Week 7: Not all just fun and games.

In an attempt to offer a more lighthearted topic, I'd like to talk about "professional gaming" - or to be more blunt, playing video games for money.

The concept itself is relatively new, dating back to the nineties. While competitive gaming did "exist" in earlier times, it was extremely niche, limited to small groups of people and remaining unknown to the general public. It was the Internet that really let the idea become popular worldwide. The ability to compete with players throughout the whole world, with almost no limits except for network performance, was a major breakthrough. Games could be designed from ground up to support multiplayer competition, while also adding new ideas to make them more attractive for the viewers. Ability to record replays or "spectator mode" to sit back and watch the game in full were a huge success.

Old school "competitive gaming" back in 1981

Growing popularity of "progaming" lead to serious corporate sponsorship, both for the whole events and for individual players. Modern day tournaments have numerous sponsors, millions of online viewers, huge prize pools and some of them are even officially supported by game creators. On a smaller scale, players are offered various gadgets, computer peripherals and payment for minor expenses in exchange for product placement. Despite all that, the games are perfectly accessible for "normal" players to play at home, while allowing for exciting competition between the best.

Modern tournaments can gather thousands of spectators.

The definite capital of pro-gaming is South Korea. It's the only country to offer a regular 24h TV coverage of esports in the world - outside Korea, such attempts have been rather unsuccesful and quickly abandoned. Top players have popularity comparable to famous pop stars in the west and it's a huge multi million dollar business. Competition and training are treated very seriously, resulting in players who have completely dominated several games - to the extent that competitors are divided into Koreans and "non-Koreans", with the latter being near certain winners.

When it comes to Poland, the concept is still relatively unknown, especially amongst major populace. Younger people might be somewhat more familiar, but it's a very small niche. The general opinion about video games being violent and brainless entertainment that corrupts young children certainly isn't helping. I'm sure we've all seen some news report about it at least once in our lives.  However, there are still some events held here - for example Intel Extreme Masters tournament is scheduled for April 2014, with prize pool of $250,000. And while 250 thousand dollars might seem impressive, it's far from breaking any record. The image below is for individual games, not entire events.

While most of these games involve entire teams, it's still a lot of money.

Another fairly new aspect of pro-gaming - or esports in general - is streaming. Live internet feeds from various games have gained enormous popularity, earning their authors serious money for simply doing what they are doing anyway. While individual streamers will never have the same number of viewers as major tournaments, there are still thousands of people following their idols' every step. As for major events, the current record is at 4.5mln unique viewers.

Record breaking day on twitch

Of course, it's not all fun and games. True professionals train obsessively for long hours in order to maintain their position and remain relevant in the competitive arena. It's a regular job, with trainers, sponsors, requirements to fulfil. Variety is extremely limited, as they play the same game day after day, often against the same people, using the same game settings, going over the tiniest of details. Games can be lost simply because they did something at 5m23s instead of 5m21s, which then cascaded into unwinnable situation five minutes later, thus costing them thousands of dollars.

As small example of that is in the above video - playing Starcraft (and its sequel) at the competitive level requires the player to perfom well over 200 actions per minute. Every single second, throughout the entire match, they have to perform four key or mouse presses or fall behind their opponents - and all of those actions must have a purpose. This requires hundreds/thousands hours of practice, something completely unthinkable for an average person.

At that point, it's not just a game anymore. Then again, is this a bad thing?

Are video games a sport?

As for the questions:

How do you feel about people being paid thousands of dollars for playing video games instead of doing "serious work"?
Do you consider this a real "sport"?
Is there any chance of this gaining popularity in Poland? Or even anywhere outside of Korea?
If you were still a teenager with lots of free time, would you ever consider such "career"?