This is an essay I wrote a few days ago about professional gaming and it's place in the world today. Feel free to disagree, comment, or simply discuss the topic below. Thanks for reading, sorry it's so long, I had a lot to say. Happy reading!
On Professional Gaming
Over the years that I have played video games casually, I have grown to realize the potential for deep, meaningful experiences that lies within. With fantastic experiments in this media form coming from every angle (the Indie developers with games like Fez and Lone Survivor, and the mainstream developers with games like Spec Ops: The Line), why is it that video games still fail to be taken as seriously as any other form of media; for example, film, or literature? The answer lies in the limitations placed on the audience by mainstream developers.
The video gaming community as a whole has grown to become defined, in the eyes of the uninformed public, by the latest incarnation of insert-violent-first-person-shooter-here. I myself have heard many an adult criticize video games as a whole on the basis of hearing that a depressed teen shot up his high school, and that that teen was a gamer. “It’s those damn video games,” I’ve often heard teachers say, “They’re turning kids into killers.” But the same teacher might assign the class to read an extremely violent novel, such as the incredible book Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Much of this can be attributed to the way in which mainstream developers advertise their games (EA, I’m looking at you), but also to how mainstream video games handle mature topics like violence. The Call of Duty series is one of the most heavy-handed violators in this case, making the deaths of soldiers in war seem trivial and minimizing the impact of murder on the player. Another particularly vile offender is Mortal Kombat (sorry, FGC). Their overuse of violent imagery and gruesome over-extended death cutscenes makes the video game community as a whole look like a group of angry, disturbed children, who sate their desire for blood and violence by playing these brutal games.
The popularity of these types of games creates a sense amongst non-gamers that this is the norm is our medium, that violent indulgence is the purpose of video games as a whole. The mainstream publishers try to appeal to teens and kids with their overuse of violent and mature imagery (Grand Theft Auto) because they know that this is what draws in that ever-growing, highly profitable demographic. I hold that adolescents do not actually desire violent indulgence in over-exaggeration, but rather they desire to be viewed as more mature, as “young adults”, not teens. Who among us has not experienced this feeling, this need to be accepted as an adult, as an equal to those older than us? The major flaw in the video game community is the connection that is made between mature content and actual maturity. This mishandling of mature content leads to the most prominent assumption made about gamers of any age: Playing video games = immaturity.
What makes this stereotype so hard to flush out is that it is largely based in truth. It is true that a large portion of video game sales can be attributed to teens and kids playing games far too mature for them, from popular, mainstream developers. We’ve all seen more than one video or heard more than one recording of kids on Xbox live spouting racial slurs or other immature, hateful remarks. This is the face of video gaming. As sad as that is, it’s true. The way we are viewed as a media form is based upon this group of immature, hateful adolescents forged by the trash games spewed out by the mainstream developers. The true face of the video gaming community, as we all know, is the one that is never broadcasted on the news or in a viral video on YouTube. This is the community that welcomes all people, of all ages, from all walks of life, to participate in this great, unique, interactive medium. This is the community that we belong to, but not many people care enough to see that.
Professional gaming, by extension, is viewed as childish and silly, and is often disregarded. The reason that professional videogame tournaments fail to garner as much attention as, say, sports, or chess, or poker is because of the image we have earned ourselves in the eyes of the general public. We let this disgusting behavior define our community for far too long, and now we are paying the price.
Another misconception about games in general is that they spark anti-social behavior in gamers. This could not be further from the truth. Games do not create anti-social behaviors. Games simply provide a safe hiding place for anti-social people to reside and coast through life. Video games are not the cause of anti-social behavior, they are merely the outlet for socially inept or awkward people to express themselves. Games, more now than ever with the advent of the internet and the implementation of widespread online multiplayer, are largely a social medium. Even single-player games now spark online discussion and interaction, as well as real-life discussions amongst friends concerning strategies, in game experiences, secrets, and the like. Games are a social media, and people need to realize that before stereotyping gamers as anti-social, brooding, violent teenagers.
Professional gaming is seen as a joke to many. I know from experience that people think less of you if they discover that you are a competitive gamer, as it is largely seen as an attempt to resist growing up. Members of my own family have ridiculed me for attending tournaments, and my own mother refuses to allow me to talk to anyone at the tournaments outside of the event. No exchanging of numbers, no setting up days to get together and play, none of that. These people, my mother assumes, are types that she does not want me conversing or associating with. This is largely due to the major misconceptions about gamers that she holds to be true. She does not want me to become that stereotypical anti-social gamer, and she fails to realize the inherently social nature of what I am doing. It’s not as if I am someone plagued with social problems, either. I constantly go out with friends and I have an active social life outside of the melee community, as does nearly everyone in the melee community. Moreover, I am not neglecting my education either. I am second in my class, and participate in more extracurricular activities than anyone I know. However, she assumes that my interest in professional gaming is a bad sign, a sign that she has done something wrong as a parent, and she tries her heart out to discourage me from continuing it.
