The Esports Landscape: Milestones in the History of Esports

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Competition has always been at the core of gaming, and esports is a great example of the evolution of gaming over the last 50 years. Esports really began in the 1980s with Walter Day who, via his organization Twin Galaxies, hosted competitions to determine the best players for arcade games like Donkey Kong and Tetris based on high scores that spectators could watch. Today, esports are more in line with traditional sports, with leagues in such varied communities as NBA 2K, Call of Duty, and Overwatch.

The next esports milestone looks to be in game development itself for both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, but particularly PS5 due to its storage architecture. Because of the way the hardware is built now with the SSD structure, as well as the elimination of hard drives, the jump in game development is akin to comparing an old record player to an iPhone.

These developments seem to signal a major milestone in overall entertainment in the gaming space, helping the form continue its transition from being an activity that only a few players can enjoy at a given time to something more like sports that thousands, even millions, can enjoy worldwide, whether you’re a gamer or not. NBA 2K League has even been featured on ESPN alongside “real” sports.

In the future, the acceptance of esports by major outlets will continue to make such an event the norm rather than the exception, especially as more games are created to work in this kind of sports format.

From its humble beginnings in the arcade, esports have become one of the greatest examples of how gaming has evolved to become the juggernaut of entertainment it is today.

The Esports Landscape: Recent Changes and Trends

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

A few things have changed.
One is that esports has become more accessible to a wider range of people. So, the affordability of gaming consoles, gaming moving towards mobile, and free gaming, have all grown exponentially over the past few years. Consequently, it’s been easier to get gaming in front of more people.
The second thing that has changed is what I call the mainstreaming of esports, where you see esports information on sports networks such as ESPN and others. You turn on your TV, in some instances, and watch esports competitions live.
That is only going to increase because esports is ultimately a global sport. We believe that there are three global sports at the end of the day: soccer, basketball, and esports. Those are the three sports that anyone can, theoretically, play at any moment of the day.
So, that’s why you see the growth of esports all around the world; because it is a universal language in that regard. It’ll only grow as technology, communication, and connectivity keep growing.
In terms of breaking into the industry — for anyone who’s interested in pursuing a career within the esports landscape, I would make a few recommendations.
One would be to familiarize yourself, as intimately as possible, with the landscape. What are the top games right now? What are the next games coming out? When and where are the big tournaments? Actually, you should attend a big tournament.
Besides, are you reading the trades of esports? Are you following esports journalists on social media? Are you watching the events online? You need to immerse yourself in the space if you’re not from it. If you’re not a native, you can’t be an outsider looking to just break in; there are so many on the inside that already want these positions. So, you have to learn as much as you can in the gaming space.

The second thing I would suggest is to look for organizations that are interested in becoming part of the gaming space. As you see more non-esports traditional entities and sports organizations get involved, — whether through investment in esports organizations or owning and operating esports organizations (such as the Cleveland Cavaliers owning and operating a team in a professional esports league) — there are more and more non-esports endemics who are tasked with leading this shift.
Therefore, if you can get to people like me first before others (people who know the space and have the connections and the knowledge), you’re going to prove your worth and help yourself potentially solidify a position. Because people like me need people who know the space.
There are going to be more endemics and organizations getting involved in esports. So, knowledge of the esports landscape, performance, and connections is a gold rush.
We’re still so early in the gaming space. It feels like esports has gotten really big over the past few years. Think 10 years from now; we’ll be looking back at around this time and realize that only a handful of games were franchised and had leagues. Theoretically, a decade from now, that could be the norm. So much could change.
So, I would say this: Learn as much as you can and make contact with as many organizations and people looking to be in the gaming space.

