The thing about computer games that I think will put off most people is that they exist in a custom reality.

In regular sports people can rely on their intuition to know what can and can't happen, to some degree. No football player is going to start flashing yellow while taking off down the field. A lot of video games are packed to the brim with custom physics and mechanics. No solid intuition, you really just have to learn them.

CS benefits from more or less functioning exactly how even a 75 year old lady would expect it to. A sniper is a sniper. A pistol a pistol. An assault rifle is an assault rifle. Bullets kill quick, and bombs go boom.

I think the biggest argument against the idea of CS becoming a household sport like football is the fact that, today, nobody bothers to watch competitive paintball. The fact that it's a simulation means it can do things you can't do in real life, sure, but it also means that it's harder to care about what's actually happening. In a real sport, you watch the players. In an esport, you watch avatars. People don't empathize with avatars nearly as much as they do with flesh-and-blood humans, at least not today.

What? CSGO is the most watched esport in the world. Paintball analogy, what?

"Do you feel like this applies to American Football?"

Honestly, yes. Protestations that it's too difficult to understand seems to me to stem from people who literally want the game explained in three seconds or less.

The core is simple. Team have ball. Team want move ball that way for points. Other team want stop them. Work out the legal ways for them to score points and move ball around as you go. The super detailed lacunae of what penalties are for what exist in all sports, it just isn't generally noticed. The FIFA rules for soccer run 144 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/... Not a huge book, probably not huge pages, but a great deal more detailed than you'd try to "explain" to someone just learning what soccer is.

Most of the meta around passing plays versus running plays can be explained easily.

It really isn't that complicated.

To the extent that it is, all the sports are. At the top end everything gets complicated, hence, Moneyball and that sort of thing. Basketball is a simple sport of putting the ball in the hoop while dribbling it, but at the top end you start talking about matchups between this guy and that guy and how being 3% better at three-point shots affects this team's matchups against that team... but that's not something you have to care about to watch it, any more than you have to care about what the name of every position is in every sport initially.

The difference lies in the fact that a really popular spectator sport mostly comes from a game people have already played at some point or could naturally conceive of(e.g. auto racing as an extension of driving, MMA as an extension of street brawls), and therefore don't need explanations for. Although Counter-Strike has a huge legacy among video games, it hasn't entered the school curriculum like baseball/basketball/football AFAIK, and it's only loosely related to a kind of live combat scenario that few people witness in person.

There's a step-function there where if a major educational institution started pushing a video game, it'd have the awareness to be a sport. But they don't, so the path forward is tied to the whims of the market.

It may work out that the 20th century pro sports model is just not going to be part of this. That model came from an era combining fast travel, broadcast media, and a small number of large sponsors. At first it was teams who travelled by rail and had their games casted over radio. Later, jet planes and TV. But nowadays, with the streaming model, it's diffused to being able to watch live speedrun attempts, an activity which can resemble watching paint dry at times, but which does bring in some income within a long-tail niche audience.

Esport is on the curriculum in some schools in Denmark. Mainly continuation schools (efterskoler) or certain high schools. I guess how it turns out is going to be an interesting experiment.

But you could say the same for most video games: Here is the object. Team shoots their way through until they accomplish the object. The rest is just arcane knowledge of experts.

For newer class-based games like Overwatch, the classes behave so differently and exuberantly that people are going to want to know what ever new flashy effect means. In football, the "classes" blend together and share a common goal. The difference between the Offensive Guard and Offensive Tackle are minuscule to the layperson. However the difference between Reinhardt and Winston are huge, both in terms of playstyle and presentation. Compound this with games adding new classes sometimes as frequently as every three months. That's hard to keep up for the casual viewer.

However you are correct that the objectives in games are usually simple. Push this thing from here to there. Don't let enemy stand here alone. Shoot enemy until no enemy.

I disagree here. I've watched professional sports a fair bit in my life, and I've watched eSports (and played their respective games) a bunch, and from my experience eSports are far more difficult to pick up.

To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.

