Oh dear, I fear you have involved me in yet another level of recursion, reading a screen about people watching a screen of people playing on a screen.
It does seem that humans enjoy watching excellence. The interesting part is that it does not seem to matter what activity the excellence is in. In fact, the more pointless the excellence is, the more likely we are to watch it. I ask myself, for instance, why I watch snooker and auto racing. Auto racing has some relation to the classic uses of sport, which is a preparation for war. Snooker does not. But snooker lets you get up close to the excellence in a way that auto-racing does not. You can't really see how a race car driver is using their hands and feet in direct relationship to how the car is holding the road. You can see that the excellence is happening. You can't see it happen.
In all the preparation-for-war sports -- football, auto racing, etc. -- there is also the element of courage. Excellence pursued under the threat of injury and death holds an inherent interest for a species evolved in times of constant warfare.
But courage is not a factor in snooker, nor in video games. What I suspect appeals about them is the element of selectivity. As a novelist, I am conscious that a novel is not a window but a lens. It distorts to focus, bringing the reader's attention to bear on one particular aspect of human experience, in order to observe it and contemplate it more easily and more intensely.
Snooker seems to do much the same thing for excellence in hand-eye coordination and the ability to anticipate the movement of bodies in space. There is no element of danger or courage involved, but Snooker refines and selects those skills and puts them on display in a very accessible way.
And perhaps the appeal of watching video games is something of this sort. (I'm guessing because I have no interest in either watching or playing them.) But maybe there are certain kinds of excellence that are selected for and refined and put on display in a video game that opens them up to the fascination of those who are interested in those forms of excellence.
So happy to see someone at least broach the topic of 'bravery' that exists necessarily to some extent in every physical sport, including auto racing, but is totally lacking in games whether digital or 'real' like snooker. Moments of courage have a totally different meaning without physical danger as a real consequence of failure. But does it matter to the spectator? Is F1 a 'superior' spectator sport to snooker because they risk their bodies? Probably not. But it feels like it should somehow.
Does it matter to the spectator? I suppose it depends on why we watch. If it is for technical interest, then probably not. But I suspect it is much more for human interest. One does need a basic understanding of a sport in order to grasp the human interest story, so the technical side is not irrelevant. But consider what Netflix's Drive to Survive has done for Formula One viewership, particularly in the US. That series is all about the human interest side of the sport. And if it is about human interest, then surely courage, and the element of danger that demands that courage, must deepen the interest.
Some people say that people only watch auto racing to see people crash. But I think that gets is exactly backwards. People watch auto racing to see people not crash while driving so close and so fast that crashing ought to be inevitable. The most exciting part of races, the stuff that has the commentators exclaiming or holding their breath, is always the not crashing.
Of course, if there were never any crashes, then there would be no interest in the not-crashes. So in some sense the crashes that do occur are necessary to the popularity of the sport. But a hush falls over the crowd and the commentators when a crash happens. This is not what they came to see. This is what they came to see not happen when it should. It is a disappointment (and worse) when it does.
The elements of courage and skill go hand in hand in racing drivers racing and not crashing. So yes, I think it does matter.
Getting older is hard. From Monterey Pop in '67 to Win 11 Insider Preview Dev Channel you feel like a grey-haired, still revolutionary teen.
I felt old about videogames (eSports in contemporary words) since I sold, for little and poor-quality heroin, my broken Commodore 64 and its Compact Cassette loader back in 1984.
So, near my sixties, I decided to front this chapter left open years ago.
The occasion to wander among spectacular human creations occurred thanks to a Game Pass Ultimate account, Bing offered me for my robotic loyalty.
It opened my eyes to an unknown world.
I'm sincere, the best part of the titles I patiently downloaded, remains the "intros" and the creativity behind the scenes.
War in Ukraine and mass shootings in the USA increased my inner aversion for war, entertaining violence, and murder.
Then, I threw down the drain 2,000 USD on Zynga "Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells" and they made me "MVP" of my club: "Siriusly Black".
Don't need new addictions. I already got a great, enviable collection.
Before it was too late, I quit.
eSports, action games, vacuum-cleaners of credit card balances are not for me.
Lately I fell in love with "Genesis Noir": more than a game or an eSport, it's a trip.
My son is 12 and started watching the more family-friendly game streamers on YouTube this past year. We won't let him on Twitch, to his dismay, but I finally started to understand the attraction. I used to ask him how he could watch someone playing a game, like some old geezer, I suggested he play it himself, or get some real exercise. Then, on a whim, I streamed a few NES classic playthroughs like Ninja Gaiden, RoboCop and Zelda. I was quickly transported to my youth by streaming a wide range of old arcade game playthroughs on emulators. Yes, he caught me watching, and yes, he gave me a hard time about it. I get it though, and I'm not the least bit surprised now why it's so popular.
