Professional Video Game Athletes and the Sport of Computer Games

Professional Video Games as Sports are rapidly gaining both popularity and commercial viability, and with the associated rise in popularity for video games in general, the Internet, file-sharing and social networking, it is very likely that Video Games as Sports may become one of the most popular entertainment venues for audiences in the 21st century.

For those who are aware of the appeal of video games, the idea that others might want to watch excellent players compete against each other in a contest of hand-eye coordination and precision athletics at least as demanding as any other non-collision sport is about as obvious as an idea can get. Ever since the earliest days of the first person shooter phenomenon which really signaled the beginning of the rapid growth of multiplayer online games, the great players and the great games have been a subject of constant conversation and constant speculation. What would happen if the two greatest Quake players squared off in a game of capture the flag? What would a great comeback look like in Starcraft?

Could the story of a great video game competition be as compelling as the stories of the great sports victories?

Are Hollywood movies only watched by people who subsist on Cheetos? It's a fair question, since video games are apparently more popular than movies!

On June 12, 2007, the Championship Gaming Series League held their inaugural player draft. The San Francisco franchise selected Vanessa Arteaga, a Dead or Alive player called a "guaranteed win" by the team's general manager Kat Hunter. This is by no means the first professional video game league. Video games have sought professional status for years, and it may be that their recent progress is simply a natural result of their popularity. Far more people play video games than any other professional sport. Even golf, with its near necessity as a meeting substitute for business people, has scarcely half the number of even casual players as video games do.

To date, Johnathan Wendel, known better by his game handle "Fatal1ty," has won over $500,000 as a professional video game athlete. He is a member of the Cyberathlete Professional League, or CPL, which is an international professional tournament circuit with events in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. The CPL has events in a variety of popular games including Unreal Tournament, Alien vs. Predator, Quake, Quake II, Quake III, Painkiller, and team competitions in games like Counter-Strike, which is a modification of the top selling first person shooter game Half-Life.

But these professional competitions are a microscopic representation of the millions and possibly billions of amateur and casual video game competitions that take place 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the Internet. At this moment, there are over eight million active players in Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft massively multiplayer online game, a large number of whom are routinely engaged in player vs player combat competitions in the battlegrounds feature or in the higher level player vs player arenas, where teams of high level World of Warcraft characters can compete against each other in preselected tournament and ladder competition. The most successful teams earn a rating which determines the rankings of top teams in the arena brackets at the end of each "season" of competition. Arena games continue day and night on a continuous basis with players participating from around the world.

While players battle in the Warcraft arenas, there are still the Warcraft real time strategy game competitions, along with Half Life, Counter Strike, Battlefield 1942, Command and Conquer, Quake, Doom, Unreal Tournament, Halo and its sequels, Red Alert, Call of Duty, Dead or Alive, and of course, the myriad other massive games like Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, Everquest and dozens upon dozens of others.

With the recently released fourth generation consoles, the popularity of video games is certain to increase and with it the potential success of professional leagues and tournaments featuring the best players.