« The Salty Runback: Regular People »

This week, Kotaku published an article that used some out-of-context quotes by David Treacy, a.k.a. “Zaccubus”, as a launch pad for some childish editorial commentary about the health and growth, or lack thereof, of competitive gaming. The author then proceeded to push her glasses further up her nose, awash in the glow of smug self-satisfaction, and got back to work on her slashfic featuring a sexually confused Sephiroth fending off the advances of an amorous Legolas afflicted by Sauron with an ancient Boner Curse.

Having people within the mainstream media be dismissive of professional gaming isn’t something new, but that’s not what’s going on here. We aren’t talking about someone barricaded at the top of a print magazine’s ivory tower, we’re talking about a fellow gamer (I guess?) borrowing time out of her busy schedule of breeding Pokemon to lob grenades at Morlocks.

Thank god for Jen Schiller. She may be a bull in a china shop when it comes to the good she’s done for pro gaming, but I was in a dry stretch of some writer’s block before Kwanzaa Sagat dropped this little nugget down my chimney, wrapped with a bow.

Let’s take a moment to address the misconceptions this sort of commentary spreads by placing Zaccubus’s words into the correct context. Here is the quote around which most of the article is based.

"Every TV show I've seen so far has been way too cheesy and not indicative of what pro gaming is about. Trying to squeeze an event into a 60 minute broadcast doesn't really work for gaming... Only recently, thanks to MLG, can we see what gaming events should look like: Great shoutcasting, well presented, and without the need to cheese it up for regular people to understand."

This statement by Treacy is bookended by Schiller remarking, “Don't get me wrong, I love watching people who are better than me at video games play them for money, especially when I don't know those people. Oh wait. No I don't.”

The article makes it fairly apparent that Zaccubus’s passing reference to “regular people” has Schiller in a snarkfit. Here’s the point that she completely misses, though. When she openly speaks about her complete lack of interest in being a spectator, she is personifying exactly the sort of person Zaccubus is referencing: a person that has only casual or loose associations with the game being played and usually has zero measurable interest in the process.

I once had a discussion with someone who had asked me why, when I commentate streams, I don’t adopt a style similar to some other personalities who favor being more thorough with their exposition of the mechanics, strategies, and fundamentals on display. I shared with him my philosophy: I don’t feel the need to explain why Alex Valle keeps throwing out crouching medium because most of the people watching are already aware of what’s happening on screen. An overwhelming majority of the people who watch streams are players themselves.

This is the sort of thing that Zaccubus is talking about, tailoring the content to a small slice of the population who, in the end, don’t really care too much about the product. It makes no sense to so arduously court an apathetic minority at the expense of an invested majority. Schiller seems to have a negative reaction to Treacy’s opinion. Here, he’s talking about how it’s pointless to put on a quality product for people who could give an expletive deleted, to which Schiller snarkly rebutts that she could give an expletive deleted.

I know that some people might hear me saying that we should focus less on the uninitiated and sing more for the choir and think that sounds a little elitist or insensitive, but competitive gaming, as a spectator event, is a far different beast than professional sports. IPlayWinner would be like NBC broadcasting NBA games if everyone in the arena seats, and everyone watching at home, was a professional basketball player as well. Or, at the very least, a sports writer or stats monkey.

The product we put out is, for the time being, for the players by the players. It’s the same for every single game that gets played at a tournament level. When Dr. Pepper signs on to advertise at MLG, they aren’t doing that to draw in that elusive 40 to 55 year old divorced white female demographic on the live stream. They are marketing directly to the players, through the players. Most of these games are followed solely by the people who play them.

Obviously, there is one hulking exception: StarCraft. If sponsors are only signing up for the direct market channel to a lucrative demographic, the players, how do you explain South Korea as an entire nation being obsessed with StarCraft like a 12-year-old boy that just discovered there’s pornography all over the internet?

That’s part of what makes this article especially flagrant. The Koreans aren’t being subjected to a product that’s watered down for their polite consumption. They are being shown what amounts to stream footage. This is a product that was discovered and championed by its audience, rather than being mass-produced in favor of the hope to attract an audience later. The players, shoutcasters, and sponsor groups are doing this the same way they would for five or five hundred people. Production values are just much higher.

Here in the west, we instead have mainstream media that is, at best, apathetic to competitive gaming, often openly mocking the idea. What hope do we have of ever drawing in new viewers if we can’t even have the support of video game “journalism”, much less mass print or television media? Attempting to tailor pro gaming to be more accessible is not going to do anything for increasing viewership and participation. A lot of PR work from dedicated individuals is what’s required.

Schiller snidely remarks that she finds it unappealing to watch people doing something at a higher skill level than what she herself can accomplish. Five minutes on television will show you how much of a completely out-of-touch mindset that is. With the right presentation, there is absolutely nothing Americans love more than to watch people doing something at a high skill level. When I say “something”, I mean absolutely anything. Have you ever watched other people play poker? Personally, I’d rather watch closed circuit footage of the backs of people’s heads as they stand at urinals and play target practice with the disinfectant cakes - and yet there are literally hundreds of thousands of people that love nothing more than to turn on ESPN and watch eight guys wearing sunglasses indoors stare at and knock on a felt table. There’s golf on T.V. You can watch it. I’m just sayin’.

We are at a flashpoint where we are experiencing a lot of growth, and we have the potential for quite a bit more. That growth, however, requires an acknowledgment that our current growth stems from an influx of new players who are all potential consumers within the culture. Our potential growth lies in leveraging that momentum, along with the growing expertise of shoutcasters and streamers, to create a product that is interesting enough on its own merits to grab the attentions of others and create a secondary population of enthusiasts similar to the millions of people around the world that follow StarCraft without playing the game.

To do that, we have a lot of work ahead of us. There’s a quite a few things we need - including a whole lot less of what we got from Kotaku.