Arcade to eSports: How Your Competitive Game Influences Player Culture and Values

[Music] everyone I'm Tom I'm supposed to remind you that you'll get an email out to this talk to rape me if you'd like to and please do take the time to do that I would love to get the feedback whether you like this kind of content whether you think books is useful this is kind of a wacky vaguely personal subject to me and I'm not really sure how much interest there is in this sort of really to me special group of players because we're not the biggest scene around so the feedback would really help me so I'd appreciate it so without further ado let's see like I said I'm Tom I've been involved in competitive gaming eSports for over 25 years now first as a player as what amounted to a pro back in the early 90s I was a fanatic street fighter player traveled the country going to tournaments my mains were chun-li in dhalsim just in case you're curious

there's still my mains in 2011 I dove into the games industry as a developer a co-founding little startup called radiant with my twin brother and co-founder there we produced our own fighting game had a brief alpha for about six months that game was called rising Thunder mmm we later sold that company to write games but in the background for the past 15 years I've been sort of developing this project called Evo with a couple of Awesome partners and that's really what I want to talk to you about today and let's get to it so this is a really quick timeline I want to talk about a special group of players for me it's called the FCC the fighting game community and talk about why I think they're special in the world of eSports I want to scrap how they got that way and describe most of my talk on that subject and then I'll contextualize it for how it matters if you're building a game or how if you want to be involved in eSports okay so behold this is the FG see how many people know what this is

show of hands oh good most of you okay so this can go fast so the FCC for maybe those of you who are seeing this for the first time is a group of really passionate fighting game fan who have organized themselves into basically a global collection of grassroots tournaments so on any given weekend throughout the year you'll see tournaments for Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat guilty gear all kinds of fighting games happen in all over the world the US EU Japan and the largest of these events is Evo and this is the event that I helped run it's kind of the de facto annual championship of fighting games we hold nine tournaments throughout a weekend and players really show up to this thing last year we had over 10,000 players show up from over 70 countries and what's unique about this scene and Evo is that almost all of

these tournaments are open they have open brackets anyone who wants to come can play and compete against the best in the world regardless of your skill level okay so why why is that important what does it matter well we think about eSports events we usually think about something like this and these are legitimately awesome I love going to these I love watching them but the draw of this event is to watch the pros play at the very highest level it's that spectacle we've seen the best of the best of the best compete and most of the people in this stadium probably play this game most of them are probably actually competitive players right they play a win but in the context of this event they're showing up as fans right to watch the pros so it's kind of like the NBA where you may play basketball you may be a die-hard basketball fan but when you go to a Warriors game you don't expect to like lace up against def right that's just not why you're there you're there watch staff do incredible things

that you can't do okay but by contrast this is the show floor at Evo and this is what you see and all these fighting game community events what you're seeing are about four or five thousand players all competing at 30 or so play stations set up around the floor and it's so dense that you can't even see many of the play stations this is about half of our show floor imagine like a hall monitor sort of next to this and that encompasses sort of what they want or day two of Evo looks like and so the draw of this event is not to sort of watch the pros it's to compete against them it's to participate in an event which with a huge set of your peers and test yourself and see test your limits see how far you can get into this event right so it's a lot less like the NBA and it's more like poker right where if you go to the World Series of Poker it doesn't matter if you're like up sponsored Pro or if you're just sort of a casual player you go to this event with them winning mentality you're trying to get as far

into the bracket or as you can to maybe make the make it money oh and then maybe if you're a longshot even to win right and so it's a different mentality so if you sum all that up I think these are how our events come together and it's a stadium setting in the end but all the people that you see in the stands are basically kind of dead bodies right almost all of them were players who got knocked out of this event and they stick around and they watch the conclusion because they love their sport and they're invested in fact many of them probably got knocked out by the two players who are left playing for the ultimate championship like they have skin in the game like this is personal for them okay and so these are the three key values that I attribute to the fighting game player right there's competition and especially the spirit that competitors are all equal and every player deserves a shot at the best in the world there's the concept of hype okay this fighting games are a 1v1

action genre it's super emotional and players love to see what happens to like that dude when he's in that chair in the moment up against the wall and yes perform there's a whole like lexicon of terms describing hype like there's salt the pop off right players really have almost like a WWE mentality to seeing the action unfold on screen and seeing the the personal drama of human beings right and then there's this is really its competition there's the struggle that the idea that every single player is always in a personal journey to get stronger and even if you're a bad player or a mediocre player you earn respect for sort of putting your and to the ring in testing yourself okay so part one over so how did the scene get this way why is this scene value those three values so highly and in part of it is probably that this is a genre that embraces the Warriors fantasy so many of these games are tied up into