Another example: My brother. I am the younger of two brothers, and my older sibling is right now in his second year of college. For my entire life, my brother has been the best at video games. Period. Every single one of his friends, and every single one of my friends, knows that he is the master of video games. He is famous in my family for beating Sonic the Hedgehog as a small child with the controller upside-down. He has a knack for games of any type, and has been known to pick up a brand new game and beat you at it, even if you have been playing it for years. He’s a natural.
My entire childhood was spent losing to him. He would win any and every game we played, no matter what it was, be it Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64, the original Super Smash Brothers, or the old NES game Spy vs. Spy. I could not win against him. Naturally, when we picked up Super Smash Brothers Melee, he was the best. Our friends obsessed over the game, he only played whenever someone else wanted to. And he always won. This is what pushed me to get into the game competitively, and so I believed, of course, that he would be right alongside me in doing this. I thought he would love to play at a higher level, to actually face challenging players and to learn new tactics. But I was wrong. He has done nothing but criticize and ridicule my foray into the professional gaming world, calling it “immature” and “ a bad life choice”. He tells people we know that “this idiot (meaning me) actually thinks he can make a living off of playing video games” when that is entirely untrue. I know that this is a hobby and not at all a way to support myself at all. Honestly, I would love playing in tournaments even if the money wasn’t there. He tells me that going to professional tournaments is “dumb”, that people who attend them have “no life”, and when I explained the unfortunate events of Pound V to him, he simply stated that “Anyone who gets mad that they didn’t get their money is ridiculous; if you enter a video game tournament, you’re lucky that they are paying you at all. It’s just a video game.”
I have been extremely caught off guard by this response from my brother. Is this the same brother who stayed up until midnight for the release of Brawl and then played it for eight hours straight? Is this the same brother who will play Super Mario Strikers Charged for three days almost non-stop to claim the #1 spot on the leaderboards? Is this the same brother who has taken Mario Superstar Baseball to an insane level, complete with rankings for each individual character at each individual position compiled into one notebook? I found this hard to believe.
Then I realized: my brother is a fan of video games; that is certain. He is also a fan of competitive gaming in the sense that if any big-name smasher, say Armada, was to come to our house and challenge him, he would play against them until his hands fell off if that’s what it took to beat them. But if I told him that Armada was not just some guy, but was a tournament smasher, my brother would refuse to play against him and would disregard him as a person with “no life” and “no friends”. Just because I assigned the tag “professional gamer” to him. This has been one of the most eye-opening experiences for me during my professional gaming career: Even video game lovers dislike the tournament scene, simply because they believe it to be a place where anti-social degenerates and misfit children go to convene and play a game and ignore “real life”. And this is largely due to the way we are represented in the public eye. It all comes back to the stereotypical “gamer” as one of two archetypal characters: the rage filled teen spouting ignorant and hateful remarks over Xbox live, or the forty-year old creep living in his mother’s basement, refusing to grow up. This is what people believe the video game tournament scene is, and we as a community have done nothing about it.
To make professional gaming more of an accepted hobby, we have to change the way the public sees video games. That means that we have to be more conservative in our approach to mature content in games, and we have to treat said mature content with the appropriate respect. As I mentioned before, Spec Ops: The Line is a brilliant first-person-shooter that allots the appropriate respect to the topics of war and death. Playing Spec Ops does not make killing the enemies fun, it actually makes killing them feel so wrong that you almost cannot bring yourself to do it. It shows a very real and intensely violent depiction of what war is really like, and how irrational and violent it is. The game treats murder with the appropriate respect, unlike Call of Duty or Mortal Kombat. Games like Spec Ops can serve to make our beloved hobby more respected by the public at large.
We cannot simply stand by and let video games slip into this chasm of immaturity, as it will only lead to more diminishing respect for the idea of professional gaming. All professional gamers wish, in their hearts, that one day their skills will earn them a chance to compete on the same stage as other professionals such as baseball, hockey, football, poker, or chess players. Our community, however, will never grow to receive this widespread recognition if we do not stop pandering to the immature adolescent audience and strive to gain more respect as a media. Literature, film, and music are all seen as legitimate pursuits, and all have awards that are given out to the best in the field. They are pursuits where one’s talent can earn him critical acclaim and a steady income. And, one day, if we handle this pivotal time seriously, video gaming can take its place with the other forms of media as a prestigious and widely accepted pursuit.
