Sports are Games - PAX Prime 2015

MrPeriod

Sports are Games
PAX Prime 2015

Gaming livestreams are some of the most popular television programs in the US. There are entire TV networks covering gaming that have existed for decades. Yet, many self-described gamers will eschew football and ice hockey as being somehow distinct from DOTA 2 and CounterStrike. We even like to use the term eSport to separate them from sports. Sports and eSports are fundamentally the same. American football is frighteningly like a distributed turn-based strategy game.

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Coldguy

Where is the Italian thing you were mentioning?

Apreche

Coldguy said:

Where is the Italian thing you were mentioning?

It was a thing of the day once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcio_Fiorentino

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee)

That yoga example in the "is this a sport?" segment was an evil trap.
Also, I bet that pro wrestling competitions exist and are arguably sports.

Coldguy

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee) said:

Also, I bet that pro wrestling competitions exist and are arguably sports.

There is, not in the WWE sense but with greco-roman style/World competition ways

Hitman Hart

Linkigi(Link-ee-jee) said:

That yoga example in the "is this a sport?" segment was an evil trap.
Also, I bet that pro wrestling competitions exist and are arguably sports.

Professional wrestling was originally just that, Greco Roman or freestyle or what have you wrestling where the performers got paid to do it. Not that long into things, however, people started "working" matches to take advantage of people betting, and also because these matches could legitimately go for hours and hours and hours at a time. There was also something called Real Pro Wrestling briefly that did team vs team with hometowns and everything, but it rather quickly failed. Here's a match featuring current UFC star Daniel Cormier!

Apparently there were also non worked matches in All Japan Women's back in the late 80s/early 90s ish period, but I need to do more research on that.
Also, modern MMA evolved largely out of performers in Japan wanting to at first do a more realistic style of wrestling based on legitimate holds and eventually decided to just stop giving a preset finish.

Luke Burrage

I watched the lecture this evening on a plane trip. I think this is one of your weakest panels for a long time!

The first half was only okay, but the start felt a bit preachy, and while the "sport or not" was fun, by only giving the definition afterwards it felt like you were missing the opportunity to get into any real depth about the sports in the time you had.

And the second half was okay, but it felt like it could have been a whole hour long panel in its own right, with a lot more time given to each of the points covered. We've had the same conversation here on the forum many times, and studying (and creating) sports is what I do for a hobby, so maybe it wasn't advanced enough for me.

In the future you should do the panel again, but call it "The next big thing: What eSports need to do to succeed in the real world."

Then you can use the "Don't compete to be ignorant about real sports" message at the start to show that by knowing about real sports, you can learn so many good things from them about making gaming and esports better, more popular, more fair, more entertaining to watch, etc. Being willfully ignorant about the history of sports means esports people and gamers will just repeat the same mistake again.

That you didn't tie back to this felt like the main failing of the panel. By doing so the start would have had a utility beyond saying "Hating is bad, okay?"

Apreche

Luke Burrage said:

That you didn't tie back to this felt like the main failing of the panel. By doing so the start would have had a utility beyond saying "Hating is bad, okay?"

Yeah, that is so right. It should have tied back.

Starfox

Do you guys beta test panels?

sK0pe

I found it enjoyable but agree with Luke's criticisms.

There are a huge number of players out of the Asian scene that come from poor families, a lot of the best Chinese and Korean players are like this as buying PCs is not a problem:
You want to play games? You don't even have to think about having a PC you just go to the local PC bang after school meet up with your friends from other schools and also online friends and play every day. A player gets really good, ranks highly and is picked up by an organisation for try outs.

On avoiding cheating, the players can't take their peripherals home in the big Riot tournaments, they have to deliver unopened packaged peripherals and those peripherals are then stored at the studios and obviously no one brings the machines in (plus it's played on a LAN).

The regional rivalries really show at international competitions which is why general media can comprehend and present world competitions like The International.

The League of Legends Stanley Cup equivalent has team names inscribed on it. On top of this, being an Esport, the team is inscribed into the game. Riot designs skins for the signature characters of the winning team. So some history is starting. Whether it persists or not is yet to be seen.


Societies which have already accepted Esports have all sorts of adverting not related to the PC hardware plastered all over their uniforms or the tournament names, from fashion labels to beverages.

I didn't even realise people were buying RAM at PAX Aus, that is incredibly sad.

Apreche

Starfox said:

Do you guys beta test panels?

Not with an audience.

Luke Burrage

I found the panel enjoyable, just weak compared to previous and recent panel videos.

Rym

We uses to give panels a run or three at other cons before we took them to Pax.

But now we go to hardly any non-pax cons, and there are four a year.

Luke Burrage

Coldguy said:

@Apreche @Rym you might like this for your sport panel.

It's not a great lecture, but it does show how LoL are learning from athletic sports to make esports better.