martial arts themes and players are probably consciously or subconsciously sort of buying into that and so they tend to value these things and I think there's some truth to that but I don't think that's the major factor I think there's something much deeper and fundamental at play which is that this is a genre that grew up in the arcades and that was a very specific moment in time that probably won't happen again and that arcade had a very specific set of rules and that arena taught players what to value it shaped their motivations okay and once those players had those motivations set they passed them down to future generations of players so then now you have younger players who have never stepped foot in arcade never had that experience but they value the same things they learned that from sort of their ancestors and I guess I'm one of the ancestors which doesn't make me feel great but what was this experience what was so special about okay is why was it different I want you to rewind your mental stack all the way back to 1991 which is the heyday of the arcades okay

so this was a full 20 years before watching video games of the internet was a thing right with twitch and with YouTube this was a long time before the birth of eSports at least for me personally which was Starcraft right and this was a full five years before multiplayer gaming on PC was the thing with the original doom okay so this was a lifetime ago in our industry this is a long time ago none of these things were around but what was happening was a vibrant competitive scene happening in arcades all over the world okay players were organizing into tournaments the companies themselves responsible in big tournaments and if you were into competitive gaming if that was your thing back then odds are you were playing a fighting game because it was kind of the best game in town okay so this is a really old photo of Southern Hills Golf Land which is now dead arcade that was in Orange County California and the in the US at least this was the place to play this is kind of like the mecca this was

known to have the best players in the country they would hold regular tournaments and if you were a street fighter player you would come to this place people were traveling from New York from Midwest to play against these players and when you did that here's what the experience was first obviously this was a public place so you had to physically go there and then you show up with whoever happens to be in the arcade at the time and when you wanted to play you'd walk up to one of these cabinets and put your quarter up literally put your quarter up on the sill of the machine right and that reserved your spot in queue reserved I say in giant air quotes but right now you can see like there are four people who are waiting to play this this person is putting their turn up and you'd wait and wait in line and when it was your turn you take your quarter you put in the Machine and you play and you play against whoever happens to be there at the time next to you now it could be like the best dude in the arcade or in the country or it could be just a random person and the key thing about this is that we didn't have things like

matchmakers it was all sort of house rules to determine how you got to play and so what is on the line for these players when they're going through this experience because that's really what shaped their values and I want to talk about this in terms of three stakes three primary stakes right there's time there's money in their face when I say face I mean respect respect and admiration of your peers okay so let's talk about time and money and I want to tell you a story real briefly about how I got involved with fighting games with the original Street Fighter 2 and a putt-putt Golf arcade near my house so I was in high school I did not have a car I did not have a driver's license so merely getting to the game was kind of an ordeal I had to either persuade my mom or bribe like a kid with a car to get me to that arcade okay so the game itself was a scarce resource you couldn't just sit down at your computer or what about your phone and play this thing it took effort to get there and once I was there I had

maybe like six to eight hours a week that I could devote to playing in the arcade and I had probably $20 right those dollars in those hours were my lifeblood they determined how much I would get to play this game this week and how much I got to play the game determined how much better I would get how much that was my practice time right so in very real sense I had limited lives and as I'm going through this experience I'm burning lies at the same time I've put in a quarter I lose a little money if I lose I go to the back of the line so you lose maybe a lot of time but but time gap could be 20 or 30 minutes before you get to play again so it's super sharp and the final factor was that the only way that I could get better the only way to stretch out those lives was to win okay that's the only way you're gonna get to play for free that's the only way you're gonna play even two times in a row is when beat that person who's next to you and what I learned going through this experience what everyone around me learned really quickly was that everyone is a competitor it doesn't matter if you

are playing this game for the first time this this week or if you complain for years when you step into this arcade and you step up to a machine you have to go in with a winning mindset you have to try to win it's sort of a no excuses environment right and winning like freaking matters okay there wasn't such a thing as like a moral victory if you did your best and you almost won and that guy's better than you anyway so it doesn't matter you're still going to back the line right so there's a premium on winning like every single time and so this was like illuminating and like crack for me and I just really got into it and got involved with it and as time went by I moved out of Albuquerque New Mexico where I was and school brought me to California and at the time I didn't know but I was being dropped into one of the most hyper-competitive hottest spots for fighting games in the u.s. at the time and so I learned a ton about face and how you earn respect right how you

