Physical sports are fun to watch because you get to see a human push their body to the edge. But I think, from a mechanical sense, e-sports make for much more interesting games in general. They’re allowed to be much more complicated, so it’s not really a fair comparison, but I don’t care! They use that advantage really well.
This page is a follow up from a previous post about What makes a good spectator sport, and I’ll be discussing a lot of the mechanics from that post. Note, I’ll also be assuming that there are no major exploits or cheats used by any competitor. These obviously do exist and often ruin the game, but are generally absent from tournaments.
The check-list
E-sports satisfy pretty much all of the main rules I outlined previously:
- Passive play is generally punished1
- Penalties are non-existent since rules are strictly enforced by the game
- Play is continuous, even spiritually in turn-based games since enough turns are required to play one match2
- Most games have comeback mechanics or precise matchmaking ladders to prevent run-away games
- Random number generators can arbitrarily be inserted for win entropy
- Every game risks your competitive matchmaking score (MMR), staking something
As a bonus, e-sports generally check off most of the other points as well:
- Comeback mechanics often exist, usually by having non-linear mechanics so teams can try for a high-skill high-reward play.
- Scores can increase by an arbitrary amount, often scores are not explicit, but more implicit (more on this later)
- Games usually have a well defined timeline, with the exception of some genres like real-time strategy or MOBA games. But usually those genres have low variance on the game-length distribution.
- Generally ties aren’t possible, requiring skill based outcomes
- Refereeing is perfectly objective since it is done by a computer
E-sports are too complex to be a mainstream spectator sport
Where e-sports really falter is in their inability to be intuitive to potential audiences. This is a double-edged sword, though. e-sports gain a big advantage in their ability to be very complex, intricate, and often not have an explicit winning team at any given point, but this comes at a very large cost of not being understandable to anyone not very steeped in the game.
I am a big fan of DotA 2 and I think it’s very fun to watch, but even I often don’t understand why pro players will say a given game action is good or bad. I don’t think I’m alone on this either, or that I should just “git gud”, because the commentators on these games (often good, but not good enough to compete) also don’t understand the ultra-high level gameplay. Only the top 100 players or so really understand the mechanics in depth enough to see the minute details of decision making and the ramifications it will have later on in the game.
For the rest of this writeup, I’ll primarily be discussing the ways complexity make e-sports very fun to watch but practically prohibit them from becoming a mainstream spectator sport.
Intuitive e-sports are like races
I think the most intuitive e-sports are probably first-person shooters (excluding movement shooters); think Halo. The point of “death match” is pretty obvious: shoot your opponents before they shoot you. Similar to fencing, you might not understand all the footwork the players are putting in but you can read a linear score and see who is winning and understand how that score is calculated.
Players win in these games by edging out their opponents in terms of speed, aim, and surprise/reactions (who shoots first). In a lot of ways, they are like a track race: pretty linear. That doesn’t mean they’re boring, but they are not interesting due to their depth.
Given the option between the Halo world-wide gold-medal match and the 100m dash gold-medal race, I’d probably choose the latter because it’s much more human.
The footwork makes a difference
The next step up in terms of complexity, I think, are fighting games and movement shooters. Similar to regular shooters, the score is easy to understand but, in these games, the footwork matters, so to speak (extending the fencing metaphor).
Unlike a 100m dash where it’s just “faster guy wins”, there’s a much larger emphasis on the viewer to understand the core skill of the game. But, as a payoff to the viewer, once they do understand these games become much more enjoyable to watch. Take this to the extreme and you get RTS and MOBA games.
Esoteric gameplay
Once you get involved in a very complicated game, watching pros feels like magic. I remember first seeing the actions per minute (AMP) counter on pro StarCraft II gameplay, and wondering how players were able to consistently get up to 300 APM. For the uninitiated, that means they are clicking their mouse or pressing a button on their keyboard 300 times a minute, or 5 times a second. While this number is probably impressive to someone who has never seen SC2 gameplay, once they see the actual player perspective it becomes unwatchable. The camera is moving much too fast to have any sense of what is going on in the game for the uninitiated. Units are dying all over the map and the controller doesn’t seem to care. Players are queueing up workers and bases all over the map 3 steps from the current time; even if you could see what was happening you would have little way of making sense of it. This is all on top of the fact that there are dozens of units with different matchups to other units, each with their own tech tree, and 3 different races that all play totally differently.
Breathe, but I understand the game, and it’s amazing to watch. Even after all these years. Because the game is so complex and rich, even when it rarely changes, players are still finding ways to gain an edge over their competition.
You might compare this to a 100 dash again, a race that has been around for thousands of years and still sees improvements, but it’s not the same. The benefits eked out in a foot race are better starts, better shoes, better foot cadence… going faster. Whereas the advantages in SC2 gameplay include all these (higher APM, better build orders, improved mico and macro unit control) they also include non-linear improvements as well!
Non-linear scoring is the secret juice
Question: Why is that DotA/League hero just sitting in the jungle farming creeps when the goal of the game is to hit towers?
Answer 1: Because you first need to lane to get money so you can get items to farm the jungle and get experience before you can hit towers!
Answer 2 (equivalent): Because gameplay advancements are implicit and non-linear.
Non-linear gameplay advancements are what make complex e-sports so captivating. There often isn’t a single number to pick a current winner, but an implicit sense of who is winning based on a deep understanding of the mechanics and an internal model for who is more likely to win given the complex circumstances.
For example, in an SC2 match, one player may be mining twice as many resources as another player! BUT that player is playing Zerg, and essentially has to because their units are so much worse than other races’ units. On paper, the Zerg player’s score is higher than their opponents, but because you understand the game you know that’s not the right metric to see who is winning. It’s only a piece of the puzzle, and we love puzzles! The complexity makes the game interesting because we cannot figure out a winner from a glance value.
Additionally, it is incredibly exciting when players demonstrate that your mental model is wrong. I think this is for a number of reasons:
- It means you can never be certain of who is going to win, even if all your heuristics for a winner are met, because pro-players understand the game better than you.
- There is something more for you to learn about the game and improve upon yourself.
- There is still space to be mined in a game for the entire community.
Furthermore, there’s a wide variety of strategies high-level players can employ because of a rock-paper-scissors kind of meta based off the non-linear rewards systems, giving more depth to the competitive scene and allowing for complex matchup tables.
This article is still under construction.
Footnotes
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Some real-time strategy games in the very late game can turn into stall outs, but this is quite rare. Notably, StarCraft and other similar, finite resource games are bad at this. Thankfully tournament organizers usually add rules to prevent this, such as deciding games over an hour as a tie and punishing both players. ↩
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ignoring the fact that any video game runs on a digital computer, so technically everything is discretized. Talking about the spirit of the point, not the word of the point. ↩