The Future is Now: New and Developing Gaming Technologies: Case Study: Twitch plays Pokemon

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) was an exciting era in gaming, especially for game designers who were curious about how such a project could work. For those who are unfamiliar, Twitch Pays Pokémon is a social-experiment-slash-game played live on Twitch, where actions and decisions are crowdsourced via the chat function.
Dan Shefelman lived through that moment and remembers all the fascinating ways the game evolved around its clear obstacles.
“I thought we’d seen it all. We’ve seen multiplayer games, we did platform games, we had FPS, we’ve just seen every genre possible. And then, Twitch Plays Pokémon comes around.”
The most glaring obstacle was how thousands of commands given by the chat could be distilled into one cohesive decision so the game could progress.
“[I asked if] it needs to take one input and the character moves. And they said no, all these people are putting in that input and they’re – somehow – getting averaged. Well, you know, at one point, then a voting system came out.”
The technology also had to answer the question of lag. If a user gave an input from South Korea, and another user gave an input from Brazil, which would arrive first? Would the first one count before the second? These questions were slowly rising, and communities developed out of the solutions people found. Eventually, they developed a voting system, until another problem arose.
“The voting system went away and it was just this incredible phenomenon of how we deal with, basically, overpopulation . . . Maybe it’s almost like a democracy deciding on a policy. And they did.”
This happened outside of the game, and players returned ready to navigate it as a team, like a crowd-sourced game.
“We as a team, a world team, we can beat that by coming together as communities to plan and strategize, to play one game,” says Shefelman. “Like a million people played one game together with one character. And that was basically a new genre.”

The Future is Now: New and Developing Gaming Technologies: The future of gaming: Mobile Gaming

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Gaming is becoming an increasingly sensory experience. Pong, as a 2D game, was satisfying. Now gamers are expecting to play tennis in a VR on Mars.
Another big part of the future is going to be Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality. You’ll be playing a game in an actual space with minuscule glasses and not a giant Oculus while interacting with other people and holograms. There will be multiplayer games fighting a hologram in the middle of Times Square. That technology is already available, but games are now going to use it on a large scale. Games will come out of virtual reality and the console, into public spaces.
Sluice, a web-based multiplayer game made by The Molecule, a company in New York City, is a harbinger of the future.
Web-based gaming is going to be huge. People walk by a giant screen with their iPad or phone. There’s rain coming down, and there are little paddles and buckets. Anyone can log in and control a paddle. There could be over 100 people walking by and playing this game, the point being to fill up your bucket.
That a game could be an open platform in an open space, where people come with their phones, connect to the game, and play simultaneously, is fascinating. In Pokemon Go, people were connecting and playing the game in a real space.
If there’s a real dinosaur coming down Broadway, and everyone is shooting it from different places with their iPhones, that would be cool. I would play that game.

Animation: Introduction to Animation

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Animation for film, TV, and linear storytelling is you controlling the character, creating keyframes for the posing, and carefully planning it out.

Animation in gaming is about creating a character or an object that has certain behaviors assigned to it so that it will behave a certain way when you control it.

Animation in the gaming industry takes a cold, dead environment and breathes life into it. Animation is not just how your player moves through the world; it’s also the world interacting back with the player.

People tend to think about the obvious, walking around or dancing, but animation is so much more powerful than that.

For instance, you’ve got an ax that you’re swinging. If you go up to a tree and swing the ax and nothing happens, you’re probably going to think that you can’t knock the tree down. If, instead, the tree wiggles and shakes a little bit, you’re going to swing that ax again.

You feel like you’re engaging with the environment, and the environment starts feeling real. You’re also cluing players into the game mechanics and which actions they can take.

You swing the ax again. This time the tree shakes harder – you’re going to swing it again. You have positive reinforcement that swinging the ax does something, and you should keep doing it until the payoff.

There’s a huge team that works on all these projects within the esports industry. And at every level of gaming education and planning, they have to consider the gaming experience.

A character designer and a modeler work together to create the characters, make them look appealing, scary, or whatever the game requires.

Next, the rigger puts in a rig, a skeleton that goes inside the mesh, the skin of the character, and creates movement. Then, the character receives its texture. Textures give the feel of leather, skin, or cloth, and they create the mood, the sense of danger, or lightness, of comedy.

Animation in gaming is different from animation in television and feature films. Each step in the process must take into account the materials of the objects or characters.

For example, as online gaming education teaches, characters made of metal will move a certain way based upon the characteristics of the metal. A program (coding) will determine how a metal character will interact with its environment.

