drats

The difference between games and sports is social in context. Curling is in the Olympics, but a lot of people I know don't really consider it a sport. On the other hand, these same people do consider darts and billiards to be sports. WoW can be mentally just as complicated as basketball or paintball or any other team sport. This will probably be easier to see once arenas become popular, since people will have websites and whatnot dedicated to team videos. In the meanwhile, you might be out of luck trying to prove that point in a presentation.

If you can find any of the old Quake1 tournament videos (Thresh in particular was always amazing) they show just how crazy people can get when they understand the subtleties of a game system.

 

• Vinsent

Golf? Bowling? Any from of racing? Gymnastics? Figure Scating? Archery? Riflery?

All of these sports the compeitors do not directly interact, they are usually there at the same time but they are just getting a score, rank, time that is then compared to the other compeditors.

Sport is a very difficult thing to define, without either a) including a lot of things that the man on the street does not think are sports, or b) exculding a lot of things that the man on the street things is.

Intresting topic anyway.

 

javelin

I would say you could classify a sport as any directly competitive activity that relies on a skill or set of skills primarily over luck or random chance. The idea behind a sport is that you or your team is 'better' at a given activity than another person or team when put in direct conflict, through training, practice, and the development of the specific skills and abilities that the activity demands. Usually this demands the understanding and application of one or more strategies as one of the underlying and pre-requisite skills to being good at what you do.

Taking that into consideration, it's really easy to identify a sport when you see it. Pool is a sport; it requires hand/eye coordination and the ability to apply force in a specific set of manners to lead to a desired outcome. Craps, on the other hand, is not a sport.

To be prefectly honest, I can't think of a better site to give defining points for eSports than http://www.sirlin.net/Features/featu...toWinPart0.htm

and it's related links.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should chellenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.--Mark Twain

 

Mattj

As I said when I introduced the topic I don't think it's possible to give a unitary definition of what constitutes a sport. It is definitely the case that what qualifies as a sport is simply that thing which is accepted by society into the dominant conception of what it is to be a sport.

 

Kecke

Also WoW and the sort have 'dice rolls' implemented into the gameplay. While rogue a and b could have the same stats and build, their performance will most likely vary to an extent in the same encounter. The effect of randomness (or pseudo randomness this is debatable) in generating dps is definately noticable.

 

FinishHer

Right, meant Korean.. My apologies.

Opinion is a medium between knowledge and ignorance.

 

Deris

Randomness could be attributed to various other sports as well - such as the wind in Golf, or fish not biting for Sportfishing, or the Ice having some crappy chip in it during figure skating. There is a random element in every action a Human being completes that requires any sort of coordination - it is why we are all clumsy :D. How many times have you seen a Gymnast or Figure Skater fall? I would call that randomness, and chalk one up for Murphy. Just like if your backstab only hits for 600, and his crits for 2000.

 

sulliwan

Some randomness in games is good, if the outcome of the game is entirely dependant on chance though, the game is not fit to be played competitively.
Basically, even if the game seems random at start, if you have the same players coming out on top over several tournaments in the game, then it is not as random as it seems. Poker is a good example of this.

 

saramin

Sure, but the difference is between situational randomness and output randomness. Wind factor in golf is an unknown, but it affects all players equally and can be overcome through personal preparation or improvisation. It's a handicap given to everyone in turn, as is a badly-tapered ice rink. There isn't anything you can do to overcome the gods of probability being fickle, and as long as we have things like "+15% stun resistence" it cheapens much of the value that MMOs could bring to eSports.

 

Celandro

I'd say that the PVP aspect of WoW certainly qualifies as a sport. Its competitive and if you have enough time/money, everyone has reasonably equivalent gear and who wins or loses comes down to communication, strategy and skill. Ask a common person on the street if it is a sport and they would probably say no, but they wouldnt say poker is a sport either (even if it is on ESPN).

