e-sports as a spectator sport are quite fun to watch, but they lack that human aspect that makes physical sports highlights so great to watch. Sure, you can watch e-sports highlights of someone going beast mode1 and it’s insanely hype, but really what they’re pushing to the limits are their reaction speeds and decision making. If you watch a physical sports highlight, they’re pushing both of those and their body to the limit.
That being said, I think e-sports are generally better sports to watch mechanically. As in the core mechanics of the game are better than most sports games. Physical sports have the benefit of taxing the players physically but e-sports have the advantage of being able to be much more complex.
In general, I think a defining factor of interesting e-sports is their non-linear scoring mechanisms. Often the games will have interesting snowball effects that create a compounding effect for the winning team and/or indirect incentives that allow teams to transfer some of their resources for a another without directly affecting the scoreboard (think Roshan in DotA2, which takes a full team’s effort do kill but gives a player a second life).
It’s hard to imagine a game like basketball that has different objectives and complex mechanics… or is it?
Basketball as a case study
Bare with me, as this is intentionally a little goofy just to illustrate a point.
Imagine all players start with some weights on their jerseys. There are arecade-style basketball hoops in all corners of the court. The rims of both teams starts smaller than the default rim, just barely enough to fit the ball into.
If a team scores enough hoops on the little arcade hoops in the corners, they can increase the radius of the opponent’s rim, making it easier to score points. Alternatively, players can individually spend their arcade points to remove weights from their bodies. Maybe players can even spend points to increase the point values of their teams hoops or bring the 3-point line in closer to the hoop, eventually unlocking the 4-point line as well.
This is definitely goofy but I think it’s really possible to have non-linear objectives within a real-life game. Despite this being goofy it might be interesting to have alternative win conditions and incentives within a physical game.
Basketball might be a little odd since it’s a relatively small game (5 players, small court, high player impact)
Alternatives
Other sports like football are already actually rather close to e-sports. They have lots of different scoring opportunities and non-unitary scoring already in place. I think recent changes to make a 2-point conversion off a touchdown more viable have been quite interesting, and I think having a potential option for a 3-point conversion could also be quite interesting.
An easy change might be to forgo a point conversion off a touchdown and instead give teams a backup down they could use at any later point in the game; i.e. you leave 1 or 2 points on the table but you are no longer risking the ball possession the next time you have the ball on a 4th down.
Or, on a 4th down, instead of just always going for a punt or a field goal, you might be able to just give up possession of the ball where it lies but gain some advantage based on how many yards down the field you are currently at. Maybe within 30 yards you can have an extra player on the field for the rest of the game; within 50 yards you can retry your next field goal attempt, etc.
Unfortunately this would make an already complicated game much more complicated, but I’d wager that the vast majority of football fans actually don’t know the rules anyways and have more of an intuition for what is and isn’t within the rules.
I am definitely open to more suggestions, this is mostly just an interesting idea I had that I wanted to write about.