re:Think Games — May 6, 20 Esports Industry Observations
Meanwhile back to South Korea… as near as I can tell, the heart of the modern esports scene lays at the intersection of South Korea and Blizzard. Fans of the realtime strategy games produced by Blizzard created a special map. It was (and still is) called Defence of the Ancients (DotA). This custom map was inspired by a Starcraft mission but created on top of the Warcraft III game. The game mode pitted two teams against each other, each trying to destroy the other’s ancients. The format became known as a “Multiplayer Online Battle Arena” and it took advantage of an innovation blizzard created in Starcraft and later expanded in Warcraft.
The most significant addition from my perspective is that they added Hero’s. Through most of the 90s, Real-Time Strategy games were hugely popular. Microsofts Age of Empires and Command and Conquer were enormous financial successes. Blizzard’s Warcraft Orcs & Humans laid the foundation for Blizzard’s later work. During this era, however, the game pieces were all impersonal drones, like chess pieces. With Starcraft, a few of those pieces became personal. The heroes were the players. DotA distilled the essence of the genre by stripping away the story of the game and focused the contest on two teams pitted against each other. DotA made a “sport” out of Real-Time Strategy.
In 2005 Blizzard featured DotA at Blizzcon, and the game spread throughout Asia being featured at the Maylasia and Singapore World Cyber Games the same year. Seeing an enormous opportunity, Valve hired the map developer of DotA to lead the creation of DotA 2 — a game dedicated to this format. Before it was even released, it became the most popular game played on Steam ahead of the next 10 video games combined. 330,000 people were playing concurrently. In 2011 Valve introduced the first professional DotA 2 championship “the International” at Gamescon in Seattle. 18 teams from around the world competed for the international title and a prize pool of $1.6M. Esports had hit the big time.
I have said for years that video games can be divided into two genres — sports games and education games. Video games can have a lot in common with a well-designed education program. Why? Because the player experiences a regiment of competency — a series of progressively more challenging patterns that stimulate the brain the way it likes to learn, releasing dopamine. Essentially a 3rd grader learning long division is in very nearly the same mental state as a college student learning calculus. Great games keep players in what is called “the goldilocks level of challenge” not too hard, not too easy. Most of these games are “single player”. The challenges are predetermined by the game designers. These games “end” however when the player completes all the levels or the challenges become either too mundane or too complex.
There is one pattern, however, that Homo Sapiens are genetically predisposed to be endlessly fascinated with. And that pattern is people. Sports games do not use a progression of challenges in the game itself. Sports games freeze every attribute of the game so we can focus on the people. In baseball, the bases are always 90 feet apart. They never move during the game, or from game to game. In football, the quarterback always throws a football, never a watermelon, or an egg. In basketball… you get the point. Sports games lockdown variables so we can focus on the players.
This is what modern esports video games do. They dialed in the environment (the field) the players would be competing on. Prior to 2000, if you had told me hundreds of thousands of players around the world would simultaneously be playing the same game level over and over again, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet every night in 2011 a third of a million people did just that. And this was just the beginning.