There's a subset of esports called speedrunning, where people simply try to beat games as quickly as possible (often utilizing arcane glitches, though there are usually categories that disallow some or all of them), and almost all of the games popular in the speedrunning world are several years old, at least. Some of the most popular (like Super Mario 64) are decades old now.
So even if someone isn't interested in watching someone casually play a game on stream, and isn't interested in watching the newer games that make up most of the larger esports, you can still find competitions of a sort for many of the games you played as a child.
It can be really charming and a surprising amount of fun to watch those childhood titles played to near-perfection.
Thanks Chris, I had heard of the speed runs, but always thought they were for mostly newer games. I'll have to check out some of the classics as well :)
Truly grateful to have read this essay. Not because I learned a ton, given that, despite not playing anymore, I'm a recovered gaming addict. But because you, a public intellectual, went out of his usual line of topics and talked about this, normalizing the behavior.
If only people let their preconceptions about activities aside, such as that gaming is X, y, and z, we would learn so much about human behavior.
I'd just like to add that esports does, and probably always will be severely lacking in granularity as compared to regular sports. You asserted that the gulf between a normal footballer and a professional is the same as between a normal video gamer and a professional gamer. I assert that because of the lack of granularity (the complexity of real world conditions and physics involved in say kicking a field goal is infinite compared to landing a headshot in an fps or skillshot in a moba, for example) the skill/talent gap between a pro and regular gamer is much smaller compared to that of a pro and regular sportsman.
That's my only point of contention, look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Edit - I sound way to confident here, could be totally wrong it's just where my mind went when I got into esports myself.
As someone who plays Apex I guess I'll wade in to bat for the team. I'd say the skill gap is much wider than you think and that the point of complexity doesn't (IMO) really hold up.
If we define the key factors of hitting a field goal as precision, accuracy, opposition, speed, and environmental (say wind) - then Apex only lacks the environmental factor i.e. wind or rain have no affect on the bullet. Also bear in mind that the environment of the football field is not very complex - at baseline everyone always plays on a flat field of the same proportions on the same material.
Speed is a constant in-game but presumably the same would be said for the ball control of a top-level football player.
I'd argue the precision and accuracy factors are far greater in-game. In scoring the 'goal' (shooting the head) you must take into account, the distance, your movement, their movement, bullet drop, travel time, and the size of the 'goal' - their head (minuscule over distance).
Opposition is also likely greater - in football you cant hide the goal inside a building or shoot back at the oncoming striker with your own ball to score a goal - or worry about a second team with their own ball coming to score at the same time.
Food for thought I guess and I'm probably simplifying stuff.
It would take forever to go through on a case by case basis comparing esports and sports. And then after that infinite process we go and compare esports to esports. For example you mention having different heights in Apex. So does Apex have a greater skill ceiling than LoL? Back and forth, fruitless.
So I only dare look at generalities. And generally speaking sports has a higher skill ceiling -and skill floor- thereby having greater competition for spots than esports.
Look at this very substack article itself as an example. This guy starts playing for fun with friends, doesn't even have an esports background and ends up playing in Diamond, which means he will see actual pro players in his games due to mmr. Same thing happens in LoL, Tekken, Counter Strike etc. It can't happen in sports. If a group of guys got together like this author did but instead played football for 2 or 3 years, and then played against a college (we don't even need to entertain the idea of a pro) team, not only would they lose badly but their physical safety would be at serious risk.
You could even look to 'digital sports' and their irl counterparts like MLB's The Show. The idea of playing a baseball video game and comparing the dexterity, intelligence and skill involved with the real game favorably is IMO cringe. You could try any example, say Tekken (for my money the most difficult esport) and real MMA fighting. I just don't see your side. I say all this as an avid gamer who is too out of shape to engage in real sports.
Yeah you’re right about falling down a nasty rabbit hole of comparing sports and esports – which is why I stuck with Apex and football . I think it is a pretty fruitful comparison of loose representatives of both their genres.
While I’m at it in response to some random points you raise: mechanically, Apex just objectively does have a higher skill ceiling than League. If Erik is playing on US or EU servers, he probably isn’t getting matched with pros in diamond. Content creators yes, but not pros – and that’s not even to speculate on what the outcome would be if he did encounter them. I mean youtube has an embarrassing amount of content which consists of pro players annihilating diamond players, particularly at the start of each split when the two groups do mingle.
You're assuming that simply because they *can* mix that the result would somehow be equal.
Regardless, let us take a closer look at your example of the group of guys who decide to pick up football for roughly 3 years and then challenge some professional players. The professional players are huge beneficiaries of social acceptance. If they’re pro, they will have played football from a very young age. They were likely singled out for their performance and were the recipients of subsequent coaching. It would have been accepted that this sport would have some impact on their education. Their parents were more likely to be supportive of this pursuit. As they got older and better they would have benefited from playing against players of increasingly high skill levels, and as they moved on would have received significant financial compensation towards their training and performance costs. They could also look back on, for knowledge and inspiration, decades of football history. Most e-sports players would have experienced a categorically different experience on their way up.
