Developing a New Major

ECAROcon speaker created utiliteam (tools for competitions and tournaments), company called zapdot.com

pro gaming leagues

• cyberathletes Professional League (CPL) – PC based FPS competitions, money prozes with big sponsors, started in 1995, closed
• major league gaming – console based competition, seems to be going strong
• electronic Sports world cup – based in France
• Cyber evolution – online gaming competition leagues, FPS, money prizes, has sophisticated anti-dcheating programs, team based, several decisions, seems to be going strong
• Championship gaming series – on direct tv (thecgs.com), live gaming, sports style narration, new source of game play, needs to find best game type for people to watch on screenwhile others are playing
• there are lots of tournaments outside the professional world, difficulty in judging, but there are strong communities around these competitions
• FPS dominate pro gaming and torunaments, good games, good inputs on the pc, totally escapist, do stuff you can’t do in RL
• good topic for games & society class – competiton, professional gaming, games as spectator sports, players get endorsements, business models

look at developments in games along iwth development in entertainment media and sports – lots of similarity, games look more like movies, have epic stories, games get more popular, have big release events and as game sales go up movie tix sales go down, entertainment is a recession proof industry, don’t knwo yet about videogames (tho guess we get to find out in next year), lots of new places to play games – there are 99 million people playing games online, lots of secondary markets around games (voip, news, fan sites, software servers, gamers are a tight knit community

look at games as having a story telling component, a competition compoent, and there are some games where those 2 things overlap (like in MMOs)

history of FPS

• Doom (1993, FPS, allowed networked play, new kind of social interaction (LAN parties, have to be physically present to network, no internet of course at that time)
• Quake – play on the net with friends and strangers
• HalfLife 1993 – based on Quake2 engines, it was modifiable and there are 300 mods availale
• Unreal Tournament – their game engine is the basis for lots of games
• Halo – FPS on console, hard sell at first because movements are a lot less precise than on pc, XBOX Live was originally based on Halo competitions
• Counter Strike – 1999-2000, started as a mod of Half Life, has money system, lots of teams, 2 million unique users monthly, use declining now because lots of other alternatives
• WOW – works with users to make new desirable content and allows mods, so new content continuously made available which helps keep game fresh and player base stable

people hate to change games – they’ve already invested a lot of time in learning a game, so they could play old game and have fun right away now vs learn new game that will take lots of time before it gets to be fun

quake live – free to play, ad supported, from id (quake maker)

developers maybe need to slow down sequels, get the maximum profit, letpeople play longer, let hardware catch up, then upgrade

XBoxLife wildly successful, big hopes for Wii and Playstion online services, there will be more competition, tournaments may move to these online services from PC and consoles

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