I’ve watched a lot of esports in the last week or so, mostly focusing on the Gamescom League of Legends tournament (in which CLG beat out TSM in the finals match). Like any sport, the matches are streamed live with commentary, and (unlike most sports) the full replays can be found online after the fact.[1] The matches that I’ve watched—especially in comparison the baseball that dominates my current sports-watching time—left me with some interesting conclusions, mostly about technology.
First, camera angles, instant replay/slow-motion, and HD are really the greatest things ever. You cannot stress enough how much of a difference there is between an HD hockey game and one that is poorly broadcast. In the same vein, I’ve generally been opting for non-HD streaming (due to a mediocre internet connection) which generally works fine. Problems generally arise, however, in situations when there’s a lot of “clutter”—think about a pile of bodies in the corner in hockey—in which details, especially with the fast pace of the game, become nearly impossible for me (or, frequently, the announcers) to make out. HD would probably help for those moments, and slow-motion replays of team fights would be incredible.
As you camera angles, watching League is somewhat like watching a football game where you have one overhead camera that moves; it doesn’t matter how good the cameraperson is (and I found that the ones at Gamescom were generally very good), you’re going to end up missing a fair amount of the action regardless. I suppose a better analogy would be a soccer game in which there were three balls for the first half of the game: as long as you can only focus on one ball, you’re going to miss some incredible action in other parts of the field. Again, an instant replay feature would be great, especially if there was a slow-motion aspect, though doing that in a game like League—which doesn’t pause until it ends—would be difficult.
Second, announcers can add to the game or they can be distracting and misleading. I would say that this is a major problem in baseball—though that is just an opinion—and stems mostly from the fact that there is so much time between pitches, and so many strikeouts, and so many walks, that play-by-play has really been replaced by color commenting, which is generally much less interesting. At Gamescom, the announcers were interesting and injected information about strategy while the game was going on, like a good pair of hockey play-by-play callers. Watching with the sound off would taken away from the experience.
Third, and I think this is true across the board in sports, watching League is simply not going to be interesting without a background knowledge of what is going on. The finals match at Gamescom included some truly excellent uses of flash, a nice turret dive or two, a couple very good ganks, interesting banning strategy, and exemplary last-hitting and dragon coordination. Of course, if you don’t know what any of that means, you’re going to find the game much less interesting, in part because you won’t appreciate the level of difficulty involved (for this reason, I found watching a Rumble much less interesting than watching a Nidalee or Cho’Gath. I have never played Rumble, have no idea what his abilities do, and wasn’t really entranced by his positioning strategies). This is why I don’t particularly enjoy football: I simply don’t understand pro offensive packages or defensive strategies, and so while I can enjoy a nice pass or a particularly inspiring run, most of the game is much less interesting.[2]
And finally, tournament League, like most other professional sports, appears to be played and watched primarily by men. I think there’s a point here, but I don’t really know what it is.
[1] Actually, like many sports, tournament-style League has a five or ten or twenty second delay, depending on who you talk to. This is to prevent “ghosting”—basically, you don’t want a guy in the audience to shout “lookout, he’s behind the door” and actually prevent the person from going through the door.
[2] I’m also the only person I know who gets excited about good defensive positioning on hockey plays.
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