So now we’ve explained your gap between the pros and the casuals in football. The pros are the beneficiaries of a system designed to help them succeed that quickly compounds into thousands of hours of practice from a very young age. Not necessarily some innate gap within the base skill required to go pro. This system was not available to the casuals, who for the sake of this analogy, picked up football for literally the first time 3 years ago. Why only three years? Because Apex only came out in 2019, and doesn’t have many mechanically similar counterparts with the godfather of the modern BR genre (PUBG) which itself only arrived in 2017.
So there’s this market that through a high player base and social and (huge) financial incentives produces incredibly good players – almost seems unsurprising. Likely because of how optimized this market already is, the current skill gap between the casual and pro footballer will not increase by much moving forwards.
However, picture the two in let’s say 10 years’ time. Assume Apex has continued to be popular and receive updates. Esports is today becoming more accepted. The players will likely be the recipients of some of the advantages professional football players currently benefit from. And now we encounter the real reason for the higher skill gap between Apex and football. The environment in which football is played is identical. There will likely not be any grand changes to the roles of the players within a decade. The players are probably as good as any in the successive generations will be. In the meantime Apex will likely have 8-10 new maps and about twice to three times as many new champions, based on current releases. Player base, and therefore the overall talent pool, will be wider. New strategies will have evolved. This adds additional difficulties to the environmental and player-skill variables. All the reasons I initially labelled in my response regarding the increased difficulties in high level Apex compared to football will still stand. So yeah I think it’s relatively clear that the gap between a casual Apex player and the pros would (and could today) be as wide, if not wider than that between the casual and pro football player.
And yeah I agree that comparing digital baseball and the real thing is cringe – but so is using it as a strawman to knock down a harder argument.
None of that approached my main point regarding granularity. As a matter of fact you unwittingly make an argument for it. The reason games like Apex are constantly changing is because they are too simple, the granularity is too rough, and they become solved extremely rapidly. This happens in a matter of a few years depending on the game. If Apex didn't get constant updates, it would die. It probably will die regardless if we use history as any kind of guide (Valorant seems to have it in it's sights already). You rush in thinking this is some 'benefit' of digital gaming compared to real sports, but in fact it's a survival and marketing strategy they'd be dead in the water without. I think if you thought about why Soccer never has or ever will need this you might untangle yourself from this mess you've created.
Your last full paragraph is a giant assumption, which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. LoL is the most established and dominant Esport of all time and yet has been struggling for years to continue to grow (some regions more than others) and it is now fairly certain that a 'League 2' will be rolled out in the future, to inject new interest and experiences into the game. Your projections regarding the future of Apex are completely ahistorical. I mean sure, come back in 10 years and tell me it was all prescient, but until then you just come across as a rabid fanboy with a chip on his shoulder.
Speaking of you being a rabid fanboy - "mechanically, Apex just objectively does have a higher skill ceiling than League." Is just embarrassing. Feel free to scream at the sky why one pvp games clicking on the screen and pressing q,w,e/r is 'objectively' more difficult mechanically than another, but I don't think you'll win many allies.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith, I think you want some kind of glory for your digital achievements. Or maybe by putting Apex on such a pedestal you are absolving yourself from the disappointment of not obtaining said achievements?
If you'd like to explain why it's a strawman to compare digital and real sports...feel free.
What if I'd said F1 simulators? Or NBA 2k22? What's the difference? Apex is just so superior huh? Glad I'm having this objective discussion not at all colored by bias.
I don't care to get into the autistic levels of detail required to explain something as obvious as Tom Brady being a superior athlete to Faker or Knee and I don't feel the need to defend the honor of any video game I've played like you do.
So have the last word.
edit - i said i wouldn't reply, so my compromise is just to add this in quick - i've already thought this through, ran the thought experiments. if you had done the same you wouldn't need this clarification regarding game updates/expacs/patches and granularity - they don't *add* granularity, they *are* the granularity. say you main Jin in Tekken and he gets nerfed forcing you to either adapt your play or learn a totally new fighter, *thats* how they add granularity to something that would become stale and solved unlike real sports as i explained above.
I think you’re confusing correlation and causation again. I don’t think games constantly updating is a matter of granularity at all, it strikes me as a matter of audience preference. The audience for something like the NFL is there to watch the NFL as it has always existed – they’re enamored by the sport as it is, as they were brought up on it and as it has been as part of their social fabric from a young age. It’s a social touchstone in many ways - any major change would cause outrage.
The average esports consumer is more fickle – they have a wide range of videogames to choose from in a market that is positively flooded with choices even within specific genres. Content updates are necessary to demonstrate a willingness from developers to continue to invest into the game – and I can’t think of a patch that has affected the granularity of the game? Like there aren’t patches to make characters larger or change fundamental rules in the game’s physics engine?
