My lofty aspirations as a child amounted to getting paid to play video games. I didn’t want to be a policeman or firefighter, 12-year-old me wanted to be: Jung Jong Hyun. This ungodly being has returned to us from the future to foreshadow what is to become of sporting. Jung dominates one of the only sports where you make up your own nickname: Starcraft II. Jung will henceforth be referred to as his handle MVP.
"This is my index finger"
Let me tell you a bit about Starcraft. It is the most popular competitive videogame on Earth. At the center of this popularity is the nation of South Korea, where matches are broadcast on live TV, streamed over the internet, casted by nerds professionals and viewed through the spectacles of millions. The life of a young Korean prospect is lived entirely in training. Promising young gamers under the age of twenty (reaction times deteriorate as you age) are sequestered in a team house where they spend over twelve hours a day bathed in the cold glow of their computer screens.
Do not let your luddite bias skew the fact that these advanced beings are the real deal. Starcraft pro-gaming in South Korea[1] is backed by mega-corporations like Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Blizzard, Intel, and any other technology company you can think of. At the top of the heap is MVP, whose tournament earnings alone net upwards of $250k, not to mention sponsorships. This puts him a few bags of money above most UFC fighters, and he doesn’t have to get punched in the face for a living. His only worries are aging and carpal tunnel syndrome.
MVP is a fitting name for the winningest eSportsmen of 2011. Short of mass human extinction, this is the future of sporting.
- the US and Europe aren’t far behind [↩]
Interesting, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head re: the problem with E-Sports. To the utisoder, the rules of football (kudos for the correct usage, btw) is very apparent kick the ball in the net. But if you came across a game of GvG on the telly it wouldn’t be quite so simple. Obviously both games have nuances. You wouldn’t expect this observer to immediately understand the offside rule or the situations which would merit an indirect free kick. But they could grasp the jist and the tools would make sense (the ball, free kicks and corners etc). With E-Sports more often than not the games have so many things going on at once that to an utisoder it must seem like such a mess (hundreds of skills, many professions, classes, attributes, weapons and armour and thats just MMOs).If an E-Sport is ever going to be successful it must have timeless and simple mechanics which are at once simple to grasp, but intricate enough to be entertaining in the long term. For example: imagine some kind of PvP based upon Portal. It’s an incredibly simple concept, but has the potential for such skill. I’d watch that!