Are games about to hit prime time?

SOURCE: BBC



It has often been said that the reason computer and video games are more popular then ever is because they look better than ever.

Add to those good looks the action, explosions and fast-paced action in the most popular game titles and you might be forgiven for thinking that they would be a natural fit for TV.

However, the history of competitive computer games is littered with attempts that have tried, and largely failed, to put games and gamers on the goggle box.

The latest attempt came to the UK in September in the form of the Championship Gaming Series (CGS). This aims to put pro-gaming on prime time TV on channels run by its main sponsors Sky and Direct TV.

Live matches and footage of CGS tournaments will be shown on Sky One. The CGS is not the only league to be shown on TV. Xleague.TV shows regular tournaments on cable and satellite channels and run its own, smaller scale, league.

The CGS models itself on US pro-sports and it owns the leagues and teams playing under its banner.

Counterstrike has been hugely popular for years

The CGS has created teams on five continents and runs its own leagues in which the teams will compete for a substantial prize pot.

All the members of the CGS teams get paid a monthly wage and each team of ten has players who excel at one of the four competition games: Counterstrike Source, Project Gotham Racing 3, Dead Or Alive 4 and Fifa Soccer 07.

Serious play

Andy Reif, commissioner of the CGS, believes that this time around video games have the best chance of making it as a pro-sport that can attract big audiences.

Prior to taking on the job of CGS boss, Mr Reif was part of the team that owned the rights to beach volleyball.

"When we took that over it was kind of damaged goods," said Mr Reif. "It did not have many fans, sponsors or media platforms."

By the time Mr Reif left to take on the CGS beach volleyball had become hugely popular, had major sponsors and plenty of TV coverage.

"I moved to the CGS because I thought video games were a bigger opportunity and its already global," he said.

The important change that the CGS has made is to create its own teams, said Mr Reif. Before now the world of pro-gaming has been fractured - divided by the games people play and the tournaments they enter.

The CGS hopes to make gaming as big as beach volleyball

The field was also hard to penetrate for those not heavily involved, he said.

To get over these obstacles the CGS had changed the rules in some of the games it ha adopted, developed special software to make it easy to follow the action in fast-moving games and makes the success of a team depend on all players winning at their chosen game.

For Michael O'Dell, a former manager of UK pro-gaming group Team Dignitas and now a CGS team manager, the competition is what the gaming world has been waiting for.

"It's taking gaming as it is now to the level of e-sports we have been trying and hoping we would achieve," he said.

By giving players a salary the CGS has, at a stroke, boosted the numbers of people that make a modest living out of it.

Before now, said Mr O'Dell, the problem pro-players faced was the uncertainty of their winnings. Although there were plenty of tournaments that offer cash prizes there were no guarantees that pro-players would end up in the money.

Few gamers manage to make a living from playing

But said Philip Wride, a former manager of UK pro-gamers 4Kings and now a game industry consultant, the arrival of the CGS has not been welcomed in all corners of the gaming world.

"A lot of European top teams did not bother getting involved with the CGS," said Mr Wride.

Some did not want to lose top players to the CGS or lose the chance to take part in tournaments, such as the World Cyber Games or the E-Sports World Cup, that offer potentially larger cash prizes than are available in CGS events.

Culturally, he added, Europeans were not used to sports in which the leagues own and run teams. This too, he said, may have been a barrier to people getting involved.

For his part Mr Reif is convinced that video games are poised to become hugely popular and that the players of today will become well-known tomorrow.

"The audience will continue to grow and grow." he said. "I've bet my career on it."

China Limits Teenage Internet Gaming

By MIN LEE

The Associated Press
Tuesday, July 17, 2007; 7:37 PM

HONG KONG -- The Chinese government has launched a campaign to limit the number of hours teenagers spend online playing games.

Under new rules that took effect Monday, Chinese Internet gaming companies must install a program that requires users to enter their ID card numbers. After three hours, players under 18 are prompted to stop and "do suitable physical exercise."

The online gaming industry "will develop in a healthy, harmonious direction" because of the monitoring system, Zhao said.

President Hu Jintao ordered regulators in January to promote a "healthy online culture" to protect the government's stability, according to state media.

Though China's communist government promotes Internet use, it has also set up an extensive surveillance and filtering system to prevent Chinese from accessing material considered obscene or politically subversive.

