CGS, ESWC botch gender in gaming

There exists an obvious but thin reason to segregate men and women in select sports - and that is testosterone. All arguments of female body builders aside, in only highly physical sports, such as American football, basketball, hockey, men at a peak physical condition will perform better than female counterparts. This accounts for the existence of a separate basketball league in the States (WNBA), for instance, since otherwise most women with maybe the rare exception would not be able to enjoy opportunities to play basketball professionally. However, such reasons to segregate competitions by gender don't make themselves so immediately obvious when it comes to gaming.

However, in many sports, gender segregation has very little justification save for following the status quo that has been in place for well over a century. The first I've observed tackle this head on is auto racing, and I don't think it's really as much NASCAR encouraging the idea rather than headstrong female drivers proving themselves on the track to the dismay of grey-haired pit managers who would vote Pat Buchanan into the White House.

I digress; my point is that these plucky racing pioneers have made a realization that the people behind the ESWC and CGS would be smart to make - that in most sports and competitive games, gender doesn't mean shit.

Holding a separate competition for men and women in key pushing and mouse movement with a second course of strategic and tactical planning and teamwork with finely tuned hand-eye coordination for desert - otherwise known as Counterstrike - as the ESWC has done, is simply useless and counterproductive. Similarly backwards is having separate competitions for male and female Dead or Alive players, as is being done in the CGS.

Whatever marketing arguments that might be made regarding a gender division to 'highlight' female gamers and attract a less male-heavy audience, while its intention is good, are quite possibly achieving the opposite. Gaming events being done with such a high profile would do so much to attempt attracting the female demographic into such a male dominated activity by using their event as a platform to further gender equality by not segregating genders in their competitions. It's not even enough to merely pit the sexes against each other, it's about realizing that competitors in gaming competitions can be gamers first and be of a gender second, that your hormone production has no impact on your ability to play video games.

At the least, such practices can certainly be chalked up as a missed opportunity for gaming to make a real impact on today's mainstream dynamic.

AMA: Gaming a disease

If you play video games for more than 2 hours a day, you're about to be stricken with a disease. No, you haven't gotten it yet, and it'll hit without warning. But if the American Medical Association decides to formally recognize 'video game addiction' as a real disorder, millions of people across the States will be instantly infected.

This is the head of a growing trend for grey haired researches and aging conservative doctors labeling every new wave of tech culture as some sort of addiction or disorder. This most recent iteration lays out a very sweeping definition for 'addicted gamers.'

"A gamer is a term used to describe a person who plays games. Historically, a gamer was someone who played role-playing games or war games, but more recently the term has come to include computer and video game players. Although the term technically includes those who do not necessarily consider themselves gamers (ie, casual gamers), it is a commonly used colloquial term to identify persons who spend as much of their leisure time as possible playing or reading about games. Video gaming has traditionally been a social experience, and most video games are playable by more than one person. Multi-player video games can be played either competitively or cooperatively online by using multiple input devices, or by “hotseating."

See yourself there? Better call up your shrink because you need therapy, apparently.

The study suggests several calls to action, including the ESRB cracking down further on gaming ratings, calling on physicians to 'further educate the public on the health risks of gaming,' and to limit gaming time to no more than 1 to 2 hours per day. Where is the line drawn now, when doctors decide to take aim at something which people do in their leisure time that has no direct negative effect on a person's health? Besides this study's potential damaging effect on the competitive gaming scene as a whole and it's attempts to gain a more mainstream audience and following, due to the general public's perpetual willingness to swallow any sort of scare tactic pushed at them, this also could open up a proverbial can of worms regarding new treatments, crackpot psychologists, and high-profile (and don't forget high-cost) drugs to treat this new invented disease.

And that's exactly what it is, invented. As long as prevailing medical thought continues to root itself in some sort of Pleasantville 1950s mentality regarding technology and the motion of culture not only here in the States but worldwide as well, the more that medical societies like the AMA will become increasingly irrelevant in the public sphere.

I, however, am going to make sure I get in as much gaming as possible in the next few days...that is of course before I'm diagnosed with a disease. But not before I write to the AMA to urge them strongly to take up similar courses of action against action movies, cell phones, email, text messaging, playing golf, practising a musical instrument, hanging out, walking....

