eSports - Videogames as a spectator sport

[James]

"Major League Gaming secures $11.3M for eSports"

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1656 ... Sports.php

Alex of TheNextWeb has written a pretty good perspective of MLG's new money raise, which has a rather hopeful outlook on everything:

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/03/1 ... -millions/

[James]

I had the amazing privilege and opportunity to give a TEDx talk about ESPORTS and SC2 at my university, UC Irvine. It was very nerve racking but such an amazing opportunity to share my passion for the StarCraft and eSports community. I did a general overview of StarCraft and eSports and how it has effected my life. Hope you guys enjoy it, and feel free to leave your honest comments.

Please be sure to "like" and leave comments to the organization, TEDxUCI. Huge thanks to my speech/talk coach Barbara Seymour Giordano who kept an open mind about ESPORTS and helped shape my talk.

http://www.facebook.com/TEDxUCIrvine
http://www.facebook.com/BarbaraSeymourGiordano

This talk was given on March 3rd, 2012. About 100~150 people attended the event to watch it live.

Played nerd card too hard.

[ynnaD]

Has anyone ever played in a competitive gaming enviroment? Such as competitive online matches (tournaments, leagues etc), LAN, competitions, whatever.

In reference to this, i'll be taking part in an online Black Ops tournament on Saturday with a group i'm part of on Facebook, we have around 100 members , growing every day as we're being backed by an official gaming magazine, me and so far, around 19 other users are going to take part.

Going to be judged over competitve games hostedin private games in Multiplayer, Wager Matches and 6 teams of 4 in zombies with a mod in each team to determine performance (risky but sounds fun)

Thought i should take part, should be fun, there is a reward for the victors too.

[ynnaD]

I came second in the tournament, i would have came first if it hadn't been for horrific mistakes by myself, dissapointed in that regard, but done a LOT better than i had imagined, so i'm pretty happy, won a prize too so can't complain.

Also got split into random teams for zombies to see who could survive the longest, we won

[James]

Congratulations, what was the prize?

Also I was watching IPL4 this weekend and the last ever SPL (Broodwar), burns me out how unprofessional SC2 is compared to SC:BW at the moment.

[ynnaD]

A cash prize of around £25 , and a t-shirt with my overall statics of the tourney on them.

Was a lot of fun, i'd do it again.

[James]

http://esportsbusiness.com/sponsorships ... Co.twitter

[Siva]

DotA2 right now is having the International 2 (TI2) Wildcard Qualifiers.

Say what you like about the DotA community, when things like this are on it's really great -- Valve are doing a brilliant job making it accessible you can watch the matches live inside the game with multiple options for commentators in different languages, community favourites (based Tobi). It's a really good feeling jumping and watching, and the people talking in the specator chat are people you recognise and often play with.

Makes me a little sad that it's a beta right now and once it's all opened up the community will fragment a little.

Even if you don't play DotA2, it's a great time to be watching it.

[James]

It's awful to watch to be honest. Dota is pretty much only accessible to players of the game, same as CS and most other team games.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1uK_Akpq_8[/youtube]

8 minutes in. Spectator sport.