Assembly Winter 2007 Game Festival
Professional gaming, a serious businessIn Assembly Winter 2007, social games were still presented as a pleasant distraction, on par with the toy car race and friendly soccer matches also on the program. The meat and potatoes of the event were first-person shooters and real-time strategy games though, both in the huge LAN party and in tournament events. Sanctioned by the World Cyber Games organization, it's obvious that Assembly wants to be taken seriously. Jussi "Abyss" Laakkonen, one of the two main organizers of Assembly, has lofty goals for his event. "We aim for mainstream acceptance of gaming as a sport." Laakkonen wants to build a grassroots e-sports culture in Finland with "district-level competitions in Quake". "Assembly Winter shows that there is demand for more gaming events in Finland, and that we can organize international, high-level tournaments," he continues. According to Laakkonen, the task of creating a strong e-sports culture is an involved business. Training and certification for judges and referees, getting squabbling player clans to play nice, and approving events are only some of the tasks that organizers face. Establishing a professional sport takes time, says Laakkonen: "A hundred years ago, tennis was a pastime for the upper classes, and nobody would have dreamt of making a living just swinging a tennis racket." He's counting on the process being faster for e-sports, though. "Grand Prix tournaments like the Battlefield 2142 Whoop Ass Contest are the spearhead that gets the media's and the general public's interest. In ten or twenty years, e-sports will be in the mainstream." 
Juha-Matti "Satiini" Backström took the Warcraft 3 pro-tournament win and is one of Finland's premiere professional gamers. Gracious in victory, Satiini thanked his competitors for a challenging tournament.
Where would professional sports be without their star athletes and players? Right now, star video game players are few and far between. Even though PC and console gaming is a multi-billion dollar industry, not many people are making a real living as professional gamers. The winners of the BF2142 Whoop Ass!! tournament walk away earning around $1000 each minus taxes and expenses; not a bad pay day, but in no way sustainable as a full day job. Sponsorship deals are crucial for pro gamers, but typical sponsors that pro gaming attracts are companies with vested interest in gaming: game publishers and computer hardware manufacturers. It will take a long time and large scale media coverage before pro gaming gets even close to the numbers of other sports, in terms of fan base and overall sponsorship. That is, if mass media ever gets the hint and starts looking at video gaming as a legitimate sport. Will they? Toni Manninen, a game researcher at the University of Oulu has a clear view of the matter: "Not everybody wants to watch football. New sporting events create new stars, who attract fans to the sport. With computer games, we can create spectator sports that you can't even imagine today." In 2001, Manninen asked Intervision TV executives when they would start broadcasting live Counter-Strike matches, and the execs laughed in his face. Manninen still believes e-sports are going to break through to mainstream media sooner or later. Other experts are a little more careful in their predictions. "As the number of gamers increases, there is inevitably more living space for specialized groups," says Elina Koivisto, a researcher and game designer at Nokia Research Center. This is a different take on cyber gaming: the potential audience of a sport gaming event consists of people who actively play the same title, or at least games from the same genre. This would seriously limit the fan base of e-sports; how many couch potatoes actually play the sports they watch on TV? 
A different kind of pro: Erno "TTR FinPro" Kuronen played the heel, ignoring the crowd and disrespecting his opponents after his dominating Project Gotham Racing 3 tournament victory.
Professional gaming gives fun a serious face. To survive, you need to put in a long-term effort, stay loyal to your team mates and sponsors, and work hard not just to hone your team's and your individual skills, but to act as a spokesman for e-sports culture in its infancy. Social gaming, in contrast, is all about light entertainment, new interfaces and (in some cases) self-expression and physical exercise - bridging the gap between gaming and everyday life. Will social games attract more people to gaming, and create exposure for the canonized genres of pro gaming? Or will they eventually change e-sports, marginalizing the less audience-friendly FPS and RTS games?
Related StuffTags |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Reviews: 
