How will video gaming grow and deepen?
Is it going to largely displace sports and sports watching? Will middle-aged dads get together on Sundays to play video games and watch Twitch while eating BBQ in the same way they do with watching football? Instead of going off into the woods for a week to fish, will people do the equivalent with video games?
Will world video games become bigger than all other media?
What new possibilities will be realized?
Video gaming doesn’t occupy quite the same space as sports. It’s something that can be done at times you cannot play sports.
I think what we’ve seen over the course of the history of video games is in fact the movement of video gaming into those spaces. 35 years ago the best video games were ones you had to go to an arcade and pay 25 cents to play in a big cabinet. Then they began moving to computers and home consoles. Then they started moving to mobile devices. They’re moving away from physical media. What I think will we see in the short to medium term is a continuation of that trend; making it EASIER to game.
I don’t think the relative complexity of games is going to change much in the near future. Efforts to make very, very deep games have had mixed results.
Plus it’s too fragmented to ever hold a spot in our culture like sports does. Both in the sheer number of video games/esports to follow vs major sports franchises and because there’s no connection to local geography or culture. It doesn’t have that same sort of cohesion.
Of course, if you and five friends all love watching League of Legends being played on Twitch then you’ll go and do that. But, even if video games were as broadly accepted as just part of life, I don’t see you meeting a new guy at your neighbor’s BBQ and instantly having a conversation over last weekend’s CS:GO tournament the way you’d say “How about them Cubs?”
Hard to say.
Often, it seems like the same tired old gamers over and over and over.
In some respects, regarding New Media a la Twitch and YouTube, it’s already there. Of course, that’s mostly a consequence of design – it’s much easier to livestream a glitchless speedrun of Paper Mario than it is to stream a pick-up football game in the park.
On the other hand, video gaming will never displace professional sports in the traditional sense. For starters, video games are still disparaged by many as “something that kids play”, which is why they get almost zero attention from the media. The audiences who watch/play sports are completely different from those who watch/play video games – there’s some overlap, but not very much. Most importantly, pro sports are a multi-billion dollar industry which mainly enriches very few people at the top (while simultaneously filling the minds of their audience with false dreams of stardom) whereas “pro” gaming is much more diffuse yet also much more accessible. The culture of sports and the culture of gaming are completely different.
So basically, video gaming is about as big as it’s ever going to get. The trick to remember is that it’s already much, much bigger than most people realize.
Gaming will grow as new media continues to displace traditional media. For example, all of the top Youtube channels are gaming channels (or music videos.) My recently purchased TV didn’t even come with a cable tuner built-in. It did come with Youtube built-in.
It will also grow as we get more and more multi-generational games, so people up playing a game and then are easily able to play iterations of that game through their entire lives. For example, I have played Counter-Strike off-and-on since 1999. It is still the same game and it’s more popular than ever with 600,000 people playing it right now. 9.9 million unique people played it in the last month. It isn’t even top 5 in terms of popularity.
Sports aren’t going away, but I think it is crazy to think that the gaming scene has plateaued.
Gaming has already displaced professional sports, in some parts of the world. Is there something different about America that prevents it from happening here entirely, or are we going to follow in the footsteps of Korea?
Video games may end up being the perfect bread and circuses because of its high amount of fantasy escapism via player input and immersion. One explanation for the Fermi paradox is that advanced civilizations plug themselves into a Matrix equivalent. Less radical, there are those who plan for the gamification of many aspects of society.
The fragmentation of popular culture is readily apparent when many people don’t watch even the most popular television shows and movies. The closest thing to a cultural touchstone lately was The Force Awakens. Sports hang on for now because of cultural inertia and often times the support of the state.
The “fragmentation” issue is could be solved by viewing esports by game genre, rather than specific title. You’d have teams that are “FPS” teams, rather than specifically “Counter-Strike” teams, with the actual game being played in competition changing as new titles come out. And the way sports franchises are selling themselves off to whatever city is willing to give them the best deal, I’m not sure “connection to local geography of culture” is necessarily going to be much of a distinction between traditional sports and esports.
