How The FGC Misinterprets Traditional Sports
Now I’ve already written at length about how I think eSports stands to learn a lot from more traditional sports and their followings. Specifically wrestling (Even if wrestling is pre-determined, read this) but also your footballs, baseballs, basketballs, what have you.
Despite being a very similar competitive self improvement-driven culture, both players and fans of eSports and traditional sports come from very different walks of life and within that, you find a weird sorta-sour grapes mentality coming from the eSports end. They’re both fascinated and envious with how big of a following stuff like the NFL gets yet act incredulous as to how it could be that appealing and draw that much revenue to begin with. This community sees itself with similar mindsets doing similar things in a similar context yet can’t come to terms with why the other’s a rousing success and they stay afloat through passion alone.
Just recently, stumbled upon a thread by FireThePyro whom I deeply respect who said they didn’t “get” the fervor behind last year’s Mariners season. For context, here’s the entire quote.
“After witnessing baseball feuds i can say that I do not get it. In FGs people rib on YOU for consistently garbage decisions YOU made that led to YOUR loss. If the Mariners batter got absolutely mixed for the final out in the playoffs, am i supposed to get mad when its brought up? I think the disconnect between instigator and actor w/ major sports teams just makes it feel so stupid. If anything that’s what i’m bothered about. You are a spectator, you’re trying to dunk on me with someone else’s shot. get real”
Now before I go any further, this is not an indictment of FireThePyro as a person. He’s been nothing short of an upstanding individual in my experience with him. He gave me patience when I didn’t deserve it at my absolute worst in this community (Look, I was a fucking asshole. If the roles were reversed, I would’ve banned me on the spot and that’s an indictment of what I’d be as a leader, not of him). He’s carpooled me on a moment’s notice. He’s intelligent, can argue for what he believes in and isn’t afraid to say it like he means it. He produces great content on a regular basis with great editing and interesting topics that’ll both draw more casual players into competitive play while also providing all-new info for seasoned players. Shit, I watch his stuff while working out and I haven’t played competitively for the better half of a decade. I’ve donated to his Ko-fi and I’m at the point both age-wise and in distance from the community that I don’t waste a red penny on anybody who doesn’t deserve it, I’ve done plenty of penny-wasting on it as is. Far as I’ve seen, he’s a good man which sets him apart from a solid 97% of the community I’ve interacted with. I don’t want this to be interpreted as a hit piece in any way and I firmly tell anybody reading this not to mock him for it.
With all the lavish praise aside however, I’ve seen this wrong idea passed around like a note inbetween a column of desks in some roughhousing classroom that just discovered that a classmate is from Mars only now the note has been snatched away by the overseeing privy teacher….only for the teacher to believe it too. Intelligent people, tenured people in a sports field that want the scene to grow and prosper can’t seem to get why something that’s nearly identical to them in all but medium is succeeding. If nobody else is going to lay out why traditional sports works/why the FGC isn’t working to that level, I guess its my burden to bear.
The Miracle
The miracle of pro sports is that its something everybody has at the very least a rudimentary knowledge of yet hardly anybody will actually play it. Sure, you may play school sports, you may play some imitation baseball or basketball with friends but the odds of you yourself going pro in your sport of choice are slim to none. Everybody will relate to art at one point or another yet sports has managed to turn something that’s completely out of reach of the vast majority of people and turn it into something captivating.
So with that established, how the fuck did we get 125 million people watching the Super Bowl with nearly 71,000 packed in attendance? Many of those people never so much as sniffed the potential of the NFL Draft if they even played football to begin with. Its simply not statistically possible and by all accounts, it shouldn’t be possible in practice.
What eSports guys fail to understand time after time is that it truly isn’t about the game itself but rather the regional pride, festivities, traditions, familial loyalty, etc that ties it all together. When you actually talk with avid sports fans and go to these parties, you’ll find that the game and its technicalities are merely a backdrop for everything else. The whole viewing experience doesn’t boil down to what myriad of defense options they should go for, it boils down to four distinct states. We’re Ahead/We’re Close To Scoring/They’re Close To Scoring/They’re Ahead. That’s really all there is to know to have a good time, all the tension, the excitement, the downfalls, it all goes down that time-capsuled funnel measured in moments.