The environment must be specified as well. Is it metal, wood, or ground? Gravity is also critical; it’s the most important part of physics regarding how a character moves.

If you’re on Jupiter, you’re going to move very slowly. If you’re on Earth, you’re going to move like we’re used to seeing people move. If you’re on the moon, you’re going to move lightly.

All of these details get programmed into the game. Whether it’s an esports, 2D, or 3D game, these things give the character the performance that makes the game exciting.

[Please embed: https://pixabay.com/images/id-5091194/ ]

Engaging the Player: Audio, Haptics, and Information: Touch and Feel

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

“We’re saying something about something here,” says David Jaffee, “We’re saying something about the human condition.” Fundamentally, it’s what feels good when you’re holding that controller. That’s what most gamers love. Rocket League, Fortnite, PUBG– it’s fundamentally about mechanics.

Audio design is tricky. You know when you want the sound to show up and do a job. You know when you want to sound to evoke an emotion in the player-a reward– a warning specifically. Usually, it’s the audio and heads-up display that says, “Hey, a missile’s coming in,” or “a bad guy’s behind you or off to your right.”

Designing a HUD is really hard for a game designer. Because the game designer wants to think that the player wants to know everything they know about the game. It’s like there’s so much stuff that the game is tracking.

And you want to throw all that at the player and say we have audio cues, we have visual cues, and we have heads-up display cues. Did you notice the player’s feet glow a little bit when he’s low on health because the eye tends to be looking lower than the center of the screen?

And you can get carried away with that. The average player might ultimately– when they get good at the game– want that data. But if you throw that at the player at the very beginning, they’re going to get overwhelmed. The game is going to end up looking like user interface porn. And you’re going to push people away.

It’s a really hard thing to do, especially when you’re talking mechanics-based games, to design something that’s robust enough to yield a play experience that the player can have a meaty, deep, intellectual, satisfying time with but without overloading what’s on the screen. Because the minute we went over the shoulder or the minute we went first-person, we lost that brilliant play mechanics space.

These are not movies. And they’ve become movies because they look like movies. But what we’ve lost in that is so much that is germane to great gameplay.

Engaging the Player: Audio, Haptics, and Information: Music and Experience

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Audio and haptics play a vital role in creating a full, sensory experience in games. Genevieve Johnson explains how these senses can define a game – and even how gamers move through virtual spaces and engage emotionally.
“Besides the sounds, you want to think about the button clicks and the sound they’re making. Think about the music in your games – music is a huge deal. I happened to play maybe six different zombie games for a minor research project just a couple of days ago.
“In one particular game, it had solid gameplay – most of them had solid gameplay – but its music was mostly sort of soothing. So you felt sort of soothing, calm, like, alright, I’m getting ready to go to battle these zombies. And it was a long, long battle.”
That juxtaposition removed tension that would have otherwise made the game unplayable while setting a tone that still worked with the horror.
“There’s no difference between music in a game and music in life,” says Dan Shefelman. “If you’re working out, you want to hear a workout mix. If you’re trying to relax, you want to hear calm music. It emotionally creates a feeling in you.”
Haptics – the understanding of the world around us through the sense of touch – works similarly. Shefelman details how haptics shapes so much of modern gaming, and how it can change depending on the medium.
“My first experience with haptics, or, I should say, with the lack of haptics, was in virtual reality . . . I couldn’t tell how far anything was because I’m used to sculpting. I’m used to feeling something that I hit. Until they have developed haptics, you’re in a three-dimensional space and you’re not feeling it. It feels vague.”
Now that games are becoming more of a sensory experience, audio and haptics have become just as important as optics. When you’re immersed in a game, you want to feel something at the same time.

