The Ads Are Coming!

There's basically two models for the acquisition of 'content' (roll with me here). Either you pay up front (movie theater, HBO, a book) or you pay through your attention span via advertising (watch 9 minutes of ads for every 30 minutes of whatever it is they put on television these days).

For video games, there may be a third way: pay for the content up front, and then pay again through your attention span. How tidy (profit, that is).

Valve is bringing in-game advertising to Counterstrike (via Eurogamer - pics here). Even more insidious, Google will profile players in virtual worlds (article about patent application from ITWire) with the intent of targeting ads to specific demographics. Potentially you buy a game at retail, pay a subscription to play it monthly, and have to suffer through ads for the pleasure (not sure if they will be in-game, or during login screen, etc.).

I've posted about this before. I think Penny Arcade sums it up nicely.

This is not part of the compact we've had with media companies. Personally I think there needs to be a revolt. Gamers should not stand for having to pay twice. If you pay up front, you're free to play after that. If you pay via advertising, the content should be free. If the game companies can't make enough money with $50 and $60 games then they are in the wrong business (and if it is solely for greed - as I suspect - then we should stop buying from developers and publishers that support in-game advertising).

From the CS-Nation interview with Doug Lombardi:

CS-Nation: Will the ads be optional on the part of server owners or players?

Doug Lombardi: The ads will not be optional.

So even though player-run servers are actually running the games for the enjoyment of player (and paying the bandwidth costs, etc.) server admins have no choice.

Gamers need rights. If virtual worlds are to become important in the future, we cannot allow them to be created and controlled solely by media companies. A gamers bill of rights?

When The Virtual Affects The Real

Funny. I was just listening to an Escape Pod Podcast (science fiction stories and reviews) and one reviewer mentioned that he hated the fact that a story had a character where a virtual world affliction affected them in the real world (sorry, don't remember which podcast).

Now we have two reports of how virtual world actions do affect the real.

1. LadyMainFrame at Gnews (btw, interviewed at igniq) reports that a student at Clements High School in Fort Bend, Texas was arrested for using the game Counterstrike (or more precisely the Valve tools) to create his high school building as a map. Overreaction in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy or an example of ignorance and overzealous behavior on the part of those reporting the news to authorities?

2. Wired is reporting on Belgian police investigating a potential 'rape' in Second Life (how that happens, I don't want to know). Reminds me of the NGJ piece from Julian Tribble (A Rape In Cyberspace).

How far will this go? If you commit a 'terrorist' act in a virtual world, can you be legally labeled a terrorist (or illegally labeled as the case may be?). I just mentioned in my last post about how many 'role-players' there are in SL. How far can that role-playing go? Are their legal/moral/ethical boundaries ? Will laws be passed and rules made (in either world) to prevent these boundaries from being crossed?

Esports and DirectTV's CGS

Some interesting developments in the world of eSports. The last CPL event was supposed to have been broadcast by DirectTV (see previous posts: "DirecTV/eSports", Esports event to be broadcast by DirectTV"). That did not happen, and according to articles at various sites (HLTV.org), this was because the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) was asking for far too much money for the broadcast rights. Either in retribution, or because they feel that working with established leagues was not working, DirecTV (in conjunction with IGN) has now turned their attention to their own eSports gaming league: Championship Gaming Series (CGS - noted on GotFrag 1, 2; ESReality).

Some interesting facts were released by CGS in their FAQ and in an interview on GotFrag:

• 1. Players will be paid a salary (tourney winnings will be on top of this)
• 2. There will be a draft (and a hierarchal tourney structure to get to this stage)
• 3. The three games will be Counterstrike Source for the PC, and Dead or Alive and Project Gotham Racing for Xbox360.
• 4. Fatal1ty will be involved in broadcasting (color commentator?)

Probably the biggest news is the player salaries and the draft concept. Midway at GotFrag has an analysis, as does Dunn at Amped Esports. Midway says that the draft should be location based so that teams get local support. I completely disagree with this point as there are many sports (golf and tennis come to mind) where locality means nothing. There are many people in the world who follow Roger Federer and Tiger Woods in their respective sports solely because they like the player, not because they are from their home town. I think eSports in the digital age will generate the same type of followings. Of course there are the international competitions where national pride for one's teams will occur but for the most part people will follow teams and players because they are fans, not because those players live down the block.