It could be viewed in the same light as a simple Hero’s Journey plot, a collision of wills, investment and simple region versus region feuds. The Mariners are a self-explanatory underdog story in that point in time, they haven’t gotten this close to the World Series in over 20 years, they’ve never made the World Series. Who couldn’t get invested in that? A whole generation hasn’t sniffed success and now they’re on the verge of it. Its as simple as that. That’s what sells tickets, that’s what garners bandwagoners, that’s what turns spectators into loyal fans.
There’s a reason why even statistically awful teams have tens of thousands of diehard fans that’ll watch on a routine for decades on end. They long for the glory days and keep riding hoping to see them again, it brings them together with their friends or neighbors for parties and good times, its something they get to pass onto their children as they grew fond of it when they were kids. In spite of it being a wholly different societal class, the simplicity of investment and the crowd spirit it brings, its relatable and enjoyable through all the ups and downs.
Personal Connections
So with all that said as to why traditional sports works, lets circle back to FireThePyro’s quote, specifically “If anything that’s what i’m bothered about. You are a spectator, you’re trying to dunk on me with someone else’s shot. get real”.
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My retort is simple. Have you never been invested in a film’s story to the point of tears? Have you never felt that euphoric sense of achievement when you beat a hard game? Have you never been disappointed to see one of your favorite Smash players fall short in bracket? Like it or not, sports is a living form of art and takes just as much investment be it through time, emotions, finances, etc as any other form of it. It’d be unreasonable to expect anybody to not be invested after spending hours a week watching it every season for years if not decades alongside their family and best friends. At a certain point, it truly is more than a game. It is a way for people to connect, it is a fantasy to strive for. Where have I heard this before?
I’ve already talked about the impersonal personal connections between sports and spectator, let’s dial it back to a Smash tournament experience. Statistically speaking, you’re more likely to beat Acola than you are to get drafted into the NFL. Oldheads may even remember the “MKLeo Number” site (TL;DR How many tournament wins you are from somebody who beat MKLeo. You beat Y guy who beat Z guy who beat MKLeo), my personal number is 3 and that’s coming from me. I’m nobody! I had a brief semi-successful run in the pandemic WiFi era and that’s pretty much all she wrote for me. I’m more known for bitching about the game than I am playing it. Yet I’m within statistical likelihood of beating MKLeo seeing as how I beat somebody who beat another top player who beat him. Now, you can safely bet your own and your mother’s kidneys against me if we were to ever go at it but the point stands that I don’t think somebody who frequently played in highschool basketball yet never made the NBA could say that they could go toe-to-toe with Kobe Bryant.
This all circles back to my original point about how traditional sports carries a largely spectator audience, people who have either never played it or played it casually. The same cannot be said for Smash or any other fighting game, just about everybody who goes to a major is there to enter the bracket. There’s no real spectator base or team/player fanbase, the people are there to compete.
Ironically, this leads to Smash tournaments feeling even more isolating than a sports event. The vast majority of people who attend a major tournament already accept they don’t stand any reasonable chance of winning. That’s dissociative by virtue, the vast majority of your players play as extras to the larger competition and thus aren’t nearly as engaged physically, emotionally or monetarily as they could be. I’d go so far as to say that the only things that differentiate a major from their card shop weekly is that they get to lose more often, have a longer carpool and pay for an overpriced hotel room for the privilege of the former two. In that exchange, the venue makes the money, the scene stays afloat through a few tournament organizers who treat this as a weekend hobby/whales and barely break even on it. My point is that if you can convince hundreds of people to get days off from work, carpool or fly out, get a hotel room and sit around for a weekend when they’ll almost certainly be defeated by the first day, you can certainly give them more for their money while at the same time making more for yourself.
When you put this all into effect, it becomes apparent that the main driver of any individual’s participation in the FGC is through their enjoyment/success with the game, something that’s both fragile and fleeting with age and changing interests. All it takes is one bad sequel for players to dump a series for a generation, all it takes is one solid job opportunity for a player to lose interest in the game. Even if their interest was always piqued, age will eventually catch up with their ability to play competitively. Meanwhile, win or lose, rain or shine, there’s a core fanbase to every mainstream sports team that keeps them afloat. There’s no Never Miss a Super Bowl Club in FGC spectating.
