I’m about to
gush over a pro gaming community. 3
years ago, if you’d told me that I would be playing a game that I’m enthralled
with, and I would find that game by watching a professional level version of
the game, I’d have face palmed you and walked away. Voyboy and Team Dignitas had just destroyed
the integrity of the WCG Grand Final for League of Legends and done so with impunity beyond
outrage from the LoL community at large (http://tinyurl.com/5wt4pma).
To me, that event put “esports” at the same level as professional
wrestling. If we can’t trust the
results, we might as well pre-determine the results and make the entertainment
value about the journey to those results.
It turns out, I would be dead wrong, not because the big esports
organizations have learned from real sports, but because a small game that was
never designed to be a sport, a passionate community, and great casters made me
care about at least one professional video game community.
The game is
The Binding of Isaac. The Binding of
Isaac is equal parts Legend of Zelda dungeon running and Robotron 2084 arcadey
goodness. The player plays as
Isaac. Isaac is about to be murdered by
his mother on orders from “God”, and what follows is a bunch of levels lifted from
Isaac’s anxiety fueled visions. It is a
bullet hell masterpiece; I’d been looking for something like this for years to
fill a chasm in my video game library.
Most remarkable of all is that I’d never know about The Binding of Isaac
if it weren't for BoILeR and Balls of Steel.
How I got to
BoILeR is rather roundabout. A twitch
streamer named Crumps (http://www.twitch.tv/crumps2)
was streaming Chrono Trigger, and I’d been playing the DS version of the game,
so I thought I’d stop in and watch.
After that, I watched a MLB ’14 stream; subsequently, I gave him a
follow. Not long after, I received a
twitch message that Crumps has gone online with something called BoILeR. My curiosity peaked, I went to the channel to
see what BoILeR was.
BoILeR stands
for Binding of Isaac League Racing. The
5 o’clock news version of BoILeR is this: 2 people play The Binding of Isaac
under race conditions with a distinct rule set.
The first player to complete the game gets a “win”, and matches are best
of 3 wins.
Crumps is your
BoILeR master of ceremonies and the only play-by-play guy. You can tell a couple of things from watching
Crumps call a BoILeR match. First, you
can tell immediately that Crumps is a top level Binding of Isaac player. There are no 20 minute rambling monologues
describing every conceivable build that can complete the game (looking at you,
Day9). Crumps identifies what has
happened, what the effect on the player is, and what the effect on the game is
with knowledge that only an expert player would have. That said, the presentation of the match is
not so filled with esoteric jargon that the newbie is caught having to play
catch up to understand what is going on.
Second, the informative yet understandable style of the play-by-play
indicates that Crumps has watched a professional sporting event, noted why the
good sports broadcasters are so effective, and applied those lessons to his
broadcasts of BoILeR. Since it is apparently verboten for an esports caster to
be a good sports broadcaster, I implore all broadcasters involved in esports
regardless of experience to watch a BoILeR and take copious notes. You’ll be better for it; subsequently, your
product will be better, and esports in the general sense can stand on its own
merits vice having to rely on entitlement, netdecking, and gamers’ collective
lack of self-esteem as the source of esports’ popularity.
Balls of
Steel (http://www.twitch.tv/bostv) is
a second Binding of Isaac racing esport.
The basic concept of BoS is the same as BoILeR. 2 people play The Binding of Isaac under race
conditions with rules that are slightly different than BoILeR. Finishing the game constitutes a “win”, and
matches are a best of 3. Play-by-play is
done by Cobalt Streak and Richard_Hammer.
Hammer holds The Binding of Isaac 7 character speed run world record, and
Cobalt Streak had a long undefeated streak in BoILeR and had a deathless streak
of over 300 kills. There is plenty of
knowledge here for Binding of Isaac players of all experience levels. The style of the play-by-play for a BoS is
more raw than it is for a BoILeR, but that is to be expected given there are
twice as many commentators in a BoS than a BoILeR, Crumps is a sports fan and
trained as an audio engineer, and Cobalt Streak and Hammer are trying to build
a brand while commentating on races.
It might
sound inconsistent for me to give BoS a relative pass on the play-by-play style
after being uber critical of esports casters in the past and present. Remember, in all things in gaming, we grade
on a curve. The Online CCG, or RTS built
by a multi-billion dollar enterprise should be better designed when compared to
a flash game with a development team of less than 10. The MOBA designed specifically to be a spectacle
of esports should be better designed than a game that had no ambitions of being
an esport. The esports broadcasts with
huge production budgets and dedicated arenas should be more professionally
produced than 2 independent esports casts with no budget to speak of beyond
what’s in the casters’ pockets.
It’s deeply
ironic to me to say that The Binding of Isaac is better designed than LoL,
DotA2, Starcraft 2 and Hearthstone as both game and esport. Any MOBA played at
a professional level should be contested under All Random conditions; likewise,
RTS games at a professional level should always be contested as a Random v
Random. Given a professional environment
of “AR” games, the well-designed esport MOBA would need to be designed such
that any character could fit any ‘role’ with inherent abilities and item builds
separating tank from damage dealer from crowd controller. This would induce professional level players
to know as much of the game as possible.
Similarly, an RTS contested as a Random v Random forces the same
knowledge base out of players. There
might be some concerns about short term luck swinging a match. To that, I say this: If a best of 3, 5, or 7
isn’t enough games to smooth out deviations based on short term “luck”, then
the format of esports is insufficient to determine who the best player or team
is at a given game. The Binding of Isaac
is item based, and items are procedurally generated. That certainly means that it is possible for
short term luck to swing an individual game; however, race conditions force
decisions on players that can and do snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory. Death in The Binding of Isaac
means starting over at the beginning, which means any player is only a couple
bad rooms on the last level away from going from way ahead to far behind.
This, in
turn, results in Binding of Isaac races being compelling from beginning to
end. It is true that it can be slightly
boring to watch both racers endlessly resetting their game until they get a
good starting item in a BoI race, but is the first 10 minutes of a LoL or SC2
match any more compelling? Is the 5 v 5
tickle fight in the mid in a LoL match more interesting than a BoI racer with a
dwindling life pool rushing to the final boss?
Similarly,
the production values of BoILeR and BoS are better in a relative sense than the
esports broadcasts for LoL, DotA2, SC2, and Hearthstone. Casters working for Valve, Blizzard, Riot or
MLG shouldn’t need to go into business for themselves to advertise their own
personal brands, since the “sport” is vastly more important than the people
broadcasting that sport. The Binding of
Isaac, on the other hand, doesn’t have MLG, Riot, Valve, or Blizzard behind it,
and the casters are donating their time away from their individual streams in
order to provide commentary on BoI races.
In such a situation, it is perfectly acceptable for casters to advertise
their personal streams in an attempt to get more personal revenue that they can
reinvest in BoI racing.
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