Editorial: Televised Video Games Are Going to Be Better than Televised Sports

At first, the reactions were grim. The public didn’t quite seem ready. And even after the thought set in, it’s still not going well.

But why are people freaking out? Why do people believe this to be the end of television, or even the lowest common denominator. That author of the latter editorial I linked to wrote, “I watch both golf and poker on TV with great fervor. But video games? As sport?”

Yes, and as a matter of fact, this is exactly my point: People watch Poker on television. People have even watched it enough in the past few years so that when you’re flipping through the channels on a random Saturday afternoon, you’ll come across a poker match being televised at 5:00 on a random Sunday.

The game, which has almost nothing to do with your physical condition, has been accepted as sport, and fans gather around to see who wins, pushing the ratings of the shows up to give them primetime time slots on Fox Sports.

It’s a niche market, somewhat, but one of the reasons why it has been so successful is what they add in to the television event. If you’ll notice in the upper left, they’ll have the percentages of each player representing the likelihood that they will win the current hand, and to the right you’ll see the cards which have been laid down. It kind of makes you feel like you have a better handle on the game, an omniscient perspective.

But who could have seen this coming? Poker is absolutely, horrifically boring to watch if you’re not in the game. Booze is probably your only refuge when you get put out in a game with a bunch of your friends–don’t even try to kid yourself. That’s probably why you don’t get a bunch of people coming over to watch a poker tournament; you either play and you’re in, or you don’t play and you’re somewhere else.

It’s not exactly the same with video games, though. Sometimes a group will be able to gather around and watch split screen players go at it in a game of Halo 2, and you’ll hear someone inevitably ask, “Wait, so which one are you again?” The point is, you already have a draw with video games.

The New York Times had a great article today explaining a bit about what the producers are doing to make the television experience a bit more accessible. For instance, they’re adding health meters to the World of Warcraft bits so that people who don’t play can immediately see who’s about to expire. And really, this is just one of the many things that they can do to make the experience more exciting.

That Times article also mentions how when television producers gathered around to discuss how best to cover baseball on television, putting a camera in the middle of center field was the best way to film somebody pitching. Obviously, putting a camera in the middle of the field so that fans at home could watch the game better was not a realistic option. When trying to cover baseball, or any sport for that matter, on television, you have a lot of problems when trying to get that omniscient view, capturing every moment from the best possible angle. Producers have done a phenomenal job with capturing sports so far, and it’s obvious all the logistical details for more difficult angles are continually being worked out.

But it’s here where I see televised video games surpassing televised sports: the video game world is virtual. Most gamers out there know there are modes and options so that you can act as a first-person camera going anywhere you want to go. Xbox Live has its own version of this, even.

The technology is already in place, and producers could realistically work with game developers to work in a mode to give them access to any shot they wanted. Take this and combine the already in-place first-person viewpoint from each player, and you could even make yourself a complete cinematic masterpiece out of every game in a tournament.

Sports moments on television happen with a lot of work, created by people who devote their entire lives to this one thing, and they have been doing it for decades. I’m excited and anxious to see what will happen in a few years after the logistics of shooting video games is worked out. While there is no “center field camera” that producers want to have, there is probably something like it, and I imagine the medium of video games will allow for quite a few work-arounds to whatever problem comes up.

And while today’s CBS broadcast has already transpired, with ratings that may or may not have been what CBS was hoping for at noon on a Sunday, I see the future as being open and full of possibilities.

Any nay-sayers out there who don’t see it as a possibility need to realize that it’s very real, and given that the Nintendo Wii is already taking away from prime time ratings in Japan, video game television might be more real sooner than we think.