earn respect among your peers in this kind of an environment okay and so I want to remind you that these arcades were public places which meant that anyone could go and the Jia Jia graphical reality of this was that the usual players tended to grenade in the same arcade okay so people would go to the arcade in our neighborhood and so you were always fighting with a group of familiar peers and in this peer group everyone had a role to play there was like the Alpha the dude who everyone knew was the best okay there was sort of the up-and-comers who were trying to like unseat the Alpha right there were the regulars who were Knight neither good nor bad but they all just showed up because maybe they liked it and then there was kind of the fish right the person who had a bottomless supply of quarters but they always lost but they always seemed to keep putting them up right and they were kind of like the break where he like okay I'm fighting the fish I can like take it easy for a bit and rest up and unfortunately like local boy from Albuquerque moving up to California full

of killers I was like the fish initially and so I lost I lost a lot trying to like razor up my skills to be able to compete with these with these guys and an interesting thing happens to you when you're in the back of that queue the first thing is remember your quarter is up on the machine you can't really go anywhere because if you go off and like try to come back in ten minutes your quarter will be gone and no one will know what happened to it and the thing is if you're smart you don't want to go anywhere you want to have like laser eyes on that screen so you can watch that dude who just beat you and maybe learn something or at least study up on his pattern so you'll have a better chance of beating him next time and so around this arcade cabinet you have a captive attentive audience but captive because they can't go anywhere the loose quarter and they're attentive because they want to learn this game and the only way you can learn if you're not playing is by watching and watching really closely about the action that's happening on screen and this produced a quality of play as

performance right it wasn't just about winning it was about playing for the crowd and being kind of a little celebrity around that arcade cabinet excellence in play was always respected but players who were big personalities or could win with style were celebrated those were the people that players really looked up to that's how you earned respect and there were a lot of players who would embrace this deeply right there were players who loved being the hero there were players who love being the heel that that guy who you just could not stand and he knew you could not stand him there was one player in particular who he was strong but he wasn't the best but he would gain notoriety being the most annoying dude you have ever met and when he played you in a tournament beat you this is not a joke he he had business cards printed and he would hand it to you the business card said congratulations you just beaten by Jeff Shafer yeah so this builds a sense of

hype right you have this familiar group of players you know these guys maybe you don't know him personally but you've seen them every week or every day in this arcade everyone knows their spot in the social hierarchy and there are little mini dramas and stories unfold day by day week by week or on this cabinet like who's gonna beat the Alpha hey this dude was terrible a month ago now he's like be be me what's going on am i a bad player too and so the familiarity of this build sort of a sense of drama and hype as you're playing and like I said in this environment I started off at the very bottom of the totem pole and I lost a lot and losing in any competitive game kind of stings I still rage when I lose in hearthstone but in this environment it was particularly nasty because your losses were public right everybody who is paying close attention to what's going on just saw you lose and you can't

like rage out you can't steam or say that's cheap because you're just kind of like lose everyone's respect you just have to like hold that now right keep it inside French Quarter up and like you to the back line if you don't have that ability you're just not gonna last long in this scene you're gonna get kind of like roasted out of it out of the scene and so what that taught me was that there's a continual struggle to get stronger and you have to be able to absorb losses as like the way you win the way you win is losing and learning from losses and then gradually getting better and the thing is eventually you see everyone lose okay even that alpha eventually makes a mistake or the dude next time gets lucky and he loses so it becomes very easy to understand that everybody loses and you just have to learn to suck up and level up from your losses so I learned a lot I lost a lot I gradually leveled up in this hyper-competitive group and there was for me a sweet sweet payoff when four

years later our work took me up to Seattle where I was suddenly in a different environment with a bunch of strong players but not the world-class killers that I'd been competing against for last four years and so all of a sudden I was the Alpha which let me tell you was a pretty awesome feeling and there's this thing we're like you're in this arcade and there may be five to eight to 15 people who are all at the same cabinet if you can potentially beat all of them maybe not consistently but if you are good enough to beat every other person then arcade you can potentially like go infinite right you can cycle the queue everyone puts the court up again you can cycle it again and you can play for hours and hours and hours off of one quarter and I actually did this a few times my my longest winning streak ever was like 73 wins in the lasted like six hours and it was just a very very different feeling from every other competitive experience I've had especially in the world we have now of automated matchmakers with eloah ratings where the system is always

