Deliverable #1: Prior Assessments and First Results

Pro-Gamers group
Neal Roessler
Zach Casull
Chandler Cell


Prior Perception  

            My group decided to study the world of professional gaming instead of a single group of people. Expanding to this larger scale allows for a more comprehensive glimpse into a lifestyle and does not limit us to a specific set of people. In this paper I will describe my expectations, perceptions, and future plans regarding this field.

            My initial expectation of what I will see is a stereotypically geeky culture that is predominately male and focused on what they do. These people will probably tend to be fairly private individuals that have been doing this kind of thing for years probably on the same game. I expect my interactions with them to be minimal as I do not foresee long, drawn out responses to questions or prolonged conversations occurring.

            Integration into this group may prove to be fairly difficult as I, or anyone else in the group, is anywhere near as skilled, or even familiar with, most of the games we will see. We will have to take the position of the audience for a majority of the study and will probably have only 1 or 2 people able to participate to any competitive degree in any of the events we plan to attend. We plan on attending gaming competitions and following some people that we have connections to during the study.

            I hope that I, and the group, will gain some meaningful insight into this broad area and be able to contribute during the project.

Initial Results

            The first interaction we had with professional gaming consisted of an informal meeting with one of our connections that is a semi-professional. We only met with this one person, Tyler, so as to give us an entry point into this field.

            Our first meeting consisted of a meeting with Tyler at his residence on Tuesday, introducing ourselves and what we would like to do, and a small interview with Tyler consisting of some broad questions we had about the area and his personal experience as well. On first arrival, his apartment appeared how I expected it to be. Minimal, kind of messy, and what little furniture he did have related to his technology in some way (TV stand, consoles, etc.). We proceeded to introduce ourselves and describe the project in a general sense as not to influence anything Tyler would do or say later. Through questions we learned that about the top 1% of gamers in a particular game can be considered professional which usually equates to around 100+ players. An interesting made by Tyler was that at a certain point, a single gamer cannot get any better and they must begin working with a team to become truly professional which is why competitions usually consist of only team contests. In addition to being on teams, professional gamers must have a coach for their teams to act as an anchor and keep the team on task and off each other’s backs.

            Overall, we gained a lot of insight from Tyler and hope to continue our study with him and others in the future. We are currently working on plans to attend as many professional gaming events as we can find and maybe even find one that Tyler can enter in.