Gaming Tourneys Coming to U.S. Television 119
greig writes "DirecTV is aiming to bring to the states what the South Koreans have been enjoying for years: regular broadcasts of videogaming tournaments. Games at the first tournament were Battlefield 2, Counterstrike 1.6, Halo 2, Project Gothem Racing and Dead or Alive 4. The initial broadcasts of the exhibition invitational are on the free DirecTV channel 101 this weekend. Is this the first step to escalating videogames to the status of the X-Games and poker?"
Taken from the about section: "The Championship Gaming Series will launch as a league starting 2007; however, in 2006, we will broadcast 3 television events: Championship Gaming Invitational, the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) Winter Finals and an event that will be announced shortly."
Not long now guys, warm up your Shock rifles. (Score:5, Informative)
Liandri Mining Corporation, working with the NEG, established a series of leagues and bloody public exhibitions.
The fight's popularity grew with their brutality. Soon, Liandri discovered that the public matches were their most profitable enterprise.
The professional league was formed; a cabal of the most violent and skilled warriors in known space, selected to fight in a Grand Tournament.
Now it is 2341, 50 years have passed since founding of DeathMatch. Profits from the Tournament number in the hundreds of billions.
You have been selected to fight in the professional league by the Liandri Rules Board. Your strength and brutality are legendary.
The time has come to prove you are the best; to crush your enemies; to win the Tournament.
Re:Not long now guys, warm up your Shock rifles. (Score:5, Funny)
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And here's a YouTube link:
Unreal Tournament Intro [youtube.com]
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Re:Not long now guys, warm up your Shock rifles. (Score:4, Funny)
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A simply awesome game.
Is there really a market for this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at LAN parties, do you see people sat back watching the action in large numbers? No, instead everyone sees that Dust is on and jumps into the action. Games just arent fun to watch.
To me it just doesnt seem like entertainment, I dont want to watch other people play games I want to play it myself - thats what games are for.
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There is also the possible connection to real life sports. But that is what I base this on. Real life sports can be an entertaining event to watch with people physically battling it out on a real life arena.
When the entire event is virtual it loses alot of the lure to be an enticing live event. Sure in one country it has a following but is
Re:Is there really a market for this? (Score:5, Informative)
It's very, very interesting to watch. I'm not into StarCraft in a big way, but I can stand to watch a few games per week. I never thought I'd enjoy watching live games of a video game, but once you take in a few, it's hard not to see the appeal.
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It sounds like Starcraft is much better, but I guess that makes sense since the visualization of strategy games like that is much easier to digest. Personally, I can't stand fps games because it's just too much too fast, with too little time to think
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My roommate and I were chatting last night about why G4 sucks so badly that you're now much more likely to find Arrested Development, Fastlane, or Star Trek being shown than anything game related. I claimed that it's not *that* difficult to construct an interesting game channel... as long as you sprinkle "hardcore" gamers around... instead of the gaping void that G4 is unaware of. Now, by hardcore, I don't mean people who love get drunk and spew racial epithets
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However, i DO enyoy watching Starcraft matches, to learn from the masters and to watch spectacular moves. There's definitely a market for theese events, perhaps even a bigger market than for minor sports like tennis or pool.
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I definately don't want to just watch random people play games - G4 already had stuff like that, last time I flipped to them (many years ago). Does anyone actually watch their midnight run of "playing games to techno" filler?
I wouldn't mind seeing some of the big competition matches occasionally - Fatal1ty, et al. Players who actually have some strategy can be pretty entertaining. Given the amount of high profile competitions that go on these days, they should have no shortage of footage.