trying to match you up with a fair opponent which means almost every player kind of has roughly a 50% win rate like this was a very very different feeling where even as like a good player not a pro but a good player you could have like ridiculous windscreen streaks you could be like the lord of this arcade right it's the feeling of like being the top dog in the moment like yeah I'm not the best but like today right here I actually am the best and none of you can beat me and you all know it so that's like super awesome and unique and I don't think it has happened since and I'm not sure if it'll ever happen again so if you sum all that up you get a culture that is hyper competitive but it's also really close-knit its social right there's trash talking and money matches but there's mutual respect for between players as adversaries even for players who maybe are not nearly as good as you right and the only way to earn respect in this peer group is to play it's to play and demonstrate excellence or it's to play continue to play even though maybe

you're not you know the top dog but you're willing to put yourself into that cauldron so this lasted for like 10 years and it was growing gradually but steady growth 10 years of growth tournaments were getting bigger we were starting to have international events and it was awesome it was really awesome and then though there's a problem which was the arcade started going down right we were sort of a budding growing competitive community I was on a sinking ship when some of the very best most popular arcades for the scene started to go under like Southern Hills Golf Lane in 2002 the writing was on the wall that this was a genre that was just gonna be dead if something didn't happen we had to jettison ourselves from from the arcades we had to decide what to do and at this time there were there was a resurgence and on the PC of eSports events like I talked about in the beginning of the talk and we I personally took a good hard look at

these and they weren't really compelling for me personally as a player even though way they were doing it as awesome they weren't for me and it goes back to the core value proposition of these events are you there why are you there are you there to watch the pros play at the very highest level or do you want an arena where you can construct where you can struggle and compete and test your limits against the best players around and it was just way more of the right for me and less of the left and so that was where the idea for Evo came along right Evo for me was literally kind of the escape pod that we would use to save ourselves from the dying planet of the arcades okay our mission right from the beginning was to preserve and grow the RP arcade competitive culture like can we take what's awesome about this arcade experience and put it in a form that can outlive the actual arcades and our values were all competitors or equal support every player's personal journey to get stronger and showcase the drama of humans under pressure right restated as competition struggle and hype so we

tried and it was a rocky road it's been like gosh 15 years now trying to build Evo and we were faced with a lot of hard choice is when we were crafting this event from day one we decided this was going to be an open tournament no matter how big we got we were always going to let every player play and we're gonna put him in the same pool and that was easy at first because tiny right but as we grew how do you run an event with a thousand players how about ten thousand right we had to invest in new systems new equipment new staffing solutions to make sure that every player who wanted to play got to play right and that came at a cost we chose to do that instead of doing other things when it comes to the dollars we spend we have to choose are we going to invest in more ways to play free to play areas exhibition things like that vers staging lighting things that make the event more attractive and feel like more professional and we've chosen largely to

invest in widening the arena for play because that's what we value and then finally when it comes to our stream production this one is a really close case and I go back and forth on this but do we focus on as much content as we can gameplay show more matches more matches verse context showing players backstories giving you the knowledge you need to sort of understand what's going on and care about these players and we've biased a lot of our production towards content and the reason why is because these this is the only opportunity where you get to see a wide variety of play styles from players from all over the world and people really want to see that diversity of play and so when we ask players in our sort of audience online do you want to see more matches or do you want to see like you know many documentaries or Q&A after they consistently tell us show us more matches right and so we try to get creative and find ways to tell that story and the natural downtime between

matches or over the course of the match like I said that one is a I go back and forth on not all the time but it's it's a tough choice that we constantly have to make and I think you know we've made some mistakes certainly we've made our share of mistakes but I do think we largely been successful where we have a scene now that genuinely captures what was awesome about that arcade culture these players are hyper invested there's just a ton of passion right and the feelings that these guys have for their scene and the competition has nothing to do with the amount of prize money right we're not the biggest scene around it's about the authenticity and the value that these guys put on being able to come together and compete and ultimately crown that winner right so why does this matter for your game I think it's clear that eSports are here to stay and this is actually me personally this is one of the first times where I'm willing to stand up a firmer crowd and say that anyone who's