This is a big step forwards for eSports in terms of sponsorship and money, but it remains to be seen if the audience will be there to support the whole structure. DirecTV is investing a lot of time, effort and money at this concept, so if it fails it will likely have repurcussions for years to come. If it succeeds, then I suspect even larger media companies will enter the arena. 2007 looks like it will indeed be a big year for eSports.

CPL Winter Showdown

The Cyberathlete Professional League held their winter tournament last weekend and this past week (why did it start on the weekend and end on wednesday?).

Quake3 and Counterstrike were the two big tourneys, with czm making an appearance to take the top Q3 prize, while fnatic won the CS tourney. The games were good, the action furious, and there were some notable nail-biting games, including the triple OT between 3D and Complexity.
There was a nice international mix in the top 3 from both games.

The interesting thing from my perspective was the coverage of the event. GotFrag had exclusive streaming coverage and did a far more competent job than what was displayed for the recent WSVG finals (as noted in my previous post). There were still some major issues in the stream but it was nowhere near as bad as what happened during WSVG. Coverage of the games utilized Octoshape, a streaming tech that uses some peer to peer model to help offload bandwidth to the clients. It was generally very smooth, but there were buffering problems, and one very repetitive annoyance where the stream would simply stop but not rebuffer which required me to manually reconnect.

The commentators did a good job and there were even things like instant replays and overhead maps showing some of the tactics taking place on the CS maps. More importantly, they didn't stick a camera in the players face as much as the WSVG did. There were some unfortunate missed timeslots during the tournament and some dead airtime, which was not very professional.

This brings me to my next point, which is that Quake, although fun to play and watch is going to be a very difficult game to sell as eSports continues to grow. The games are non-stop, which leaves no potential for commercial breaks, instant replays (without overlapping the continuing game), or extensive commentary. The gameplay, although simple in concept, can actually be very boring to watch. Observing two players trading rail shots across a 3D dungeon is not that exciting, and a running player is absolutely dull. The other problem with Quake games is the spawn dependencies and the fact that a single player can take a dominant lead from which he cannot be usurped. This is a big downside to the game. An example took place in the WSVG finals where Toxic went up so many points in the first two minutes that his lead was insurmountable. At that point the game was over and the rest of the match was a complete waste of time. If Quake games want to push towards mainstream viewing this problem will need to be addressed.

CS on the other hand has some faults of it's own, although I think it makes for a far better spectator sport. On the first hand it's team-based, which makes it far more interesting (to myself at least, I still don't know why people watch things like tennis). Secondly, it's very tactical, with clear offensive and defensive sides (think football - and it is easy to explain). Third, it has definite breaks in the action, which are perfect for instant replays, commentary, and probably most important of all, commercial airtime. One big problem with CS, however, is the money schema. If a team has to save for a round or two, then that makes for some very boring game rounds until that team can purchase some weapons. That also makes for some very complicated explanations, and I think that if eSports wants to start reaching a general audience they are definitely going to have to some nice graphical charts to help the neophyte viewers. In the meta game, however, the increasing amounts of money allow for a team that is down several rounds to come back, which happened many times during the tournament and made for some exciting matches. This is not something you see that often in Quake. The "any given sunday" phenomenon is very appropriate here and until a team clinches that 16th round win, the game is still up in the air.

My suggestions for the future are to have more overhead map views for CS, perhaps even displaying it permanently during the game. And although there was a scoreboard present, it only showed rounds won for each team. A more useful presentation would be to show each player's status during the round, so that somebody watching could tell if it was still 5 on 5, or 4 on 5, etc. especially since unlike normal sports, the camera can not always be on the action, so keeping track of who's alive, who's dead, etc. is difficult (split attacks on a single bombsite means that there are many places where the action is taking place). Health and gun status would also be nice. Perhaps these could be incorporated in the map view. Think of how the current poker mania makes for some interesting television because the audience at home knows what everyone is playing with (pocket aces, ace king, bluffing, etc.) while the players themselves do not. Another concept to consider is showing the view of all of the players, with the center of action enlarged or highlighted. Hmm...the audience will have to become smarter and the way games are broadcast are going to have to change (then again, people watch cricket, and for that I have no explanation, nor understanding).

