Competitive Video GamingBy: Tyler Busby

Overview

• Landmark competitive games

• Competitive video game culture

• Lives of professional gamers

Competitive Gaming GenresFirst Person

Shooter• Doom• Doom II• Quake• Halo• Call of Duty

Real-Time Strategy

• StarCraft • Warcraft III• StarCraft II

Fighting• Street Fighter• King of Fighters• Mortal Kombat• Tekken• Marvel vs. Capcom

Online Multiplayer Battle Arena

• Defense of the Ancients (DotA)

• Heroes of Newerth• League of Legends

Doom• Pioneered “Deathmatching”• Innovative technology for its

time• First game to achieve

widespread multiplayer success

• Major precursor to all modern games, especially competitive FPS games

Street Fighter II• Started the fighter game

boom of the 90’s

• Improved upon older fighter’s game mechanics

• Had a huge following in Hong Kong

StarCraft• Most critically acclaimed RTS• Gameplay is extremely

balanced and has been extensively praised

• Largest competitive gaming scene

• Extremely popular in South Korea

Professional StarCraft Competition• StarCraft became extremely

popular in South Korea in around 2002

• Professional players were organized into teams

• South Korea has two television channels devoted to 24/7 StarCraft match broadcasts

SlayerS_’BoxeR’• The most successful professional

(StarCraft) gamer with 547 career wins

• Annually he earns more than $490,000 and is heavily endorsed

• His fan club of over a million members endearingly refers to him as “The Emperor”

• In 2010 he retired from the professional Korean StarCraft leagues to start his own team for StarCraft II in America

American Competition• Evolution Championship

Series is a fighting game championship held in Las Vegas annually

• Evo 2011 had 2,400 participants and thousands of spectators, as well as 2 million unique online stream viewers

American Competition Cont.• Major League gaming holds

professional gaming tournaments for many different games

• The Anaheim Pro Circuit drew 20,000 fans and over 35 million streams online

• Viewership is steadily increasing