So, um, I wanted to write something today, before realising I couldn’t think of anything. So I found this e-sports piece I did for an application to EDGE many moons ago, before the laziness. I hope you like it.
A flick of the wrist, a speeding projectile, everything’s over. The crowd cheers or jeers; high fives or patted shoulders are exchanged accordingly. One individual, his pinpoint accuracy and lightning reactions the savior of the day, is the hero for his team.
Seven thousand miles away two people engage in a high-stakes strategic game. Each has his plan and knows a million or more ways to counter, predict and outplay his opponent. Each has a shot at the hundreds of thousands of pounds and worldwide fame that comes with being the best of the best. Each knows only one unsmiling, polite face will be the victor.
And, alone in his room, a British man sits. He is waiting. Waiting. With a minute movement, disappointment and rage spreads through another man; many kilometres of fibre-optic wire away. A further flurry and a grin expands on the first man’s face. “Damn I’m good”
This is e-sports.
Whether it’s a 5 on 5 Quake tournament in front of the developers themselves; the landslide of sound and light that is the Korean StarCraft scene or just some kid in his room, getting those perfect AK shots in Counter-Strike; it’s an amazing piece of gaming culture. It’s expanded beyond what anyone may have thought possible and resulted in some of the best gaming experiences of this decade. Let’s look at where we’ve come from and where we’re going.
Gaming has always been competitive. Since the earliest days of Pong, Pacman and electronic pinball there have been pairings trying to get the higher score, the next level, the longer time played. There are definitive titles – Street Fighter and its various sequels being the early fighter that grabbed the attention of players, producing “that moment” (http://bit.ly/IjMt) starring Daigo where one now-famous player managed to come back from almost-certain defeat to fully parry a flood of attacks and execute his own super maneuvre. A rare moment where the flashy effects of a game perfectly fit into the play used by professionals.
StarCraft must claim the RTS top-spot of course, but it is harder to choose a perfect moment from a game that sees less attention outside of the utterly non-english South Korean play. It takes an awful lot more game knowledge to understand the beauty of a perfectly executed game of StarCraft too, and obviously its nature as an RTS makes highlights a longer affair. However, I must recommend Epic Moments of StarCraft by MooN (http://bit.ly/UxMfm), showcasing some of the most amazing plays ever.
The FPS is a strange genre when it comes to competitive gaming. It is split into the team games such as Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source or Team Fortress 2 and the one-on-one arena games such as Quake Live and Unreal Tournament. However, finding examples of brilliance in any is easy – there are new frag videos created every day. Which leads us to the inspiration for this article: the amazing work that comes out of it.
There is a Counter Strike: Source video called “Incorporated 2″ (http://bit.ly/gCIgt). This video is full of impressive frags, at least half and probably more of which are by players who are using wall or aim-hacks. Once this was pointed out to me, I enjoyed the video as much as I did when I thought it was simply a display of some of the most skillful players around. Why? Because this is a video where weapons fire is [i]synced up with the drum beats in the song playing in the background[/i]. It is the kind of video where every single scene has been specifically selected or crafted to fit into the rest. Without e-sports, gaming would not experience that level of inspired design outside of cinematic teams.
The communities that form and allow this to happen are some of the best there are. Elitist and utterly horrible large portions may be, but their devotion to figuring out and mastering their favourite games is a site to behold. All of the games mentioned here have countless fansites, wikis and guides devoted to them; hyper-analysing every tiny mechanic until it can be categorised and exploited or ignored. The number of frames in a Street Fighter animation; the meanings of exact building placements in early-game StarCraft or the Counter-Strike map area naming conventions – to someone, they’re all relevant.
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Yay! You reached the end. Well done. Hopefully I’m going to be writing more soon, please leave a comment. Sorry for the captcha, but there were 20,000 spam comments on here before I deleted all of them (leaving some weird artifacts) and I don’t wanna do it again.
Also thanks to Quintin Smith (aka Quinns aka The Quinninator) for writing this piece over at RPS reminding me why I like writing about e-sports (and thus causing me to find this).