i contend that what is required for physical sports is largely the same as for esports, with only a few differences. for both athletes and pro gamers, a lifetime of training has gone into mastery of their respective crafts. most olympians start training from a very young age. to be sure, that training is more rigorous than simply learning the skills required to play video games by playing video games, but i’m sure that most pro gamers have spent an extraordinary amount of time throughout their lives building up the skillset that makes them good at what they do.

learning a sense of timing, a sense of what is logical within game systems, both visual and aural senses of what is important and what isn’t—these are all crucial to being a pro gamer, and do not come easily. the gamers reading this may be thinking that they are skilled in those areas, and that it wasn’t a big deal to become skilled. but you only have to think about anytime you’ve tried to get a non-gamer to play something as simple as mario, and how difficult it was for that person even though it’s simple for you, to realize how much the time you’ve spent playing video games has honed your skill. many pro gamers would make us look like those novices. and while it may seem like because of the fact that the games being played at tournaments are usually fairly new, and therefore not that much time went into preparation for that tournament, pro gamers are using the language of gaming that they’ve learned over a lifetime in order to feel through the strategies and execution of a new game and learn it far quicker than a novice would.

while it may not be equally important for both olympians and pro gamers, physical condition is definitely more important than most people would think for the latter. being overweight, having poor circulation, respiration or an above average heartrate can cause headaches and eyestrain which are obviously detrimental. poor circulation can also cause cold extremities which reduces mobility of your fingers and can cripple an otherwise amazing player. all of these also affect your stamina, which is more important for longer games like starcraft, but still important nonetheless. i’m sure a pro gamer could tell you more about this but i’m definitely not intimately familiar with what it takes to perform at a tournament. regardless, it’s clear from what i’ve said that a gamer in good physical condition will have an edge over one who is not, especially in suboptimal environmental conditions.

physical execution is also extremely important in both cases. pro gamers spend large amounts of time just practicing physical mechanics. in fighting games, they need to have the muscle memory and timing to be able to execute a button press within a window of 1/60 of a second. and not just one button press, but a string of anywhere from 5-25 in a row. failing to press any of these at the correct time will give your opponent an opening he can use to gain advantage. in starcraft (a strategy game), one measurement of physical execution is APM (actions per minute). an action is anytime you click the mouse or press a keyboard key to take an action within the game. pros clock at around 200-250 APM. that’s between 3-5 per second. i’ve been playing games all my life and the highest i’ve seen my APM get is around 150, and it’s about 80 on average—nowhere near the level of a pro. those familiar with games may be thinking that the rules that cause games to be so execution-heavy are arbitrary, since it’s up to the developers of the game to create the rules. well, many olympic events aren’t exactly pure in this sense either. many of them have arbitrary rules which cause us to do things that we would never otherwise do.

both require intense concentration. becoming distracted for even a moment will allow your opponent to punish you. in fighting games you must always be judging the distance between you and your opponent and adjusting it accordingly. waver for even a split second, and a skilled player will take advantage. in strategy games like starcraft, you aren’t able to look at the entire game field at once. sometimes you have to be concentrating on multiple areas, but since you can only look at one area at a time it can be easy to forget about a squad of units that you sent to one corner of the map, or to gather resources in your new forward expansion. it takes an extreme amount of discipline to be able to focus at that level.

what may be most important for many olympic events and most esports is a strategic and calculating mind. this is also what i personally find most impressive about both. very important is the ability to “read the mind” of your opponent. this skill comes from extensive knowledge about the rules of whatever game you’re playing, and what is referred to as the “state of the game,” which i will talk more about later. in fighting games a huge amount of information and strategy goes into being able to read your opponent.

i’ll list some of the important terms players use to discuss this in fighting games. “priority” is what affects the outcome when two moves connect at the same time. for example, if one player jumpkicks and the other one does an uppercut, the game needs to be able to decide which move will connect. “frame data” is literally exactly how many frames each move or combo and each step of each combo take up. one frame, which can be 1/30 or 1/60 of a second depending on the game, can make the difference between winning and losing an encounter. a “hitbox” is an invisible area surrounding what appears to be your character, which the game engine uses to detect collisions between your character and the game world, and other characters. pros need to have extensive knowledge of all these things, as well as the special moves and combos of all the characters (some games have upwards of 40 characters to choose from), in order to be able to predict what their opponents might do next.

