Abstraction

Take another look at those two clips above. In the EVO clip, the quality sucks, and you can’t really make out what the players are doing in the insert video in the corner. Don’t worry, you didn’t miss much: just two guys staring at a monitor moving their hands very quickly. There is a reason that most esports broadcasts don’t bother to show video of the players themselves for most of the action. In almost all cases, it can be summed up as “guys staring at a monitor moving their hands very quickly” (and it IS guys, more on that in a moment.)

Now marvel at the second video. Watch how high this basketball man has to jump, how far his arm has to stretch to overcome his very tall and physically imposing opponents in order to make the basket. Both videos show displays of extreme skill at the highest level of player. One however, exists at a level of abstraction that the other does not.

Taken at its most clinical terms, the spectacle of professional games is in watching the most skilled players interact with an input device to make impressive things happen in an illusory playspace. By contrast, athletes, by the nature of their chosen pursuit, are the spectacle. The impressive thing is them and the things that they can push their bodies to do- jump higher, run faster, move with grace and agility. (You can and probably should raise a lot of questions about the commodification of athlete’s bodies, but that’s quite another can of worms.)

By this metric, it is easier to explain to the novice viewer why they should be impressed, and an impressed viewer is more likely to keep watching. The novice viewer knows the actions they are seeing are impressive, because they are living inside a vessel that can be directly compared to what they are seeing.

The Olympics are a great example of this phenomenon in action, since they feature so many sports about which most viewers have only a passing knowledge at best. I know very little about figure skating. I have never figure skated. But I know how impressive those figure skaters are at the Olympics because I can instantly recognize the things happening, in a physical space, are so different from my own abilities.

With competitive games, unless you are immersed in the ruleset, it is difficult to be as impressed, even when what is happening is impressive. Scrub around this video a bit to watch the very best DOTA 2 players compete for millions (!!) of dollars:

I don’t play DOTA and I could not explain to you why what I’m seeing above is impressive, even though it is. The path from skill to result is filtered through a keyboard and mouse, and then again through an arcane ruleset. With traditional sports, even if the rules is equally arcane, the path from skill to result is right before my eyes.

Not helping matters is that these players all use their in-game handles and not their real names for primary identification. And why shouldn’t they? That is how they have played the game for years and is how they have been come to be known. However, consider how this looks from the point of view of an outsider trying to be convinced by Overwatch League’s slick, sports-like appearance:

It evokes the naming convention of performing artists or WWE Superstars. In other words, as a performance, not a sport. Not something real, even if it is.