Richard “Dr. Gonzo” Lewis shares his derailed train of thought with the wider world in his regular column feature, Gonzorreah.

Read Richard's last column "A Disappointing eXperience"HERE

This column is the sole opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Heaven Media Ltd or the opinion of any affiliates.

After staying up and listening to DJ Wheat’s LO3 CGS “tell all” show that dished less dirt than an OCD addled maid, I was still left to ponder that it is the closest e-sports has come to mainstream acceptance since the whole thing got going. It was a glorious failure; debauched, depraved, disgusting, dramatic and ultimately doomed. Love it or loathe it you cannot deny it got closer than anything else to inserting a clear understanding of what e-sports actually is into the collective consciousness. Yet the e-sports community lambasted it for not choosing the right games, the right players, the right rules. They correctly identified that it was less to do with e-sports than it was about television and that was ultimately the only path the CGS experiment could walk.

CGS: Long dead, but still talked about (Picture: Heaven Media)

I recently got back into the whole games reviewing thing, something I’ve not done for a good few years and when it comes up in conversation down the watering hole the general consensus is that somehow my job is a good one. Most of my friends seem envious of the prospect of a working day that involves getting up, investing six hours in playing an advance copy or beta of a game, then writing what I think about it. Yet when I try and explain the work I do relating to “e-sports” they look at me blankly. It doesn’t inspire any form of jealousy, just mostly confusion. They start with the questions, ones they have asked many times over, ones that seem frustratingly basic when you have heard them dozens of times before:

“So what, people play games for money?”

“You can earn a salary?”

“You’re going abroad to watch people sit on computers?”

While the broad strokes are easy enough to grasp after some explaining, it is still a largely alien concept, especially when it comes to the more tactical elements in team games. Trying to explain the history of e-sports with its wave of acronyms is bewildering for them enough, but sitting them down to actually try and follow a game generally leaves them cold. Without a running commentary and having things clearly explained to them at every turn they lose interest, the same as you would if you picked up a TV series from the mid point of the second season. You’d get it eventually, more so with each passing episode, but you’d always be behind those that were in it from the start and there’s plenty that you would miss as it referenced earlier plot points.

Yet it is understandable why it feels inaccessible to those who exist outside of the microcosms we create and nurture. We are not even overly sure what constitutes an e-sports title, nor could we tell you who ultimately applies the label. Wikipedia defines an e-sport as a “general term used to describe the play of video games competitively” yet I have always thought there was a clear distinction between competitive gaming and e-sports. Competitive gaming is something you engage in every time you utilise the 2 player option on any game. Competitive gaming are those mulleted veterans still mashing buttons in the hope of getting the world record on an arcade classic that the modern gaming generation have never seen. Competitive gaming is jumping on to a deathmatch server and racking up the best kill to death ratio, with maybe some casual griefing thrown in “for the lulz” but it certainly doesn’t constitute an e-sport. Not in my book anyway.

Aliens Versus Predator isn't likely to be an e-sports title (Picture: Heaven Media)

So while not all forms of competitive gaming are e-sports, all e-sports have their roots in the practice of competitive gaming. You play a new FPS title and it’s all much of a muchness in truth. It takes a lot to present something new. Crosshair, guns, maps, objectives… There’s so many different iterations of the same premise. I was having a WASDA on the new Aliens Versus Predator last week. It ticks all the FPS boxes, but I don’t see it ever having a recurring string of cash prize competitions. So why do some become embraced and supported and why do others fade away, little more than a throwaway and “fun” experience?

I’ve seen the debates about whether or not “e-sports” can be considered as sports at all and largely find them boring. That ultimately comes down to personal preference rather than any concise definitions. It’s no different to trying to pinpoint whether you think darts or snooker is truly a sport or a game. Even the English language seems undecided when you consider a sport can mean “an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess” or a “diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime.” But, out of all the many thousands of games released there are a handful of titles that actually wear the tag of being an e-sport title with any conviction. Starcraft, WoW, Quake, WC3 & DoTA, FIFA, Halo 3, Street Fighter, Trackmania Nations and, of course, Counter-Strike. After that you really are starting to struggle, right? The games we might be more familiar with, such as Call of Duty, CS:S and TF2… Well, they’ve still got some way to go before they are considered in the same light as the big boys. I’m a lot more interested in what makes this distinction.

It seems that having a loyal fan-base and user-base isn’t enough alone to become an e-sports title. Even having game mechanics suitably tweaked to make competition more feasible isn’t enough. Many games that never become recognised as e-sports titles have competitive mods and modes that are optional, or they immediately lend themselves to the idea of competitive play. You know the ones, a six to eight hour shitty one player storyline that acts as little more than a tutorial, basically just to get you juiced up for online play. This is depressingly becoming the standard now, where in the glory days of innovative programming a game that offered less than 40 hours of gameplay from start to finish was considered only fit for a “budget” release. Even with this being the norm these games don’t go on to have any serious competitions and those that do dedicate time to it, enough to become the best, might be inclined to look over at other titles and think “why didn’t I pick that one up instead?”