in strategy games, as one might imagine, the focus is less on memorization and more on the bigger picture. memorization is still involved, as players need to know all about the strengths, weaknesses and abilities of all the available units and buildings, but more important is being able to decide what to do and when to do it. at the outset of a game, there are dozens of basic strategies a player might choose from, based on what he thinks his opponent will do and also what map they’re playing on. as the game progresses, players will usually need to adjust their strategies many times according to what their opponents are doing. most strategy games have multiple “races” to choose from, which are basically different sets of units and buildings which have different strengths and weaknesses. as with fighting games, players need to know what works against each different race and adjust accordingly. these are not easy things to do. being a soldier is an admirable and respectable thing, but not every soldier has the strategic mind of a general. obviously i do not have the knowledge of real military conflicts to say whether the strategy used in games like starcraft is as difficult, but clearly it isn’t a commonplace ability.

the last major topic i’d like to talk about is what makes olympic events and pro gaming different. firstly, and most obviously, olympians are in perfect physical condition and must perform mind-blowingly difficult feats of strength and dexterity. i have a huge amount of respect for this. at the same time, it’s quite obvious that some events are much more difficult than others. i won’t give any specific examples because that really isn’t the focus of this post and i don’t really want to discuss it, but i know they are there. the ones i am more willing to get excited about mostly include games, where there are people facing off against each other, which you may have figured out when i said i find strategy to be the most impressive part of competition.

what sets esports apart from the olympics is something that i think is extremely important. the competitive playing of video games evolves drastically over time. i’m not only talking about new games coming out, although obviously that is part of it. new olympic events aren’t very common—i haven’t done any research, but i would expect that new tournament-ready video games are more frequent. and that is exactly what causes games to evolve so drastically. each game brings with it a new set of things to learn, and players can’t possibly learn even most of them by the time the first tournament comes around. players are constantly learning new ways to deal with situations, creating new strategies and soforth. this is what is referred to as the “state of the game”. i think this is what makes esports exciting–you never know what to expect. yes, there is still some evolution of olympic events but most of them have been around for so long that the rate of new exciting things has slowed to a crawl.

once again i’ve written way more than i expected to on the topic, and i need to step away to wrap my brain around it. i hope i have at least made this largely unknown topic a little more clear. i also hope that i hear some interesting opinions and counterpoints, including from the friend who inspired this. i may write another post depending on that.

how do we get people to think about this game as much as possible throughout their lives, and how can we reinforce that they need to come back and play as often as possible?

the reason for this is simple. the more you think about doing something, and the more time you spend on it, the more likely it is that you are forming a habit of doing it, and the less likely it is that you will ever quit. i’m sure this sounds familiar to many of you at this point. yes, zynga and others simply want you to be addicted to playing their games. the reason this is beneficial to them is obvious as well: the more people are playing the game, the more likely it is that they will be buying products for use within the game.

game designers have become pretty adept at understanding what keeps people playing a game. the main method i’m going to be talking about here is scheduled rewards. over the years, game designers have quite literally run experiments to find out exactly how often it is that people want to be rewarded in a game in order to keep playing it. now, they have it down to a science.

you may be thinking that this sounds a bit far-fetched, but if you just think about the game mechanics it becomes pretty obvious that this is what’s going on. the most important mechanic in games like farmville is that you have only a certain number of turns to use each time you play the game. this means you can pretty easily complete all the tasks that you want to complete in just a few minutes. this seems counter to the goal, but you can also buy more turns for real money in the in-game store, so whether you continue to play or not, the developer has profited in some way. if you opt not to buy turns in the store, you can do other pointless tasks for a while or wait for your turns to replenish. this is where it gets insidious. if your turns have replenished to the maximum possible amount, and you do not log in, you are basically wasting turns that could be replenished if you weren’t at the maximum. this is not an accident. it literally means that if you don’t log in before you’re maxed out, you are getting behind in whatever goal it is you’re trying to accomplish in the game. it’s quite deliberately designed to force you to pay attention to the game on a very regular basis. another mechanic of these types of games that accomplishes the same goal is forced deterioration of in-game resources. if you don’t log in soon enough after your crops have sprouted, they will wither and die, costing you time, effort and in-game money. again, if you don’t want to get behind, you have to log in exactly as often as zynga wants you to.