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Well, I live in South Korea. There is definitely a market for this, but the question is... is there a western market? There are two channels on my basic cable setup that show live gaming competitions exclusively. There's no gaming news, no gaming documentaries, nothing but live gaming action. One of the channels is StarCraft almost 24/7, but the other one varies quite a bit. Counterstrike and FIFA are popular, but I've also seen such strange stuff as 1v1
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Agreed - but that's because nobody has made a game with this specific aim in mind - yet. All games are designed so that they are enjoyable from the point of view of one player - not from the point of view of an observer. A game like Counter-Strike doesn't lend itself well to spectation because it's impossible to follow more than one person at once, but there might be three dozen people you need to keep track of to make sense of the flow of the game. Foot
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Personally, I'd be happy with some sort of split screen view. Say, a center overview map with smaller cameras following the action around the edges of it. Maybe bounce one of the edge camera views into the middle if a producer
Helmet-cam baseball? (Score:2)
What about the expectations of the audience? Do you think the median cable sports viewer would be able to follow a baseball game where all video comes from the players' helmet cams?
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A center view of the whole field. A close up cam of the batter. Another of the pitcher. Isolation shots of baserunners. The usual closeup shots of the crowd. etc.
Better yet, I'd love to have a means of choosing which view I'd have in the center and which should be around the edges. It's not really feasible to broadcast that much data for a live action video stream, but it should be doable for a computer game broadcast.
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To me it just doesnt seem like entertainment, I dont want to watch other people play games I want to play it myself - thats what games are for.
I watch people play the games. Especially DDR and fighting games. I find it more interesting than sports, actually. Super Smash Bros is a fun one to watch from outside the gam
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Doesn't CS have a map interface where you can watch the match from a bird's eye point of view? You could hire people who understand the game to comment about the action as it unfolds. Since the game
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Never played it so I can't say. One problem with birds eye views is that if you have multiple levels and can go inside of buildings or (as in several levels in other games I know of) it all takes place inside a cave, a birds eye isn't that useful. About the only thing I can figure out that would be needed would be a 3d radar map that would tell you where everyone is and some birds eyes of where the action is.
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Actua
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Using the football example, think of how a football coach mus
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Re:Is there really a market for this? (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, I actually detest Street Fighter III, Third Strike but look at:
The Infamous Daigo Parry [youtube.com]
KO versus Daigo [youtube.com]
which I admit were some of the greatest gaming footage I had ever seen. Listen to how the audience goes nuts during the entire thing; it was like watching art unravel before your eyes. The most telling thing was that a lot of the people in the audience knew aboslutely nothing about the game, but were going nuts anyways.
I also think a game show like Ga
Every culture has its own weird customs (Score:1)
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Mod Parent Up (Score:1)
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That is of course the reason why sports broadcasts (soccer, basketball, baseball, football et al) are so unpopular around the world.
there's a market for anything (Score:1)
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That's how i feel about football - there are clearly people who disagree.
Of course there will be people to watch this, as they pointed out it has caught on in other places of the world. Its a new kind of sports, one that won't get you in good shape.
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The Competition (Score:2)
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WCG (Score:1)
Then again, lots of us were there for the free swag
Videogame a sport ? (Score:2)
Despite the fact that I'm a hardcore videogame player I don't like the idea of associating it to a sport. Sports have set rules, and you hone your skills for years in order to become the best.
Videogames, on the other hand, will see your best stats nerfed, rules changed, new versions coming out, maps modified. It's like a basketball player who focused on his speed to outplay others, and who suddenly is given a pair of shackles because the creators thought that he w
Re:Videogame a sport ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Formula 1, on the other hand, will see your best stats nerfed, rules changed, new versions coming out, maps modified
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But in broader sense, I still think that there is no "stable" skillset that every videogamer must have in order to achieve 1337 skills. And that's why it's har
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Oh wait, you do.
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Of course only a few will be good enough to be able to compete on a national championship but at least everybody can experience it and therefore relate more to it.
If I watch F1 I can't really tell how difficult it is to do, I never tried anything remotely similar, but if I see someone ruling a deathmatch I'll know how good he is...
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Competing at the CPL is not the same as playing videogames at your home, as playing pro baseball is not quite the sam
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You spelled your last name wrong.
www.gamebangers.net [gamebangers.net]
Karting a sport ? (Score:2)
Do they have motherfcuking snakers [neogaf.com] too?