I’ve already been to enough parties where, “Hey, have you played <new videogame>” has made large inroads into, “Hey, have you seen <new TV show>,” as a conversational gambit that I wouldn’t be surprised if it started making similar inroads on “How about them <sports team>” as well.
Which is why I don’t see gaming filling that same role. Maybe someday sports will fade significantly but I don’t see gaming taking over in the same way. There’s no cultural significance or feeling of community around “How about them Operation Kino’s?”
I think you’re overstating that. But, even if it was the case, it’ll just be the death of local community around sports, not the birth of it around gaming.
I could be wrong though. I play a lot of games but have zero interest in watching other people play games (much less for hours, like a sports event) so I might not be the best person to ask.
I agree. The “traditional” position of sports is an artifact of twentieth century technology, the period in which it arose. And when people say “sports” in this context they really mean only a handful of major sports like football and baseball; the rest of the sports subculture is as fragmented as the rest of popular culture.
The institution of “sports” arose during the rise of mass media, a period where there were only a few channels on TV; they couldn’t have provided much diversity in sports if they tried, there wasn’t room. So it ended up very centralized & specialized; a few major sports with everything else pretty much unnoticed except during the Olympics. And people who were fans of sports became fans of those particular sports, because that’s pretty much all that was available.
Video games are unlikely to take the same position because the situation that led to the major sports becoming an institution no longer exist; as you say, it mostly persists for those sports out of inertia. You’ll note that* new *major sports don’t arise; oh, some new or obscure sports gain popularity, but only as niche fandoms.
Consoles seem to have completely hit the wall. I’ve owned a PS4 for a couple months now, and it’s more than a little unsettling how the entire focus is on social media and multiplayer and friends and parties and chat and groups and gangs and bunches…which goes a long way into explaining the really pathetic variety of games available. Seriously, go to a Gamestop sometime. Where are the music games? The rhythm games? The simple younger-age sports games? The all-ages puzzle games, the platformers, the sidescroling beat-em-ups, the racing games that didn’t require a degree in mechanics, heck, the weird offbeat stuff? Up to the 32-bit era, all this stuff was ubiquitous. Now it’s all stuff that I either don’t have the time for, don’t have the patience for, don’t have the reflexes for, or don’t feel like opening a goddam spreadsheet to keep track of. (Seriously, I needed two spreadsheets for Dead or Alive Paradise.) And the emphasis on multiplayer, multiplayer, multiplayer would be find if I had lots of friends who owned a PS4. But I don’t, and that’s never going to change, so that severely limits how much fun I can get out of this thing. (Honestly, whoever decided to tie skill points to multiplayer in Assassin’s Creed Unity should be slapped. Hey, I remember writing about this. Thread’s still there if you’re interested.)
The console scene looks like it’s as big as its ever going to get. In fact, after all the high-profile boondoggles, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes a big step backward in 2017. At this point the only thing that might be able to save it were full-on, guilt-free customizability, much like the Game Genies and Codebreakers of old permitted (That’s the thing I missed most with the PS3, and seriously, how hard would it be to disable trophies?). But this “casual/hardcore” dichotomy garbage might kill that before it has any chance.
Handhelds are the big thing right now, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change anytime soon. One thing that the industry as a whole really needs to drive home, though, is that developers need money, and just because they ask for a small amount doesn’t mean they’re trying to soak you. As it is, most games require you to pay a nominal fee to get rid of ads, which I find perfectly reasonable. But in the future, I think adopting the shareware model would be a much better long-term solution. I.e. get 1 or 2 levels for free, than pay to get the whole game, no ads. That’s seems to be what Nintendo did for Mario Run, and I have no reason to believe it’s not going to be a huge success. But regardless, the variety is tremendous and the prices are (usually) reasonable. I’m not a betting man, but this seems to be where the smart money is now.
