Competitive gaming is tremendously popular as an underground gaming scene. I call it underground because most gamers don't know about it, follow it, or care about it. Even people who label themselves "hardcore" couldn't tell you the name of one famous Counter-Strike clan or a famous korean Starcraft player.
Now lately the most popular eSports in the world are still games like Starcraft and Counter-Strike (which is sad, despite how awesome those games are). New games have been focusing more on cool feature and flashy effects over simple and balanced gameplay (making them fun games for everyone, but not good picks for the next big competitve phenomenon).
South Korea has fully accepted eSports into their culture, with the game of Starcraft leading the way as an extremely popular specator sport there. Before you laugh at the idea of this, think about what makes a spectator sport -- spectators. Contrary to popular belief, a sport only becomes such when there are people willing to watch it. Shooting a ball into a bucket sounds awfuly dumb,but people watched it, more rules were added, and the game became an interesting and intense sight to see.
That's what happened in Korea. Two nerds playing a computer game intense? Ha! But when people realized just how hard this game was, just how much speed and mental ability was required to play it, it became a hit, the players became celebrities, and huge tournaments are being held as we speak.
So Starcraft proved that videogames can serve as an entertaining sport in Korea, but with SC2's improved visuals and the staggering popularity of the orginal, do you think we will ever see more attention to eSports in the west?
I saw a T.V show about a pro madden players touring on a bus, and getting elimated as they went along. It was a terrible show, so why can't we have a channel reserved for real eSports?
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