been around eSports for a while knows it's been kind of a rocky road it's been up and down up and down but I really feel like these the notion of competitive gaming as incredible content and an incredible experience for gamers is here to stay and I think in five to ten years we're gonna see a much wider variety of formats of both in broadcast and an eSport than what we see today we're really at the very beginning of this journey and so if you're building a game or an eSport or experimenting in eSports I want to encourage you to choose a model for your eSport don't inherit one don't blindly look at what's going on in the other game and sort of copy/paste it if you're a game developer try to spend the same kind of effort in crafting your eSport that you spend in crafting your game and when you do that think about what you want your players to value both from the competition and how they should think about competition and what you want their players to value

from each other right and that can help you decide what kinds of you know rule sets and formats and things like that you want for your eSport okay that's it Thanks any questions uh hi Dave Schwartz from RIT we now have an eSports program there as we were building in our program one of the things that were concerned about is diversity and I note it was a phenomenal talk I love your presentation but I'm sitting there Google you know hitting Google women in Evo and I was curious if you could respond to that yeah that's a great question Thanks so the FCC I think is one of the most diverse group of players in eSports except for when it comes to women and

there are a lot of theories about how we got to be so diverse and along some lines and not that particular line my personal feeling is that it comes to leadership and role models for whatever reason the leadership in the FTC the tournament organizers the the people who are out front sort of evangelizing fgc are pretty diverse there's a lot of black and brown people who are doing that and there are no women and I think when other women see that it makes it feel like this is not the right place for me and they go and look at other games I think there's hope here what's going on with smash sisters in particular is super awesome and I'm really glad to see that they have some success there yeah they're cool know that they it but what I want to say is like it's if we want to solve this problem and I really want to solve it not just for the FCC but for all of you sports I think we have to look and get getting diverse leaders and diverse

representatives from eSport and once we solve that problem at the top it'll become a more welcoming place for all kinds of players so I'm curious what you what do you think games of other genres can do to kind of encourage that competitor mindset and not just the spectator mindset more oh boy so the question was what can other genres do to encourage the competitive mindset and not just the fan mindset right so there's this paradox in eSports in the models that were pursuing which is a lot of these games were pursuing sports based models but they only look at the top very top of the pyramid and if you look at a sport like basketball okay yes there's the NBA but there's a whole pyramid of engagement in competitive formats to nurse for a player up to the very highest level there's like the d-league and then there's like all the way down to like YMCA and youth leagues right and so you can have success as a competitor when

you were young and when you were bad and when you were growing and that doesn't exist for eSports and so if you are a giant eSport and you want to help support the competitive mindset in players I would say ad formats for young and budding players collegiate formats are great some of that is happening how about like you know youth formats just open tournaments where you may be explicitly carve off the pros because we know they crush everybody but say hey if you want to like get to know what it feels like to be a competitive player here's an event for you yeah so looking at the whole top to bottom solution not just stuff hi there it was a great presentation by the way thank you thank you so as an event organizer myself that runs a lot of tournaments I'm always looking forward to seeing where everything is going and Evos been one of those things is saying what does the Evo doing what games were they focused on I'm curious on a two-part question which is first off how do you guys try to be thought leaders in the space what do you do to try to be

thought leaders and a space more specifically to keep on the the edge leading across all the other tournament organizers in the country and secondarily where do you see other events needing to be better in order to escalate the major level to bring it up to better for the entire fgc community Thanks so if I understand the question it's what are we doing at Evo to try to stay ahead of the game yeah and then what's my advice to other tournament organizers basically right so we don't really try to stay ahead of the game in terms of competing with other tournaments but what we do try to do is always push the envelope on pursuing risky projects that are in line with our values for instance we've done things like the Evo scholarship to try to support the idea of indie game developer and support our players dreams event almost ultimately entering the game industry we now have like an indie showcase where we show

like competitive games that aren't fighting games to try to get again support for developers and so it's really we're not we're not trying to like make a million dollars we're not trying to even be the biggest tournament there's a lot of interesting stuff happening on the more I guess professional traditional eSports sides of fighting games with the capcom cup and with eleague those are awesome and I think there's a great space for them and we're just trying to focus on our area which is giant open tournament sort of like the World Series of Poker and I guess my advice to other fighting game tournaments is to take the same approach find something that you can do better than anybody else and then just go hard on that I think combo breaker is a great example of an event that's doing that where they have at their own cool quirky feel in different emphasis than other fighting game tournaments because when you do that I think you have a great chance of stumbling on something that is awesome and can explode whereas if

you're always following behind someone else's footsteps you're not gonna really have that opportunity okay time for one more question or no nope I'm done okay thanks [Applause]