Not just what cities, but what game vendors are willing to sponsor as well.
an esports league is one of my “lottery fantasies” and I was thinking a variation on what you are thinking. having a “FPS” team or “RTS” team and the teams only knowing that they will be playing one of 5-6 different games and not necessarily knowing which ones until the monitors come on. No custom scripts or personalized control layouts, just kicking ass with the bog standard setups.
I dunno; I think you’d have to allow personalized control layouts. It’s not much fun to watch someone blundering around because they like to use E for zoom and the game they’re in uses that for “use item”, or whatever. And control personalization is something that’s built into pretty much all games nowadays, and is available as a simple menu item (i.e., without needing a third-party hack or the like).
Just for a comparison.
Total US computer and videogame sales in 2015 were around $16 billion.
Total revenue for the top professional sports leagues were as follows (2014):
NFL $13 B
MLB $9.5B
NBA $4.8B
NHL $3.7B
Total ticket sales for the film industry was about $11B for the same years.
So obviously, gaming is actually pretty big compared to other forms of entertainment.
I think as a spectator sport, games being a commercial product give them a bit of a disadvantage. Companies have too much of an incentive to “tinker”, to create sales, and the ever evolving game design and graphics changes give companies a huge pressure to release new games.
Obviously sports are not stagnant, there are a lot of new rules introduced to counter overwhelmingly dominant strategies and keep the games interesting, but there’s nothing in badminton quite like adding a new hero in Overwatch, or the shift in the metagame an expansion to Starcraft 2 gives. When it comes down to it, gamers, including pro players, expect new content, but you simply cannot keep a spectator sport going 100 years adding 2 new heroes or units or races or sweeping balance changes every year or so. The game becomes too bloated for anyone but the most dedicated to learn, and too complex for your average spectator to follow (insert cricket joke here).
I’m not saying it’s impossible for a game to survive as a spectator sport for 100 years, but it has some serious obstacles in its way that Tennis or Boxing or whatever simply don’t.
(Note: I’m not saying conventional sports are NOT a commercial product, but they’re commercialized in terms of ticket sales and TV ads rather than the way even “competitive [video] games” are where there’s a drive to make them accessible to as many people as possible to get revenue on sales, in-game transactions, or in-game advertisements)
In retrospect, I believe I missed a major piece of my industry analysis. For sports, I provided the total revenue for the leagues (which presumably includes ticket sales, advertising and merchandising). However, “sports” in general is a much larger industry, if you take into account casual participation. Americans purchased over $60 billion in sporting goods each year. So taking that into account, sports dwarfs videogames by almost an order of magnitude.
Although they are not mutually exclusive.
I don’t see videogames ever reaching the level of popularity of professional sports or film. Part of the popularity of sports and film is that they are a shared cultural experience. All 100+ million people who watch the Superbowl or The Force Awakens experience the same story with the same players. I can’t imagine 100 million people ever watching someone play StarCraft or Call of Duty for 3 hours.
Videogames are largely a personalized experience.
Plus I think people largely overstate adult interest in videogames. I’m 44 and have had a casual interest in games since there were games. But between work, parenting and having an actual social life, I really don’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to “gaming” on the level that is required for some types of games out there. I know very few people in my age group who have expressed any interest in videogames.
Apparently 20 millions people watched DOTA2’s The International Tournament in 2014. I imagine the numbers rose in 2015 when it was broadcast on ESPN2 and 2016 when Twitch streaming had become even more widespread.
I’m ten years younger than you, but a fair number of people I know have at least some familiarity with watching video games. It’s not as guaranteed a conversation starter as talking about college basketball (in North Carolina) but I find at least as many people who understand what a Zergling Rush is as who know what the Infield Fly Rule means.
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Check the Playstation store. Offbeat indy games don’t get physical releases, but they’re out there.
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Get a Nintendo. They’ve almost completely given up on the primary console market and mostly go in for more casual stuff.