Also a strange hill to die on regarding League but It just strikes me as obvious? The characters don’t move as fast nor are they as agile, the skill shots occupy a much wider relative space and players only move in two dimensions?
I would like to introduce you to a concept called a thought experiment “in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out *for the purpose of thinking through its consequences*.” I think you’ve missed the point by seeing me as trying to make wild predictions about consumer preferences, I’m just asking you to entertain the results of a hypothetical, purely for temporal purposes. In a similar vein I don’t doubt that Tom Brady is greater player than Faker – he’s had roughly 37 years to play and study his game (and been a beneficiary of the system I extrapolated on in my last response) – That’s a decade longer than Faker has been alive.
Yeah I think there’s probably an argument to be made for F1 simulators being pretty close to the real thing – F1 drivers use them to train after all. But it wasn’t the comparison this discussion has been based around and using something simple like 2k and actual basketball isn’t really helpful. Of course it cant be as granular – you’re controlling an entire team as opposed to playing as one. The same amount of detail hasn’t gone into its production, and it is an imitation of something which (as I’ve been arguing) has less granularity than Apex to begin with. The issue is – can there be as large a skill gap between a pro Apex player and a casual as there can be between a pro football player and a casual, and I think I make a relatively decent case for that. I can’t be blamed for your rather childish ad hominem psycho analysis.
Knowing that AIs will easily outperform any vain human attempts at a video game with enough training cycles and data, "watching excellence" isn't quite the point though, is it? By that measure, esports players should be among the very first victim professions of AI automation.
And while we already may have popular virtual influencers on Instagram and the like, something tells me the spectator equation of the esports market would largely wither and die if dominated by algorithm vs. algorithm combat.
I think the drama and competition of sports is why people watch (and the bounded excellence within that). But competition in things like sports is always fundamentally based on arbitrary rules - you can't touch the ball with your hands, etc. Because of this inherent bounding, I actually think human sports and Esports will never get automated, it's one of the safest career paths. Already there are things like auto-aim or "wall hacking" that are basically AI-assistance. However, players don't use them, at least not in the professional circuit, for the same reasons that performance-enhancing drugs.
It never seemed that weird to me, though I think that might be because I've never really enjoyed 'normal' sports either. As someone who doesn't watch sport, not watching esports seemed very natural, and I've never seen much of a difference between the two.
"Esports are perplexing, for video games are meant to be played, not watched" is how I've always felt about traditional sports, too, on the whole. I think what I find most surprising is that older sports fans find it so difficult to understand the appeal of esports. Though perhaps you need that basis of having played games to 'get' it - much like most football fans will have played football as a child, even if they don't still regularly play as an adult.
I cast esports semi-professionally. I've also played them, though the only one in which I reached the highest competitive level in was extremely niche (though it may be of particular interest to this crowd, because part of the elevator pitch is that it's a "reverse Turing Test." It's called SpyParty, and I highly recommend it).
When I'm asked why someone would watch another person play video games, the answer is: for the same reasons you would want to watch another person play sports. To enjoy excellence, to see the real-life narratives of skill and pressure and strategy play out. Basically everything you've said.
One thing I'd like to add, which is related to what you mentioned about donations, is the parasocial nature of the profession. Like most streamers (and, for that matter, many podcasters) there's a false sense of intimacy that draws people in, that makes them feel like this person is their friend. It's standard, until you're *really* huge (and sometimes even then) to call out every donation by name on stream.
There's some of this with athletes, to be sure, but not as much. There is a degree to which technology here is simultaneously the cause of and "solution" to our sense of loneliness, and the relationship people have with esports and streamers is just one example of it.
My first exposure to esports was listening to some pro Quake players comment on a replay of their match. It was eye-opening. They mentally kept track of maybe 4 different timers for various damage buffs, armor shards and weapons, and sort of instinctively knew where their opponent was likely to be based on those timers.
My main beef with esports is that all of the particle effects and animations often make it hard for the uninitiated to understand anything at all without having played the game. Whereas I mostly get American football without playing constantly. There aren’t any “special abilities” beyond the usual things humans do, but at an ultra-elite level
You make a great point regarding the effects and animations. I wonder if a much more physically realistic game would do better are roping in audiences to Esports viewing, e.g., like a war game, since it would be easier to follow (e.g., in Apex there are like, special abilities that probably look like Marvel movie CGI-spam to the uninitiated).
I guess CS:GO would’ve been the natural choice, but it doesn’t appear to have the huge audiences that DotA, League of Legends, Overwatch, and others have
For anyone interested, The Observer is almost definitely referring to this video, which was one of my first exposures to the depth of competitive gaming, as well:
Oh dear, I fear you have involved me in yet another level of recursion, reading a screen about people watching a screen of people playing on a screen.
