(Thanks to LiT for making a community blog I already had a blog for!)
I love EVO. I love watching fighting games played at the competitive level.
But I can’t take it seriously. Here are a few things that NEED to change for EVO and the eSports scenes to feel like more respectable entertainment, followed by a couple of things that COULD be changed/added for the better.
Names
Let’s start with a simple one. The player’s names. Cute, nerdy nicknames are a holdover from when video games were for nerds, and when there was safety in anonymity.
Professionals are not anonymous. Professionals play these games sometimes for a living. I don’t go to my day job as “Exelement.” Michael Jordan didn’t play Basketball as “Snake Eyez.” We’d look ridiculous.
Gamers at EVO look ridiculous. I can’t take people seriously when they don’t take themselves seriously. I want to root for people, not handles.
And the same goes for announcers: Killian and Chen are the best announcers at EVO- getting to that more in depth in a second- partly because they’re actually people. Not progs.
Announcers
Some of the announcers at EVO are, quite honestly, a joke. As a viewer, I don’t need the announcer to scream about how hyped I should be- fighting games make that clear enough as is. I don’t need an announcer to stumble through his thoughts after every amazing play, gushing like a fan girl as things continue happening that may need to be explained. It’s distracting. It’s annoying. It’s childish.
What I want, as a viewer, especially of games I don’t actually play, are articulate, calm, and observant explanations, explaining what’s happening, how it’s happening, and what makes the players who are playing the best in the world.
We got that from Killian and Chen during the Street Fighter matches- one of the only games at EVO that I don’t actually play myself. I felt I understood everything that was going on, from a mental to a technical level.
During Blazblue? I got mostly bias and fangirling. And I play Blazblue- perhaps that’s what made them so infuriating as commentators.
I can understand incredible things happening, and how they might emotionally move the commentators (comebacks and EVO 37 moments don’t happen all the time, after all). But these things happen in the Olympics too- take a breath. Calm down. And help the casual viewer have a clue of what just happened, and why everybody else surrounding the (hopefully someday) television set just erupted in cheers.
Because I can fan girl just fine, myself.
Those two are things that simply must happen for esports to be taken seriously, as far as I’m concerned. These next few are just things I think would make the scene as a whole more enjoyable, especially for a casual observer.
The Games
Street Fighter is a joy to watch because every moment it’s anybody’s game. But the combo heavy fighting games like MvC3 and BB? If that burst is down, the player caught in the combo gets to just sit and pray his opponent makes a mistake and drops it.
That’s what makes Street Fighter so much more interesting to watch- every single moment is spent at the edge of the seat. When the announcer says that “this should kill” when the victim still has 75% of his life bar remaining, it just isn’t as intense. It’s honestly kind of boring.
Which is why I greatly prefer shorter combo games like Street Fighter, Soul Caliber, and Super Smash Bros, where 100-0 (or 0-100 in the case of SSB) combos are unheard of. Comebacks come not by the punishing of a single mistake, but rather on-point play over and over and over again. It makes them far more impressive.
Of course, that one’s mostly personal preference. I want games to be built around skill, adaptability, mind games, and moment-to-moment decision making. Not muscle memory.
Teams
It can be difficult to pick a single player to root for- generally I just pick the one who goes in with a character I like. But for people who don’t play these games at all, it’s hard to care for who wins and who goes home empty-handed.
In sports, we have teams- you root for your hometown, or your family’s team, or for the people you know personally. If nothing else, you can pick based on the team’s name and emblem if you live in like, Antarctica or something. Picking your favorite is an easy thing to do.
The Olympics do it best, of course. You know who to root for even if you’ve no idea what’s going on or what sport is being played or who’s playing it. You root for your home country. Or the country where your parents are from. Or that country you visited abroad and really liked. You know who’s who even if you don’t know which athlete is which.
Is something like that possible right now, where we only really see dominating performances by a handful of countries? No. But I dream of rooting for the US team in a future eSports Olympics.
Also, its such an obvious merchandising strategy.
eSports
This is a small complaint- change the name. Gaming isn’t a sport. People who don’t game don’t see it as a sport. Most who do don’t either. There’s no reason to call it a “sport” and try to, what, piggy back off of sport success?
We don’t even call the Olympics sports. We call them the Olympic Games. So it’s not like calling them what they are is demeaning.