I think an important thing that defines a sport is that the common person watching and the expert person watching sees different things. If a common person watches american football, they will see the quarterback thrown the ball to the reciever who was being covered by 3 people for a touchdown. The expert will see the blocking schemes, the run pattern, the defensive schemes, and truly understand where the offense succeeded while the defense fell down (im not a football expert but I know it gets even more complicated than this). Similarly if a common man was watching a particular pvp skirmish, they may see that somehow the 1 warrior killed the 1 druid who was holding the flag with 2 other defenders only to be picked up by the hunter. The expert will see the warrior trick the druid out of bear form to heal the rogue, the target swap and burst damage to get the druid to low life, the druid swap to cat form to break the hamstring and run away, the druid swap to a healing form, the warrior intercept and execute to finish off the druid, the buggy god damned game code that caused the warrior to overshoot the druid and prevent returning the flag before the hunter picked it up ;).

The complexity of a sport should increase the more you know about it. This is true for every sport I can think of (baseball, football, soccer, hockey, swimming, track, chess, poker, trading card games, military war games). Certainly there are other criteria, but this is important for a sport.

 

Liandra

Actually, even Bridge (the card "game") is recognised as an Olympic Sport:

http://www.worldbridge.org/IOC/IOC.htm
http://www.olympic.org/uk/sports/index_uk.asp

With great power comes great responsibility.

 

SKoe

http://www.angelfire.com/me4/joeyadonis/index.html

There you go

 

Oneiros

If you've ever played any other MMO, the PvP in WoW would be the least competitive imo. There is a lot of skill involved in WoW, but it isn't very balanced for PvP (at least in my opinion) and gear plays too high of a role. In older games such as Ultima Online, gear, for the most part, didn't matter at all. Also, Blizzard has pretty much made it obvious that they don't intend their PvP systems to actually be competitive, but they'd prefer them to be grindfests to keep their customers playing.

When you start heading towards games like CS and DoD, then you have relatively equal players (gun choices differ on opposing sides) and it is all based on coordination, teamwork, and individual wit/skill/intellect/instinct.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

Dominick

Arena's would be the WoW equivalent of sporting play. AB/WSG/AV/Eye obviously aren't balanced with the allowance of organized vrs. pugs being the painfully obvious example. It's like setting a CS clan against a group of random pubbies, or the New York Yankees against some baseball afficianado's. Clearly the organized team will win. In arena however there is ranking, team matching and at least an attempt to even out the consumable/cooldown issues.

 

Oneiros

At least in my very humble opinion, arenas will be way too based on class balance and CC abilities. Classes with no good CC abilities will be vastly underpowered vs classes with good CC.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

Orb

Hello

I myself have been involved in e-Sports so to speak for quite a while. I have attended WCG 4 times and ESWC another couple so I'm fairly sure I could probably answer some of your questions. Feel free to chuck me a PM with your msn or what not :)

 

Trouble

I don't think anything in PvE would qualify as a sport, but depending on the level of competition, we might see arena matches starting to get to that level of competition. It's direct competition against another team in a fast paced, controlled environment. Even something like AB or WSG can't really compare because they're slower paced with more people and the ability to continually respawn. Arena play gets you closer to the counter-strike type fast fast competition that might be worth watching.

 

henaki

I could see Arena competition or battlegrounds becoming an e-sport but the system would have to be catered to balance (ie all gear has to be equivilent). Otherwise, I don't think Warcraft really counts as an e-sport, considering the competition isn't really fragmented into events, nor can you selectively play who you want to, which is pretty key. PvE is done over the course of... forever, there are no trophies besides "who got a world first". I'm a pretty competitive gamer (Played War3 into lower tier tournaments, play a couple fighting games at tournament level and used to play CS more than I should have), in case you wanted to know where I lie in my perspective!

Gur - Level 64 Undead Warlock on Hellfire

 

Trouble

At the high levels it should all even out and come down to skill. Remember it uses the same ranking system that chess uses (I think).

 

Oneiros

I still think its going to boil down to class makeup at the highest level of play. You can't use protection pots against a full caster group and you can't use limited invuln pots against a melee heavy group. It will boil down to who brings the group with the most useful abilities and that can successfullly employ those abilities.

I believe in Harvey Dent.

