bunch of sweaty nerds gathering to beat each other up on a TV screen if the participants can be good sportsmen and make their communities accessible to all kinds of people.
James Richards is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from New Orleans. You can follow him on Twitter @JayEllRichy.