EPTI've grown up in a family of 7 children with two parents who have been married for 30+ years. (37 this year to be exact). My parents love sports. Wait, let me correct that... My parents LOVE competition. Everything I've ever done has always been fueled by the intent to be better than my siblings and/or friends. This led me to love watching any competition - Ice skating, ping pong, foosball, video games, football, tennis, volleyball, basketball, hockey, soccer, company events etc. Fuck, if it has teams and points, I'm already really fucking interested and motivated to watch.
5+ years ago, I first discovered professional gaming. I actually wanted to compete in Smash Bros. Brawl on GameBattles but ended up selling my Wii because I was irresponsible at the time. I still had a computer, and ended up either finding Teamliquid or videos of professional Broodwar. Because of my desire to be competitive and growing up playing video games as one of my main hobbies, I was enthralled with the scene. Not only that, but watching people play a video game at that high level for the first time was honestly a mind fuck.
I get frustrated though reading people's complaints in eSports communities about this or that, or at least I use too. There have been more times than I can count where I've written blog posts criticizing X community for Y reason because I felt they were being... overly critical. What is life without irony?
A few weeks ago I read this article by a favorite author / speaker of mine Steve Horowitz. He talked about the idea of celebrating micro-wonders. We live in a world we're constantly trying to improve so we're naturally going to be looking for flaws more often than the advances we've already made. While it's good that we're looking for those flaws, we should be taking a few moments every once in awhile to celebrate the fact that we've even gotten this far. Hell, we should be celebrating the fact that we're looking for and discussing flaws such as the Econ in LotV, unit composition, tournament formats, etc. because that means we've made progress enough to start discussing these new problems.
We've reached a point in eSports in general where we're trying to perfect the smaller pieces so it works they way we want, and that's fucking awesome. There are some flaws we still need to fix and I think we should continue discussing them in any capacity possible. But we all need to take a second and realize what this has become so far. Every weekend I'm reading tweets and watching events for Melee, DotA, Starcraft, Counter-strike, League, Street Figher among others.
I go to work and talk to my co workers about the weekend events I watched only to hear my manager pipe in and say " you guys are such dorks..." I take it as a compliment - If being a dork means passionately watching Jaedong break my heart over and over as he fucking gets to a semi-final then LOSES AGAIN or watching Team Secret make RIDICULOUS plays with Techies, or cheering against Leffen no matter who he's playing simply because I like to have a pro-player that I hate in any given event (not only that but he plays Fox.... PSH!) - then yes, I am the King of Dorks god damn it because eSports is so fucking cool to watch, and honestly, is more entertaining than normal sports.
TL;DR - We've come a long way and we have a long way to go. Let us celebrate this miracle while at the same time we continue to make it better.
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