So, I might have made the most noobish mistake when it comes to time spent on writing for ESFI/this blog: spending my time on too many ideas at once. I figured that each idea might still take a little time to develop and properly work into a coherent though, so I figured I’d at least write a little status update on what I’m thinking about or working on every so often.
DotA2, DotA-clones, MMORPGs and esports. Granted most folks are latching on to the new term ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ instead of calling them what they are, I wonder what the influence is of a game like League of Legends growing by leaps and bounds over something like World of Warcrafts’ recently marked decline of subscribers. DotA and like titles seem to be the perfect match amongst micro-intensive players looking to focus solely on a uniform goal instead of an ever-changing meta game, while World of Warcraft and MMORPGs have an ever-changing meta game based more along having new content that players crave and (quite frankly) pay for. I’m no expert about MMORPGs, so I’m polling some big community contributors to help me find a solid base of knowledge about the whole genre and its relation to the esports movement.
It’s esports. Not eSports. There’s an ongoing gag in the ESFI chatroom and amongst certain individuals on Twitter where when they refer to esports in another written manner, I would troll them with a simple message correcting them. I think that dropping the capital letter is a pretty important step to take, but it’ll probably take the whole community to get there. When I saw someone use the word with the capital S used, I wondered if it was a brand like Major League Gaming—which it isn’t. Maybe I’m a little slow when it comes to finding distinctions like this, but I think the community should begin a public discussion about this.
iPad/PC deliberation. I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I have to say, I’m really close to springing for an iPad sometime soon, but I always back down from picking one up because of the fact that… well, I already have an iPhone. I dunno if I could justify adding an iPad to my inventory when I have access to a pretty speedy MacBook Pro as well as my personal MacBook. I want to start looking at getting a PC for home so I can do things like play the last three years’ games the way they were meant to be played or perhaps stream something that doesnt suck over Justin.TV.
Alright, I’ll start dropping the cap S. I don’t think it was ever a reason for it being there but it just snuck into our vocabulary. All stylized words I can think of are indeed brands; mIRC, SHOUTcast, WinRAR, foobar2000 etc.
Those are all brands, but SHOUTcasting/shoutcasting is in the same situation because producers no longer use Winamp to broadcast their live games over—there are other services, thus shoutcasting is a generalized term now and the brand is pretty far-fetched from the act of simply streaming audio.
I know, I was being serious.