Competitive Gaming

Competitive Gaming

Are you game?

Mike Hirst explores the world of professional gaming tournaments.

COMPETITIVE GAMING is something that has always fascinated me. It is also something that I have – at one point in my life – tried to claim as my own.  Very few people can say to me that they don’t like the idea of proving their dominance over other gamers, because we are programmed by evolution to become the alpha dogs of our peers.

In the chaos that was the FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon and whatever recent Cricket tournament took place, TV has been full of sports news about national teams duking it out on a variety of battlegrounds, ranging from pitches to courts, but at the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, 1800 players arrived to pit their strengths in a one on one knockout bouts of fisticuffs for the prize of $20,000. I speak of course of the Evolution Championship 2010, an event where players get to fight other talented fighters on games such as Super Street Fighter 4, Tekken 6, Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, Melty Blood and more.

Gaming athletes

I watched with awe and amazement at the livestream of some of these fights. None of what I saw performed seemed possible by what I would call a decent player, in fact they were barely human at all, and the guys who I play regularly with simple wouldn’t come close to the likes of Daigo Umehara, the first and now current Super Street Fighter 4 World Champion. They’d get destroyed; flawless victories every time. The competition is fierce, more so than in any other game related tournament, but it got me thinking; Video games are now interactive narratives that are meant to entertain millions of people, but it’s not entertainment to these guys, it’s a sport. It’s these people who are likely to scream down your ear when you FADC into a Shoryuken, ripping apart their guard and potentially wining the match. If you don’t play Street Fighter you wouldn’t have come across that term before, simply put it refers to a way to trick an opponent into making them think you are going to do one thing before cancelling your move with another move and dashing in for that ultra special. It’s an advanced manoeuvre you wouldn’t pull on the CPU in Arcade mode unless you were fighting the boss on the most difficult setting and even then its overkill, but against one of these superhumanplayers, it’s often the only way to damage them.

I’ve not had SSF4 for very long but this competitive side of it has peaked my interest, and as a result I want to get better, if only to match the spamming Ken players online. But when you decide to make that leap from gaming as a form of entertainment to a sport which could possibly be televised, you fall into the pitfalls that you do when you decide to play sports.  If you want to play well and have a chance against other players you will need the right kit, and so begins your search for an arcade stick.

You start to throw yourself into trying to find a more mechanical way to play, creating your own combos, discovering whose fireball would work better in a spam war, how to hold the arcade stick and what arcade sticks use the best methods to send the quickest and most accurate signals to the console, and BAM! That’s all the fun gone. Well not all of the fun, but it reminds me of playing in the IGUK (Interactive Gaming UK) – A union of LAN centres who pool their efforts to compete centre against centre at a variety of games – and their weekly competitions of Dawn of War where you would begin to build a base and get spammed by the cheap units on mass just as you started to get a force together, and suddenly the game is no longer fun to play.

Continues…

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