> In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex

I think that is a key point. In most sports the arenas are quite simple. Most ball sports have some rectangle and you can judge intuitively whether a team is likely in a better position than another. And even in marathon or triathlon or such the course itself may be complex, but you can reduce it to "X meters till finish line" and "athlete A is in front of B" to get a good enough understanding on the situation.

Of course all sports allow for some amount of tactics, when to play a bit more passive, when to attack, ... but you don't need those for some basic experience while watching.

In eSports the arena is complex and hard to preceive, the physics aren't exact as we all know them, the virtual equipment (weapons, boosters, ...) are unknowns.

And then eSports typically are quick, which makes learning hard.

You could trivialize any sport/game down into 3 simple sentences. The problem is that in American football, there really is only 2 type of players that have different rules: QB, and non-QB. Maybe kicker. Same with soccer too, goalie and non-goalie.

In League, there's (at the time of this writing) 140 players (champs) that each have different rules and capabilities assigned to them, because they have different abilities and are used differently strategically. Top/mid/bottom/jungle really doesn't matter much more than player placements like tight-end, offensive tackle, howver.

Counter-Strike has 1 character type, 2 teams, and is so simple to explain. I can explain counter-strike to my mom in one sentence. The places where one should get anxious or excited are immediately obvious to a layperson. Explaining the goal of league is easy, however I'd struggle to explain enough of league to my mom so that she can understand why she should be excited when one specific champ is getting fed, or why the enemy team should be careful about clustering, because of a unique situation in this one specific match that is not always going applicable to a different match.

I'd probably be done explaining a handful of characters by the time the match is over, and she'd forget within 10 minutes. I know this because I've been trying to explain Pokemon since the 90s. She 100% understands football and baseball, however.

"But you could say the same for most video games:"

For games that involve shooting at people, I'd agree. A particular first-person perspective may be difficult to follow but the core is simple and you can pick up the pieces as you go. Quake deathmatches have a lot of interesting arcana to dig into if you want to play at top level, but you can just watch one without any particular skill. From there you can incrementally pick up that shooting someone before the player even saw them is impressive, or that identifying, acquiring, and plinking them with a rail gun in <500ms is pretty impressive. The speed of these things might be inaccessible, but it's not the rule set that is.

Most things have a novice-level entry ramp. My sons seemed to pick up the basics of American Football in about 5 minutes when they were 8. It really isn't that hard. They didn't encounter their first "safety" until quite a while later, for instance, but their lack of knowledge of what a safety is didn't bother them. I've been watching for a lot longer and still couldn't simply whip off the names of all the positions or anything myself.

Not all esports have that, though. I can say from personal experience though that DOTA is impenetrable if you don't know what's going on. I've been at a local restaurant that was playing some matches for whatever reason. I know about video games in general but know nothing about DOTA. I suppose you could say I understood what it was I didn't understand, but I had no idea who was winning, what a good play was, etc.

I mean, at least with real life sports there are no hacky obtuse contrivances because, it's real life, not a videogame with a meta that includes knowledge of engine exploits or intimate knowledge of map geometry. Someone pixel-aligning themselves to throw a blind smoke that bounces off of invisible above-the-map geometry to eliminate a sightline or someone blind firing though a wall-bang because they've counted the seconds since round start and judge someone might be there is obtuse to anyone onlooking via a stream. In football, or golf, or soccer, all the elements of play can be observed all at once without multiple angles needed to explain what's happening.

American football to me sounds very messy and extremely overly complicated? Like sometimes they throw, sometimes they kick, there is some goal but not goal thing. And stopping all the time? Like why not immediately get up and start running away? Or just dripple the ball all the way across the field? What is the point anyway?

Both teams work within the same constraints with the goal of beating the other. Same as any other sport.

They stop after a play because that’s part of the rules of the game.

You could probably find a video or article and understand all this in a few minutes. You have four attempts (downs) to move the ball 10 yards or you lose possession. Nearly everything else makes sense with that context.

Football is dead simple, even simpler than CS: One team wants to go one way with the ball, the other wants to stop them, drive them back or, ideally, get the ball away from them and go the other way. They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries.

