I’m a pretty avid gamer. And since the dawn of gaming, I;ve always looked with interest at the likes of the Cyber Athletes League, and imagined a world in which I could be paid to play games all day. I haven’t got the cash to race cars in real life, but online I’m fairly good at it, and if competitive gaming had taken off when I was in my peak, I’d have put myself up against most of the top ranked drivers on PGR3 and Forza Motorsports with a fair amount of confidence…
But there is one underlying problem. To get to the olympics, you would start by joining your local athletics club and progressing through regional heats. To get to gaming finals, generally the heats stage is online. Which means for anyone on slow broadband, you’re running with one shoelace undone.
You could take the fastest racers on time trial scoreboards, or fastest game completion times etc, but you then run into the problem that some gamers invariably exploit ways to cheat. So the scoreboard becomes meaningless, unless you want to know who can exploit standby cheating to the greatest extent….
And in a day and age when companies can’t realise a game without game-save ruining bugs (MotoGP 06), and Electronic Arts is actively selling access to cheat codes for the latest Tiger Woods game, I can’t see any way to persuade every gamer worldwide to adhere to the rules, or to persuade companies that equality should be taken into acount when they’re drawing up revenue and budgets…
That leaves the only online gamers in with a chance are those with cash, suprisingly supportive parents, and lots of time in their tenage years to exploit all the loopholes and hone their skills.
So even when it comes to armchair sports, it’s a game for the young… And one with moe to watch than merely steroid abuse.
