World Cyber Games -- be a good sport

Tournament gaming needs to be a spectator sport to cut it as a real sport. This year's WCG is for players and fans.

Tournament gaming has crept slowly forwards towards being a proper pro-sport. Everyone involved has always wanted it to be a big league thing, and I don’t doubt that gamers have always fancied themselves as rich and famous sporting celebrities. Major tech companies have almost always been desperately keen to throw money at events, buying the immense prestige that comes with sports sponsorship. And there’s no shortage of tourney organisers who wouldn’t at all mind being the Bernie Ecclestone of tournament gaming.

But most tourneys are run by the same teams that run your local weekend LAN and that’s what’s holding it back.
These guys are technically adept and know well how a ladder structure needs to work. They understand the community, but not what lies beyond it. These organisers share dreams of seeing game tourney’s break into the mainstream as a proper pro-sport, but thus far, we’re just seeing bigger and grander versions of your regulation weekend LAN.

A radical way of thinking is needed if tournament gaming is ever to bust out of its box and be taken seriously as a real sport. If it’s going to be part of the Sunday TV news sports round-up instead of the post-weather report curio piece.

Fingers crossed, gaming now has its best chance ever. The Australian series of the biggest tourney event in the world – the World Cyber Games (WCG), has been picked up by organisers who offer it a sporting chance. Network Events and Media are at the top of their game, organising and promoting sports events, footy mostly. They are applying what they know to make gaming work, and a big part of that is hauling in the right people and partners.

These guys have got key people from AusGamers involved, the big tech companies are onside, and yes, Atomic has been in the mix too. Amid all the huzzah they’ve created though, it’s a snazzy piece of software that doesn’t even have a name yet which I reckon is the revolutionary jump. This little wonder makes gaming a spectator sport, at long last, which is exactly what it needs.

It’s at www.worldcybergames.com.au/webcast (you will need to register). You might have seen Half-Life TV; this is a generational leap. It’s just a single mouse click to run, it displays four player screens simultaneously -- from a choice of ten -- with integrated commentary, and it can support just about any multiplayer game.

It was developed locally by Network Events and Media’s Peter Boot, who described the goal as: “the way forward is to broaden the spectator base of competitive gaming. We come from a sports marketing background and gaming needs broadcasting to make it work.”

The broadcasting software (it needs a cool name!) is a tidy package indeed, and is particularly noob-friendly. Indeed – it feels just like spectator gaming out to be. The screen shows four player views, any one of which can be expanded to the main view. Running scores and a full replay mode is right there. Very slick.

Peter developed the package in-house, using open-source software wherever possible. Cinelerra (www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra) handles the video rendering. It runs through a 23 Athlon64 render-farm, feeding through two dual-Opteron servers. The Opterons sport a hefty 16GB of RAM for live encoding, and the whole shebang is piped through the Speedera content delivery network. Speedera handles about 1/3 of net traffic and its load-bearing capacity ensures minimal lag and potential for connection grief.

Check it out, it’s damn cool. It’s first major live event is the Trans-Tasman round of this year’s WCG on the 4th and 5th of June.