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Webtelevision, Webseries and Webcasting

Case studies in the organization and distribution of television- style content produced online

Dee Majek

Filmvetenskapliga Institutionen / Department of Cinema Studies Examensarbete 15 hp / Masters of One Year Thesis 15 credits Filmvetenskap / Cinema Studies Magisterskurs (15-30 hp) / Masters of One Year course (15-30 credits) Vårterminen / Spring term 2012 Handledare / Supervisor: Maaret Koskinen Webtelevision, Webseries, and Webcasting

Case studies in the organization and distribution of television-style content produced online

Dee Majek

Abstract

This thesis outlines the structure and functionality of a selection of webseries, webshows, and casting examples, in order to add to the discourse on online . Webtelevision, or Web TV production, distribution, and financing systems will be detailed in the case studies made; and industry actors such as entrepreneurs, independents, corporations and conglomerates will be discussed and identified. Who are the producers, the advertisers, the distribution platforms, the sponsors, the rights holders, and how do they interact? In exploring the structure of some examples of Web TV, I wish to debunk the online-amateur association as an inaccurate or insufficient description which permeates much prior academic study on online video. Webshow content, business strategies, legal and copyright issues, as well as fan culture aspects will also be investigated; and in regards to eSports, the question of televised as opposed to streamcast tournaments will be examined.

Keywords Web TV, webseries, webshows, eSports, webcasting, webtelevision, livestream, , YouTube, , , Angry Nerd, Cinemassacre, Day9, .tv, Starcraft, liveness Contents

Introduction...... 2

But is it TV?: Defining Webtelevision...... 3

Online Channels and Hosting Service Migrations: Bootstrap Businesses, Corporate Strategies, and Copyright Witch-hunts...... 5

From YouTube to Blip (and back again)...... 6

That Guy With The Glasses and Channel Awesome...... 9

Cinemassacre and the ...... 12 eSports: Casting and Casters...... 17

Examples of eSports Casting: Past and Present...... 18

Sean ”Day[9]” Plott and The Day9 Daily...... 24

Televised or Online Casting? ...... 27

Conclusions...... 32

References...... 34

1 Introduction

"Since the Web went mainstream around 1995, people have made the same mistaken assumption with each mutation of the medium: that amateurs would finally triumph over professionals, kicking those bigwigs of the publishing industry / music industry / movie industry / TV industry to the curb." - Scott Kirsner, "The Future of Web Video"1

Certainly, the media conglomerates of the pre- era have not been dismantled as a result of viral and lolcats. On the other hand, to contest that nothing has in fact changed would be equally ill- reasoned. So what is actually happening in the realm of online video? In the hopes of contributing to this discourse, I attempt to map out the organization of a handful of examples of 'web TV,' or television-esque content produced primarily for online distribution, within the greater context of the media industry. By examining a selection of popular webseries, webshows, and eSports webcasting, I intend to provide some insight into the industrial structure of web-based, TV-style content. How is this content produced, financed, and distributed? Who are the players, be they independents, entrepreneurs, established media moguls, or multinational corporations; and how do they interact? While media scholars such as Scott Kirsner and Toby Miller stress the naivete of cybertarianism and reject the claim that, thanks to the internet, “everyone is a publisher,”2 much of the discussion surrounding online video production is based on vague or weakly defined notions of 'amateur' and 'professional.' This amateur/professional dichotomy tends to hinge on the unfortunate assumption that content produced for online viewing is by nature 'amateur,' because 'professional' content is produced for the television set and movie theatre. One of the reasons for this assumption is the lack of academic attention given to web TV, such as webseries and online shows, whose creators, often CEO's of their own companies with relevant backgrounds in -making, produce online video content as a full-time job.

So how do we define notions of amateur, professional, and industry bigwig when it comes to audiovisual media? Is it the name of the company behind the production? The number of productions under their belt? The of connection with a media conglomerate? The production costs involved? Is it the method of content distribution? The amount we pay for access? The level of popularity? It is a household name, and in which case, whose household? One of the aims of this thesis is to highlight the

1 Scott Kirsner, The Future of Web Video, CinemaTech: 2007. 2 Toby Miller, “Cybertarians of the World Unite,” The YouTube Reader, eds. Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 424.

