Welcome! As this is the first blog post, I think that it should be an introduction to the subject itself. E sports has been around for a while at this point. The first appearance would probably be high score tables in arcade games. The community and technology has made E sports grow into an industry. Now, tournaments can be held in either LAN environments or online. Online streaming has also revitalized the industry by giving people anywhere in the world access to the tournament.
While there are several different genres represented in the worldwide E sports community, such as First Person Shooters and fighting games, for this blog I want to focus mainly on the Real Time Strategy (RTS) games that make up the bulk of the E sports scene. The RTS game that will probably have the most focus is Starcraft 2, as it currently has the largest following.
The original Starcraft was a huge stepping stone for E sports. It was one of the earliest games to receive a worldwide fan base (especially in Korea) as well as international tournaments. The game still has a following, even after 13 years and a sequel.
As a disclaimer, I'm not great at Starcraft 2! Maybe some posts will be my attempt at playing, I guess we'll find out. I might do some posts about League of Legends as well, as it is a game I'm actually pretty good at and can cover in way more depth than Starcraft.
That's it for today!
Are you going to giving an introduction to playing several games competitively or do you plan on just covering the competitive scene of several games? I don't follow games competitively (especially not RTS games), so I am interested in seeing how they are played at a competitive level.
ReplyDeleteThe e-sport scene is one that I have seen make several pushes (albeit bad pushes) to gain more of a main stream appeal. Most notably being DirectTV's attempt at a competitive gaming TV show (it was bad). That being said I am also interested in how big you think the e-sport scene will become, do you ever see it becoming as mainstream as sports, or even being shown on TV?
I don't know about it becoming mainstream in the US. Here it is still kind of an underground community. It's getting much bigger in Europe, and at least the Starcraft scene has flourished in Korea. Korea has GomTV, an entire station devoted to Starcraft. I think it will take a long time for anything like that to happen in the US but, who knows, the community has been growing pretty steadily for a while now.
ReplyDeleteI think I will spend more time covering the competitive scene. I'm not good at Starcraft... At all. But I'm better at watching it and knowing what's going on. I am alright at League of Legends, which has grown MASSIVELY since its release. As for other games, there aren't as many with a big enough following to cover in depth. There is usually a Starcraft 2 tournament at least once a month, so it is a good candidate for regular coverage.