this problem doesn’t only come up in social games behavioral manipulation engines. world of warcraft is a prime example of a game that is designed to force players to log in, but the methods they use aren’t quite as insidious. blizzard genuinely wants people to enjoy their game. any mechanics that happen to look like manipulation for the sole purpose of retaining subscribers are created through the thought process of “in order for people to keep subscribing, we have to make interesting content and mechanics for them to experience, as well as reward them with cool stuff. what can we create to satisfy these requirements?” unfortunately, most of the stuff that is put into the game isn’t really that interesting, but it’s not for a lack of trying. the thought process for games like farmville is “what manipulative tactics can we use in order to keep people playing as often as possible and hopefully buying things from our virtual goods store?”

the reason i know this difference exists goes back to what i said at the beginning. the developers of these games do not care about the quality of the gameplay. the easiest way to look at this is to think about what is a scheduled reward in the game, and remove them all. if farmville did not have these scheduled rewards, would anyone still play it? the answer is that some people would, but the vast majority of people would never have heard of farmville if it weren’t for these purposefully addictive game mechanics. in other words, it’s not fun like people are forced to think it is, it’s simply designed to manipulate people into wanting to continue playing.

i know that even if everyone who plays farmville and other similar games read and understood this, many of them would still continue to play them. people don’t like to have their feelings challenged. i’m just hoping that some people, particularly family and friends (i actually have no idea who of the people i know play these games), will realize they are being manipulated and change their behavior. i strongly feel that zynga and other developers of these games do not deserve the success they have garnered. hopefully as more people come to realize what’s going on, they will be forced to change their ways, but i honestly don’t see that happening. i guess we’ll see.

since my ps3 post, the gap has shrunk from 8,120,000 units to 5,200,000. that means that since then, ps3 has sold 2,920,000 more units than 360.

and onlive has launched with hardly a hitch. i’ve been using the service and it’s even better than i expected.

and in 2 weeks, konami’s new castlevania game for xbox 360 will be coming out, which features a 6-player online cooperative mode. not exactly what i wanted, but considering how outlandish my request was i’d say it’s close enough.

the greatest game ever would be a 2d castlevania style game with the following elements of mmorpgs:

* classes

* skill trees

* procedurally generated weapons, armor and accessories (as well as uniques)

* group instances

* crazy scripted boss fights

now if you would be so kind, konami…

i was linked this article earlier as proof that onlive cannot possibly work the way it has been presented. the writer does make several good points, but they are presented in a way as to easily sway the reader instead of just stating facts.

To give the kind of performance OnLive is promising (720p at 60 frames-per-second) realistically its datacenters are going to require the processing equivalent of a high-end dual core PC running a very fast GPU – a 9800GT minimum, and maybe something a bit meatier depending on whether the 60fps gameplay claim works out, and which games will actually be running. That’s for every single connection OnLive is going to be handling.

this is obviously false. with most of today’s games, if you have a very high end consumer pc with 4 of the best video cards, you can run multiple copies of a game simultaneously with no problem at all. later on he makes an allusion to having high end servers, but for some reason he still says that you’d need one machine per user.

Not only will these datacenters be handling the gameplay, they will also be encoding the video output of the machines in real time and piping it down over IP to you at 1.5MBps (for SD) and 5MBps (for HD). OnLive says you will be getting 60fps gameplay. First of all, bear in mind that YouTube’s encoding farms take a long, long time to produce their current, offline 2MBps 30fps HD video. OnLive is going to be doing it all in real-time via a PC plug-in card, at 5MBps, and with surround sound too.

several things here. first of all, i’ll be nitpicky and say the units he used were incorrect. it should be 1.5Mbps and 5Mbps, because it’s referring to megabits not megabytes. second, they have only stated that those speeds are the minimum required connection for using the service at SD or HD resolution. they have said nothing about it actually using all that bandwidth (or bitrate) all the time. in fact they have explicitly stated that most of the time with 720p video you’re looking at closer to 2Mbps (just like youtube’s HD video). also, the framerate isn’t really as much of an issue as people make it out to be. going from 30fps to 60fps hardly increases the bitrate of a video because most of those frames are b-frames (tiny interstitial frames that only contain a bit of delta information, that tell the decoder where objects have moved and how fast they’re moving, etc). lastly, he makes it sound like the video encoding hardware is just a pci card that anybody can buy in a store, when clearly it’s very specialized.

