eSports to be televised on CBS
From the New York Times, CBS is airing edited moments today from the World Series of Video Games Tournament, which took place last month in Louisville, Kentucky.From geekdom to mainstream:
Still, for most of the last two decades gaming has been considered an odd, insular subculture, the territory of teenage boys and those who never outgrew their teens. But now, as the first generation of gamers flirts with middle age, and as family-friendly game systems like Nintendo’s Wii infiltrate living rooms around the country, video games are beginning to venture beyond geekdom into a region approaching the mainstream.
With mainstream dollars:
The dollars are already quite mainstream. Americans bought about $13 billion worth of video game systems and software last year, more than they spent at the film box office (around $10 billion). Advertisers for Sunday’s broadcast include KFC, Intel and the Marines.
Modeled after the Korean games spectacle:
For gamers, the national model to emulate is South Korea, where video games are one of the dominant pop-culture pastimes and where there are at least three full-time video game television networks akin to ESPN. But for now, they and the rest of the viewing public will have to make do with this first attempt at making games a mass spectacle.
It'll be interesting to see where eSports is going in North America.
For more, check out the article>>
posted by Florence Chee, PhD at 12:29 PM
3 Comments:
Personally, I’m probably too old to be optimistic about the chance of success this will have. I’m part of a group of gamers that I think are into games for their own personal enjoyment. My age group still hears the ghostly calls of “You’re wasting your time.” “Go outside!” “The real world is calling.” So, the psychotic wrist gestures of some youngster who’s tan came from a monitor holds little interest for me.
That’s said, maybe the less old gamers are ready?
What you describe is absolutely the mentality with respect to North American 'geek culture.' The assignment of value to certain activities over others and distinction of what is 'real' is still being negotiated though. We still have a really big mental/cultural barrier that keeps us from welcoming these types of spectacles into our lives for the time being, but perhaps events like these are indicative of such (slow) change.
It's one broadcast, as opposed to the constant exhibition found in places like Korea... so there's still a long way to go. And we have to answer whether or not we want to even go there.
When I was a boy, we had to type up hill in the snow! And we LIKED IT.
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