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You'd be surprised.
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You underestimate the amount of thinking that goes into playing ball at the professional level. And are you calling top-rank chess not a sport?
O rly [wwe.com]? Even if you don't accept professional rasslin as a sport, there are plenty of art and soundtrack in televised ball, and there's still plenty of drama in (say) steroid scandals.
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Sports I can guarantee have no such thing as "set rules". Sports constantly evolve, like your gimp night elf druid. Lets take an example, in rugby union (and rugby league) there are things called scrums. This involves the six largest players on each team push each other (in dual triangle formation) while the ball is fed into the m
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People have to train to get good at these games, hence there is a different between who wins and who looses. The games have rules - and sometimes they must be changed for one reason or another - just like many sports games have had their rules changed. The fact that its not particularly physically taxing is not relveant. Sure Merriam-Webster describes it among other things as "a particular activity (as an athletic game) so engaged in" but also "a
Hmm (Score:1)
Could be done right (Score:1, Interesting)
BF2 already has a battlerecorder built in (not that any servers use it).
If you unleashed a small army of talented post production people with the skills to place cameras in an already played event, it could become entirely watchable.
You could event capture player face expressions with webcams during play and map them to the players avatars in post.
This could be rendered far better than any gaming rig could handle.
I think it w
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Cable? TV? (Score:1)
What gods-honest self-respecting geek has cable? That would be a distraction from gaming and programming!
I actually have cable service, now that I think of it -- but only for my ISP.
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I downloaded the pilot of Firefly from iTunes and we have all the Star Trek originals on DVD. Computers and playstations play DVDs
Never having watched Stargate or Battlestar Galatica, I don't miss them
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I respectfully agree about "jocks" -- or maybe they're donkeys lured by the carrots. Some are social parasites, wanting to climb on the backs of the downtrodden to get their moment of fame. You see that type in the business world all the time
The G4 flop (Score:2)
There is a reason that a "gaming channel" now shows nothing but startrek and the man show.
Uh, no. (Score:2)
No. I cannot think of anything more boring than watching someone else play a video game. There is nothing dangerous happening. There is nothing all that interesting happening. It's akin to watching someone else watching a movie.
Seriously, statements like the one quoted above just demonstrate the author's misguided desire that someday other people will share their love of video games... and maybe, just maybe their othe
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Just in time! (Score:2)
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Anyways, I went back (as my wonderful Tivo does) to the previous days and I saw that it was on Saturday, but not Friday. CD USA was on Friday.
And yes, I appreciate a story telling me to watch something a day before the story came out as well.
It just won't be the same without Fred Savage... (Score:1)
Airing information (Score:3, Informative)
- This is only on DirecTV. Don't have DirecTV? You ain't gonna see it.
- It airs on Channel 101 (normally CDUSA) in the late evening.
- Tonight (9/10), you can catch all three episodes, plus some animated shorts in between, starting at 6PM ET. Check your EPG to be sure - the west coast may have second feed that would air it later.
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Of course, similar content has been available in high definition 24x7x365 on GamePlay HD [gameplayhd.com] via Voom and Dishnetwork for over a year, so while the story makes this sound like some DirecTV breakthrough, it's actually them just starting to play a little catchup with Dishnetwork.
The game tournaments are fun to watch if you like the strategy elements. It helps a LOT if you've played the particular game that they're playing in the tournament, becau
GamePlay HD on Dish Network (Score:1)
of course we'll get gaming on TV... (Score:2)
While a very few channels (mostly the networks) try to increase return on investment by spending more hoping to attract more viewers, the majority of channels try to increase return on investment by spending less hoping to get the same number of viewers.
Given that by far most content on TV is not original, but licensed from someone else (typically a repeat), the key is to OWN YOUR OWN CONTENT. This is why ESPN created the X-games, because they own all the rights to the event and can
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I'd Love It (Score:1)
YYYYYYEEEEESSSSSS!!!!! (Score:1)
I just want the classic competitions back...... (Score:2)