2 need for redefined terminology when it comes to online audiovisual content, for, as will be explored in the coming chapters, the common dichotomy of amateur and professional is inadequate in describing the complex interrelations of independent companies, advertisers, corporations, and media conglomerates online.

But is it TV?: Defining Webtelevision

"YouTube and the emergent practices referred to as IPTV, Internet-protocol television, might be seen as the final straw, fragmenting the cable era's slivers into atomic particles and pushing our expectations and definitional conceits regarding television to the breaking point." - William Uricchio, “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television”3

How to study web television? One of the most immediate hurdles to overcome lies in choosing and defining terminology. What I have opted to describe as 'web TV' is fundamentally different from both Uricchio's 'IPTV' and 'internet TV,' despite the similarities in nomenclature. By web TV, I do not mean content produced primarily for viewing on the television set via cable or satellite, which is later made accessible online via Netflix or the like (internet TV). Nor am I referring to television content delivered to the set via Internet Protocol as opposed to cable or satellite (IPTV). Rather, by 'web TV,' I refer specifically to content produced primarily for online distribution, where viewing is done on the PC. Webseries and webshows are an example of just that, and are generally hosted via online video distribution platforms such as YouTube, Blip, , etc. That Uricchio chooses to group two distinct technological forms of content delivery, IPTV and YouTube, further stresses the need for better defined terminology. Prior academic study tends towards overemphasis on YouTube, or rather, the neglect of online video outside of YouTube. While I do not question the importance of YouTube and its obvious value for academic study, too often is it used as a sort of blanket-term for online video in general. The vague, assumptive labels of 'amateur' and 'professional' may be a product of this in my opinion unhelpful blanket-terming: we all know YouTube began as a platform for the upload of home videos, and if we accept that YouTube is synonymous with online video, we risk drawing the inaccurate conclusion that online video is by nature amateurish, or not professional.

Studies of amateur film-making are, of course, not unvaluable to the study of webseries and web TV, but neither do I feel they are wholly sufficient on their own, for the simple reason that much web TV

3 William Uricchio, “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television,” The YouTube Reader, eds. Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 34.

3 is professional. Of what theoretical groundwork can we then avail ourselves? In his study on the digitalization of media and , Jostein Gripsrud defines broadcast television as push, or something that flows, as opposed to pull or “discrete items on demand.”4 To Grisprud, watching video- on-demand television is not television at all, but “the digital version of watching a rented videocassette.”5 But livestreaming technology, as is the staple of eSports casting and live webshows, baffles this definition because it fulfils Grisprud's characteristics of television as content that flows, that is not available 'on demand,' that is often not archived after the flow has ended, that is scheduled, that is live, and so on. Direct-address from presenter to audience, or co-presence as currency, is just as fundamental to many webshows and eSports casting in particular as it is to traditional television. In fact, livechats during livestreamed webshows and eSports events may exceed television's claims to immediacy and audience-interaction, because they enable hundreds of thousands of viewers to chat with one another and even the show's producers live, all while the show is being streamed. As will be discussed in the following chapters, webshow creators such as Sean “Day9” Plott can actively respond to the livechat on their show's livestream, in real time. This form of audience-producer interaction is unprecedented and deserving of academic attention, especially given our field's rather enthusiastic analyses of television-based audience interaction.6 Even non-streamed webseries and webshows fulfil many of the primary characteristics of television as defined by Gripsrud: namely, scheduling, direct address, and co-presence. Two such webseries, The Nostalgia Critic and The Angry Video Game Nerd, will be detailed in the following chapter.

Web TV is not television, but the fact that it is characterized by the same qualities labelled typical of traditional television calls our definitions into question. Despite the deficiency of prior academic study concerning webseries, webshows, and webcasting, I make use of related research into YouTube, internet television and IPTV in order to inform demarcations of what web TV is and what it is not. In defining web TV, I opt primarily for technologically determination: TV-style (serialized, cast) content produced for online distribution via video sharing, streaming, or hosting services, and viewed through an internet browser. Thus, the discussion of such online video services, and how they are conceived, funded, and function becomes of interest to the structural examination of web TV.

