General Discussion - Page 860

On August 19 2012 16:01 Firebolt145 wrote:
Why are we now talking about philosophy jeez can't we just talk about dota

On August 19 2012 16:01 Firebolt145 wrote:
Why are we now talking about philosophy jeez can't we just talk about dota

On August 19 2012 16:53 Itsmedudeman wrote:
Why are we talking about runes, can't we talk about dota

On August 19 2012 12:45 TheYango wrote:

That's the thing though. You can feel excitement and involvement in the sport at a visceral level with just that level of understanding. With DotA, there's absolutely nothing that engages that rudimentary visceral excitement for the uninitiated spectator.

This isn't exactly something easy to get around, because by nature, something happening between two human beings is going to be more emotionally engaging than two characters on the screen--particularly when there's no immediate aspect of those characters for the spectator to relate to/empathize with.

When you're at the Olympics, even if you have no understanding of the sport, there's still the baseline instinct of rooting for your country. You can empathize with the players on an emotional level. With E-sports there's an inherent barrier to this because of the degree of separation between the player and his character on the screen.

On August 19 2012 17:48 r.Evo wrote:


What you're describing is a marketing problem, not a problem inherent to games.

Gamers as a whole have a tendency to value information over emotion. Part of it comes from the - still existing - basement stigma, part of it comes from the ability to interact with others without actually interacting with them. Now, while this is usually no problem at all within the community a problem arises when you want to sell your game to people from the outside as some kind of "spectator sport".

Ask your average football fan why xy was awesome and he's gonna be like "WHAT? JUST LOOK AT IT OMG WAS SO GOOD DID YOU SEE THAT OMGOMG" while your average gamer will start with "Well, first this was about a pushing setup against a ganking setup but they had so much map awareness that they could see the enemy blablablabla..." - people stop listening right there.


Emotion is what people enjoy about sports. Rivalries. Crying losers and celebrating winners. E-sport scenes don't have that much of it, that's why they settle for the next best thing: DRAMA. Tobi is probably the greatest example for how things should be when you want to sell them. The trailer for the Valve documentary does the exact same. It's all about emotion, relations and to some degree about the lifestyle.

I can show a Tobi stream to my gf, help a bit with establishing a relationship between the players (who lost when vs who, who are the big rivals, who doesn't like who) and suddenly she's fevering along despite having literally no clue what's going on simply because the casting is on an almost pure emotional level. Tobi isn't great when it comes to analysis, he is weird when casting with other people because he shouts them down but all that doesn't matter since he gets across his excitement for the game.

On August 19 2012 18:29 cilinder007 wrote:
I think tobi does a great job of letting the co caster give his input, but steps in when the time for analysis is over and there is screaming to be done

On August 19 2012 19:05 Nilrem wrote:


Something along those lines. And yes, I know it has been posted. But I think it gets the point across haha. I think anyone that co-commetates with tobi must realize that the second there is a blackhole, they should leave it to him .

On August 19 2012 18:39 Appendix wrote:


So you say it's not the games, it's the gamers?

The problem with games is, as TheYango says, games don't allow for that basic human interaction which you get from normal sports. From the moment we are born we are trained to recognize, interpret and understand facial and bodily expressions of other human beings and take interest in them. As long as you get this emotional input any activity can be appealing without full understanding of the rules. In games you get none of that. It definitely isn't some kind of inherent difference in personal traits between gamers and "normal people".

On August 19 2012 19:25 r.Evo wrote:


Compare your average football game to this. You see small little human like creatures running around the field kicking the ball around. You don't actually see their faces or their interaction between each other until the action has died down. You get the goal, the foul, stuff like that ---> zoomed in cameras show their reaction.

It's not much different from a team winning a fight and the camera showing their reaction or the reaction of the crowd to it. It just comes off kinda bad in comparison if the guys look like stone statues or the crowd claps twice and is done. =D

On August 19 2012 20:10 Yoshi- wrote:
Both games sounds really uninteresting

On August 19 2012 12:17 frucisky wrote:


This is beautiful