But as someone just said, you aren’t just following an athlete, you are following an actor. Do you care who is staring in a Star Wars movie, or will you watch it no matter? Do you care who is the stunt performer in a TV show, or will you watch it because you like the story?
The only comparison is to teams, and you like the team but don’t care who plays for them. Or maybe you are a Kevin Durant fan, and you start supporting the Golden State Warriors when he moved.
The different promotions aren’t big leagues or professional leagues or development series, with stars rising to one when they get better or joining a bigger team. It’s just entertainment, and some will be more to your taste. Personally I couldn’t imagine watching a four hour wrestling show! Thankfully Luchs Underground episodes are about 50 minutes each, and that fits my taste much better thanks!
There is something like that. I certainly watched a lot of movies in the early days of DVD because they had Jackie Chan in them. It didn’t really matter what the plot was because it was a Jackie Chan movie and I liked watching Jackie Chan. I’m more likely to check out a random movie on Netflix if Nicolas Cage is in it as opposed to generic actor 310. As Jackie aged and did more American movies that were less in the style of the traditional Jackie Chan movie, I stopped watching. Perhaps that’s the closest comparison, but even that is not an exact analogy.
I think videogames throw a huge twist in this discussion.
Ball and Stick sports are overwhelmingly a spectator affair. You can play baseball or football casually with your buddies, but unless you’re in a college league or a professional there is an almost impossible chance for your to regularly compete seriously in organized play, a majority of your time invested in the sport will be watching or discussing it. And I think that’s why they are so compelling. Physical sports are easy to watch and exciting even if you have no idea what’s going on. If you do know what’s going on you can enter a community of theorycrafters and casual gossipers about drafts or fantasy betting or whatever.
Videogames throw a monkey wrench into that. It’s so much easier to play seriously. Even if you’re not a top player you can play ranked whenever you want and engage with the meta. I would suspect that people are generally less invested in esports because there is less of a divide between the pro and casual players. You might not be able to play in front of a cheering crowd for cool cash but if you have a decent micro you can still pull off the fancy trick you see the pros in Starcraft doing. Much less realistic than matching Tiger Woods for par. Despite being far more visually bombastic, watching videogames is far less interesting if you don’t know what the hell is going on.
this of course still doesn’t explain why in the living hell mobas occupy the status they do as the esport to play. The first developer to make a game that is actually fun to watch will crash that market in less than 24 hours.
So the genre of movie you liked was “Jackie Chan Action Movie”. You wouldn’t care who the other actors were. Those movies had a following like any other franchise.
Don’t think of professional wrestling as a sport in this case. It involves athletes and physical contests, but it’s much more about the media property.
This sort of sums up my feelings about American Football. I like the game, but given the crap pulled by the NFL and the NCAA I’m not a fan of supporting the teams in any way.
I fully expect American football to fade into history over the next decade or two. It’s too dangerous, and it’s not like such a shift in sports fandom is unprecedented.
One thing esports pundits seem to overlook, however, is related to something you said.
It’s true that esports, unlike tradsports, are more accessible to play by the general public. It’s also true that esports are less effective at generating the kind of fandom and non-player-spectator experience that tradsports do.
Most people are trying to make esports more spectator-oriented, and to emulate the successes of tradsports. Home teams, arena games, jerseys, games designed for spectators primarily, etc…
This overlooks something important.
With traditional sports, we assume that most people can not reliably engage in organized play. Most spectators have never, or at least not recently or regularly, played the game they watch in any serious capacity. Many not at all in decades. That’s expected and hard to avoid.
esports are different. Culture is getting different.
The future is not non-player-fans of spectator-oriented esports. That’s part of the future, but it’s not the future.
The future is everyone is a gamer. They play esports and they watch them, for their entire lives.
Imagine what American Football would look like if 80% of the people in the arena played American Football every day themselves, and were decent at it.
If you want to forecast the future of esports, you have to forecast the future of how society treats gaming as a whole. What does a spectator sport look like in 2039 when you can assume everyone watching knows exactly what is going on?
Others include pool/snooker and other “pub games” that everyone has tried, and continue to play socially. Also running and swimming. More people run per week than watch other people run, I guess.
I’m workshopping a lecture/panel on “pub games,” and I was very close to including one in our “40 games you must play” talk. They are a whole game design space in and of themselves.
Over the New Year, we ended up playing quite a bit of pool and a small bit of darts. I’m half inclined to take up pool again.
I imagine it’s going to be a Go-type game, something that has a very high skill cap but nonexistent cost of entry. It most likely won’t be Go, because at least in America it has been solidified as a super nerd game, but some kind of game akin to poker where the “skill” involved is more mental than physical. The only difference between casual and pro poker players is the amount of money they’re winning. The breakthrough will be when someone invents a tabletop game as visually appealing as physical sports.
I’m picturing some sort of AR setup for Card Games where the players play their card games and all of the monster and spell interactions are rendered as CG overlays.
I really wish it were Go, Go has other issues, like, it takes too long. You actually do need a good bit of knowledge about the game to realize most of what is going on, especially once you get to the higher levels of play.
Without concentrated effort to learn the game even the things that mid level amateurs do will seem like god damn magic. I’m not particularly strong, I’m 3k on OGS right now (I’ve been 1k on KGS and IGS before, but I haven’t played seriously in a decade) but when I’m teaching people who are even up to 10k I constantly get responses of absolute surprise at some moves that I consider rote brain dead responses.
Go is a bad spectator game because it’s got an issue with positional heuristics. You can’t look at the board and see who is winning without a lot of expertise on how to play.
I think the future is more like Nidhogg where you can glance up and see who is winning and losing and by how much.