Game spectatorship: Spectating tournaments

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This is the sixth part of the video game / e-sport spectator series. This time, I’ll focus on the spectatorship of tournaments: Spectators are sitting on a tribune and watching their favorite players performing on a stage.

I’ve listed four ways of spectating computer games in the first part of the spectator series. However, one additional method should be discussed: Watching competitive gameplay live in the arena during a tournament.

Major tournaments and grand finals, like the Grand Final [1] of the World Cyber Games (WCG) [2], are taking place in exhibition and convention centers. Typically, these events are taking place on a stage in front of a tribune. Several computers are set up on the stage and thus are creating the playing field. The stage itself provides a huge screen allowing all the spectators to watch the matches between the players. Finally, the gameplay is spectated and commentated by a commentator.

This kind of spectating gameplay is comparable to watch a sport event in a stadium. Apart from enjoying the gameplay, most of the entertainment derives from spectating in a crowd [3]. Fans are cheering for their favorite players and a excellent gameplay is honored with applause.

These live events do also have a social and a society aspect. Spectators can see the attending expert players performing live and walking around on the venue. Additionally, depending on the country and the interest in e-sports of the society [4], these tournaments evoke a huge media coverage.

However, the two main spectator personas of this spectatorship series, can’t benifit much from visiting these events. Watching these live events can be almost compared to watching live broadcasts [5]: The Interested hasn’t ever played the game. Thus the fast paced gameplay of expert players could blur the impression of the avarage gameplay of the game.
The Pupil likes to improve its own gameplay and analyze the tactics of the expert players. Like watching a live broadcast, the Pupil can’t pause the action and rewatch critical situations. However the commentator might provide some useful information.

[3] Cheung, Gifford; Huang, Jeff (2011): Starcraft from the stands: understanding the game spectator, in: CHI 2011 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 763 – 772.