The Most Dangerous Game

At this point, executive editor and site director Greg Kasavin would much rather watch people playing video games than playing professional sports. What kind of a nerd is greg@gamespot.com anyway?

Games don't need to come with a pound of illicit drugs attached to get gamers hooked. All you need is to check out the "/played" listing on any one of those level 60 World of Warcraft players to figure that out. But inventing new incentives and levels of competition aren't going to hurt either. Because in the end, you can say all you want about what type of gamer you are or what type of games you like, but it's the points that are going to give you away. The days of embellishing high scores are over. And the days of actually getting high scores are back.

To me this shift also represents a renewed interest in the concept of professional gaming. Yes, professional gaming sounds like an oxymoron, and if you're anything like me, you've always figured that high-level gaming competition would be far too esoteric of a thing to draw a mainstream audience. Back when I was hardcore into fighting games, I did have aspirations of becoming a truly competitive player, and jumped into a few tournaments and everything. The competition was extremely intense, but I never could have imagined it being particularly interesting to anyone other than the types of people participating.

After all, games are still difficult for non-gamers to grasp, and most of the games that draw a truly competitive fan base move far too quickly for the average person to be able to understand exactly what's going on. We all know the types of people who like watching football or basketball, but what sort of person does it take to appreciate a high-level Warcraft III or Counter-Strike match?

My mind on this subject changed abruptly over the weekend after I witnessed some extremely exciting Quake 4 exhibition matches between longtime pro Quake player Kornelia (who humbly admits she's no longer pro, though her skills seem to suggest otherwise) and some masochistic attendees of our first live event, the Games and Music Experience. Let me qualify my comments by pointing out that I've never been much of a fan of spectator sports, and pretty much always prefer playing something to just sitting there watching something. But being there for these Quake 4 matches was just incredible. And to my surprise, it wasn't just the obvious act of carefully and quickly pointing and shooting that was so impressive to me. It was the ruthlessly efficient strategy and spur-of-the-moment decision-making. This was no mindless shooter--it was a straight-up manhunt. Sometimes it seemed like Kornelia would just fire rockets down the halls across the map at random, since no target was even in sight. But sure enough, about a hundred yards down the rocket's flight path, the opponent would inevitably round the corner and take the explosion square in the face. These guys seemingly couldn't move a muscle without Kornelia knowing it.

Those of us transfixed by all the carnage surely must have appreciated that the game was running on an extremely high-end machine and was being projected onto a couple of huge screens. That is, the action itself looked amazing, and there's a lot to be said for that. As games grow better and better looking, the chances of them being inherently appealing to more people just from a visual standpoint logically increase. So while I think it took a first-person shooter player to understand what was so great about those Quake 4 matches, I also now think we're getting closer to the point where it won't take much for the average person to quickly understand and appreciate what's going on in a game.

But here's the punch line: Earlier I referred to how it's never seemed like a mainstream audience would accept professional gaming as a pastime. But this stuff doesn't need to be mainstream in order to be a success. And conversely, who's to say what becomes mainstream anymore? Could you have ever imagined that televised Poker tournaments would have become this popular, or that something like American Idol could get millions and millions of people in a tizzy? If Poker and bad singing can get this kind of attention, certainly so can video games. Besides, the stereotypes about the types of people who play games are breaking down. Professional game players like Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel do indeed carry themselves like pros, at least from what I've seen. And as for Kornelia, I can't think of a better word than "professional" to describe how she conducted herself with her opponents and the crowd. Some of the notoriously immature big-name athletes out there could probably learn a lot about proper athletic conduct from these players.

By now I think the biggest impediment to professional gaming becoming more popular is the reality that there typically isn't any one game that remains popular indefinitely. Part of what makes professional sports an engaging pastime is that its audience is fundamentally familiar with the underlying rules and regulations. A game like football is actually pretty complicated, but since lots of kids learn those rules at a young age, the whole thing seems second nature by the time they reach double-digit ages. But as for video games, since the whole medium is still evolving, who's to say what we'll be playing in a few more years? First-person shooters are really only about a decade old and won't necessarily be popular forever, and fighting games are arguably past their prime already.

It's possible if not likely that games will evolve in such a way that they become more dynamic and less predictable, but at the same time more intuitive and more realistic. That's what it'll take to get more people playing them longer. At that point, I think they'll more-closely fit the template of what makes for a compelling spectator sport, and they'll have such broad learning curves and appeal to so many people across the world that superstar players will undoubtedly emerge. And while the typical video game player and the typical athlete are probably about as different as two people can be, the truth is neither one is an inherently interesting person. Only through the sheer audacity of their skill and personality can they become iconic.

Next Up: Insomnia by Andrew Anderson