On Professional Gaming
Over the years that I have played video games casually, I have grown to realize the potential for deep, meaningful experiences that lies within. With fantastic experiments in this media form coming from every angle (the Indie developers with games like Fez and Lone Survivor, and the mainstream developers with games like Spec Ops: The Line), why is it that video games still fail to be taken as seriously as any other form of media; for example, film, or literature? The answer lies in the limitations placed on the audience by mainstream developers.
The video gaming community as a whole has grown to become defined, in the eyes of the uninformed public, by the latest incarnation of insert-violent-first-person-shooter-here. I myself have heard many an adult criticize video games as a whole on the basis of hearing that a depressed teen shot up his high school, and that that teen was a gamer. “It’s those damn video games,” I’ve often heard teachers say, “They’re turning kids into killers.” But the same teacher might assign the class to read an extremely violent novel, such as the incredible book Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Much of this can be attributed to the way in which mainstream developers advertise their games (EA, I’m looking at you), but also to how mainstream video games handle mature topics like violence. The Call of Duty series is one of the most heavy-handed violators in this case, making the deaths of soldiers in war seem trivial and minimizing the impact of murder on the player. Another particularly vile offender is Mortal Kombat (sorry, FGC). Their overuse of violent imagery and gruesome over-extended death cutscenes makes the video game community as a whole look like a group of angry, disturbed children, who sate their desire for blood and violence by playing these brutal games.
The popularity of these types of games creates a sense amongst non-gamers that this is the norm is our medium, that violent indulgence is the purpose of video games as a whole. The mainstream publishers try to appeal to teens and kids with their overuse of violent and mature imagery (Grand Theft Auto) because they know that this is what draws in that ever-growing, highly profitable demographic. I hold that adolescents do not actually desire violent indulgence in over-exaggeration, but rather they desire to be viewed as more mature, as “young adults”, not teens. Who among us has not experienced this feeling, this need to be accepted as an adult, as an equal to those older than us? The major flaw in the video game community is the connection that is made between mature content and actual maturity. This mishandling of mature content leads to the most prominent assumption made about gamers of any age: Playing video games = immaturity.
What makes this stereotype so hard to flush out is that it is largely based in truth. It is true that a large portion of video game sales can be attributed to teens and kids playing games far too mature for them, from popular, mainstream developers. We’ve all seen more than one video or heard more than one recording of kids on Xbox live spouting racial slurs or other immature, hateful remarks. This is the face of video gaming. As sad as that is, it’s true. The way we are viewed as a media form is based upon this group of immature, hateful adolescents forged by the trash games spewed out by the mainstream developers. The true face of the video gaming community, as we all know, is the one that is never broadcasted on the news or in a viral video on YouTube. This is the community that welcomes all people, of all ages, from all walks of life, to participate in this great, unique, interactive medium. This is the community that we belong to, but not many people care enough to see that.
Professional gaming, by extension, is viewed as childish and silly, and is often disregarded. The reason that professional videogame tournaments fail to garner as much attention as, say, sports, or chess, or poker is because of the image we have earned ourselves in the eyes of the general public. We let this disgusting behavior define our community for far too long, and now we are paying the price.
Another misconception about games in general is that they spark anti-social behavior in gamers. This could not be further from the truth. Games do not create anti-social behaviors. Games simply provide a safe hiding place for anti-social people to reside and coast through life. Video games are not the cause of anti-social behavior, they are merely the outlet for socially inept or awkward people to express themselves. Games, more now than ever with the advent of the internet and the implementation of widespread online multiplayer, are largely a social medium. Even single-player games now spark online discussion and interaction, as well as real-life discussions amongst friends concerning strategies, in game experiences, secrets, and the like. Games are a social media, and people need to realize that before stereotyping gamers as anti-social, brooding, violent teenagers.
Professional gaming is seen as a joke to many. I know from experience that people think less of you if they discover that you are a competitive gamer, as it is largely seen as an attempt to resist growing up. Members of my own family have ridiculed me for attending tournaments, and my own mother refuses to allow me to talk to anyone at the tournaments outside of the event. No exchanging of numbers, no setting up days to get together and play, none of that. These people, my mother assumes, are types that she does not want me conversing or associating with. This is largely due to the major misconceptions about gamers that she holds to be true. She does not want me to become that stereotypical anti-social gamer, and she fails to realize the inherently social nature of what I am doing. It’s not as if I am someone plagued with social problems, either. I constantly go out with friends and I have an active social life outside of the melee community, as does nearly everyone in the melee community. Moreover, I am not neglecting my education either. I am second in my class, and participate in more extracurricular activities than anyone I know. However, she assumes that my interest in professional gaming is a bad sign, a sign that she has done something wrong as a parent, and she tries her heart out to discourage me from continuing it.
