Lunchtime Discussion: Professional Gaming

This weekend I watched that FA Cup football thingy. Chelsea seem to have won the cup, against my wishes. Largely I wanted Portsmouth to win just to annoy djhsecondnature, it’s all part of being a friend you know? But all of this competing and a brief argument about footballers being paid far too much money got me thinking about professional gaming competitions. Sure there are a few organisations, but in the Western world competitive gaming certainly isn’t big business.

So why not? The act of playing games is certainly huge business. The industry is worth billions of dollars, has hundreds of companies involved in it and millions of people pick up new releases each and every week, playing online time and time again. I will admit that this is focused on more affluent countries, it’s not like football where pretty much anyone, anywhere can play, but there are certainly enough people around for competing to be much bigger business than it is now.

A part of it is the way that gaming is marginalised by the media in general. We gamers are still often portrayed as fat, unfit, unsociable slobs. For some of us, me included, that’s certainly true to some extent. But it’s by no means representative of the culture at all, we’re a mix of people, just like that fans of anything. There’s no easy way to portray us as a group, in the same way that there’s no real way to portray football or movie fans as one group. Whilst we’re still portrayed as weirdos on the fringes of society gaming is never going to get any exposure as any kind of competitive ‘sport’ with a professional elite.

Of course all of this only applies to the Western world for the most part. There’s a bit more exposure in the United States, but if you want to look at professional gaming you really need to go South Korea where entire TV networks are dedicated to it. It is very, very big business over there, although it’s geared more towards RTS games. I imagine if gaming competitions and professional gaming became big in Europe it would focus more on the two shooter genres, which seem to be the dominant forms of gaming here right now. To be honest RTSs are probably much better for broadcasting and commenting on, you can do a lot more with the camera and get a lot more of the game’s context than from the camera in a shooter, so maybe that’s holding us back somewhat.

If competitive gaming became more popular in our end of the world would you watch it? Would you take part in tournaments and even consider going pro? We all know gaming requires talent to be really good, and some form of ‘training’ is needed if you want to really master a game’s multiplayer, but is it really competitive enough to have pro and amateur ranks?