The Viability of E-Sports: Part I

During the rise of video gaming in the late 1990s, a strange phenomenon began to occur. Certain games that placed a heightened sense of importance on both strategy and human reflex began to emerge at the forefront of "competitive" gaming. These games were played in LAN settings - short for Local Area Network - where gamers could hook up a multitude of computers together in order to participate in the same game while operating on different screens (done so opponents could not see what they were doing). Certain gamers began to develop into celebrities within their respective scenes, but they went largely unnoticed by anyone not directly and very intensely involved with that specific game.

Then games that used entirely separate servers were developed, gamers could play against opponents miles or even oceans away, and the gaming world changed forever.

It was decidedly less cataclysmic than this, but the metaphorical effect was just as large.

Games like Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Halo became early contenders in the race to the biggest online game. Slowly, the players began to be referred to as "athletes", mostly because of the dexterity and mental discipline required to hone the skills required to be good as these games. Although North America had a slowly burgeoning scene, the same could not be said for China and South Korea. Here, E-Sports took shape much quicker, and on a scale that nobody would have predicted.

This is the crowd to watch the finals of a tournament in Starcraft: Brood War, a game that was soon considered South Korea's national sport. This is one of my favourite facts ever.

While Starcraft became an incredible success in South Korea, Warcraft 3 became just as popular in China. Here, these two games were analyzed with a precision that rivaled the kind of focus it takes to make a scientific breakthrough. Strategies were created, refined, and then countered. Players rose and fell swiftly, first those with good mechanics (essentially flawless play), then those with great in-game knowledge (the ability to make decisions on the fly and adapt), and then finally those who combined both of those into something dominant. Around 2001, Starcraft had its first hero. Lim Yo-Hwan, better known as BoxeR to his fans, became the undisputed best Starcraft player in the world, dominating tournaments and earning the nickname "The Emperor" in Korea.

This guy is in a long-term relationship with South Korea's most popular supermodel and has earned over $500,000 during his ten year career. He did it by playing video games. You can see why he's a bit of a hero to some gamers.

Although BoxeR was the first, soon there would be others. iloveoov, NaDa, saviOr, and then later Jaedong and Flash...all of these gamers would go on to become heroes in their home country and be signed to six-figure salaries to play for various gaming teams. Over in China, players like Moon became Warcraft 3 legends. E-Sports was officially viable, but the market was still very restricted. In North America and Europe, these games were also popular, but had nowhere near the same following and lacked in strategic development of the players. Although Quake garnered a rather large European following, it paled in comparison to what was happening in the Asian countries. That was until the introduction of the foreigner; a term originally used derogatorily but now used simply because it makes sense in the context of games like Starcraft and Warcraft. A foreigner was simply someone who wasn't from South Korea. That is how dominant the country was in these games; in the top tournaments, it was so rare to see someone who wasn't from South Korea or China competing that they were immediately labelled foreigner for their novelty, as well as their inevitable early exit at the hands of the superior country.

That was until players like Grubby and Day[9] came along. 

Tune in next week to see the second part of this article, where I trace the remaining history behind e-sports and delve into its current status and the questions that arise from it.

Violence in Video Games, Scapegoating, and Accountability

With the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto V, slated to hit shelves on September 17, 2013, it was inevitable that people from all walks of life would notice. Few games have been as successful and polarizing as the GTA series, which deals with pretty much every mature theme you can think of. Gameplay elements range from mass shooting sprees to quiet, introspective drives along the beachfront before picking up a prostitute to shake your (potentially stolen) car back and forth a few times. Whether these elements are done tastefully is a debate for another time, although I will say that The Ballad of Gay Tony was perhaps the best expansion to a console game I've ever played and one of the few that really made me feel like I got my money's worth.

I wasn't kidding about the title.

The notoriety of the series has reached such a peak that you can almost feel news outlets growing anxious in anticipation for the newest installment's release. After all, it seems that almost every time youth violence is reported nationwide it is with the explicit intent to scandalize video games and other forms of entertainment. Never mind the fact that the games have a rating of "M" for Mature, which means it would be completely illegal for a child under the age of adulthood to purchase it, meaning the parents of the child had to consent; beyond that debate, there seems to be an underlying acceptance that violence in video games is a legitimate means of scapegoating.

I don't see anyone blaming this for youth violence.

The violence in video games debate seems to work two ways: one, an important and widely-read media outlet asserts a connection between avid game-playing in a youth and a violent action that particular youth has taken recently. Two, alternative media outlets, including gaming websites and blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq, offer up studies that suggest the contrary. Usually these studies are accompanied by an authority figure that indicates the news story in question really didn't have that much to do with video games anyways. After this, the debate seems to just...stagnate. 

I understand that for this generation, timely news stories are even more important than they have ever been before. To dwell on a subject that is no longer a hot topic, or interesting to a specific section of the target audience, is to lose potentially thousands of pageviews and word-of-mouth advertising. However, it's curious that the news networks that report on these perceived links between violence and video games are never held accountable for errant reporting when an article, or multiple articles, surface that contradict or downright disprove the media outlet's original stance. If a news network erroneously reported that a Florida man ran screaming into the night about alien abductions while wearing a trash can on his head, when in fact he was wearing tin foil so the radio waves wouldn't get him, it would be fair to expect a correction. Sometimes, even an apology is warranted, like in the case of The Essex Chronicle, which ran an article dealing with a drug dealer's arrest using a picture of an entirely different person.

So why is the media not held accountable for their misconceptions about video game violence? Because that violence serves a purpose in media coverage that is a difficult niche to fill. It offers an easy go-to explanation about youth violence that avoids the bigger questions, like potential flaws in the way parents go about raising their children, or imperfections in society that would require serious work to fix. Mass media reporting isn't about exploring the darkest corners of the stories they're reporting, not when it touches on elements that make people uneasy. It is simple to point at the case of the 8 year old boy shooting his caretaker and say, "surely he did this because of his exposure to violence in his free time, something we could not have controlled". It is far harder to examine the case and state "perhaps his access to firearms in the presence of an elderly woman is troubling, or perhaps him needing a caretaker in the first place means he is neglected by his parents whether intentionally or unintentionally".

As uncomfortable as the topic seems to make people, violence in video games is a scapegoat to avoid further levels of discomfort. Until that changes, we'd better get used to the same cycle: mass controversy over a popular violent video game, backlash from the gamer community, and then silence until the next one.