How To Become A “Casual” eSports Fan
Picking up the world’s fastest growing (and somewhat inaccessible) pasttime becomes easier when you drop your preconieved notions.
Damn, it feels good to be a sports fan these days. With a veritable cornucopia of content available via television, radio, web, social media, magazines and newspapers, getting your sports fix has become a 365/24/7 endeavor.
April is a particularly packed month:
- March Madness
- The Masters
- NBA playoffs
- NHL playoffs
- MLB opening day
- NFL draft coverage
- MMA
- IndyCar/NASCAR races
The only thing missing from this smorgasbord of athletic insanity is eSports. As a sports addict (and lifelong gamer), it’s been on my to-do list to add the rapidly growing segment to my daily diet, but where to begin?
I wasn’t up to speed on any major eSports titles — which should have given me pause — but then again, I don’t actively follow basketball and I still enjoy watching the Warriors. Despite my relative ignorance, I was confident that I would quickly find something in the world of eSports to cheer about.
Oh, how naive and wrong I was.
Parlez vous eSports?
The first thing you need to understand if you, too, are embarking on a (misguided) quest to casually watch competitive gaming is that despite the name and soon-to-be mainstream trappings, eSports isn’t a spectator sport like its real-world counterparts.
Instead, eSports are highly technical exhibitions of skill in the mold of competitive chess. As such, there are no easily identifiable or familiar “moments” for casual fans to latch onto. The amount of fun the viewer can have is almost entirely dependent on his or her knowledge of the rules and high-level meta — so without at least a rudimentary grasp of the basics, it’s game over, man.
To get a sense of what I mean, check out this highlight reel from the recent League of Legends World Championships:
To a non-fan, that clip plays like a foreign-language movie without subtitles. Sure, you can infer certain things by paying attention to the visual and auditory cues — you can even take some measure of joy in the skilled performances of the “actors” — but the larger implications of the action (plot points) are lost on viewers who don’t speak the native language.
Now, contrast this with a highlight reel from Super Bowl 50:
While football is objectively easier to grok for a number of mechanical, cultural and psychological reasons, it’s still a highly complex and sophisticated sport. This puts the NFL in the unsavory position of having to please a diverse fanbase with wildly varying levels of product knowledge.
The easiest solution — in the league’s eyes, anyway — has been to boil the whole thing down into a palatable slurry of sharp camera angles, colorful graphics and carefully scripted soundbites. The NFL is mostly empty calories, but it’s also undeniably tasty and filling. Anyone looking for a more substantial meal can then head to a media outlet or specialty site on their own time.
To the contrary, eSports telecasts are all meat and zero fat. Everyone — from the players to the analysts to the majority of the viewers — analyzes the game on the same conceptual level, so the bar never moves. That’s great if you’re already a gourmand, but it keeps the rest of us from taking a seat at the dinner table.
Singing For My Supper
In previously unpacking my feelings on this topic, I argued that eSports leagues need to follow the NFL’s example in order to entice casual fans who were turned off by the steep learning curve or had other interests that kept them from converting on their own. I had all sorts of clever reasons in support of my conclusions, but I came to my senses before I clicked the publish button.
It dawned on me that I had become so accustomed to having sports work for me, I couldn’t even begin to comprehend a scenario where I would have to work to enjoy myself. This was an arrogant position, mainly because millions of gamers have already proven it’s possible to meet the high demands of eSports fandom.
After all, why should the gaming industry lower its standards to convert someone like me; someone who was unwilling to make a commitment to understanding the product?
In my haste to justify why eSports was getting it wrong, I was also overlooking two important business considerations:
- Why would companies like Riot Games waste time trying to convert outsiders with questionable loyalties when they already have a deeply committed fanbase to cater to? League of Legends has nearly 67 million active players, and one needn’t obtain a Harvard MBA to recognize the wisdom of maintaining a successful position in an existing (and profitable) niche.
- Despite the burgeoning groundswell, the mainstream isn’t quite ready for eSports. Maybe in ten years, when competitive gaming has built up its own sense of tradition and cultural cachet, companies can pin their entire business strategy on catering to the masses, but for now, it’s a risky proposition — even in our increasingly digital world.
Unfortunately, these realizations left me in a rather hopeless situation. I genuinely wanted to enjoy eSports, but I didn’t have the time nor disposition to grind out the firsthand experience necessary to become an actual fan. No, I needed some sort of compromise, and, unexpectedly, it was the aforementioned parallel drawing between eSports and foreign-language films that led me to the promised land.
Enter K-dramas.
Native Tongue
When I was six years old, I immigrated to the United States and quickly adopted English as my primary language. I only spoke Korean with my parents, so my fluency waned with each passing year.
Years later, when Korean culture had it’s PSY-fueled moment in the sun, I discovered the joys of K-dramas. Initially, I kept the subtitles on, but over time, I realized that I needed them less and less. They still came in handy for understanding complex plot points and parsing metaphors, but I had inadvertently started relearning the language.
So why couldn’t I do that with eSports? Why couldn’t I eventually learn to appreciate the complex lexicon of LoL or decipher the frenetic pidgin of CoD?
Sure, it would take time (and work), but by keeping an open mind and repeatedly exposing myself to the source material — and relying on the help of the many YouTubers, wiki editors and forum mavens who’ve documented the ins-and-outs of their world — actually understanding what the hell was going on should be within my grasp.
Incidentally, this was exactly how my initial love of sports began. When I was a kid, I didn’t know anything other than to cheer when my team did something good and boo when the other team did, well, anything. But the more sports I watched, and the more coverage I consumed, the more my knowledge and appreciation deepened and matured.
Look, I may never be a diehard eSports fan, but even if I never love it as much as I love football or hockey, there’s no reason why I can’t find a little niche for it in my heart. The only remaining question was, where the hell do I start?
A New Challenger Appears
For starters, I’m going to give League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm an honest try. (Admittedly, I’m not really looking forward to getting yelled at by my future teammates.) I’m also going to try and reacquaint myself with shooters like CoD and Halo. (I’m not looking forward to getting yelled at there, either, there is a lot of yelling during online games.)
I’m also really excited about getting into Rocket League. It’s basically football (read: soccer) played by RC cars and it’s apparently all sorts of fun to play.
I originally discounted it as a potential spectator sport because if I was going to watch football, I couldn’t imagine choosing a digital offshoot over, say, an actual EPL or San Jose Earthquakes game. But after watching a few matches, I think it has potential. It seems to to offer the right combination of accessibility and high level competition that a budding eSports fan needs.
Unfortunately, the pro league just wrapped up its playoffs in March, so I’ll have to wait until it comes back around, but not to worry: I’ve got plenty of other sports, both traditional and virtual, to keep me entertained until then.