Final WSVG

Some mainstream coverage on cnet:

But the Counter-Strike match wasn't easy viewing for a live audience. If competitive gaming is going to gain more footing as a sport, at the very least there's going to have to be a scoreboard of sorts.

It's too bad that with such exciting matches that the coverage was so poor. I mean 3D tied the match and it went to OT in the CS final. I was reminiscing about NiP vs 3D on de_nuke oh so long ago.

More info on the live audience experience on eSplat.

All I can say about being in a studio audience is that it sucks. Spectators are not allowed to do pretty much anything during the match except cheer for the player you want to win. Sure it makes for good TV but damn it really sucks having to sit there for an hour not being allowed to go to the bathroom while the crew are trying to fix a technical problem and they won't let you out because they don't know when the'll be able to fix it and start the filming.

Nice to see that they actually knew what they were doing. I can just imagine during an NFL game not allowing the audience to go to the bathroom. Can you say riot?!

The net coverage was horrendous. On the first day nothing worked. On the second day the coverage was spotty, laggy, and often down. On the last day, with the biggest CS matches on the line, the technical details still had not been worked out. Not only that, but the producer (or technical director, or whoever was in charge) obviously had no idea how to broadcast the show. Although the TSN shoutcasters did a decent job covering the games, the camera kept cutting from in-game footage to a view of a player staring into a computer monitor. Wow, exciting! And not just during the slow times in the matches (say at the end of a round or during buy time) but when critical moments such as one team attempting to penetrate a bomb site were taking place, or when it was 1v2 in the final seconds of a round. Brilliant! More problems like a poorly shown scoreboard, epilepsy-inducing in-game camera changes, and station/commercial breaks that were announced but never taken (we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, I think I heard that twice, but the break never happened?). Whoever was in charge should have been fired.

Additional notes on Amped and GotFrag.

Hopefully the CPL Winter event will have better coverage (Q3 and CS 1.6).

eSports and Drugs

The Cyberathlete Professional League is going to start testing for performance-enhancing drugs in 2007. Perhaps they should just pay attention to the map exploits that some teams use (how is eSports ever going to become popular when you have map exploits, and shooting through walls - try explaining that to your grandmother).

Update on WSVG.
1. The MLG WSVG controversy has apparently been resolved.
2. Fatal1ty vs. Toxic was probably the best set of games I've seen in Quake in a long time. Fatal1ty came from the losers bracket to beat Toxic in the first best 2/3, but lost in final map.
3. The CS series continues. The Scandinavian domination of CS is not going to continue at WSVG as both NiP and fnatic are out of the tourney. That leaves Team 3D and ALTERNATE aTTaX to play in the final match. Maps 1 and 4 were especially entertaining, while the rest were lessons in domination in the first few minutes.
4. Grubby won the WC3 tourney in a 2-1 win over Sweet.
5. Str8 Rippin won the Halo2 tourney.

Civil Protection and CS Noob Guide

This short piece, entitled Civil Protection, is pretty damn amusing. I really admire the animations that were done using HL2 Source, as I am currently struggling in Hammer and FacePoser myself.

There's also the CS Noob Guide. A fairly accurate and sarcastic portrayal of the gameplay, weapons, and most importantly, the community that plays Counterstrike.

The Beautiful Game - Updated

Not football!













(guarding the bridge on de_aztec)
I have a profound fascination with CounterStrike, a modification of Half Life. In my opinion, it is one of the most brilliant game designs ever made (second only to Tribes for FPS multiplay), and the fact that it was conceived of by two people, Minh Le, a Canadian (yeah!) and Gooseman, makes it even more interesting (design by committee is for the communists).

CS is of course is now a retail product in it's own rights, and both CS 1.6 and CS Source are played avidly by the community. CS is the WoW of FPS games, and to this day, 7 years after the release, it completely dwarfs the competition in number of players (according to GameSpy stats, for whatever they're worth, CS is played by more people than ALL of the rest of the FPS games, COMBINED).