It does seem that humans enjoy watching excellence. The interesting part is that it does not seem to matter what activity the excellence is in. In fact, the more pointless the excellence is, the more likely we are to watch it. I ask myself, for instance, why I watch snooker and auto racing. Auto racing has some relation to the classic uses of sport, which is a preparation for war. Snooker does not. But snooker lets you get up close to the excellence in a way that auto-racing does not. You can't really see how a race car driver is using their hands and feet in direct relationship to how the car is holding the road. You can see that the excellence is happening. You can't see it happen.
In all the preparation-for-war sports -- football, auto racing, etc. -- there is also the element of courage. Excellence pursued under the threat of injury and death holds an inherent interest for a species evolved in times of constant warfare.
But courage is not a factor in snooker, nor in video games. What I suspect appeals about them is the element of selectivity. As a novelist, I am conscious that a novel is not a window but a lens. It distorts to focus, bringing the reader's attention to bear on one particular aspect of human experience, in order to observe it and contemplate it more easily and more intensely.
Snooker seems to do much the same thing for excellence in hand-eye coordination and the ability to anticipate the movement of bodies in space. There is no element of danger or courage involved, but Snooker refines and selects those skills and puts them on display in a very accessible way.
And perhaps the appeal of watching video games is something of this sort. (I'm guessing because I have no interest in either watching or playing them.) But maybe there are certain kinds of excellence that are selected for and refined and put on display in a video game that opens them up to the fascination of those who are interested in those forms of excellence.
So happy to see someone at least broach the topic of 'bravery' that exists necessarily to some extent in every physical sport, including auto racing, but is totally lacking in games whether digital or 'real' like snooker. Moments of courage have a totally different meaning without physical danger as a real consequence of failure. But does it matter to the spectator? Is F1 a 'superior' spectator sport to snooker because they risk their bodies? Probably not. But it feels like it should somehow.
Does it matter to the spectator? I suppose it depends on why we watch. If it is for technical interest, then probably not. But I suspect it is much more for human interest. One does need a basic understanding of a sport in order to grasp the human interest story, so the technical side is not irrelevant. But consider what Netflix's Drive to Survive has done for Formula One viewership, particularly in the US. That series is all about the human interest side of the sport. And if it is about human interest, then surely courage, and the element of danger that demands that courage, must deepen the interest.
Some people say that people only watch auto racing to see people crash. But I think that gets is exactly backwards. People watch auto racing to see people not crash while driving so close and so fast that crashing ought to be inevitable. The most exciting part of races, the stuff that has the commentators exclaiming or holding their breath, is always the not crashing.
Of course, if there were never any crashes, then there would be no interest in the not-crashes. So in some sense the crashes that do occur are necessary to the popularity of the sport. But a hush falls over the crowd and the commentators when a crash happens. This is not what they came to see. This is what they came to see not happen when it should. It is a disappointment (and worse) when it does.
The elements of courage and skill go hand in hand in racing drivers racing and not crashing. So yes, I think it does matter.
Getting older is hard. From Monterey Pop in '67 to Win 11 Insider Preview Dev Channel you feel like a grey-haired, still revolutionary teen.
I felt old about videogames (eSports in contemporary words) since I sold, for little and poor-quality heroin, my broken Commodore 64 and its Compact Cassette loader back in 1984.
So, near my sixties, I decided to front this chapter left open years ago.
The occasion to wander among spectacular human creations occurred thanks to a Game Pass Ultimate account, Bing offered me for my robotic loyalty.
It opened my eyes to an unknown world.
I'm sincere, the best part of the titles I patiently downloaded, remains the "intros" and the creativity behind the scenes.
War in Ukraine and mass shootings in the USA increased my inner aversion for war, entertaining violence, and murder.
Then, I threw down the drain 2,000 USD on Zynga "Harry Potter Puzzles and Spells" and they made me "MVP" of my club: "Siriusly Black".
Don't need new addictions. I already got a great, enviable collection.
Before it was too late, I quit.
eSports, action games, vacuum-cleaners of credit card balances are not for me.
Lately I fell in love with "Genesis Noir": more than a game or an eSport, it's a trip.
More suitable to my chemical weaknesses.
My son is 12 and started watching the more family-friendly game streamers on YouTube this past year. We won't let him on Twitch, to his dismay, but I finally started to understand the attraction. I used to ask him how he could watch someone playing a game, like some old geezer, I suggested he play it himself, or get some real exercise. Then, on a whim, I streamed a few NES classic playthroughs like Ninja Gaiden, RoboCop and Zelda. I was quickly transported to my youth by streaming a wide range of old arcade game playthroughs on emulators. Yes, he caught me watching, and yes, he gave me a hard time about it. I get it though, and I'm not the least bit surprised now why it's so popular.
There's a subset of esports called speedrunning, where people simply try to beat games as quickly as possible (often utilizing arcane glitches, though there are usually categories that disallow some or all of them), and almost all of the games popular in the speedrunning world are several years old, at least. Some of the most popular (like Super Mario 64) are decades old now.
