TIL: eSports Popularity

There are many barriers in getting eSports, or competitive gaming, or whatever label you want to stick on it, to mass market appeal. I think the first one that needs to be addressed is making it easier for viewers to understand what is happening in the games.

For over a hundred years now, the rules of stick and ball sports have been ingrained into our psyche. Almost everyone knows about the pitcher and catcher and batter, an alley-oop, a touchdown pass, or they've heard of the term snapshot. None of the terms that commentators describe in an eSport match are recognizable to move causal viewers. Check out this World Cup match around the 5 minute mark,

How much of that do you think a casual viewer would have followed the first time?

The two grandfathers of the sport, Starcraft II and Counter Strike, are two different genres of games, with totally different play styles. Someone who just stumbles across one of them probably won’t be able to understand what’s happening in the game right off the bat.

I myself have spent a few hours just trying to understand what's happening in League of Legends, and I can still only follow part of the action. The hosts of the podcast Rally Point made a suggestion on one of their episodes that Twitch should have secondary streaming channels that provide an outsiders insight into what's happening in the game. For someone new to the game, trying to figure out what an Ultimate is and how fast it's charging, while trying to figure out which character we're now following is a daunting task. It's hard to know what's happening on screen when there is SO MUCH happening on screen.

In contrast, a football game starts with a group of men staring at each other on either side of an imaginary and slightly arbitrary line in the field, and then someone says "go" and they run at each other. Sure plays happen on a micro level and even in football the camera operators miss things, but decades of filming the sport have given us a pretty good ability to follow the important action.

In Overwatch, Blizzard's record breaking foray into eSports, has so much going on at the same time, we just haven't figured out how to broadcast the game successfully. We've only started to get instant replay functionality, and that's still hard to perfect because there just aren't enough cameras in a match. Still, in the semi-final match between Sweden and Spain, the very last round, went as long as it possibly could, with one team coming back from a 0-99 deficit and winning in overtime. Anyone could have tuned in to watch that and would have understood how exciting it was.

Some viewers might have missed the reason the "ulties" were being called and which teams characters were getting eliminated and having to run back into the battle. (On a side note, why do we have to use the term "ulties"?)

With all of the roadblocks and challenges the industry is facing, this is still probably the biggest challenge that has to be overcome. Duncan “Thoorin” Shields, and many other eSports analysts have commented on better ways to handle this and more accessible methods for getting casual fans, or viewers who aren't even fans, into the games.

Like I said, I had no idea how some games were played until recently. And games that I swore I'd never watch other people play are some of my favorite competitions to watch now. It's not that people unfamiliar with the games can't get invested in watching or following the games, we just have to help bring them in to the fold.

So, my two suggestions for helping attract new viewers and help keep them, is exactly the same as many other professionals in the industry. And that's because there are only a handful of ways we can start to fix this:

1. Better ways of communicating what is happening in the games.
2. Better ways of showing what's happening in the games.

Not everyone will start to enjoy it, not everyone will enjoy the same sports; just like baseball has its die hard fans and football has its die hard fans and never the twixt shall meet. But we can't let other people in if we don't respectfully lead them in.

As for the other barriers to eSports gaining main street popularity, those will be discussed in future articles. It's a complicated and multi-faceted challenge that lies ahead, but it's not an insurmountable one.