Valve just released a an update to CS that I think is phenomenal. The radar system in CS has now been upgraded to include a background of the map that shows far more of the action than was ever previously available (even in spectator mode). The information architecture in displaying complex information in a simplified manner in this instance is worthy of praise from Edward Tufte himself.

















(zoomed in radar view from above screen)
The map shows a great deal of detail, yet it is easy to understand even for the novice. Each player is shown as a blue or red dot (counterrorists or terrorists, respectively), along with an arrow showing their current orientation. Bomb areas are highlighted with a rectangular orange area showing exactly where the bomb can be planted and with text showing the name (in case you didn't know where A and B were) for each area. Teammates who use the radio buttons to broadcast information ("bomb down", "enemy spotted", etc.) flash briefly to show you where they are.

In spectator mode, the small map shows even more detail (all the better for spectators). Dead bodies, dropped bombs, player tracts, bomb plants, differences in heights, etc.













(bomb down)


















In spec mode the currently selected player is highlighted with an 'eye' (shades of Illuminati!)




























(nothing stands between this T and the dropped bomb)




























(bomb plants are shown are flashing expanding red circles)














(You killed Bill Cosby! You Bastards!)
The really interesting thing is how this applies to eSports. One of the biggest difficulties in making games like CS more popular is the complexity of the games themselves. Unlike normal sports where the playing field is typically rectangular and all of the players are visible, computer games have far larger and more complex game environments and arenas. The top down view provides enough information so that anyone not familiar with the game should be able to pick up the game rules and complexities fairly easy.













(large map fully zoomed out view in spec mode)
CS is of course one of the most popular eSports games, with many tournaments played every year with thousands of dollars in prizes. The prizes are paid for by sponsors, who would dearly love for a larger audience for their products. Part of obtaining a larger audience is having very clear explanations of what is going on in any sport or game. The radar and map updates to CS is going to significantly enhance that (in fact, I think some of the major sports out there would kill for this type of overview). Graphical enhancement of information is becoming ever more common in sports these days, with NFL football plays being shown in video games.

What I would be interested in is going through some of the demos from the major tournaments over the last year, and statistically analyzing the data, and then showing that information on the map overlays to show major routes for CT and T runs, kill sites, major sites for contact, chokepoints, etc. (which brings up another point about eSports - the lack of stats tracking as compared to something like baseball or football).

Hopefully this leads to greater coverage of games like CS on TV and it also provides a lot of opportunity for coverage by outlets like TSN.

Esports event to be broadcast by DirectTV

I've been very busy lately.

I noticed this news item on the BBC about DirecTV obtaining the broadcast rights to the Cyberathlete Professional League's winter event (Dec. 13-17), and a series of events in 2007. Supposedly the event will be broadcast live, along with interviews and other coverage that go along with adding the 'spice' to the broadcast (maybe similar to the way the top poker tournaments are broadcast, with interviews and player backgrounds).

The BBC also reports that DirecTV had been experimenting with their own eSports tournaments for consoles. There is a note at the bottom saying that another channel, Voom, is planning on dedicating an entire channel to eSports.

Although this is a significant step forward for eSports, giving much broader exposure to the games played, the competitors, and expanding the audience (something the sponsors will love), it remains to be seen if it will catch on with a broader audience. The long term result should be an increased number of events, increased winnings, and theoretically, better competition. Perhaps eSports will become more like what occurs in South Korea.

However, there is some concern that live coverage by HLTV (being able to view the tournaments live, in-game, through proxy and spectator servers) and by the various streaming audio broadcasters like TSN (Team Sportscast Network) will be affected, which would be unfortunate since these technologies have worked for years to provide coverage of these events to the eSports fanatics (like myself). It still remember watching the infamous X3 and NiP match on De_Nuke that went into overtime. Hopefully these are not lost.

There's also some concern, in my opinion, on the possible negative effects of broadcasting violent video games to the public. How is the public going to view a game like Counterstrike, where you have terrorists trying to plant a bomb, with respect to what has happened over the last few years? Will there be a call to censor, or modify the game, so that it is palatable to the general public? Will we have the T side planting a flag instead (or maybe a carrot inside the CT's garden?)