So even if someone isn't interested in watching someone casually play a game on stream, and isn't interested in watching the newer games that make up most of the larger esports, you can still find competitions of a sort for many of the games you played as a child.
It can be really charming and a surprising amount of fun to watch those childhood titles played to near-perfection.
Thanks Chris, I had heard of the speed runs, but always thought they were for mostly newer games. I'll have to check out some of the classics as well :)
Truly grateful to have read this essay. Not because I learned a ton, given that, despite not playing anymore, I'm a recovered gaming addict. But because you, a public intellectual, went out of his usual line of topics and talked about this, normalizing the behavior.
If only people let their preconceptions about activities aside, such as that gaming is X, y, and z, we would learn so much about human behavior.
I'd just like to add that esports does, and probably always will be severely lacking in granularity as compared to regular sports. You asserted that the gulf between a normal footballer and a professional is the same as between a normal video gamer and a professional gamer. I assert that because of the lack of granularity (the complexity of real world conditions and physics involved in say kicking a field goal is infinite compared to landing a headshot in an fps or skillshot in a moba, for example) the skill/talent gap between a pro and regular gamer is much smaller compared to that of a pro and regular sportsman.
That's my only point of contention, look forward to reading more of your stuff.
Edit - I sound way to confident here, could be totally wrong it's just where my mind went when I got into esports myself.
As someone who plays Apex I guess I'll wade in to bat for the team. I'd say the skill gap is much wider than you think and that the point of complexity doesn't (IMO) really hold up.
If we define the key factors of hitting a field goal as precision, accuracy, opposition, speed, and environmental (say wind) - then Apex only lacks the environmental factor i.e. wind or rain have no affect on the bullet. Also bear in mind that the environment of the football field is not very complex - at baseline everyone always plays on a flat field of the same proportions on the same material.
Speed is a constant in-game but presumably the same would be said for the ball control of a top-level football player.
I'd argue the precision and accuracy factors are far greater in-game. In scoring the 'goal' (shooting the head) you must take into account, the distance, your movement, their movement, bullet drop, travel time, and the size of the 'goal' - their head (minuscule over distance).
Opposition is also likely greater - in football you cant hide the goal inside a building or shoot back at the oncoming striker with your own ball to score a goal - or worry about a second team with their own ball coming to score at the same time.
Food for thought I guess and I'm probably simplifying stuff.
It would take forever to go through on a case by case basis comparing esports and sports. And then after that infinite process we go and compare esports to esports. For example you mention having different heights in Apex. So does Apex have a greater skill ceiling than LoL? Back and forth, fruitless.
So I only dare look at generalities. And generally speaking sports has a higher skill ceiling -and skill floor- thereby having greater competition for spots than esports.
Look at this very substack article itself as an example. This guy starts playing for fun with friends, doesn't even have an esports background and ends up playing in Diamond, which means he will see actual pro players in his games due to mmr. Same thing happens in LoL, Tekken, Counter Strike etc. It can't happen in sports. If a group of guys got together like this author did but instead played football for 2 or 3 years, and then played against a college (we don't even need to entertain the idea of a pro) team, not only would they lose badly but their physical safety would be at serious risk.
You could even look to 'digital sports' and their irl counterparts like MLB's The Show. The idea of playing a baseball video game and comparing the dexterity, intelligence and skill involved with the real game favorably is IMO cringe. You could try any example, say Tekken (for my money the most difficult esport) and real MMA fighting. I just don't see your side. I say all this as an avid gamer who is too out of shape to engage in real sports.
Yeah you’re right about falling down a nasty rabbit hole of comparing sports and esports – which is why I stuck with Apex and football . I think it is a pretty fruitful comparison of loose representatives of both their genres.
While I’m at it in response to some random points you raise: mechanically, Apex just objectively does have a higher skill ceiling than League. If Erik is playing on US or EU servers, he probably isn’t getting matched with pros in diamond. Content creators yes, but not pros – and that’s not even to speculate on what the outcome would be if he did encounter them. I mean youtube has an embarrassing amount of content which consists of pro players annihilating diamond players, particularly at the start of each split when the two groups do mingle.
You're assuming that simply because they *can* mix that the result would somehow be equal.
Regardless, let us take a closer look at your example of the group of guys who decide to pick up football for roughly 3 years and then challenge some professional players. The professional players are huge beneficiaries of social acceptance. If they’re pro, they will have played football from a very young age. They were likely singled out for their performance and were the recipients of subsequent coaching. It would have been accepted that this sport would have some impact on their education. Their parents were more likely to be supportive of this pursuit. As they got older and better they would have benefited from playing against players of increasingly high skill levels, and as they moved on would have received significant financial compensation towards their training and performance costs. They could also look back on, for knowledge and inspiration, decades of football history. Most e-sports players would have experienced a categorically different experience on their way up.