The bottom line here is that OnLive’s ‘interactive video compression algorithm’ must be so utterly amazing, and orders of magnitude better than anything ever made, that you wonder why the company is bothering with videogames at all when the potential applications are so much more staggering and immense.

it’s definitely true that it sounds too good to be true, but what other potential applications are there? i’m not quite sure what media needs instant video playback other than video games.

he posted a “sample video” of what it would look like to encode game footage in realtime. unfortunately, the test in question is obviously not very scientific. he wrote nothing about the encoding process or the source material. to me it looks like the source of the video was previously-encoded game footage which means you’re looking at generational loss. he obviously used a software compressor to do the encoding. using a hardware compressor will obviously increase the quality by quite a bit. this is the part that doesn’t make any sense to me. why is it so unbelievable that they have a low-latency realtime video encoder that can produce high quality video? realtime LOSSLESS video encoding has existed for at least 8 years, and that’s just off the top of my head. it’s probably been longer than that. the point he brings up that actually raises a legitimate question is, onlive has stated that their video encoding only introduces 1ms of latency. for that to be true, the video encoder has to be running at 1000fps. i would assume their model includes running multiple users per server, and somehow creating hardware that can encode many 720p signals in realtime at 1000fps seems basically impossible. this is the first real point that makes it seem like onlive is trying to pull a fast one.

the second and last point that makes it seem unlikely is the issue of latency. if you assume onlive’s claim of introducing 1ms of latency in the encoding process is true, there is still the issue of sending that video stream over the internet. even with the most optimized routing and data centers all over the country, it seems unlikely that you could get latency to any less than about 50ms. with 50ms of input lag, almost any game would be unplayable. if they have somehow gotten around the network latency issue with their “psychophysics” development, i’d be very interested to read about how that works.

what i don’t understand is how they could have gotten all these publishers/developers to sign up with them if they didn’t even have to give a real demo. if i worked at EA and i was being presented with this technology, i would say, “okay, can we load this up on my laptop and see how it performs?” if anyone did that, that proves that it works. if not, why the hell not?

i’ll remain skeptical about whether or not this service is going to work. but i really really hope it does.

hardware sales since release (source: vgchartz.com)

clearly, ps3 was basically neck and neck with xbox 360 for since-release sales until about halfway through ps3′s life when it actually gained a lot of ground on 360. if this trend continues, 360 will eventually be overtaken. that’s not even considering the facts that ps3 has always costed more than 360, and 360 had a failure rate of nearly 30% at release, causing many people to go buy another system, artificially inflating sales figures.

another way to look at this is to imagine of ps3 had been out as long as xbox 360 has. we can basically estimate mathematically how this would look. to do that, you just need the number of days since each console’s release date, and the number of units sold.

xbox 360 came out in the us and canada on november 22nd, 2005, 1209 days ago. ps3 came out in japan on november 11th, 2006, 855 days ago. since the most recent known hardware sales figures are from march 7th, we’ll subtract 8 days giving us 1201 and 847 respectively. since then, xbox 360 has sold 29.1 million units, and ps3 has sold 20.98 million units. (source vgchartz.com)

29,100,000 units / 1201 days = 24,230 xbox 360 units per day
20,980,000 units /  847 days = 24,770 ps3      units per day

from there, we can extrapolate based on the average units sold per day to arrive at a theoretical number of ps3s sold if it had been out as long as xbox 360:

24,770 units * 1201 days = 29,748,770 units

29,748,770 ps3s - 29,100,000 360s = 648,770 more ps3s than 360s

so basically, in spite of more expensive hardware, hardware that actually works, and having “too few good exclusives”, the ps3 hardware is still selling just as well or better than 360. don’t let the naysayers misguide you.
p.s. i don’t want to hear about how it’s because ps3 has a bluray drive. sony gambled on bluray and won. that’s business.