4 Jostein Gripsrud, Relocating Television (London: Routledge, 2010), 9. 5 Ibid 6 Examples: Henry Jenkins (1992, 2006), Jostein Gripsrud (2010), Peter Larsen (2010), Anne Jerslev (2010), Ib Bondebjerg (2010), Barbara Gentikow (2010), Gunn Sara Enli (2007); also studies about ITV or 'Interactive TV' such as William Boddy (2004), Hari Om Srivastava (2002), etc.

4 Online Channels and Hosting Service Migrations: Bootstrap Businesses, Corporate Strategies, and Copyright Witch-hunts

“We love that professional and up-and-coming independent producers can create entertaining series and gain audiences of millions. We celebrate that they can produce original series as their full time job and make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, or more. Their only constraint is the limit of human creativity.” - The Principles of Blip, http://Blip.tv/principles7

We should not allow ourselves to be blindly seduced by the idyllic notion that in the Internet age, all “wounds caused by the division of labour from the Industrial Age are bathed in the balm of Internet love,”8 no matter how appealing that thought might be. As Toby Miller stresses, “these fantasies are fueled and sometimes created by multinational marketers only too keen to stoke the fires of aesthetic and autotelic desire.”9 The distinction between independent and affiliated film-maker can understandably be quite convoluted, (sometimes intentionally) obscured, and difficult to define; especially when it comes to online production and distribution. On the other hand, this is not to deny the fact that when it comes to webseries producers and even distributors, we find a striking set of examples of do-it-yourself film-making, entrepreneurship, bootstrap financing, and grassroots community-building at work.

A variety of entrepreneurs are running successful, ad-financed, profit-turning webshows which nevertheless remain viewable free of charge, straight from their own dorm or bedroom. Without the hype-generation and cross-promotion systems available to conglomerate-produced content, the continued popularity and market penetration of webseries lacking this structural support hinges largely on the word of mouth of their fanbases. At the same time, however, YouTube generally plays an integral role as the catalytic distribution platform, and as such holds an extraordinarily critical amount of power and influence. In this section, I attempt to map out the genesis, structure, and functionality of a small handful of webshows and how they have evolved since inception; and to explore the nature of their interactions with YouTube and other media corporations.

7 Website: Blip, ”The Principles of Blip,” http://Blip.tv/principles [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 8 Toby Miller, op. cit., 424 9 Ibid

5 From YouTube to Blip (and back again)

High-school drop-out Mike Hudack is a co-founder and CEO of Blip (formerly Blip.tv), a webseries hosting, distribution and monetizing platform for independent producers. It is currently the largest independently owned video network in the world,10 and boasts over 330 million monthly video views.11 Blip was born out of a Yahoo Video Blogging Group in 2005 where its five co-founders met and conceived the idea for the business, which ended up launching successfully the same year. While Hudack highlights his former status as a highschool drop-out on his personal website,12 he had, prior to Blip, worked as an IT specialist for the National Hockey League.

With Hudack’s IT expertise and the pooling of the team’s “spare” servers and existing software, it took barely a week to acquire a domain and create the Blip.tv interface. Blip.tv’s bootstrap beginnings are matched by ongoing expertise-fueled infrastructure cost efficiencies. Angel investors are also playing a role in financing Blip.tv’s operations.13

These “angel investors” currently include giants such as Bain Capital Ventures and Canaan Partners, who had by 2011 invested over $18 million USD in the distribution platform.14 Throughout the first year of the company's existence, however, Blip was bootstrap financed. In a 2006 interview with ZDNet, Hudack identified Blip's advertising system as a key component of the business's structure and service provision, where webseries creators can choose the advertisers they feel would work best for themselves personally. “If you've got a hit show we'll even go out and meet with media buyers directly to get you a real, honest-to-goodness high-end sponsorship. We share everything 50/50.”15 This aspect of Blip's business model seems no less important today, with their website describing a number of options independent producers can choose among when it comes to advertising, including RSS feeds, DVR reminders for set-top boxes, video syndication, and so forth; in addition to more obvious choices in flexibility such as the selection of ad-size and placement. Furthermore, Blip currently boasts an impressive list of advertising partners, from General Motors to Starbucks, to Procter and Gamble, to Reebok, , Central, Samsung, and more.16 Blip also maintains a fan-funding system for webseries creators in need of financing through Kickstarter, the popular all-or-nothing community

