The other weekend I went out to the Hilton at O’Hare and visited a Major League Gaming videogame tournament. About six hundred people showed up at the hotel ballroom to play Halo 2 and Super Smash Brothers until a) their brains fell out of their heads, and b) one of them was crowned king. I went on Friday night, and actually found it pretty boring. It was mostly kids, and the presentation itself wasn’t great– there were just about 30 different setups of four networked Xboxes on four TVs for eight players each, and they were running through the brackets one by one. Fun if you’re playing, kind of boring if you’re not. I wrote it up as a piece for Newcity, so if they run with it, it should show up this week or next.
But the most interesting time I had personally didn’t even show up in the article. Ubisoft’s girl gamerclan the Fragdolls were there showing off Ubisoft games. This is a group of girls, hired by Ubisoft (a gaming company, for those of who you don’t know) to play in tournaments and promote their games. I walked over to say hi, and met Jinx. None of the little interview I did with her made it into the Newcity article, but here’s the entire thing from start to finish for your New Year’s reading pleasure.
Interview with Jinx, a Fragdoll
So you guys are showing off Ubisoft titles specifically?
Primarily– that’s what they gave us money to practice on. We play a lot of Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell. Far Cry, which is what we’ve got here this time. So that’s mostly what’s going on.
How many of you are here today?
There’s only four of us here today. There’s six total, and we’re recruiting two more.
Are you recruiting them from real players in the tournament?
We’re hoping to, because we need kickass players, and this is the place to find them. So we’re encouraging all the girls here to apply.
MLG’s big thing is that they want to turn this into a sport. Do you think that videogaming is a sport?
I think for sure it’s heading in that direction. It’s definitely a spectator sport if done the right way, and there’s a lot of experiementation going on– people are trying to figure out how it needs to be done to make it a spectator sport. As soon as that catches on I think it’ll do really well. They have all gaming channels in Korea, it’s just that it hasn’t caught on here quite that much.
And the question is, of course, why hasn’t it caught on in America?
For one I think that a lot of Americans are a little bit jaded. They’re a little bit too cool for it. We have one gaming channel and that’s G4, and even hardcore gamers go, “Oh, yeah, I’m too cool for that.” It’s elitism in my opinion. But I think that as it becomes more mainstream, and as more people get interested in, “Oh, look at this gaming,” and “Oh, my gosh, people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars,” that we’ll see more people be interested in it, not just competing, but also spectating and seeing what’s going on.
You said it’s a spectator sport if it’s done right– have they done it right here?
Yeah, I think so. For one, the audience that is watching the matches is very hardcore. They know all these players, they know what’s going on. They don’t need an update, they don’t need an introduction, you can just throw them in, they can watch it, and they know what’s going on. Also, it’s inherently really tense to watch two amazing teams compete, because it becomes a huge game of cat and mouse. And the way they play it, as a professional sport, I think really gets to the crowd here.
How’d you get recruited by Fragdolls?
I actually used to play an online game called Shadowbane. I was really involved in the community there. I was involved in the beta, I ran a fansite, and I got to know a couple of the developers. So when Ubisoft decided to put Fragdolls together and some of the Ubisoft affiliated developers saw it, they said, “Hey, seriously, you need to try out for this.” And they liked me enough to offer me a spot on the team.
So it was that you knew someone– there weren’t like tests of–
There were. I had to make it through all of those, but the way that I found out about how to apply at all was through people I knew showing it to me. We had to compete against each other in a couple of different titles, Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six primarily, and that was really tough.
Splinter Cell multiplayer is kind of crazy.
Yeah, but that’s my game.
Is it more hardcore gamers that belong in these types of tournaments, or do you want more casual gamers to come and try out?
I think it’s really important to make sure that you have the support of hardcore gamers, because they lend it legitimacy that it wouldn’t have otherwise. But at the same time, a lot of hardcore gamers forget that mainstream gamers are a huge part of what keeps the industry alive. So we do need to get mainstream gamers interested for any of us to continue.
—
Here’s where I stopped recording, unfortunately. I asked her what other games she was interested in, and she said that, especially traveling, the Animal Crossing DS game was eating her time away. I told her about my experience with the Gamecube version (all the animals are pissed at me now because I haven’t picked it up in months), and she said that it was even more addictive on the DS because you carried with you everywhere and played all the time.
Even though she did her shilling (that’s what she’s being paid to be there for) and defended G4 (inexcusable, I know), I thought she had a pretty good grasp on gaming. Not as good a grasp as, say, me, but pretty good all the same. Can’t say I agreed with her that the tournament we were at did spectator sports right, but I have to give it up for anybody who could take me to school at Splinter Cell multiplayer. That thing is hard.
