All your professionalism are belong to us - Bcrbo's Column

Many a word has been written about eSports in the last couple of years and increasingly so by the mainstream media. One could therefore assume we are on the right way, that all is going well and soon we can celebrate "The Age Of The Competitive Geeks". And yes, this going to be another column about something lacking, about something that is not right with eSports and its often claimed professionalism.

For starters, professionalism means a great many thing to even more different people and how can we claim to be professional gamers when we are not even sure when exactly people are to be called professionals?

Should we award each player with the elitist professional gamer status as soon as they have won any amount of prize money?

I feel this has some immediate and, for most people, apparent downsides: Although distinctions would still be made between all those players within the community, outsiders might assume that a team like Fnatic winning ESWC is of the same calibre as Button Bashers winning an edition of i-series. An additional negative point in this view is of course the fact that almost anyone becomes a winner, that almost no one is a not a professional and that takes away the connotational meaning of the word professional, which usually implies that you are better than most others. And when it takes almost no real practise or huge amounts of talent to become a professional, why would teams and players try so hard?

So in my view, this is the most vague and inappropriate meaning which could be applied to the world professional. Only those who like to boast on their own performances will not hesitate in using this term in conversation with others.

The next step would then be to up the ante and call gamers professionals as soon as they have collected a certain minimum of prize money. Let’s say that you will need to have collected €10 000 of prize money to qualify as a professional gamer.

Well it would take away one of the former arguments almost immediately, as it very rarely happens that such smaller and local LANs hand out such a prize purse and surely one would agree that if you placed amongst the top 3 at i-series events five times in a row, you must be a professional at what you do. Right? Well no, putting up a required performance incentive is illogical and you will definitely end up with fluke results. For example, it has all too often happened that one or another hardware manufacturer or game developer hosts some weird gaming competition for amateurs with an insane amount of money. It could very well be that someone picks up the win there and should immediately be called a progamer, whereas other teams and players who have been trying to reach the top of gaming strike out early in the world’s biggest competitions (the ESWCs, WCGs, WSVGs of our time) and after years of playing have not yet reached that requirement. Should they therefore be called less professional than the one who got "lucky" once?

We are getting closer, but there are still many flaws in this view with the word professional. The special meaning would not be lost but the lack of a proper money source would not allow us to differentiate between those who are in or out. Money is a bad guideline with regards to professionalism, success should not be measured with the amount of money you got out of it, in my view.

Another step up the ladder will lead us to the view that says professional gamers are those who have a contract and make enough money to live off it. Fulltime. Basically stating that it becomes their job, their profession. Being paid to play games competitively.

Yes. This must be it, right? Once you have reached that, you MUST be a professional right? Waking up to play games all day and getting paid for it as well. Cue dream sequence. But wait. In all things eSports, it has happened on so many occasions that even the very best of gamers, those we all aspire to become, do not uphold the truest and most desired forms of professionalism.

How often have we not seen or read about the lacklustre attitude some of even these contracted and moneymaking gamers live by. Who are put in a situation that offers them a shot at becoming truly special in our “little” world and seem to not give two cents when it comes to practising regularly or giving even small amounts back to their idols through shoot-outs or giving advice. When you are given the opportunity to make your job, your profession out of gaming, then you are contracted and if you see gaming as something replacing your career for as long as you can remain at the top, then it somehow seems not to be such a herculean assignment at all.

Not to take away the effort and time some of these players DO put into their passion, as there are those who are always easy to approach and have a friendly manner about them as well as investing a lot of time in their personal improvement. Yet simply because some of them are capable of doing all these things well and treat it as if it were a normal nine-to-five job (although it is more often a six-to-two job because of the training hours), I find we need to distinguish the opportunists from the real professionals.

And as I see it, there are not too many players or teams who fit into this criterion of being one of the best gamers in your respective game as well as inspire other players to become as good or even better than yourself and that is in part a tribute to the few out there who are a real example for others to follow (and do not hesitate in telling me who you feel are such true professionals), but it shows there is still so much wrong with the way we do our business.

On LANs the participants tend to laugh about how little they practised, sometimes it will even go so far that they will return from inactivity and join up with a team just so they can attend one or two LANs, even when there is no real intent to do well, forgetting that the organisations pay several hundreds if not thousands to get them to their designations and always expect good things from their teams. This shameful abuse of the organisation’s goodwill is something I find very sad. Of course it is fun to meet up with your gaming friends in some exotic location (although, when it is at some i-series event, you can strike out exotic and replace it with rainy), but at the expense of your backer, who honestly believes you are there to give your best, while in truth it does not matter all that much to you whether you win or lose, is something I will never condone.

And the same can be applied to all divisions of eSports. Especially the writing section. There are so many community websites out there who like to profile themselves as the journalists of the New Age, but when it comes to such vital and basic things as correct spelling or double-checking your sources, these journalistic beliefs and many more are quickly forgot. Each time I see another infringement against the most basic of English spelling traps such as It’s/its, of/off, s/’s and many others, I simply cringe. I am not prophesying that all my writing is squeaky clean, although I feel I am not doing a bad job either. Yet that is exactly my point, even those who know and understand these rules can make mistakes against them, that is why all these websites should have some sort of editor or at least a proofreader. And yes, almost all websites have an Editor in Chief as it is so nicely called, but they hardly ever do any real editing or they simply do not recognize mistakes when confronted with them. It is this laziness with regards to their own content and their own productions that infuriates me nearly every time. People should not only look at what they say, but at how they are saying it as well. It is called common courtesy towards the reader, otherwise you are simply calling them simple-minded.

I do feel it is time to round off my rant by saying that we should look at improving our general attitude towards everything we physically produce in eSports, whether it be gaming, news articles, organisation applications or team product models. For now, we need to be satisfied with being only semi eSports, although there is still time to learn, still time to improve and hopefully end up as the winners, proving to all that eSports is not some pubescent attempt at attention seeking but a valid idea many of us believe in and want to be a part of.