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070615/002750.shtml

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/06/doctor_urges_am.html

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20031104/2344216_F.shtml

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060915/031213.shtml

http://news.spong.com/article/12879?cb=601

The new, real virtual battlefield

The protests and riots on the part of Russian nationals in response to the decision made by the Estonian government to move a Soviet-era war memorial is not exactly current news any longer. However, all political and nationalist concerns aside, these protests have brought to light a new type of operation in the arsenal of the independent partisan - attacks on the electronic infrastructure of a nation.

The idea is nothing new to gamers or hacker types, we see individuals, ventrilo servers, game servers, and even entire IRC networks get targeted in DDoS (or distributed denial of service) attacks.

Problematic elitism in 'eSports'

eSports needs to die if gaming is to progress.

A bold assertion, I realize - and please don't misunderstand, it's not the activities of the entire scene that I have a quarrel with, but rather what everyone pretends to call the scene and themselves: eSports, cyber- or e-athletes. What's in a name? Why would I feel the need to take issue with the term used to describe the hardcore gaming scene, especially since it seems to be commonly adopted by those it's intended to describe? My issue with the term 'eSports' lies within a wholy larger problem that is having and will continue to have a quite damaging effect on the scene as a whole - elitism.

The term 'eSports' tries to draw a broad overarching parallel between that which it only really meets halfway - the world of professional sports. Here lies the major dillema which the serious gaming scene has been trying to wrestle with for years now - what defines a sport and what qualities does a sport have over something defined as merely a game? And where does the competitive gaming scene sit on that spectrum? Lets take for sake of examining this further that football (soccer) is a sport and chess is a game. (I can't imagine too many people taking issue with that.)

Chess involves one thing primarily and above all - mental prowess. Chess is an endeavor of the mind, focusing on planning, strategical foresight, tactical agility, careful calculation, and seeing and executing that winning combination of moves which results in victory: checkmate. However, you need only the physical ability of being able to move one piece weighing no more than a salt shaker a couple of inches every few seconds - no great display of physical agility or endurance here.

Football, in comparison, requires a great deal of mental prowess as well by all players on the field. This is also exhibited in long-term strategical planning, figuring out how they'll manuever against certain other players, and having similar vision team-wide in seeing and acting on opportunities presented, moving themselves individually and as a unit around the field to create that opportunity for a goal: checkmate. However the physical prowess and conditioning necessary of participants in football far exceeds that of chess, and in the opinion of this writer is one of if not the key qualifier which separates sport from game.

I see sport as the true and full convergence of mind and body; all facets of a person's being are called into employment while participating in a sport. Yes, professional athletes in any major sport are rarely noted as posessing particular eloquence or remarkable intelligence, however what they are and must be smart about is every little nuance of their sport of choice as well as how to keep their bodies in peak condition and how to best utilize their own unique physicality in the approach of their job. Conditioning, strength training, and agility are all primary concerns, but are ultimately useless if a competitor or team comes underprepared for a contest - you hear it all the time, "We just weren't prepared enough for this game."

Now the quandry that the term 'eSports' creates should lie quite exposed when viewed from this angle: the physicality involved in activites most widely recognized as sport is far and above what is required by gaming. Pushing a mouse around, clicking buttons and using a keyboard in a gaming setting demands some dexterity and a good deal of hand-eye coordination, but demands nothing towards a peak physical condition in order to achieve it at a high level. (I'll delve no further into that point as it'd be far too easy to get blatantly offensive...) Gaming certainly requires more physically of a participant than chess does, however does that qualify it as a sport? Or does it rather lie inside a grey area between the two - and if it does, can we ignore it, call competitive gaming a sport and expect that to be swallowed by the mainstream? Within the intellectual realm, gaming certainly demands the same of participants as chess and football do of theirs; however this is where the comparison ends and, in my opinion, so does the validity of the term eSports.