There are a lot of fiddly details in offsides rules, incomplete passes, extra points, etc. but they aren't necessary to understand and enjoy watching a game.

You can even simplify even more. "They have to cross the line" instead of discussing 10 yards. And as humans have a rough understanding of the world we are in, even somebody with no prior knowledge of football can understand how complicated it can be to catch the ball. Input to eSports, which buttons there were to press at which time and how the game's physics model would react isn't as intuitive.

> They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries.

Born and raised in America, I never knew this. First time I've seen it explained this way.

To my mind, Football is overly complicated, with crap tons of breaks, weird jargon, and a countdown clock that apparently means nothing.

The difference with American Football is although there have been subtle changes in the rules, it has been mostly the same for over 50 years. With esports (like in the case of Overwatch) they do not have that lifespan. So unless you are someone who is currently playing that game, you don't know how it works really. And if you were someone once playing that game 5 years ago, as in the case of Overwatch 1, they literally shut it off and it can't be played anymore.

The other difference is that American culture lives and breathes football, right from pee-wee to middle and high school, to the state college team level.

It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.

Most commenters here also dont realize that American football is completely irrelevant outside of USA.

Most other countries dont know the sport, apart from maybe Commonwealth who play rugby at schools.

>Do you feel like this applies to American Football?

As someone that grew up in the US and watching it with family, no, it's not the same. What is the same is watching Cricket. It probably has an even larger viewing audience than American Football in the US. As someone that has grown up with it, and they will start spewing rules at you that might as well be spoken in Klingon for the sense they make, but are perfectly understood by those that grew up with it. To be fair, reversing the conversation for me to explain rules to them is met with looks like I have 2 heads.

Video games are similar. I grew up in the "golden age" of home console games starting with Atari 2600, NES, and through today. However, I still spent time doing other things other than games. So to me, sitting around watching other people play video games is a non-starter. Maybe if I was at a bar and it was on the screen, but usually I just find a different screen. For people that are younger that don't have memories of playing outside and only know "playing" involving a computer device of some sort, then this seems perfectly reasonable that's what they'd rather watch.

just curious, how old are you that you think current youth have no memories of playing outside? what an amusing and out of touch statement, have you been outside in the past decade? Maybe not in a populated area because I see kids playing outside basically everyday. I also don't believe that you've never watched someone play a game, you didn't have siblings or friends growing up?

American football in 20 seconds: You have 4 opportunities to advance the ball a cumulative 10 yards, upon doing so, your 4 opportunities reset. Advance past the goal line = 6 points + opportunity for 1 additional. Fail to move 10 yards? Ball possession transfers to opponent. If it's 4th down (final opportunity) you can hedge -- punt the ball (transfer possession, but about 40 yards further away) or attempt a field goal (place kick through yellow uprights), which is worth 3 points.

Obviously there are nuances but that's 90% of it right there, in a lot less than 10 minutes.

Well, yes ?

Try to get to the end zone, if you do you score 6 points. You have 4 attempts to move forward 10 yards, if you don't, the ball goes to the other team. If you have more points, you win.

That's it, that's all you need to know to watch it and enjoy it. Sure, there's more ways of scoring and the details of each position, the routes they are running and play-calling in general is interesting, but it's not needed to just watch the game.

Ok but you can say the same about Counterstrike. The object is to diffuse the bomb. You shoot your way through the enemy until the bomb is diffused. The rest is just details for experts.

> The object is to diffuse the bomb

I assume in this scenario the terrorist team is trying to plant and detonate the bomb, thereby diffusing its (perhaps damaging, poisonous, or radioactive) components over a wide area, while the counter-terrorist team is trying to defuse the bomb and prevent it from exploding in the first place.

Which is why OP said CS is the game most likely to become popular. It's the simplest/most realistic esport.

Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.

As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it.

Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.

The difference: I have an intuitive understanding how hard it is to catch a football if a bunch of people runs towards me. Even if I never touched a football in my life. I have no intuition on what the eSports player can and can not do with their controls and the physics engine.

Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that.

And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"

Cricket would be an alternative example that most Americans don't already understand

American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.

American Football watchers grow up watching American Football.

Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.