Gaming, Professional Style

In this wacky world of ours, people can profit from all sorts of skills. With enough time spent analyzing interactions and play decisions, you can make money playing card games. Enough time at the XBox can give you great hand eye coordination. Whether it’s Poker or Magic the Gathering or Halo or Doom, if you’re good enough you may actually profit from your hobby.

Or will you?

The idea of making a profit on what you love is nice, but is it truly worth it? The hours and hours (and hours) you need to spend to be proficient, not to mention the best in the world, is a huge number. I know guys who spend all of their off-hours playing Halo and they get nowhere near the skill of the top players in the world.

That poster over there is funny but also true: There are plenty of people working as we speak to get gaming into a more professional standing in the public eye. There are Pro Leagues around, but nothing as substantial as what is being planned.

I don’t know about you, but Halo is usually a dirty word around parents. They don’t like how it’s violent or how it’s time consuming or how it’s unproductive…

…but would they like it more if the kids called it “training” instead?

“But mooom, I’ve got a $10,000 match this Saturday!”

And so it goes.

Halo tournaments are commonplace now, not unheard of and the gaming store I visit regularly has Halo championships and tournaments all the time. While the ‘big money’ tournaments are rare, they do happen and turnout reflects that.

But when a million bucks is on the line, it makes you wonder. When those events are broadcast on national television, with award ceremonies and commentators and fans in the stands…who knows how far it could go?

To put it in front of a huge audience who cheers and laughs and heckles…this is something I’d be interested to see. To try and make a Halo match exciting without actually know how to play Halo—this is the hat trick. This is the trick that all of these new endeavours must pull off or they will fail spectacularly.

Why? Location. When you watch football, you are focused on the ball. You see the field, the large, clearly marked numbers, the players who stand around that field. If you know the rules, you know exactly what’s going on. If you don’t, commentators are more than happy to explain it for you.

But when you watch a Halo match, you see only what the player sees. The player knows where the other guy may be, and he knows the location of the bonuses/power-ups/items scattered around. The best players actually know the timing of how often the bonus items and weapons show up. They “run the map” by timing their route around the perimeter, taking all of the items before the other player can get to them.

When you watch a card game match, whether that is Magic or VS System or L5R, the player knows what the other player may have. The player knows what they’re trying to achieve with the current game state, if they’re winning or if they’re losing.

The secret is not communicating this information to the players of said game watching at home. They can usually deduce what’s going on. The problem is communicating this to the unwashed masses who are watching at home. The kind who click on Hit-The-Monkey ads, the kind who buy the detergent promoted during the break, those who truly define the word “consumer.”

What kind of 3D diagrams will be necessary to show them where the players are and what they’re doing? What sort of color commentary is necessary to get across game states and probabilities? This is why the idea of a Pro Gaming League that has broadcast cable or broadcast network support has never truly taken off. When this formula is discovered, expect it to either explode in popularity or explode on impact.

Either way, parents around the world won’t be happy about it.

 And though they were sad, they rescued everyone
They lifted up the sun, a spoonful weighs a ton