EPTStill, they have their place. It's better, on the whole, most of us would say, to be happy than not – even the worst puritan would admit that being happy and good is better than being unhappy and good, however the latter might compare to being happy and bad – and whether you think that happiness is an ephemeral thing that will perish with the disassociation of our atoms, or the preview of some future heaven or nirvana, the emotion exists and is valued.
Games, of course, stimulate these emotions: competitions of all sorts bring out pride, fulfillment, sheer irrational joy – the more abstracted the contest from the self, the more irrational the joy, but when the Lions finally win the Super Bowl I will run around screaming and being generally insufferable. I apologize in advance.
Throughout history, the human race has invented for itself two main forms of competitive entertainment: the athletic and the intellectual. Pride of place has been given to the athletic, perhaps for obvious if populist reasons: physical prowess is far easier to appreciate, and is in a way more complete than intellectual pursuit of pleasure. The fencer, the wrestler – even on a very simple level, the runner – has to calculate as he goes; with team endeavors these complications grow dramatically; meanwhile, the chess player sits there at his board and could quite literally (if a bit clumsily) play as a quadriplegic. Admittedly moving pieces with your mouth would be messy and unsanitary, but the thing is a possibility.
They cheered the bull-runners and bull-fighters and acrobats of Crete; the runners and wrestlers of Greece; the gladiators and charioteers of Rome; the shining knights and sturdy archers of Europe; now the men of the cricket pitch and football field and baseball diamond and all numbers of other sports. Meanwhile, the players of Set and go and chess, having acquired a reputation of aristocracy if not outright wisdom, sat in their quiet rooms, debased variants of their meditative games occasionally finding their way to the checkerboard at local pubs.
Some of that changed with the refinement of printing and production technology, the ability to make complicated things cheaply available. Games like Risk and Monopoly gained large followings, and other games were made and played all over – but the popular ones always seemed either relatively simple, or intent on introducing some element of luck. In some ways, I think this is the carry-over of the gambling instinct – from bones to dice to cards, and now to cardboard – but that's highly speculative.
Then we went and invented computing, and spawned a new generation of games. Games which combined intellectual prowess and some minor athleticism, to varying degrees of each. The result: seemingly "easy" entertainment, with much scoffing at the wastes of time the youth are becoming. It happens with everything new, of course – way back when Plato (irony of ironies) had Socrates complain about these newfangled writing things wrecking everybody's memory, and if people wrote bad music it would mess up the youth so we should only stick with "proper" music – by which, despite Plato's revolutionary philosophical contributions, I am about 90% sure Plato meant the new jams were just tacky and wanted to stick with the safe staid harmonies he grew up with. Reading between the lines of history, Plato's Athens seems to have been seeing an artistic explosion the likes of which the Western world wouldn't really see again until the Renaissance, and old habits and tastes die hard.
But I digress, slightly. In examining the requirements of success in gaming, I am attracted more and more by this hypothesis: that in his essence, the champion of the flickering screen is most similar to the virtuoso of the quivering strings. The instrument of excellence is different, of course, but the ingredients seem similar. The essential elements are intellectual understanding, combined with a specific limited physical ability, directed through a third object capable of producing the art of the result.
Like any comparison, it has its limitations. A musical competition, whether a "battle of the bands" or a "national concerto competition" is largely an added bonus, a celebration of an already beautiful thing. With the video game – as the "game" in its name implies – the competition is all but required. Not that there aren't any number of games which are perfectly adequate as solo experiences, but on the whole, few single-players match the pinnacle of the competitive multiplayer game. I think I can say categorically that none have matched multiplayer for spectator value. (Partly – and here is another difference – this is because the video game medium assumes the player as spectator, and the experience is geared towards interactive "viewing". Not that I haven't spent hours watching really good players solo various levels in many games, or been massively intrigued by watching what are essentially "single player" games – the first-person view – of BroodWar or other games.)
As such, the presentation of gaming to an audience has naturally gravitated towards the tournament format – as it should. This is not figure skating, where a 10 out of 10 means you did the same stuff everybody else did, only better, or even that you did something the same but harder; the pinnacle of achievement in gaming is to do something different, even if the very least difference is in fact just doing the same thing more brilliantly, and win because of the difference.
What the format doesn't change is the nature of what is being presented: not the thing athletic, but the thing artful. On these considerations, I think we are looking in the wrong direction when we want to talk about "eSports". The goal of a gaming league is not the aura surrounding a football game or a cricket match, or even the more high-class atmosphere of tennis. We should be thinking in terms of grand concerts: of giving our idols and heros not the idolization lauded on the star physical specimen, but the worship reserved for the virtuoso.
Of course, we've seen this already. The Big Men of Brood War made their reputations and practiced their art by doing the impossible, the brilliant, the new: Paganini and Lizst could hardly have wanted more grandiose nicknames than we've rewarded them with. "The Emperor"; "The Revolutionist"; "Genius"; "The Almighty"; "Storm Zerg" – and others.
With Starcraft II, the Western gaming model of the LAN competition has played to this nicely. The "concert" of an MLG weekend leaves you both satisfied, and wanting the next one to come. (Questions on format aside, of course.) In ways the Korean sports-model never managed, the LAN manages to package this artistic intensity correctly. What pomp and circumstance the sports model is forced to reserve for finals, the event model can lavish on each "show", and then outdo itself for a final grand hurrah.
(For what it's worth, this "event" model is practiced both in the "intellectual" games like chess, and in most individual sports.)
What about down time? The long slow weeks between events? I've written before about the necessity of team play, of more-or-less continuous leagues, to the success of a gaming league. Have I changed my mind? To a degree, yes. In another way, no.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States, even individual sports are tied to schools or clubs, and run mainly through team competitions – individual prizes may be awarded, but team scores are reckoned up as well. Cross country running is a team sport: you may place first, but if the rest of your school's squad finishes badly, you still can't claim victory. Similar things are true in tennis, wrestling, swimming. Some of this mentality exists elsewhere, as in country medal tallies at Olympic events.
The nature of the beast simply requires someone to train against, in a way that a violinist may learn from examples but doesn't really need an "opponent" to do her best. I think we rightly viewed the Starleagues as the pinnacle of achievement in Korean Brood War play, despite their drawn-out formats. But the Proleague does and did provide a valuable tool for finding and training and testing, as did the "minor" Dream League and Elite School League. Fundamentally, talent is found by opportunity, and team leagues represent the best opportunity to find and develop talent. To take a recent example, Killer is not an OSL player without being shoved out on stage twice a week and forced to sink or swim. Without a school team, Horang2 remains an obnoxious cheesy player on the Fish server.
So yes, I've revised my view: I no longer think that team leagues are the lifeblood of gaming. But they might be the skeleton, the infrastructure. The background they create keeps talent flowing upward and the competition alive. And even if this isn't true, even if no "team league" player every graduates to the big leagues, even if a league fulfill no other purpose, they provide opponents on which stars can demonstrate their prowess.
After all, even Paganini needed an orchestra.