Engaging the Player: Audio, Haptics, and Information: Accessibility

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

Adding accessibility features when you’re developing your game can help make it playable by a larger audience, even if they aren’t diagnosed with a specific condition. You may unknowingly be limiting your audience by not adding these features.
For instance, many high performing players will play with the colorblind mode on even if they are not fully diagnosed with color deficiency. Colorblind mode has a higher contrast which makes it easier for them to play.
Even for those that aren’t colorblind, when people get in a really stressed situation its harder for people to see color. It’s as if your brain goes into a high-octane mode and optimizes for moving quickly and efficiently. Color information is a lot to process, so you stop being able to see color clearly when you are pumped full of adrenaline. This is the reason why when people are in a situation where someone has a gun, they might not actually remember their shirt color, or if they were in a car accident, they might not remember the car color.
Another time when people can experience a lot of adrenaline is when they play video games, especially if they are in a stressful firefight or a large boss battle. Because of the adrenaline it might be harder for them to perceive color. Running colorblind mode can help in these situations.
Another area of accessibility that’s becoming more popular in recent years is around cognitive differences. People have differences in short-term memory. You might tell a player on one screen that you need them to do this thing, and then they move to another screen. There is a sizable percentage of players that might not be able to remember those exact words transitioning from screen to screen. This is important for game developers to be aware of so you don’t limit your audience from being able to play and enjoy your game.

Development in VR: VR Audio

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

It is odd to hear sounds behind you, but it is actually on the screen in front of you. But that’s precisely what happens with Dolby 5.1 and gaming. We have grown to accept it. But it is artificial.
In VR, you want to hear a character coming up behind you. If a character is 100 feet away talking, you want to feel and hear them as if they really are that far away IRL. That is why the concept of spatial audio in VR is huge.
Spatial Audio
Sound is incredibly important in gaming. Yet, some developers do not realize how imperative it is. They’ll work on a game for a year, then show it off without sound. “Audio design is extremely important,” Dan Shimmyo says. “And if you are not thinking about audio early, I feel like you are failing to develop your game.”
In VR, audio is vital because players need to hear where sounds are coming from. Shimmyo describes a perfect example of this using zombies. “You want to be able to hear a zombie coming so that you can protect yourself and deal with them as quickly as possible, expecially when they’re coming/sneaking up behind you. And what could be more terrifying that sitting in a dark room but you can hear these zombies coming from all sides?”
If a player is holding a lightsaber in their hand, they should be able to hear sound like it is really there. Spatial audio is a fantastic part of the immersion of VR. There is a significant difference between looking at something two-dimensional and hearing a sound over here on stereo. It may work, and we may accept it in regular gaming. But in VR, we want technology to advance to full immersion for the best possible experience.

Developing & Managing Communities: Interaction with Players

Yellowbrick on December 24, 2021

The gaming industry has understood the value of communities. There are many community managers in every video game company. They tap into the folks who follow their games for the folks who invest in their products.
“That’s brilliant,” says Malik Forte, “because you want people to play your games again and again. If you implement micro-transactions, and they keep coming back, you, the developer, make more money. “
A lot of games nowadays are about persistent online experiences. You play those games for a long time. The developers keep releasing content for the games.
Players look forward to all those content updates and additions. They see the game grow and mature.
It is like planting a tree and seeing it grow. Games are the same. Therefore, so many video game communities are passionate and dedicated to the developers and the game.
Forte’s been a part of several game communities like the Overwatch community. Overwatch is a team-based shooting game in which the players fight over objectives. Blizzard Entertainment, a veteran game publisher/developer, created the game.
“It wasn’t about me knowing the developers, the game, or the characters,” says Forte. “I got to know several people who were passionate about that game.”
The Overwatch community is one of the biggest of any video game. Community members love Overwatch and its characters. The community has people who passionately love the game, love watching other people play it, and love talking about it. They’re so invested that they make fan art and dress up as those characters at conventions.
Overwatch became more sophisticated on the competitive side, too. It became a whole league and made it to the Barclays Center for the grand finals in 2018. It’s been on television.
It is the community that made Overwatch a phenomenal success. “You see that with many games that top the sales charts,” says Forte. “If you go on Twitch,” Forte continues, “the most-watched games have the strongest communities.”
Establishing a community is crucial. You hire a community manager to keep that excitement going. With video games, it’s super imperative to have somebody in your company who focuses on your game’s community.