10 Website: Blip, ”About Blip,” http://Blip.tv/about [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 11 Brian Stetler, ”Online Video Start-Ups Seek to Carve Out a Place Beside YouTube,” , 5 Jun 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html?pagewanted=all [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 12 Mike Hudack, ”Mike Hudack,” Personal website, http://mhudack.com [checked 5 Apr 2012]. 13 Donna Bogatin, ”Blip.tv vs. YouTube? Founder talks 'The Real Deal' in exclusive interview,” ZDNet, 13 Nov 2006, http://www.zdnet.com/blog/micro-markets/Bliptv-vs-youtube-founder-talks-the-real-deal-in- exclusive-interview/658 [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 14 Brian Stetler, op. cit., http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html? pagewanted=all 15 Ibid 16 Blip, op. cit., http://Blip.tv/about

6 funding platform for creative projects.17

In 2009, Blip landed a series of distribution deals with with YouTube, iTunes, Vimeo, , set-top boxes such as Tivo, Sony TV, Verizon FiOS, and NBC Local Media in .18 Some of these deals opened up new distribution networks, others modified the terms of prior agreements. The deal with YouTube, for example, enabled “Blip.tv to place its own in the YouTube player on behalf of the Web video creators who use Blip.”19 2009 was notably a year of expansion for YouTube concerning advertising, when the number of media partners able to purchase and place advertisements on YouTube increased from just a few big players such as CBS, to over 50 in the space of a few months.20 More recently, GoogleTV has been added to this list of distribution partners.

The existence of these partnerships can readily be interpreted as a tactic from the side of internet and media corporations to further their influence and expand their ever-booming content and advertising networks by incorporating smaller, emergent distribution platforms and content producers. The history of Blip suggests that while its bootstrap-financed founders managed to unfold and monetize a market previously untapped by large-scale, corporate producers and distributors, monolithic internet and media corporations can be seen as simply annecting these new networks once they have been established (and at someone else's risk capital and sweat equity, at that). While such partnerships may indeed be mutually beneficial to both parties, there is an inherent lopsidedness in the power structure present for small production and distribution companies when partnering with multinational giants such as Google, which should not be ignored. Neither should the fact that, while partnerships with YouTube prove to be highly beneficial for new distributors desiring greater market penetration and the advertising revenue possibilities that come with it, these deals are also highly advantageous for YouTube, serving to galvanize its position at the heart and centre of video exchange online.

According to the company, Blip is doing 72 million video streams a month to a worldwide audience of 22 million people. Only 4 percent of those views are on Blip.tv itself. [2009]

“I think we will double our audience with these deals,” says Hudack. He might be able to double his audience with just YouTube, which comScore estimates does 6.6 billion streams a month and reaches about 100 million people in the U.S. alone. It is not so much distributing videos on YouTube that is a big deal. It is being able to share in the

17 Website: Kickstarter, ”Blip - Discover the Best in Original ,” http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/Blip [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 18 Erick Schonfeld, ”Blip.tv Lands A Big Distribution Deal With YouTube And Others; Redesigns Dashboard,” Techcrunch, 28 Jun 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/28/bliptv-lands-a-big-distribution-deal-with- -and-others-redesigns-dashboard/ [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 19 Ibid 20 Ibid

7 advertising revenues and getting tracking data back.21

Blip has been busy gathering not only business deals with distributors and advertisers, but also adding already popular webseries to their long list of original content shows. In 2011, Blip entered into a deal giving them distribution and ad sales management rights for some of the most popular producers on YouTube known as The Collective,22 including The Annoying Orange, that has since its origins as a comedy webshow started in 2005 become a successful franchise, including an upcoming TV show by the same for Comedy Network. The implications of the deal are a significant follow-up on Blip's advertising agreements made in 2009, and work in the interest of content producers, granting them access to Blip's advertising networks and the resulting revenue, as well as providing greater audience exposure. “The announcement could indicate that as some other web series mature, their creators may also begin to look beyond YouTube for more robust distribution, monetization and reporting help.”23