So now we’ve explained your gap between the pros and the casuals in football. The pros are the beneficiaries of a system designed to help them succeed that quickly compounds into thousands of hours of practice from a very young age. Not necessarily some innate gap within the base skill required to go pro. This system was not available to the casuals, who for the sake of this analogy, picked up football for literally the first time 3 years ago. Why only three years? Because Apex only came out in 2019, and doesn’t have many mechanically similar counterparts with the godfather of the modern BR genre (PUBG) which itself only arrived in 2017.
So there’s this market that through a high player base and social and (huge) financial incentives produces incredibly good players – almost seems unsurprising. Likely because of how optimized this market already is, the current skill gap between the casual and pro footballer will not increase by much moving forwards.
However, picture the two in let’s say 10 years’ time. Assume Apex has continued to be popular and receive updates. Esports is today becoming more accepted. The players will likely be the recipients of some of the advantages professional football players currently benefit from. And now we encounter the real reason for the higher skill gap between Apex and football. The environment in which football is played is identical. There will likely not be any grand changes to the roles of the players within a decade. The players are probably as good as any in the successive generations will be. In the meantime Apex will likely have 8-10 new maps and about twice to three times as many new champions, based on current releases. Player base, and therefore the overall talent pool, will be wider. New strategies will have evolved. This adds additional difficulties to the environmental and player-skill variables. All the reasons I initially labelled in my response regarding the increased difficulties in high level Apex compared to football will still stand. So yeah I think it’s relatively clear that the gap between a casual Apex player and the pros would (and could today) be as wide, if not wider than that between the casual and pro football player.
And yeah I agree that comparing digital baseball and the real thing is cringe – but so is using it as a strawman to knock down a harder argument.
None of that approached my main point regarding granularity. As a matter of fact you unwittingly make an argument for it. The reason games like Apex are constantly changing is because they are too simple, the granularity is too rough, and they become solved extremely rapidly. This happens in a matter of a few years depending on the game. If Apex didn't get constant updates, it would die. It probably will die regardless if we use history as any kind of guide (Valorant seems to have it in it's sights already). You rush in thinking this is some 'benefit' of digital gaming compared to real sports, but in fact it's a survival and marketing strategy they'd be dead in the water without. I think if you thought about why Soccer never has or ever will need this you might untangle yourself from this mess you've created.
Your last full paragraph is a giant assumption, which doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny. LoL is the most established and dominant Esport of all time and yet has been struggling for years to continue to grow (some regions more than others) and it is now fairly certain that a 'League 2' will be rolled out in the future, to inject new interest and experiences into the game. Your projections regarding the future of Apex are completely ahistorical. I mean sure, come back in 10 years and tell me it was all prescient, but until then you just come across as a rabid fanboy with a chip on his shoulder.
Speaking of you being a rabid fanboy - "mechanically, Apex just objectively does have a higher skill ceiling than League." Is just embarrassing. Feel free to scream at the sky why one pvp games clicking on the screen and pressing q,w,e/r is 'objectively' more difficult mechanically than another, but I don't think you'll win many allies.
I don't think you're arguing in good faith, I think you want some kind of glory for your digital achievements. Or maybe by putting Apex on such a pedestal you are absolving yourself from the disappointment of not obtaining said achievements?
If you'd like to explain why it's a strawman to compare digital and real sports...feel free.
What if I'd said F1 simulators? Or NBA 2k22? What's the difference? Apex is just so superior huh? Glad I'm having this objective discussion not at all colored by bias.
I don't care to get into the autistic levels of detail required to explain something as obvious as Tom Brady being a superior athlete to Faker or Knee and I don't feel the need to defend the honor of any video game I've played like you do.
So have the last word.
edit - i said i wouldn't reply, so my compromise is just to add this in quick - i've already thought this through, ran the thought experiments. if you had done the same you wouldn't need this clarification regarding game updates/expacs/patches and granularity - they don't *add* granularity, they *are* the granularity. say you main Jin in Tekken and he gets nerfed forcing you to either adapt your play or learn a totally new fighter, *thats* how they add granularity to something that would become stale and solved unlike real sports as i explained above.
I think you’re confusing correlation and causation again. I don’t think games constantly updating is a matter of granularity at all, it strikes me as a matter of audience preference. The audience for something like the NFL is there to watch the NFL as it has always existed – they’re enamored by the sport as it is, as they were brought up on it and as it has been as part of their social fabric from a young age. It’s a social touchstone in many ways - any major change would cause outrage.
The average esports consumer is more fickle – they have a wide range of videogames to choose from in a market that is positively flooded with choices even within specific genres. Content updates are necessary to demonstrate a willingness from developers to continue to invest into the game – and I can’t think of a patch that has affected the granularity of the game? Like there aren’t patches to make characters larger or change fundamental rules in the game’s physics engine?