 

syr

This can be considered similar to Football (or soccer if you prefer) in that a team's formation is used to create an "ideal" ie. 3 defender's 4 midfielders and 3 attackers but you could use any number of formation's to counteract this and a player's "skills" make's up his place within that formation. I think some of the top arena team's will recognize the ideal's of not entirely forcing people into one role but rather one playing style, and then try to utilize that style in an arena.

I don't consider the internet as generally being a level playing field, something that's really required in a sport. Golfer's still play on the same course on the same day as do people who play FPS game's in tournament's such as The CPL. Perhaps that is where Blizzard hopes the arena's are headed though (given previous lan event's they've supported)?

Something of interest regarding drug testing in eSports though http://www.thecpl.com/league/?s=news&p=newsitem_1063

RTS games in part's of Asia to my understanding are huge, with the top player's earning in the region $200,000 per year for winning's and sponsorship. I'm not really sure how/if WoW arena's could be configured to be Lan based and feasible as a spectator sport (I presume it's desireable for Blizzard too), but with 8 million subscriber's it's definately possible.

Some semi-useful research link's assuming they haven't already been provided for you (sorry I skimmed some of the other posts),
http://www.hltv.org
http://www.thecpl.com

Perhaps you should try to contact the management of a professional eSport's team such as 4King's / Complexity / SK to see if they had any business research/information they could pass on since ulitimately financial support from companies like Intel is key to promoting the growth of "eSport's". (any middle management should have a degree of information / research they *may* be willing to pass on since it's the kind of information which help's them retain their sponsorship).

 

Sticks

WoW doesn't really fall into the eSports category as teams are not equal going into any given match. If each class had a set gear allocation then maybe wsg/ab would qualify but as it is, groups get too much advantage from putting time in doing other things like raiding/grinding for gear. Just because chess has rankings, doesn't mean that grandmasters get an extra queen or by playing 15 hours a day gets you extra pawns.

As for clips, I'd really suggest looking at dling a few vods (i think wcreplays.com has some decent war3 ones) although how much a non gamer would pick up from them is questionable.

 

mek

This last point is crucial, and you should focus on it. I personally hate watching REAL sports on tv, but love watching DOTA replays or WoW videos; if I could watch cutting edge raiding guilds replays' of world firsts on ESPN with commentary from Tigole and the raid leader, damn right I would. I believe it's only a matter of time until eSports, or video sports, or whatever, hits the mainstream, and it'll start with some crappy satellite channel with hot chicks talking about WoW Arena matches and CS and DOTA and the like, you bet. Done well, the market would support a gaming channel mixed in with the 900 sports channels my television set already gets.

For extra points you should talk about South Korea, who are way ahead of us in accepting video games as a legitimate competitive activity.

 

Kylo

I assume you may already know about it, but since you are in the UK http://www.ukcounterterrorist.com/ offers good coverage of the UK Counter-Strike scene, and offers interviews with the "stars", basically offers a form of media coverage.

 

Abbi

The way I've always wanted to see it done is this:

Pick a server; pick six raid guild leaders. Announce a draft, and everyone who wants to play competitively enters the draft. Pick in random order. ("With the sixth pick in the first WoW Raid League Draft, <Pretentious Latin Name> chooses Adamantium, tauren tank!")

A season is, say, three months, or maybe until new significant content comes out. Each team is scored on bosses killed, time to kill the bosses, deaths, and consumables used. You probably need to pick a set of instances that matter, and scoring probably differs between instances. (Not so many points for Molten Core.) Maybe you get bonus points for doing an instance undermanned.

You can't hop raid guilds -- there've gotta be trades. Do a supplementary draft at mid-season, and another draft at the end of the season, for transfers and new level 60s and so on. In theory you ought to pay the raiders some kind of pittance. That's the part which moves the idea way outside the realm of possibility.

If you wanna televise it, you make 'em all raid at the same time, so you can cut back and forth. ("<Singlewordname> is a long way back from the pack, but they're known for their quick trash clears.") Put a GM in each instance as a cameraman. Interview the raid leader before the raid starts, so you can get the cliches. ("Well, Firey has been at the top of his game for the last few weeks, and we've put some amazing gear in his hands. I expect another #1 DPS performance from him this week.")

Personally, I think the ubiquity of progression threads demonstrates that there's interest. Probably not enough interest, though.