Blip's appeal for small-time or independent producers is further made evident when one examines YouTube users' history of strife when it comes to video removal due to (false) copyright claims made by media conglomerate giants; especially with regards to the creators of some of the most popular webseries to date. As I will detail, the impetus for making the leap from “amateur YouTube user” to professional content producer, which in these cases corresponds to the establishment of an own website as well as migrating one's hosting and distribution services away from YouTube and into other providers, has in some of the most high-profile cases come as a more or less direct response to YouTube's trigger-happy, trawling net-style video and channel deletion policy when it comes to claims of copyright infringement. It reveals an ironic pattern of bad policy built on overzealous corporate defensiveness where webseries creators are punished under false copyright claims when making YouTube videos for no monetary gain, but left in peace should they organize their production efforts into a revenue- producing business featuring the exact same content. Review a song or movie owned by Time Warner or MGM just for fun on YouTube? Risk account suspension and channel deletion. Release that same review via Blip and profit from ad revenue? Enjoy a plethora of corporate support networks.

21 Ibid 22 Ryan Lawler, ”Blip.tv Adds Fred, Annoying Orange and Others With Collective Partnership,” Gigaom, 1 Jul 2011, http://gigaom.com/video/blip-tv-adds-fred-annoying-orange-and-others-with-collective- partnership/ [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 23 Ibid

8 That Guy With The Glasses and Channel Awesome

“Perhaps best known for "That Guy With the Glasses" videos starring Doug Walker, [Channel Awesome's] Web site, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com has 770,000 unique users for 3.7 million visits and 14 million page views each month.”24 - Ann Meyer, The Tribune (2009)

Illustration 1: ”Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don't have to.” - Doug Walker filming his most popular webshow, "The Nostalgia Critic." Image Source: The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4

In 2007, laid-off Circuit City employees Mike Michaud, Bharghav Dronamraju, and Mike Ellis formed the bootstrap-funded production company, Channel Awesome, after losing their jobs at the (now bankrupt) electronics retailer. By 2009, Channel Awesome had an annual turn-over of $150,000 USD, based on advertising and viewer donations.25 In the last quarter of 2009, $32,000 of that sum came from ad revenue from one show alone, Doug Walker's “The Nostalgia Critic” (two of Walker's shows combined accounted for a total of $53,000 in ad revenue in the same period).26 The Nostalgia Critic is a comedic, review-based webshow wherein the eponymous character, played by creator and producer Doug Walker, reviews nostalgic movies

24 By April 2012, the website was receiving over 18.5 million page views and 4.5 million visits per month. [Source: Quantcast.com]

Ann Meyer, ”Growing breed of accidental entrepreneur has recession to thank for business creation,” , 6 Jul 2009, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-07 - 06/news/0907050116_1_kauffman-foundation-entrepreneurship-older-entrepreneurs [checked 26 Apr 2012]. 25 Ann Meyer, op. cit., http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-07 -06/news/0907050116_1_kauffman- foundation-entrepreneurship-older-entrepreneurs 26 Michael Learmonth, ”Blip.tv Brings Programs to YouTube, Ads to 'Channel Awesome',” Ad Age Digital, 28 Jul 2009, http://adage.com/article/digital/blip-tv-brings-programs-youtube-ads-channel- awesome/138164/ [checked 27 Apr 2012].

9 and TV shows from his (and therefore, his audience's) childhood. The show's catch-phrase and opening line, “Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Critic, I remember it so you don't have to,” instantly establishes both direct address to the audience, and an intimate co-presence based on shared memories and experiences.

In a 2009 interview with the A.V. Club Chicago, Walker recounts:

I started doing these 5 Second Movies on YouTube, and they got a really a big following. So I tried acting in a few sketches and created the character of the Nostalgia Critic. That seemed to catch on too, and after being kicked off YouTube three or four times, [Mike Michaud] came along and said he was looking to start this business called Channel Awesome. He said, “We’d love to give you a site because there’s money to be made off of this. You can make a living doing this.” At the time I didn’t believe it, but man was he right. I still can’t believe what a big fan base I have.

