I was thinking recently about how interesting it is to be actively witnessing the formation and establishment of the rise of professional competitive gaming. Obviously having been around since like the 1960s long before I, or anyone else in my generation or younger were even born, competitive entities like MLB, NFL, NBA and even the NHL have been around for decades, and had the vast majority of their rules and infrastructure already build, established and requiring no more than occasional tweaks and union-related agreements to operate smoothly on a seasonal basis.
On account of that, I’m often fascinated by the way the ever-growing professional League of Legends scene as well as other professionally played video games operate in, by comparison, some very fast, loose and always changing rules and structure. I get that they’re the new kids on the block in professional competition, but it would be kind of nice to not have to re-read the rules and conditions of the league every single season. In LoL alone, the format has switched from best-of-ones, to best-of-threes, and then there’s all these weird convoluted tiers when it comes to playoff seeding, and they’ve basically invalidated the entire first half of a season, by making the first half winner not a lock for Worlds, while the winner of the second half is an automatic #1 seed, which makes absolutely no fucking sense to me at all.
The global professional League scene is just now at the tail end of just their seventh year, but it’s safe to say that aside from the map they play on, it’s entirely a different game now than in which it started when Europe were kings and Korea and China hadn’t even entered the playing field.