CS is a complicated game, at least as complicated as American Football, and even moreso since the game is not played on the average rectangular playing surface (court, rink, pitch, field, etc.). At least there are map overviews, which should definitely be combined with first person and 3rd person views when showing the game. Explaining something as complicated as an eco round to the gaming public will be difficult. How are they going to explain 'handles' or 'nicknames' or the differences in guns, grenades, etc? I don't know but I do hope they obtain some experienced broadcasters from TSN, or one of the other eSports radio shows.

One advantage eSports has over almost any other sport (except maybe racing), is that you can get a camera perspective from the players themselves (first person). Personally I think any broadcaster should take serious advantage of that, as it provides an unusual perspective of the game, and would also allow people to truly experience the game as it is played. Who wouldn't want to see what it would be like to score a Kobe Bryant layup, a Ovetchkin goal, or throw a Manning pass? Combine that with instant replays, and you should have a fairly comprehensive broadcast, if it's done right.

What I do expect to happen is a huge proliferation of statistics for the game coverage (for some reason American broadcasters love to spew useless stats during the game, I suppose they do it since they have nothing else to talk about). I can imagine stuff like "and compLexity wins 67% of the time when they're down 3 men to 2 in the 4th round when playing as CT on De_Dust2 and the T squad attempts a run at bombsite B and Danny “fRoD” Montaner has a Deagle and full health". Blech.

Also on ESReality, and GotFrag, and previous mentions of other game tournaments to be broadcast on Guardian GamesBlog and Joystiq.

Wow versus Counterstrike

MMOGCHART has released a new update. Obviously World of Warcraft dominates the MMOG market, as these charts show (1, 2, 3, 4). This reminds me of another game that dominates it's respective genre, Counterstrike. If you check the Gamespy stats, you can see that the various incarnations of CS account for the largest chunk of FPS gamers playing online. Although CS activity has dropped in recent years, let's not forget that it was first released in 1999, almost seven years ago! That type of longevity is not to be laughed at. I suspect WoW will have a similar track, at least until WoW2 comes out, and considering the first expansion has not yet been released, I expect that will be years from now.

So what do these two games have in common that makes them so dominating in their respective fields? Both games are extremely easy to get into and play. They are easy to learn, but difficult to master, and the high level play in CS (both professionally in leagues like the CPL, and on normal pub servers) matches the high level of play that can be found in high end instances in WoW. Both of them are unbelievably addictive, as I can attest to personally. One other important reason is the breaking point in the history of both games where they became so popular that a tipping point was reached which contributed to the game's popularity by virtually forcing the formation of large gamer communities. For CS, that meant that many of your friends were playing, it was easy to find servers to play on, and countless clans and websites sprang up around this community. A similar spike in popularity occurred with WoW, although all servers are owned by Blizzard, but many players and guilds popped up. Contrast this with a game like Quake 4 which has almost nobody playing (according to Gamespy again, less players than Quake 3) and you can barely find a server to play on with a ping less than 200. Guess which one the average user is going to play, the one where he is playing with nobody he knows, or the one where his friends are playing.

Finally, the most important reason for their popularity is that they are both fun to play. Of course my idea of fun in WoW died out after 3 months, whereas I still play the occasional game of CS. Fun is a relative thing, but enough people found these games enjoyable, although they are not for everyone.

I haven't listed any of the details that made these two games so great, like simple and intuitive interfaces (although that's debatable in WoW), ability to ease newbie players into the game via training, the gentle learning curve (which ramps up exponentially) etc. However, I wish more game companies would pay attention to these details so that a larger selection of games at least matched the professionalism of CS and WoW (and it can't be that hard, CS was started by two guys as a Half-Life mod), even if they don't end up matching the overall popularity.

Machinima film chosen for Tribeca Film Festival

Apparently this film, deviation, a machinima film about in-game character angst, was an official selection for Tropfest at the Tribeca Film Festival. Although the film was competently made, we've seen these same philosophical contemplations by in-game characters in other machinima, most notably Red vs. Blue, which, I should point out, has just finished its fourth season. I guess success breeds duplication of content if not form. Not sure why deviation was chosen, but it certainly does not break any new ground for machinima.