State of Play: A wide world of games

The gaming industry may span the globe but attempts to homogenise what it produces may end up killing creativity.

Austin isn't necessarily a place you've ever thought much about. Quiz aficionados know it as the capital city of Texas. Music fans know it as the self-proclaimed "Live Music Capital Of The World", thanks to its unusually high concentration of venues per capita.

The rest of us would probably struggle to put it on the map.

But the city, home to this month's Austin Game Developer's Conference, has an odd status in the videogame world.

In an industry dominated by its twin poles of Toyko and Los Angeles, Austin has long been a cluster of development excellence.

From the days of Looking Glass and Ion Storm, to the current trend for major outfits like BioWare, Midway, NCSoft and Sony Online Entertainment to base studios there, Austin has a long history of attracting, and retaining, game developers.

Handy info, if you're a game-fan-quiz-aficionado. And no doubt good news for Austin's local board of commerce. But does it have any wider significance? Does where a game gets made have any impact on what it's like to play?

The most obvious divide is between western and Japanese developed games.

Think of the extraordinary range of subjects, styles and structures you find in the "world cinema" section of a decent video store, and imagine what would happen if we could apply the same diversity to gaming. Margaret Robertson

The cultural gulf is obvious - each industry is drawing on different languages, histories, social traditions and fairy tales.

And, as the appeal of games took hold in the late '70s in the US, and the early '80s in Japan, that gulf was amplified, as 30 years' worth of games established a new set of traditions to serve the local markets.

But while it's easy to look at game history as the US versus Japan, Atari versus Nintendo, the truth was always more multi-cultural.

Britain had a flourishing and distinctive game development scene, initially serving Clive Sinclair's homegrown computers the ZX81 and the Spectrum.

France soon established itself, with titles like Another World and Rayman still resonant today. Currently, it's areas such as Scandinavia and Korea which are pushing to the forefront of development.

So can you pick up a game and guess where it's from?

Sometimes it's easy: there's a trend for humour and oddness in British games which still survives today, in the output of Rare or the presentation of Little Big Planet.

The French insistence that games can have a wider emotional and stylistic range can still be found in forthcoming games such as Heavy Rain and The Crossing.

A Scandinavian tradition for understanding that "mature" can mean more than mere lashings of gore can be seen in Dreamfall, Kane & Lynch and The Darkness.

Korea's emphasis on highly customisable, multiplayer PC games is producing recognisable aesthetic trends, in both its casual and high-end games.

Bioshock was part-written by Austin resident Susan O'Conner

Even in Austin, the local high-brow, off-beat atmosphere can to be seen in the work of Warren Spector at Junction Point, or of writers like Susan O'Conner who collaborated on Bioshock and Area 51.

Yet, while some local flavour remains, the prevailing trend is for the opposite: games face almost total globalisation.

Overwhelmingly, publishers hope to be able to market what they make worldwide, which leads to them to limit the culturally distinct elements in a title.

Developers themselves are well used to relocating, often skipping continents to find the work they want. Even individual game projects are global affairs - it's no longer unusual to find projects that are being worked on simultaneously in three different countries, scattered across time zones.

Other older art forms had longer to incubate local traditions before becoming global commodities, meaning that national literary and musical identities have stayed strong.

Some newer media, like comics, have failed to generate the kind of commercial pressure that the games industry now generates, ensuring local traits continued to flourish.

Gaming may be facing a uniquely acute risk of losing its various identities.

Which takes us back to that original question. Does it matter? Isn't gaming's global appeal part of the proof that it's a truly modern medium for a truly modern age?

Gaming is capable of hitting all the current buzzwords, as it crosses borders, and encourages collaboration and user-created content. What sense does it make to cater to a domestic audience when you could be making games for the entire world?

The answer is another buzzword: diversity.

There's little importance, from a gamer's perspective, in whether or not Spain has a thriving development scene.

But if there weren't studios in Warsaw and Kiev, we almost certainly wouldn't have game projects inspired by film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) or writer Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher).

The games industry is used to having arguments about whether bringing more female, gay or ethnically diverse staff into the development process will make it more able to serve those markets.

What doesn't so often get discussed is the benefit that cultivating regional identities could bring. Think of the extraordinary range of subjects, styles and structures you find in the "world cinema" section of a decent video store, and imagine what would happen if we could apply the same diversity to gaming.

Isn't that the kind of globalisation games should be fighting for?