So, the Omegathon

I've resisted writing on the PAX '08 Omegathon until now because I wished to tie it in with my upcoming article with dichtung-digital.

I went to PAX this year in part to put money where my mouth was: I had written about the Omegathon as part of my thesis, but had conducted my reading of the event based solely off of news items and Youtube clips. I needed to see which, if any, of my impressions were founded in reality.

To understand this, I need to explain a little about the thesis UCLA gave me oh-so-much money to write. You see, my paper, at least in its original form, spent half of its pagecount talking about home audiences and half discussing competitive gaming, namely the performer-audience dynamic surrounding the former and the spectator sport-like atmosphere which surrounds the latter. In my opening paragraph, I contrasted the 2006 final battle of the Omegathon to the final act of The Wizard, in a sort of life-imitates-art-imitates-life comment on the current state of competitive gaming.

But was it really like that? I like The Wizard specifically because it's so damn absurd, as I'm sure many would agree. There's something patently ridiculous about a swarming mass of people getting excited about a bunch of kids playing SNES games on a row of tiny TV sets. So how could the Omegathon get the real thing out of people? If it's true what academics say --that video games are isolating, esoteric experiences only truly knowable by the person with his hands on the controller-- then there couldn't be anything sport-like about it. Classic gaming competitions like the ones in King of Kong are obviously unaccountable anomalies. And professional gamers in South Korea? Well, they're Asian, so they don't count.

So citing the Omegathon in my thesis was a way of saying "Look, see? Here's a high-profile, very real, heavily-attended gaming convention where people sit around cheering like football fans about a game of Tetris." But lacking anything but videos and Kotaku reports, I couldn't say I got a genuine, palpable sense of where the crowd was at, until this past August in Seattle.

And palpable it was. Let's forget the highly-publicised accounts of the fields of Fallout puppets and talk about the sweaty, claustrophobic, thronging mass of mostly-male, mostly-exhausted PAXers who pressed close to the stage, cheering anxiously. Let's talk about the whoops and shouts that rose up when Robert Khoo and various invited guests loped into the VIP section, interesting themselves in the Sumo pillows as they awaited the events like a heavy weight prize fight. Let's talk about the enormous projected screens and the heavy lights bearing down on the two final contenders.

Finally, let's talk about the match: cheering for the underdog, shouting out warnings when their bikes started to overheat, wanting them to get back in there, get in there, cream that guy! It was over so quickly it barely even qualified as a PAX event (did I really stand in line for three hours for that?) and yet, every moment was just as exhilarating as watching any one-on-one sport you could name.

There is a part in King of Kong where Brian Ku speaks of the demands of competitive gaming: fast reflexes, tight co-ordination, mental and emotional stamina. In the supplemental interviews, Robert Mruczek goes even further, likening it to martial arts, whether your opponent is a human being or a computer. And the producer of the film, Ed Cunningham? Formerly of the NFL, so you should know where he stands on the game::sports analogy already.

So, My Thesis

Of course, there are already articles out there that liken gaming to sports, but my paper took the idea one step further and talked about games as spectator sport. Don't you know people who have seldom in their life played American football, and yet never miss a game with their favourite team? And if any of you have siblings or children, haven't you observed times where they just like to sit and watch? Or maybe you privately like to watch more than you like to play?

It's a terribly common phenomenon, but academia has never even considered it. Now, this isn't a gross oversight, because video game theory is still a young discipline. But in the course of my research, the fact that there was this enormous disparity between what I know goes on with game fans and what the literature says is true of game fans grew harder and harder to ignore.

The truth is, everyone engages the game text differently. The day when theorists acknowledge this will be a grand day indeed, because I'm admittedly sick of one side saying "oh, it's all about the story and the art" and the other side saying "DEATH TO CINEMA", each while only considering games which reinforce their worldview. This is really the topic of my next paper, but if I had to break it down, I'd put game fans into categories like so:

• Ludic players ("I want to play something mechanically interesting").
• Performer players ("I want to do something that looks/sounds cool").
• Cinematic players ("I want something that behaves like a movie").
• Literary players ("I want something deep and literary").
• Spectators ("I want to see people compete with games").
• Audiences ("I want someone else to perform for me").
• Slipstreamers ("I want to experience the world of the game through any means open to me, but I don't want to play it").

As gamers, we probably exhibit qualities from more than one of these categories, and even the ones we generally eschew we have probably experienced at least once in a while.

My thesis dealt primarily with these last three groups, the non-participatory game audiences who identify themselves as fans but not necessarily as players. Devoted gamers might find these fans undeserving of the name, but the fact is that they exist in droves. In my opinion, that fact alone merits them at least a cursory glance.

Preview:

Audiences legitimize story for story's sake and performance for performance's sake, something which many titles are hard-pressed to do if they are ostensibly only intended for the player. What meaning does Guitar Hero have to a single listener? What point do Metal Gear Solid 4's extensive nonplayable sequences have if there is no "pure audience" mentality? Perhaps video games are a lot like cars: the driver is empowered by being the decision-maker, but the passenger has the option to take in a view that the driver can't, to offer alternative solutions, and to give additional meaning to the experience. Game audiences, therefore, are able to provide incentive, validation, and editorialization of the game experience.

[...]

The current division amongst game theorists between narratology and ludology is fundamentally fictitious and, as Matthew Johnson notes, "has actually begun to stand in the way of valuable scholarship." As stated previously, most video games combine ludic and narrative elements to achieve a particular effect, just as films are comprised of an interplay between imagery and story. The video game industry and its consumers are far too diverse to suggest that the same techniques --or ways of talking about them-- should be applied universally. We need a more holistic approach, and there are far worse places to start than to reconsider what the "game audience" consists of.

You can find the whole article at the link below. Note, however, that this article is substantially revised and shortened from my original thesis, hence why I spoke at length here about the Omegathon and other subjects, things which were sadly excluded from the published draft. I believe the spirit of the paper remains intact (although I do miss the section I had on South Park). So if you're a little interested in what I do when I'm not spawncamping Gamepolitics, read on.

Watching the Game: Video Games as a Function of Performance and Spectatorship