Sports: The Comparisons

I love my Sunday gaming group to death, but it’s established that I can’t watch sports with them. I turned off the Super Bowl one year because they were MST3K’ing it. One of them rooted against the Giants, because a World Series win would mean traffic during the parade.

So for them, and any other gamers who don’t understand why we spend so much time discussing who will football the hardest, here’s why sports is great on a societal level. I’ve even written it out in geek-friendly metaphors, because I live in the center of the Venn diagram of Sports Fan + Total Nerd. My friends, just imagine that…


… Every single person in my city cheers for the Browncoats. That guy on the bus has an opinion on whether Wayne Coyne is getting too old to play with The Flaming Lips. During the postseason, every day is PAX, and everyone is cosplaying.

… Your grandma watched STK win. Your dad taught you how to zergling rush. Your mom gave you orange slices while you were writing your first fanfic, and your uncle helped you edit it.

… The boss talks about going into teamfight mode when he schedules overtime. Everyone can sympathize when the wife throws away PC Gaming’s swimsuit issue. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Where have you gone, Peter Molyneux, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you?”


This is what it’s like to be a sports fan in a nation of sports fans. Sports is great because we've all agreed to care so much about something that doesn't matter.


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(No, I don’t think sports are a necessary part of everyone’s lives. What I’m doing here is poking fun a little, but also showing how having an entire society agree to care about something makes it easier to reach out to people, making common ground to break the ice. I wrote a blog post once with a similar premise.)

(It doesn’t matter that it’s sports, necessarily. It could just as easily be anything else, but our society decided it should be sports. You can see similar effects within a fandom, or when a television event like the Red Wedding or the Breaking Bad finale happens. The only difference between sports and those is that so many people have already bought into sports.)

Gaming: The Year So Far

We’re nine months in, so it’s a good time to look at the year so far. We haven’t seen many structural changes, like the explosion of Kickstarters last year, but that doesn’t mean it’s been a boring nine months. Read on, and let me know in the comments if you think I missed something.

No one spoils BioShock Infinite’s ending…

Infinite was always going to be a blockbuster, and it was always going to have a game-changer ending. This was never in doubt. It was far from guaranteed that it would be this spectacular, though, and much credit goes to the producers who finally pushed that game out the door. Infinite in March was the first Game of the Year contender, and all the pent-up excitement from years of teasers exploded in cosplay, art and ending discussions.

Oddly, though, this generally didn’t end up spoiling the ending. There was a lot of discussion that there was an ending, and that it would leave you reeling, but not the specifics or spoilers. The media was generally on-point, as well, pointing towards Booker, Elizabeth and their relationship as the most important part, rather than the world they were in.

… or the ending of The Last of Us, either

Plot spoilers weren’t discussed publicly for Infinite, but the mechanics could be debated, and companion AI immediately became a major conversation. In June, Elizabeth was followed by Ellie, and it felt like Infinite all over again. Both games had mechanical similarities, featured an AI companion designed to be appreciated, and had Troy Baker voicing the protagonist.

With all those similarities, the only major difference was that Infinite was more of a cultural phenomenon: Elizabeth and Columbia made for better fan art and cosplay. I’ll be interested to hear the comparisons between these two from a business side. Two art games wrapped in an FPS shell, received with high accolade from the press – but one got a titanic marketing campaign, and another relied mostly on word of mouth. Profit comparisons would be fascinating for these.

(Point of interest: I’ve heard that Elizabeth’s role was actually modeled after Ellie. The story goes that the Infinite team had originally designed Elizabeth closer to the traditional model of a companion, then after watching a Last demo, realized Elizabeth’s mechanics had to change.)

Subscription MMOs still get made

Sure, it makes a degree of sense, but I never guessed that both ESO and WildStar would be subscription-based. We’ve been heralding the demise of the subscription for a while, and now even WoW is considering going F2P; ESO and WildStar might be the last chance for subscription to remain the default option.

Growing pains in the industry

Much like last year, this year’s seen a lot of moments where the gaming industry confronted glaring failures in including women in the community. From Dickwolves getting dredged back up at PAX to the videos of Tropes vs Women in Video Games, this year’s had plenty of headlines about this. Unfortunately, judging by how each flashpoint’s occurred, it doesn’t seem that much has changed: Each flashpoint treads the same ground, without the vocal arguers on each side changing at all.

Interestingly, this year’s marked a couple of shifts in the way we discuss diversity in gaming. In years past, the diversity discussion centered around having female and non-white protagonists; now it seems more focused around how good female characters are, and how we treat female gamers.

Sony serves Microsoft…

After the initial reveals, everyone was watching the PS4/Xbox One drama. Sony didn’t just strike the right tone by reaching out to indies, they backed it up with exclusives and got extra mileage with snarky ads and trollish stunts.

… and Microsoft makes a solid recovery

It’s yet to be seen whether the PS4’s early buzz advantage will matter, though. After E3, Microsoft did a pretty complete 180, blurring the differences between the two systems. Titanfall in particular might match the PS4’s buzz, even if it isn’t exclusively for the Xbox One.

At this point, the console rivalry’s dropped off the radar of casual conversation; with much of the stain on the Xbox One nullified by the changes in policy, Microsoft might be able to build buzz properly when it actually launches.

Saint’s Row IV

For a couple weeks before and after launch, SR IV was getting talked up as much as BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us. Going back a few months, the chief selling point was that this would be as madcap weird as the third game, but with superpowers thrown in. Then the first gameplay section came out, with the Saints in a weird mix of alien invasion and Aaron Sorkin drama, with writing that lives up to Sorkin.

By the time the dubstep gun preorders started arriving, the game had built buzz that wasn’t going away, that this was a genuinely great game. The devs and publishers have kept that train rolling with Sony-worthy trolling, like the GAT V DLC on Steam the day GTA V came out for consoles.

At time of writing, it’s a month after release, and the GAT V stunt still has people talking about it. Right now, the Game of the Year list seems to be Saint’s Row IV, GTA V, BioShock Infinite, and Last of Us.

(Note: I've left GTA V off this list, for the moment, because I'm not sure how it'll shake out. If nothing else, it hasn't been surprising like Saint's Row IV, nor has it been a juggernaut like Infinite.)

DotA 2 makes its case

Somehow, after years of being League of Legends’ perpetually-in-beta cousin, DotA’s emerged as an equal in the MOBA space. League got a huge lead over the past few years, but DotA 2 is making its case, and it’s about equal in the

I’m reminded a lot of what one of my bosses is saying: Riot’s going to start to decline in 2014. It’s definitely far too early to make any calls, but League doesn’t have as strong a grip on the MOVA space as it used to, even in the Traditional subgenre it used to dominate.