Even setting all of the lofty philosophy behind the term aside, a simple pragmatic examination of the term sees it fail miserably. Those readers who consider themselves serious gamers, the next time you find yourself out getting a beer (or a soda for the kiddies) with your non-gamer buddies, please try and bring up casually that you participate in 'eSports' and see what kind of reaction you get. I have 1:1 odds on smirks with a 5:1 option on flat out laughter. This humor (at your expense) would be derived from the 'air castle' effect; quite simply and on its surface, the term just tries too hard, and at its core the term exhibits the detrimental elitism that generally (but with exceptions) plagues the upper crust of competitive gaming to the detriment of the entire scene.

This is the same elitism and arrogance which exhibits itself in sectioning off groups of teams in 'elite' divisions in online leagues, a pointless practice which creates cliques and cool kids clubs who use their CAL-Non-O status as a platform to piss on the heads of anyone 'below' them. This is the same elitism which is found every 'postseason' in online competitions, where all the recreational teams who could give a shit less about championships, really just want to play for the sake of playing, and comprise the majority of any game's competitive community, are not given a scheduled match and are forced to sit out while the gaming aristocracy has their little playoff for four, five, sometimes six weeks. This is the elitism that is justified in the name of eSports, a term that gives license for individual players and teams to be exclusionary, closed off, and stifled, and that welcomes community growth not for the sake of greater competition but only to serve as a larger pedestal to scream for more prize money for themselves at LAN tournaments.

'eSports' says to the casual gamer that what the eSports participant does is somehow different as well as inherently more valuable than what they do. I participate in eSports, I am a 'cyberathlete' - you're just a gamer. This distinction does not have a place in sports. Participants at all levels are considered 'athletes' - from the Hall of Famer down to the Little Leaguer, they're all athletes. While this goes unnoticed and is simply how we all consider sports participants, its important to note that an athlete is an athlete regardless of the sport or relative proficiency. Any distinction of proficiency is not part of the term, but is left to outside qualifiers, such as 'professional,' 'semi-pro,' or 'recreational.' Again, regardless of level, an athlete is an athlete - it's inclusionary and encourages participation. eSports is an exclusionary world, flat out discourages participation by the very way the scene chooses to separate and present itself as an exception to and superior to the rest of the gaming world, and is exclusionary even in the way that prominent leagues structure themselves and make new teams and new players feel incredibly second rate and excluded from the full experience.

If professional gaming has a chance in hell of existing on a stable, long term basis, 'eSports' and all of the elitism attached to it must be kicked to the curb without hesitation, and we all need to stop pretending that what we all participate here is somehow something greater than gaming at a high competitive level. It would be for the greater good of all involved - the casual gamer, the competitive gamer, and the mainstream onlooker - if we spent as much effort towards the sharing and the propagation of what we all enjoy so much as we do trying to make competitive gaming seem like a highly exclusive country club.

The first step towards that is getting rid of the notion of eSports and being honest and real about just what it is we do and how we define ourselves: we are gamers and we participate in gaming - nothing more, and nothing less. We can begin to build a community on that premise that has the potential to stand much stronger than one built on the faulty premise of eSports - a premise that engages both the expansive casual gaming community as well as opens the door towards encouraging wider participation at any level of gaming. Efforts towards expanding the gaming community as a whole will go further towards helping secure a solid foundation to build professional gaming on rather than trying to promote such a ridiculous notion as 'eSports' on it's own weak merit.

Makings of a monopoly

Pop quiz: who owns Major League Baseball? Who owns the National Football league? Who owns professional basketball?

Stumped? Here's an easier one: who owns (or at least claims to own) professional gaming? This should bring forth a decent list of people all of whom have tried (and failed, to a point) to claim ownership over competitive gaming, and all of whom have done so under the premise of 'trying to bring gaming to the mainstream' or 'furthering the gaming community' - Angel Munoz, Scott Ringel, Michael Sepso, among others are prominent on that list. We can add one more name to the list, and it's a scary one: News Corporation.

As much as they will try to bury the connection in an attempt to make the Championship Gaming Series seem legitimate to those that don't know better, the CGS is nothing more than a hugely elaborate, well funded, and overly hyped production for a television series - media fodder, and nothing more. In the process those at News Corporation plan to make every red cent they possibly can from gaming for as long as they possibly can, leaving the gaming scene, quite honestly, screwed over either way things progress for the CGS.

