Hey Lek! How are you? You guys did a great job with the ET Tournament at QuakeCon in Dallas!
Your points above… the error people make when comparing computer and video gaming to sport, is that they generally compare it to one sport alone. The analogy of a constantly changing football field, basketball court or hockey ring makes a compelling sounding argument, providing you are happy to equate all online multiplayer gaming to a single sport (say Basketball) and consider the playingsurface to be the important part.
There are dozens of televised sports though - all with varying popularity - and all played on different pitches, courts, fields etc. This is why there is space for dozens of multiplayer games; from the simpler game-play of CS to the more in depth-tactics of ET.
Regardless of which sport you are a fan of though, arguably the reason the pitch within one sport doesn’t change is because of the logistics involved. It’s just not something they can reasonably do. Take a game like Billiards though, and it has morphed in to many different games because the table can change - and one of them (Snooker) became incredibly popular. Pool (its simple cousin) is played in bars everywhere. Tennis is another good example of a game where the surface changes.
The biggest question of course is whether spectators will watch. With televised sport, the majority of people watching do not play the sport themselves, yet understand the rules with great clarity. This is due to professional commentary; also a growing area of multiplayer tournament play - recently highlighted by the Shoutcast guys flying over from the US to commentate the 4Kings/Armateam match.
Right now (in the UK at least) we are still plagued by TV Producers that believe gaming needs to be dumbed down to make it palatable to audiences at large - injecting ‘comedy’ and ‘attitude’ in to live-audience video gaming review shows with MTV-style presenters; uncomfortable presenting anything that isn’t actual real people in the studio, playing against real other people with camera close-ups of that facial expression that only us gamers seem to pull off with embarrassing regularity :).
The solution remains to get online multiplayer gaming televised regularly with professional commentary and then reported on in the mainstream press. This is probably the only way to separate the hardcore online tournament community from the ‘interactive entertainment’ side of video gaming.
You and I can see the difference between clans playing ET and kids playing Finding Nemo on an XBox, but sadly my Mum still can’t :banghead:
