It’s hard to pinpoint the biggest problem in eSports. Is it the lack of one game to market? Maybe it’s a general lack of interest in the general population. What about all the immaturity and shady “sponsors”? That’s got to factor into the equation of “things holding back competitive gaming”.

All those are true, but I also think that one stands out more than the rest. The biggest group of problems in eSports is getting the public interested in watching the product. Leagues are trying to solve that in different ways. The CGS played around with the game rules a little bit, and they’re introducing a more recognizable league structure, among other things. MLG delays their broadcast to provide the best commentary, replays, and effects they possibly can. The CPL … I don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a McDonalds booth here, does that count as trying to help gaming go mainstream?

Joking aside, I think we tend to overlook one key problem: replicating the communal experience.

Before we go further, it’s worth mentioning that there is another way to engage a wide audience: living through the player. The pocket-cam did this for poker. We all know it was the catalyst behind the game’s success, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why. Our hearts beat faster with every big bluff, and we die with every suck out on our favorite player. Particularly if your favorite player is Phil Hellmuth and you have to listen to him whine for ten minutes after busting out.

I don’t think that approach will work with eSports. The action is too alien, and so are the emotionless ingame avatars. You can cut to and from player reactions, but it’s not nearly as exciting to see that after the fact, and cutting away from the action isn't a good solution, either. I don’t think there’s a way to make it anything more than fun sidebar, like watching to a manager when the second baseman makes his third error in an inning.

You could argue that people just aren’t ready for gaming because they haven’t grown up with it, and maybe that’s true.  But I’ve grown up with gaming, and watching HLTV feeds is approximately one-trillionth as fun as watching 3D beat Pandemic 16-1, 16-2 at WSVG Kentucky. And those weren’t even “good” matches; it would be like watching an NBA team win by fifty points. Not the most gripping action. Getting a more vocal audience is the way to go, in my opinion.

A person is incredibly influenced by the people around him/her. There's a famous experiment in social psychology where people were asked to watch a speech with or without the audience reaction. One person would watch the unedited speech, with laughter after the jokes, and one person would watch all the jokes “bomb” because the laughter was edited out. As a whole, the people that watched the speech without the reaction rated the speaker and the speech as much less humorous. The participants that watched the unedited copy rated those aspects more highly.

You see similar things in professional sports all the time. If you watched any of Golden State’s home games during the NBA playoffs, you know what I mean. Or if you followed the New Orleans Saints in their first season back after Katrina. The games are more fun and more exciting, for fans and players, when there’s a huge crowd cheering you on.

There are more examples I could bore you with, but I’ll spare you the agony. The underlying ideas behind them are the same, and they might be summed up best by Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.” When we’re in a crowd, we tend to act like the people around us.

Where does that leave eSports?

If we really want to advance the “sport” we have to figure out a way to enhance the communal experience we see in other sports. Actually, “enhance” is getting ahead of ourselves. We need to have it before we can work on making it better. A thousand lines of text in SourceTV isn’t more exciting than one line of text, it’s just more annoying. LANs are cool for everybody there, but people on the outside are left in the dark. Considering that’s where we’re trying to expand, I think we should try to figure out how to turn the lights on.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any solid answers. Good broadcasters (shoutcasters) are a step in the right direction, but we can do more. A fun, but probably impractical, idea would be to set up some kind of canned background noise. Sit-coms use canned laughter to make their shows seem more entertaining, it’s not a total stretch to think eSports could use that thought to make it seem like you’re watching an event with 20,000 other people. That’s not the solution (unless I’m Nostradamus), but it’s something to work with and think about.

Until somebody solves that problem, I'll be enjoying the CPL.