Also a strange hill to die on regarding League but It just strikes me as obvious? The characters don’t move as fast nor are they as agile, the skill shots occupy a much wider relative space and players only move in two dimensions?
I would like to introduce you to a concept called a thought experiment “in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out *for the purpose of thinking through its consequences*.” I think you’ve missed the point by seeing me as trying to make wild predictions about consumer preferences, I’m just asking you to entertain the results of a hypothetical, purely for temporal purposes. In a similar vein I don’t doubt that Tom Brady is greater player than Faker – he’s had roughly 37 years to play and study his game (and been a beneficiary of the system I extrapolated on in my last response) – That’s a decade longer than Faker has been alive.
Yeah I think there’s probably an argument to be made for F1 simulators being pretty close to the real thing – F1 drivers use them to train after all. But it wasn’t the comparison this discussion has been based around and using something simple like 2k and actual basketball isn’t really helpful. Of course it cant be as granular – you’re controlling an entire team as opposed to playing as one. The same amount of detail hasn’t gone into its production, and it is an imitation of something which (as I’ve been arguing) has less granularity than Apex to begin with. The issue is – can there be as large a skill gap between a pro Apex player and a casual as there can be between a pro football player and a casual, and I think I make a relatively decent case for that. I can’t be blamed for your rather childish ad hominem psycho analysis.
Knowing that AIs will easily outperform any vain human attempts at a video game with enough training cycles and data, "watching excellence" isn't quite the point though, is it? By that measure, esports players should be among the very first victim professions of AI automation.
And while we already may have popular virtual influencers on Instagram and the like, something tells me the spectator equation of the esports market would largely wither and die if dominated by algorithm vs. algorithm combat.
I think the drama and competition of sports is why people watch (and the bounded excellence within that). But competition in things like sports is always fundamentally based on arbitrary rules - you can't touch the ball with your hands, etc. Because of this inherent bounding, I actually think human sports and Esports will never get automated, it's one of the safest career paths. Already there are things like auto-aim or "wall hacking" that are basically AI-assistance. However, players don't use them, at least not in the professional circuit, for the same reasons that performance-enhancing drugs.
What we like to call "enabling constraints" :)
It never seemed that weird to me, though I think that might be because I've never really enjoyed 'normal' sports either. As someone who doesn't watch sport, not watching esports seemed very natural, and I've never seen much of a difference between the two.
"Esports are perplexing, for video games are meant to be played, not watched" is how I've always felt about traditional sports, too, on the whole. I think what I find most surprising is that older sports fans find it so difficult to understand the appeal of esports. Though perhaps you need that basis of having played games to 'get' it - much like most football fans will have played football as a child, even if they don't still regularly play as an adult.
I cast esports semi-professionally. I've also played them, though the only one in which I reached the highest competitive level in was extremely niche (though it may be of particular interest to this crowd, because part of the elevator pitch is that it's a "reverse Turing Test." It's called SpyParty, and I highly recommend it).
When I'm asked why someone would watch another person play video games, the answer is: for the same reasons you would want to watch another person play sports. To enjoy excellence, to see the real-life narratives of skill and pressure and strategy play out. Basically everything you've said.
One thing I'd like to add, which is related to what you mentioned about donations, is the parasocial nature of the profession. Like most streamers (and, for that matter, many podcasters) there's a false sense of intimacy that draws people in, that makes them feel like this person is their friend. It's standard, until you're *really* huge (and sometimes even then) to call out every donation by name on stream.
There's some of this with athletes, to be sure, but not as much. There is a degree to which technology here is simultaneously the cause of and "solution" to our sense of loneliness, and the relationship people have with esports and streamers is just one example of it.
Went to find your pieces in my very full inbox (12,027 unread), and that is a first. Grateful for your perspective
My first exposure to esports was listening to some pro Quake players comment on a replay of their match. It was eye-opening. They mentally kept track of maybe 4 different timers for various damage buffs, armor shards and weapons, and sort of instinctively knew where their opponent was likely to be based on those timers.
My main beef with esports is that all of the particle effects and animations often make it hard for the uninitiated to understand anything at all without having played the game. Whereas I mostly get American football without playing constantly. There aren’t any “special abilities” beyond the usual things humans do, but at an ultra-elite level
You make a great point regarding the effects and animations. I wonder if a much more physically realistic game would do better are roping in audiences to Esports viewing, e.g., like a war game, since it would be easier to follow (e.g., in Apex there are like, special abilities that probably look like Marvel movie CGI-spam to the uninitiated).
I guess CS:GO would’ve been the natural choice, but it doesn’t appear to have the huge audiences that DotA, League of Legends, Overwatch, and others have
For anyone interested, The Observer is almost definitely referring to this video, which was one of my first exposures to the depth of competitive gaming, as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdkDjsBiO58
Yeah, this is the one!
This explanation was so satisfying. Thank you!