Around the holidays a few years ago, my family gathered to consume hams slathered with honey, pies filled with various fruits, and my brother-in-law’s latest batch of homegrown ghost pepper salsa, which I inhaled with reckless abandon. After effectively burning away my lips and inner cheeks, I checked in on my oldest nephew. He was watching a Modern Warfare streamer whose name I don’t recall. I’d not yet played the then-recent version of the game, so I sat down and had a beer, partially to nurse my wounded mouth, but mostly because I was interested in seeing the game in action in the hands of someone who knew how to play it.
Halfway through the beer, my brother-in-law came in to ask if his salsa had unmanned me, but before I could come up with a witty retort, he dropped another question: “Hang on a second, are you guys just watching someone else play a game?”
He left the room shaking his head, again, before I could reply.
Gaming as a spectator sport hasn’t been around all that long, so a bit of confusion–sometimes even outright hostility–toward the act of watching high-level competition, or even a favorite streamer on Twitch, is not only understandable, but expected. And there’s a good chance that everyone reading this has run into a situation similar to mine. Everyone reading this can also likely come up with plenty of reasons to kick back and get lost in the play of others, thanks to some stream or another, be it tournament or a favorite weekly series.
Gerald Lee from Core-A Gaming put out a video earlier today discussing what he believes makes watching fighting games superior to watching their real world counterparts. Lee cites the fact that fighting games don’t require judges to determine a victor and that no one (typically) receives physical injuries from partaking in digital competition as two of the pluses that the fighting genre holds over things like boxing and UFC.
The video also touches on the lack of physical fitness required to compete at the top level in fighting games and how that may have a good deal to do with the less-than-positive reception they sometimes receive, or at least why they’re nowhere near as popular as their traditional sports variants. It’s easy to see how a certain degree of satisfaction can be drawn from watching two combatants at the height of human fitness slug each other in the jaw until one of them falls down, but something that those on the outside of the gaming sphere looking in may not understand is the level of thought that goes into every button press, be it a jab or a half-step backward. That the competitors pressing those buttons can be literally anyone from anywhere, regardless of age, gender, physical fitness, disability, you name it, makes this point all the more beautiful. Those taking home the prize at a major tournament may not be able to bench press a small car, but they can solve any problem thrown their way with unparalleled accuracy and speed, a skill that certainly demands respect.
People have been stepping into arenas to settle matters by way of bloodshed since humanity has had the skills to record such events, so a more traditional take on this sort of activity maintaining popularity makes sense. But if fighting games can, in fact, deliver the same sort of excitement without many of the negative aspects–as Lee suggests, and I wholeheartedly agree–we may all live to see a time when our genre of choice eclipses even the mightiest of mainstream sports.
We’ve got a beautiful thing here in the fighting game community. We may not be as big as League of Legends, Dota 2, or any number of other massive competitive scenes, and we may not be as familiar to the general public as boxing and UFC, but we’ve got more heart than all of them combined. We’ve got a community of individuals who do everything they can to help grow the scene, and many of those individuals take part in streams and tournament organization. With that in mind, I close with a question: which streams will you be watching this weekend?
Be sure to check out Core-A Gaming’s full video below. It’s loaded with excellent information that didn’t make it into this article, and everyone who loves chucking hadoukens should absolutely give it a watch and encourage their friends to do so as well.
Source: Arcade Stream, tip via Guy C.