Another example: My brother. I am the younger of two brothers, and my older sibling is right now in his second year of college. For my entire life, my brother has been the best at video games. Period. Every single one of his friends, and every single one of my friends, knows that he is the master of video games. He is famous in my family for beating Sonic the Hedgehog as a small child with the controller upside-down. He has a knack for games of any type, and has been known to pick up a brand new game and beat you at it, even if you have been playing it for years. He’s a natural.
My entire childhood was spent losing to him. He would win any and every game we played, no matter what it was, be it Diddy Kong Racing for the Nintendo 64, the original Super Smash Brothers, or the old NES game Spy vs. Spy. I could not win against him. Naturally, when we picked up Super Smash Brothers Melee, he was the best. Our friends obsessed over the game, he only played whenever someone else wanted to. And he always won. This is what pushed me to get into the game competitively, and so I believed, of course, that he would be right alongside me in doing this. I thought he would love to play at a higher level, to actually face challenging players and to learn new tactics. But I was wrong. He has done nothing but criticize and ridicule my foray into the professional gaming world, calling it “immature” and “ a bad life choice”. He tells people we know that “this idiot (meaning me) actually thinks he can make a living off of playing video games” when that is entirely untrue. I know that this is a hobby and not at all a way to support myself at all. Honestly, I would love playing in tournaments even if the money wasn’t there. He tells me that going to professional tournaments is “dumb”, that people who attend them have “no life”, and when I explained the unfortunate events of Pound V to him, he simply stated that “Anyone who gets mad that they didn’t get their money is ridiculous; if you enter a video game tournament, you’re lucky that they are paying you at all. It’s just a video game.”
I have been extremely caught off guard by this response from my brother. Is this the same brother who stayed up until midnight for the release of Brawl and then played it for eight hours straight? Is this the same brother who will play Super Mario Strikers Charged for three days almost non-stop to claim the #1 spot on the leaderboards? Is this the same brother who has taken Mario Superstar Baseball to an insane level, complete with rankings for each individual character at each individual position compiled into one notebook? I found this hard to believe.
Then I realized: my brother is a fan of video games; that is certain. He is also a fan of competitive gaming in the sense that if any big-name smasher, say Armada, was to come to our house and challenge him, he would play against them until his hands fell off if that’s what it took to beat them. But if I told him that Armada was not just some guy, but was a tournament smasher, my brother would refuse to play against him and would disregard him as a person with “no life” and “no friends”. Just because I assigned the tag “professional gamer” to him. This has been one of the most eye-opening experiences for me during my professional gaming career: Even video game lovers dislike the tournament scene, simply because they believe it to be a place where anti-social degenerates and misfit children go to convene and play a game and ignore “real life”. And this is largely due to the way we are represented in the public eye. It all comes back to the stereotypical “gamer” as one of two archetypal characters: the rage filled teen spouting ignorant and hateful remarks over Xbox live, or the forty-year old creep living in his mother’s basement, refusing to grow up. This is what people believe the video game tournament scene is, and we as a community have done nothing about it.
To make professional gaming more of an accepted hobby, we have to change the way the public sees video games. That means that we have to be more conservative in our approach to mature content in games, and we have to treat said mature content with the appropriate respect. As I mentioned before, Spec Ops: The Line is a brilliant first-person-shooter that allots the appropriate respect to the topics of war and death. Playing Spec Ops does not make killing the enemies fun, it actually makes killing them feel so wrong that you almost cannot bring yourself to do it. It shows a very real and intensely violent depiction of what war is really like, and how irrational and violent it is. The game treats murder with the appropriate respect, unlike Call of Duty or Mortal Kombat. Games like Spec Ops can serve to make our beloved hobby more respected by the public at large.
We cannot simply stand by and let video games slip into this chasm of immaturity, as it will only lead to more diminishing respect for the idea of professional gaming. All professional gamers wish, in their hearts, that one day their skills will earn them a chance to compete on the same stage as other professionals such as baseball, hockey, football, poker, or chess players. Our community, however, will never grow to receive this widespread recognition if we do not stop pandering to the immature adolescent audience and strive to gain more respect as a media. Literature, film, and music are all seen as legitimate pursuits, and all have awards that are given out to the best in the field. They are pursuits where one’s talent can earn him critical acclaim and a steady income. And, one day, if we handle this pivotal time seriously, video gaming can take its place with the other forms of media as a prestigious and widely accepted pursuit.