The connection is clear despite their attempts to 'clean up' the CGS image by removing all direct references towards DirecTV and registering an LLC specifically for it in order to mask ownership completely. Trace the ownership of five of the seven partners for the CGS - DirecTV, Sky, Star, IGN, and GameSpy are all owned by News Corporation. CGS leveraging the assets of News Corp to deliver gaming to the mainstream? Negative, rather News Corp leveraging its own weight to build a monopoly on that which is better left open.

The singular element that contributes most towards professional sports leagues' stablility, economic feasibility, and overall integrity within the general public is lack of ownership. Curious as to why it was so hard to dig up answers as to who owns professional baseball or football? It was a trick question, the league has no ownership body, and in most cases is an unincorporated entity, and merely is a representation of all teams inside the league doing business collectively. The professional sports league entity itself is no more than a cellophane wrapper around the real business units in sports: the team.

This fact has been ignored by each and every individual who has attempted to build professional gaming in the United States for the simple reason that lack of ownership means lack of potential to profit directly and without limit from the entirety of the league as a whole, which leaves little room or need for people such as Munoz or Ringel. In simpler terms: you can't profit off of that which you don't own. And since these competitive gaming figureheads have no viable place inside a true professional gaming league, since their goal is to further their own bank account at the expense of furthering gaming, nothing of the sort has existed.

The CGS is not the answer, quite the contrary - it exhibits this issue to a much larger degree and is blatantly overt in it's intentions: to own professional gaming.

Andy Reif, 'Commissioner' for CGS below.

eSports is truly the convergence of sports and entertainment and new media and traditional media. By combining high level competition with the rich content and action of video games, we are creating the next great sports property. (Full story)

The word 'property' is a key: it clearly states their intentions here (it was used six different times in the three page article linked above) and it means only more of the same for gamers and gaming: we provide the basis and get none of the reward. The gaming community has been flat out fleeced for a decade now by people pretending to further it, and much the same will continue now with the CGS. News Corp is not interested in building a legitimate gaming league half as much as they're interested in building a television production. Teams that sign with the CGS are not becoming the first truly professional gaming teams, they're signing on to become actors and actresess in loosely scripted TV series. And with supposed deals aimed towards locking down entire games from being aired anywhere outside News Corp networks (which I would just as soon chalk up to typical Gotfrag sensationalism - and speaking of Gotfrag, I wouldn't be suprised if there was an acquisition announcement made rather soon) the intention is clear to dominate gaming media to the point that if a truly legitimate professional gaming league was to be established - one geared towards the advancement of gaming itself for the maximum benefit first of the players and teams above all other concerns - that it would be stifled by a lack of media attention due to outstanding agreements made towards News Corp's CGS.

Yet it's the competitive gamer that is the most supportive of this endeavor despite the clear intent to abuse them. The figure at which these initial teams are 'signing' in terms of compensation will set the precedent to be used for all future signings; if you think that player salaries in the CGS will increase over time if it takes off, you're bloody mad - if the current batch of players won't play without a raise they'll simply find another batch of idiots to play video games on a television show. If Mr. Wendel can be hyped as the 'John Madden of gaming' they can turn any pub scrub into the next gaming phenom. The signings of compLexity and Team 3D to the CGS are historic only in how much damage they have done to the quality of life for aspiring pro gamers for years to come.

It is the mainstream who will have the most trouble swallowing this, because as much efforts are being put forth to merely mimick the structure and workings of professional sports, it's far from the real McCoy, and it's those that don't have a vested interest in gaming to begin with that won't be able to stomach it. News Corp's professional Counter-strike league is not nearly as attractive culturally as the 'national game of baseball,' and the link between a sports team and a metropolitan populace which is being ignored, since it's far more economical to have all teams play in an air conditioned studio in California instead of in the cities these teams are supposedly going to be representing, is going to be the achilles heel of the CGS.

Why my uproar? I'll admit, in a softer light the CGS could be viewed as a small step forward for gaming. However when viewed from all sides there is no disguising the five steps backwards this is putting gaming and gamers in return.