What makes a good eSport title?

Electronic Sports (eSport) is a growing field in the games industry. Here players practice one title extensively to compete on international levels against the best. During the 2008 olympics in China an eSport tournament was even hosted, losely connected to the olympics themselves [1].

Asia and especially South Korea eSport athletes (if you want to call them that) are celebrated as national champions, heroes and stars. They get contracts by sponsors which pay them monthly just to practice and play tournaments. These payments have exceeded the amount necessary to have a decent live a long time ago. This is no wonder considering price moneys such as ten million dollars for "The International" [2], a Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2) (Valve Corporation, 2013) tournament hosted in Seattle in 2014. So what makes a good eSport title and why are some games more succesfull than others? These are the questions I want to take a look at in this post. Without giving a complete in-depth analysis, I just want to shed some light on the aspects of the games which, in my opinion, make a video game so compelling and qualifies it for being considered a sport.

     Balance. One of the most important aspects of good eSport titles is the balance of the game. This might sounds trivial on the first look, and somehow it is. But thinking about past eSport titles the one thing that kept them on the top of the tournaments was their perfect balance. The balance in games like Starcraft: Brood War (SCBW) (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998) or Counter Strike (CS) (Valve Corporation, 1999-2014) was perfected to a point that these served as a measurement for newer titles. SCBW was considered an eSport title for over ten years until its successor Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty (Blizzard Entertainment) was released in 2012. But still, even in those, considered perfectly balanced, games people developed strategies which gave one side of the competition an advantage. This is due to the fact that winning those matches becomes so important that people start discussing strategies online, which leads us to the next important aspect of an eSport title.

     Metagame can be defined in many different ways (one example would be Carter et al. (2012)). For the matter of this post we just have to see metagame as the discussion of strategies and the creation of new ones outside of the game. Here "strategies" would not only mean actual war-like strategies such as "how to engage your enemy", but also things like "with what character should I buy what items in which situation?". The information resulting from metagame discussions are insanely detailed and very sophisticated in-depth analyses of specific games. In CS for example it was common knowledge at what time players of the opposing team would be able to be at what spot of the map. This, combined with the knowledge of walls in the map which can actually be shot through, lead to the ability of killing players without seeing them. In the Starcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998-2014) series equally well known information include what type of unit the enemy will build if he is mining one or two gas ressources at a specific time in the game.

   The most interesting part about the metagame though is not how detailed the information themselves are, but the fact that no matter how good a strategy is, there is always someone who can invent a counter tactic. Still, sometimes it comes to the situation that too many players think a specific action, item or map is either "op" (overpowered) or "imba" (imbalanced). This leads to the developers actually changing the game code through patches because of metagame discussions of the players themselves.

      Through these discussion every situation in a game can (theoretically) be solved by what I want to call for now the Rock, Scissor, Paper Mechanic. By this I mean that for every strategy there is a counter strategy, for every move a counter-move and by knowing this (and the metagame) the players know exactly what the other person is going to do. This means that in the end eSport comes down to the perfect execution of a tactic or a game of bluffing, where the person wins you is able to deceive their enemy. How exactly players develop strategies during a match of Starcraft was subject of an article of Simon Dor (2014) in which he analyses from a psychological point of view the heuristic processes happening in the players' minds.

    Additional to these three aspects a video game needs to fullfill one more condition to be a succesfull eSport title: The possibility for Spectatorship. Every sport and therefore also eSport would be nothing without the audience. Those are the people paying to watch games, which in the end also leads to the players being able to be payed. Even though the system is a bit different in eSports (up until now the players get payed by sponsores, who themselves try to get the audience to buy their articles. In established sports sponsorship is not as important as players pay the clubs directly, for example in their stadiums or through merchandise), it is still the audience who keeps up the industry and clubs behind the sport. Important for the condition of spectatorship is that a game is designed in a way that makes it possible for the audience to watch. In videogames this is more complicated than in normal sports such as soccer or american football. Because in videogames there are a lot of things happening at the same time on different places of the game. To compensate this is the job of shoutcasters in eSport who work as a medium between the actual match and the audience. They filter and comment the important things, which still leads to the audience missing out on something that might be interesting.

    The aspect of spectatorship is a huge problem for Blizzard Entertainment. Ever since they introduced the arena battles (two to five players stepping into an arena to fight each other), Blizzard tried to establish World of Warcraft (WoW) (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004-2014) as a eSport title. The main reason for this failing was that these arena battles (even with only 4 players in total) are too confusing for the audience, as there are too many abilities to be used by the players and some of them can't really be seen by the audience.

It has to be stated that my knowledge of World of Warcraft is only up to the addon Wrath of the Lich King (2008). But as I have not seen WoW in any tournament recently it seems as if Blizzard could not solve the spectatorship problem up until now.

(these are footnotes in the original, but blogger.com just doesn't like me copy pasting again)

[1] http://www.gosugamers.net/news/7960-esport-meets-the-olympics

[2] http://www.dota2.com/international/compendium/

Bibliography

Carter, M., Gibbs, M., & Harrop, M. (2012). Metagames, paragames and orthogames: A new vocabulary. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 11-17). ACM.

Dor, S. (2014). The Heuristic Circle of Real-Time Strategy Process: A StarCraft: Brood War Case Study. Game Studies, 14(1).

Ludography

Defense of the Ancient. Valve Corporation (2013).

Counter Strike. Valve Corporation (1999-2014).

Starcraft: Brood War. Blizzard Entertainment (1998).

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. Blizzard Entertainment (2010).

World of Warcraft. Blizzard Entertainment (2004-2014).