With sponsors and big prizes, playing is serious businessDallas has become one of the major stops on the professional video game tournament circuit.
And if you haven't heard of these lucrative competitions yet, that's about to change.
"My goal is that, five years from now, you flip on TV or the radio or open up a newspaper, and we're sitting there next to other traditional sports," said Sundance DiGiovanni, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Major League Gaming.
Mr.DiGiovanni and the backers of the various other pro gaming leagues say it won't be long before you turn on a sports channel to watch live or near-live coverage of their tournaments.
Sound absurd?
"Ten years ago, would you have considered it fun to watch someone play
poker on TV?" said Marty Stratton, executive producer at game maker id Software in Mesquite, whose annual QuakeCon tournament and expo is being held this week in Grapevine. "Probably not. And how many poker tournaments could you have caught on TV? Probably zero."
"Now, if you have the right channel lineup, you can probably watch poker 24 hours a day."
And there is serious money backing up these tournaments.
Mr. DiGiovanni says his league, formed in 2002, has now raised $35 million in outside investment.
He didn't disclose current revenue for Major League Gaming, but he said the potential for the overall pro gaming industry is huge.
"I don't think anybody has really done a good measurement in terms of what it could be in 10 years," he said. "But we're talking about the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in not very long." Download
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Matt Ringel, founder and commissioner of the World Series of Video Games, said the Dallas area will probably remain a prime destination on the pro circuit.
"We've always seen Dallas as kind of the cornerstone of competitive gaming," he said. "It was the birthplace of the CPL [Cyberathlete Professional League, a pioneer in video game tournaments] many years ago, and with id Software there and a number of other developers, it's always a place gamers love to come back to."
The money helps, too.
And with big money come serious gamers; tournaments draw anywhere from a couple dozen participants to a couple of hundred.
Many competitors in these tournaments – generally guys in their teens and 20s but with a growing contingent of young
women poker players –aren't local enthusiasts but rather professional gamers with sponsors, packed international travel schedules and a growing fan base.
Some players sign contracts with leagues, which adds to the money they earn from winning tournaments or collecting sponsors.
For example, one of the most popular games on the pro circuit is the shooter Halo 2.
Major League Gaming has signed $1 million contracts with each of its top three Halo 2 teams.
With four players per team, that's $250,000 per player.
Supporting those big contracts and prizes are big-time sponsors.
Grapevine-based GameStop Corp., the biggest video game retailer in the country, recently renewed its sponsorship of Major League Gaming, and computer graphics card maker Nvidia is putting up the $100,000 in prizes at QuakeCon.
"This video game competition is really being raised to the level of traditional sports," said Tom DeNapoli, GameStop's vice president of marketing. "It's the fastest-growing nontraditional sports competition in the country right now."
Despite the hype and growing attendance at events, though, it's hard to imagine that watching someone else play video games can ever be more than a niche pastime. Play
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After all, while it's beyond the abilities of most mortals to throw a perfect spiral, dunk a basketball or slam a 400-foot home run in real life, doing so in a video game requires nothing more than reaching over to hit the power button on a console.
So why watch someone else play a video game when you can so easily play the game yourself?
Part of the answer is that professional gamers can truly do things that many weekend warriors cannot.
Take, for example, "rocket jumping."
In games like Quake 3, rocket jumping involves making a character leap into the air and simultaneously fire a rocket at the ground.
The boost from the blast propels avatars much higher than is possible with a regular jump, which can help players access parts of the level that were previously off limits.
For regular gamers, executing a simple rocket jump without turning their hero into a pile of digital bloody chunks is a nifty achievement.
But at these
poker tournaments, the pro gamers have their characters rocket jumping like they're on pogo sticks while firing pinpoint shots at opponents.
As amazing as some of the virtual feats are, though, great gamers won't be enough to draw in hordes of nongamer spectators, industry experts say.
Presentation is key.
Chris Swain, assistant professor in the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts and co-director of the university's EA Game Innovation Lab, noted that poker became popular thanks to the creation of the "card cam."
Being able to see all the cards in play and the odds for each player at the table made the game dramatic even for viewers who had never played poker before, Mr. Swain said.
Video game tournaments will have to come up with something similar, he said.
"If you think about it from a television production perspective, what are you going to put on the screen to make it exciting?" he said.
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Mr. Swain said game tournaments could also make the action more intriguing by documenting the personalities of the competitors, much like professional sports broadcasters.
"Do some star-making," he said. "They could make the players into stars or sex symbols."
The tournament organizers say they're aware that top-notch competitors won't be enough to draw in someone who doesn't know Halo from Half-Life.
Whether it's hiring good announcers – known as "shoutcasters" – or coming up with nifty graphics to display statistics or new camera angles to track the players in-game, all tournaments are looking at ways to present the frenzied play in a way that's comprehensible and intriguing to hard-core gamers as well as their moms, dads and nongamer friends.
Mr. Stratton at id Software said his company is now developing games to make it easier to set up virtual cameras to track competitors.
He said he's also seen tripods and joysticks that mimic the look and feel of video cameras used at football games and other events; they are used to control the cameras that track the action during video game tournaments. Play
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That way, veteran camera operators can cover a video game tournament the same way they would the Super Bowl, rather than having to master the keyboard and mouse controls that most in-game cameras currently depend on.
"Those are the kinds of big breakthroughs we need to be thinking about, and we are at id," Mr. Stratton said.
Mr. Ringel of the World Series of Video Games said that one reason his tournament features nonshooting games like Guitar Hero is that they're easier for nongamers to appreciate.
"We're definitely looking to bring nongamers in to watch this type of thing," he said. "Anybody that watches music videos or American Idol can watch Guitar Hero."
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