Possible Solutions
So how do we change that? How do we build the same loyalty traditional sports has here? Let’s go beyond what I’ve already written about building organic narratives via wrestling tropes. The one mindset I really want to criticize is one I’ve seen come up in a lot of organizers, they seem to have this mentality of using how an individual should approach climbing a competitive mountain (Super rigid rulesets, slow to deviate if controversy/lowering viewership arises, flying out oodles of top players for the highest caliber competitive experience even if there’s no feasible way to turn a profit on it) and conflating it with how to run a community let alone a sports enterprise. Look at the downfall of Luminosity Gaming, signed every top player in the book to have theoretically the highest ranked team in Smash Ultimate’s history, had 0 idea how to monetize all the blank checks they just wrote, barely do toy reviewer YouTube numbers at best and then go belly up in a couple years. While I’m here, Alex from LG, I bet you $100 your org would go under in 2 years at the time I wrote my comment, you ghosted me in your Twitter DMs about it. Where’s my winnings? Shit, if I was wrong, I would’ve gladly tucked my tail between my legs and paid my dues.
Point is that LG is what happens when you take that statistics/self-improvement stuff to the highest extreme. There’s no community-building process, there’s no monetization involved, its just “What guy can we chuck a barrel of money at to get a bunch of Twitter likes this week?”. No long-term successful sports organization is run like that and when it comes to turning a struggling scene into something that’ll be profitable, as crazy as it sounds, we need to put fantasy fulfillment and the game itself in the backseat. We’re a community but we’re also an organization and we can’t really support and uplift one another if we’re all broke or alienated from the top experience.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you tip the competitive scales in favor of the 0–2ers to appease the majority. Just about every attempt at that has demonstrably failed simply because the top players will adapt to and optimize that environment meanwhile the 0–2ers lest they improve their fundamental gameplay will not. All it does is create an artificial ceiling for the gameplay’s depth while leaving its intended beneficiaries no better off. Now, viewer-oriented game changes aren’t uncommon in sports (You can look at the MLB pitch clock which limits how long a pitcher can stand before throwing the ball to speed up games, implemented in 2023 along with a whole myriad of NBA changes) and I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen plenty stare at their phones, bullshit among eachother or just straight up walk off/close the tab on Sonic/G&W sets and the like that are bound to be 20+ minutes of nothing happening.
Surely we can find a way to redirect that investment back into the game? Again, when you lose people’s interest in the game, you’re losing potential community members and dollars. It may not happen overnight but when your community lives and dies on game interest, apathy is downright corrosive overtime. As for how Smash as a game should be tweaked to get over that hump, that’s way out of my element that I’d leave to experts like FTP. I’m an old fart that has observed communities/structures over time, I’m by no means an expert on competitive Smash.
Conclusion
We find ourselves and the community at large with an inability to understand how sports operate. It’s more than a game, its a parasocial event with your family, your neighbors, your local bar, your region. Successful sports leagues mobilize their fans to be fans of more than the game itself and thinking that we can emulate that by simply raising the bar on how we help people learn the game is plainly ridiculous. There simply cannot be a nation of Acolas in the same way there’s an acceptance in say the football fanbase that they won’t be Peyton Manning. Even if there could, that doesn’t guarantee a fan following if there’s nothing to cater to them.
This is not by any stretch a doom and gloom post either. Smash absolutely can and should be a massive deal in eSports. Its accessible, hugely recognizable property and its digestible to a mainstream audience. The problem is frankly poor leadership that doesn’t understand why traditional sports are a success to begin, let alone how to adapt that formula to eSports circumstances (Which League and the like have done so to an arena impact). You simply cannot rebel against traditional sports and the reasons why they’re successful and then wonder why you’re not a success. You’re doing the same thing but with monitors.
I implore y’all, pay more attention to whichever sport your region is good at and learn from it. Its really not rocket science and that’s precisely why it works. The game is the least important thing to spectators, sponsors and frankly anybody not destined to play at the elite level. You either grow with the times or die with them and keeping Smash as a treehouse is simply limiting its massive potential.