Modern Warfare 2 was a big seller but was in no way a successful e-sports title

It's impossible to draw up any clear criteria as to what would make a successful e-sports title and what wouldn’t. If you tried to market a game specifically with the intention of it becoming a huge e-sports title there would be no blueprint you could follow except to emulate an existing one and even that guarantees nothing. The game doesn’t even really need to be fit for purpose and can be riddled with bugs, as long as they can be quickly assimilated into a manner where it garners an advantage. Not that many would do this anyway. It usually works out quite the opposite and we’re now starting to see games come out where it is almost as if they’ve made the game in the hope it is shunned by the e-sports crowd. Look at Modern Warfare 2.

And while I think having things like the ability to bet on the outcomes of certain games through sites like XLBet and being televised does put you above the others, it isn’t even necessary for long term success or surviving against the advance of time. Surely though content has to be something of a consideration. While some people might be turned off by the cartoonified graphics of something like TF2, as my colleague Jimmy Breeze alluded to in his first Cadred column, that is surely preferable from a marketing perspective when you compare it to versions of Counter-Strike.

Sure, maybe back before September the 11th terrorists running round trying to plant bombs while being shot at was just a bit of a laugh. The game even goes to the length of using terrorist factions from real life atrocities, bringing them together like some demented big brother house or a tea party thrown by Hitler. But the one serious attempt to televise CS:S had to be sanitised to the point where you would have been forgiven for thinking you were watching “Gardener-Strike” a game where a team of horticulturists have to plant a daffodil in the middle of a factory grounds to cheer up the workers, while the security guards shot them with nerf guns. Or something. If we live in a country where you can be arrested and detained under anti-terrorist laws for texting Clash lyrics to the singer in your covers band, how are you going to get this game on television as it stands? It’s bad enough that when the Daily Mail is running short on stories they simply label whatever the most recently released FPS title is a “terrorist training” tool. In that sense can it ever truly be an e-sport in the same way as something like Starcraft is in Korea? And if it can’t, what can?

These are the questions that are asked by the people that make e-sports happen. If you think about it you need the money, because that is what generates the competition and the hunger to win. You need a framework, a cup system or a league system. you need rules and someone to enforce them. You need a method to ensure fairness. All of this costs, so it is no surprise to see people leaning towards whatever is being pushed, or what has caught the eye of big sponsors or wealthy benefactors. As much as you might love one game, would you honestly turn down a salaried position to play something else even if you thought it was less enjoyable by comparison? In that sense what is really an "e-sport" is dictated to the community of players. If you play for prestige then you are a player, if you play for fortune and glory then you are a "cyber athlete" even though the two may lead the exact same sort of life.

Does the future of e-sports look like this?

So the real and only thing that makes an e-sport an e-sport seems to be if people are willing to throw money at it, to back leagues and tournaments with prizes, to be willing to salary players on the grounds of the exposure it will give them and their partners. When this happens then all of a sudden the game becomes an attractive proposition. Now you don’t only have the players that play it for enjoyment, but you also have the players that play it in the hope of getting a chance to win some money and get noticed. It doesn’t increase the overall amount of users, just streamlines them according to priorities. But at any point the money men can change their minds about what they want to back and that would cause everyone to shift. In the same way some 1.6ers changed codes because they were tempted by CGS, you saw the same logic applied by CoD4 players when MW2 was the selected game for i-series. Multiplay didn’t really want to use it, but their hands were tied. The players didn’t really want to play it, but they had their tickets and a chance to win some cash. So people reluctantly went through the motions and while it was undoubtedly a disaster, no lasting harm was done to the CoD4 scene. Indeed after the tournament finished the players all promptly went back to playing the game they wanted to: HoN.

I think a huge step forward in the development of e-sports as a whole is going to be players not being bound by titles or even genres, but by their skillset. I’ve got colleagues that won tournaments in racing titles, FPS titles, RTS titles and fighting titles across their gaming career. Sure, those few might seem freakish and they’ve since moved on to other things. People thought the choice of games by CGS were all wrong, that it was the game selection that sowed the seeds of their downfall. It’s complete nonsense… Viewing figures would have been a lot less on television if they had used 1.6 over CS:S because it looks like what it is – a dated game from a different time. But they also showed that they would change titles quite happily and players would have to adapt – the PGR racers had little room to complain when they were playing Forza in the second season. At the end of the day though they were getting paid to play anything that was put in front of them, so why be precious about it?

When e-sports does break big in the West – and believe me that is inevitable on a long enough time scale – the titles we are all so obsessed about now will be largely forgotten, or perhaps only remembered as pioneering games that paved the way for bigger and better ones. History teaches us that lesson. The gaming industry thrives on change and progress; new titles, new technology, new genres. It was a growth industry during a time of global recession and soon the gaming industry will likely be outbanking Hollywood. E-sports is the tiniest fraction of that, but only because of the resistance to change and a strange insistence on specification as opposed to diversification. You can’t do that in a fledgling industry that doesn’t yet have a clear sense of where it is headed. Go back fifty or sixty years and you will see people who represented their country at multiple sports simply because they were adaptable athletes. Once something is established as truly professional that’s the time when you need to make choices, but for now we need to be more in tune with the wider e-sporting ethos, whatever the hell it is. Mind you, there was a $1 million tournament for the best Bejeweled 2, Solitaire and Zuma player, so we might want to include some form of limitations as we move forward.