Speaking at SXSW About Pro Gaming

I’ll be speaking at this year’s SXSW Interactive festival on March 7th on a panel discussing:

 Pro Gamers: Extreme Athletes of the 21st Century

The event takes place in Austin, TX in March 7th - 16th, so if you’re in the area or will already be attending the festival drop me a line and let me know. More details on the actual event to come once it gets closer, meanwhile though I wanted to pose a question to you.

What are your thoughts on Professional Gaming and Pro Gamers?

Do you consider it a sport, do you think it has the potential to become a mainstream sport, and if so what could be done to better secure it’s spot as one?

With the new blog IM (see: right), I’ve been having a lot of great direct conversations with the community.  About 100 messages a day on average. A lot of which have sparked some really great convo regarding the game, feedback, suggestions, and just gaming in general. So I’m anxious to see what some of you have to say on this subject.

Hit the jump for my rant on the subject as well as some more questions to sulk over.

[Rambling Rant Starts Here]

State of Gaming

I think it’s safe to say Video Games and recreational gaming is well beyond mainstream, with over $18 Billion in console hardware sales alone in 2007 and the top games of the year attracting millions of players (Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare = 7 + Million), it’s clear that gaming is a part of a lot of people’s lives. So I don’t think it’s that fair fetched to presume with the right support Professional Gamers could become even more mainstream themselves.

Competitive gamers are already competing for tens of thousands of dollars on a fairly regular basis, and with the increase in competitive gaming leagues such as GGL, MLG, and several others it’s starting to become more and more common to see players affiliating themselves with a team of regular players, even on the more casual side of gaming players are teaming up.

 So What’s It Gonna Take

To take competitive gaming to that next level of mainstream professional gaming? This isn’t something I claim to know, but just throwing it out for general discussion. We already have lots of solid professional gaming teams out there, and plenty of good leagues going, but I can’t help but feel like something’s lacking. Maybe an overall standard and general acceptance of the sport.

Creating A Multi-Game Standard? 

Developers can play a huge role in this as well, especially if there was a standard in what’s expected from a ‘competitive game’. From the development side, developers have a whole community to consider, so where is the sweet spot of appealing to your competitive community while also offering a welcoming experience for your general audience, casual players, and hardcore non-competitive players?

I think Clan Integration is becoming more and more of a selling point for a lot of gamers and if there was a unified standard on what Clan Integration should be, perhaps some built-in clan API’s for developers from hardware manufacturers. For example, if Microsoft were to build in Clan support for Xbox Live where you can start a Team, invite gamertags. Once they’ve accepted you have a separate friends list consisting only of your team.

For matchmaking purposes, developers could then be provided with the neccessary tools and API’s to allow for easy matchmaking for clans only. For example, you go into multiplayer and you have two options:

 Solo Play

Team Play

Solo play is all one wolves, you matchmaking with X number of other random players, with Team play being users who are part of a Team via the built-in Clan support on the Dashboard.

As it is at the moment, every developer does their own thing for supporting their competitive community. Whether it’s something like we’ve done with a Party System, Clan Tags, etc. or something as extensive as a fully custom Clan section in multiplayer (i.e. Splinter Cell: Double Agent). Overall demanding a lot of development resources, time, and manpower to creating a custom clan / competitive features and aspect to the game. Resources that may not be alloted because focus is improving and adding to the gameplay experience for the community as a whole, and not just those who will use the competitive aspects of it. However, if there was a standard, development resources needed would be must less, and the ability to more easily cater to both the growing competitive players AND the overall casual / hardcore non-competitive gamer would be much more feasible within the growingly more demanding development cycles / costs.  Simply, as it is now how can we make it more justifiable to put the extra costs and manpower behind features that less than 20% of the community actually use? Now I use Xbox Live as an example, but this applies to all platforms.

Conclusion

In the end, it’s all about the standards. If there are common standards across the board for competitive gaming and teams, then you’re going to see a lot more unity, and growth. As it it now, there’s a lot of great companies doing their own thing, which is great but without unifying and growing that community as a whole it’s going to be to busy competing with itself rather than competing with other sports.

We’re working on some really cool concepts for how we can make our competitive contribution here at Infinity Ward for future games, stuff that’s wayyy too early and idealistic to talk about now, but something I am interested in seeing developed over the course of our next game, but that’s a distant future I won’t bore you with now. Discuss.