Ethnography - Week 0

PRIOR PERCEPTION

            For our ethnography this semester, my group has decided to study the life of professional video game players. We chose this group because despite being among the best of the best at what they do, they don’t appear to see a lot of recognition for their accomplishments. Through the course of this ethnography, we hope to gain a valuable understanding of the passion that drives professional gamers to keep doing what they do.

Even though video games are an accepted part of today’s culture, there seems to be a common thought process that a person’s video game skills and social skills are inversely related. I will be the first one to disagree with that conjecture, as I enjoy playing video games myself. I would not, however, in any stretch of the imagination, call myself a professional gamer. In fact, I had no idea there existed such a thing as the MLG (Major League Gaming) until I joined this group.  I mainly play one-player story driven games, and maybe some sports games on-line (usually on the losing end). Therefore, I would love to see what goes through the minds of the people that are on the other end of my beatings.

I am joined in this project by Neal, Andy, and Chandler. The four of us together have varied gaming experience in the sense of both how often we play and what kinds of games we play. This, I believe should be a very strong foundation for the research we are conducting, since, the way I see it, we all are coming in with different biases. Hopefully, this should help us to interpret our observations in such a way that all can agree with.

To help kick off our research, we will be meeting with a friend of Neal’s who has climbed through the ranks to become a top tier Halo player. Our plan is to ask him some very basic questions to get a little bit of an insight into how he views the gaming world. The next report will come after we have spoken to him.

INTITIAL RESULTS

Today, we spoke with Tyler, who, as I stated earlier, has established himself as an extremely skilled Halo player, probably within the top 10% of the over 125,000 active Halo players. While this may make him the best player any of us know, he has mentioned that it’s probably in the top percentile that the recognized professional players lie. Nevertheless, he was more than willing to spend time with us and answer some of our questions. He has even offered to join us whenever we go to interact with other hardcore gamers.

The first things we asked Tyler about were about his personal life in the gaming sense. He said that he has only been actively playing Halo for about two years, and that it was in fact Neal that talked him into playing it initially. Within a very short amount of time, Tyler had surpassed Neal’s skill and had moved on to “pwning n00bs” through Xbox Live. He stated that if he could, he’d play video games 40 – 50 hours a week (the same amount of time as a full time job), but has unfortunately not had a lot of time to play lately due to his studies.

Next, we talked about official tournaments of the MLG. Although Tyler had never competed in an MLG tournament, he keeps up with the tournaments via internet videos, particularly Justin.tv. We asked him who he thought were the best Halo players in the world, and he mentioned RoyBorg and IGotYourPistola (who are both on the same team) and he also talked about Ninja, who’s around the top 25, so not as high as RoyBorg and IGotYourPistola, but still gets a lot of mention on Justin.tv. He said tournaments are usually played in a round-robin style, developing into a 16-team bracket (teams usually consisting of four players and a coach), where winners advance towards the finals while losers continue in “losers brackets” to determine their placing. Depending on the size, importance, and buy-in fee of the event, the winning team could get somewhere around $125,000, and even sponsorships.

While our meeting with Tyler was very short, Neal, Andy, Chandler and I feel as though we have gained some very useful information for our study and are excited to continue. Future steps include checking out Justin.tv to see some of the pros in action and, to get a little more interaction with this group as a whole, seeking out and attending major gaming competitions, starting with a local Gears of War 2 tournament coming up this Saturday.

More to come.