When asked to detail his struggle with YouTube, Walker states that upon enquiring with YouTube as to the nature of the problem following his second suspension, he was informed that a number of studios claimed his movie reviews were infringing on their copyright. “At the time, once you got two complaints, your whole channel was gone. So I gave every single video its own channel and listed them under the "favorites" category. Once I started a feud with The Angry Video Game Nerd, my videos became really popular, and YouTube went out of its way to take them down.”27

An important repercussion of these video and channel deletions is a zeroed view counter: the hit counter on a YouTube video is not reinstated, even if a clip flagged for infringement is later cleared of suspicion. Such false copyright accusations may not be mere “mishaps” (particularly when they repeatedly occur against the same account despite previous acquittals), but a market- cleaning practice that intends to eliminate evidence of popularity of new online content producers in a hits-based climate such as YouTube. A YouTube movie review with a few hundred views does not possess the same potential for power as one with millions of views. It is, however, still very possible that this repeated harassment did indeed stem from mere poor judgement and bad policy on the part of YouTube and the film studios in question. Whatever the case, the exact same, previously allegedly copyright-infringing reviews have since 2009 been hosted by Blip, and have since 2008 been viewable on the umbrella website

27 Ibid The ”feud” referred to here was a collaborative series of episodes between Walker and another popular webseries creator, , ”the Angry Video Game Nerd.” Due to the similar style of these unrelated webshows, there was some fan speculation as to Walker and Rolfe being enemies, fighting over the same target audience. As it turned out, the two were fans of one another's work, and played off of fan speculation to the contrary by collaborating on a multi-episode epic detailing a showdown between their respective characters, The Nostalgia Critic and the Angry Video Game Nerd.

10 ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, run by Walker, Michaud, and Mike Ellis. The website currently features over 20 reviewers of movies, TV shows, video games, music, and comics, each with their own webseries, for which the average run-time per episode falls between 15 and 25 minutes. In March 2012, the website ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com had a daily pageview count of over 90,000. 28

Channel Awesome's migration from YouTube to Blip was not immediate, however. Prior to 2009, Channel Awesome's 200-some videos were hosted for several months on , another video-sharing platform for original content which, much like Blip, intends to monetize webshows through ad placement. This brief partnership, however, was marred by financial deceit and technical difficulties. Channel Awesome members complained of delays of up to days when posting videos, glitchy uploads, and an overly strict adult rating system which disqualified many of their reviews from advertising. Between December and April 2008, Revver stopped paying Channel Awesome their share of advertising revenue generated by Channel Awesome's content, owing Michaud and his team over $4500.29 Subsequently, Channel Awesome removed their content from Revver and migrated to Blip in early 2009, where they made over $40,000 in ad revenue in their first six months.30 In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Mike Michaud discussed his hunt for extra warehouse space for Channel Awesome in Chicago. “He considered the vacant Circuit City building where he once worked, he said, but concluded that the space was too small.”31 Doug Walker has never bothered to recreate a YouTube channel for either himself or the ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com umbrella site, despite a 2009 legal agreement between YouTube and Blip allowing Blip shows to be distributed on YouTube.32 Fans have, however, uploaded a number of the site's hundreds of videos onto YouTube themselves, including their own fan channels based on Channel Awesome content. These do not appear to suffer any further copyright infringement allegations – the largest such channel, with over 39,000 subscribers and over 16 million video views, has been running since 2008.33

28 Website: Cubestat, ”thatguywiththeglasses.com estimated worth and web stat from Cubestat,” http://www.cubestat.com/www.thatguywiththeglasses.com [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 29 Troy Dreier, ”Revver Non-Payments Have Video Makers Crying Foul,” Streamingmedia, 14 Apr 2009, http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=65454 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 30 Ibid 31 Brian Stetler, op. cit., http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html? pagewanted=all 32 Michael Learmonth, op. cit., http://adage.com/article/digital/blip-tv-brings-programs-youtube-ads- channel-awesome/138164/ 33 ”The Official Channel Awesome,” http://www.youtube.com/user/NostalgiaAVGNfan? ob=0&feature=results_main [channel statistics recorded 16 Apr 2012].

11 Cinemassacre and the Angry Video Game Nerd

“When you turn on your TV, make sure it's tuned to channel three. He's got a nerdy shirt and a pocket pouch, although I've never seen him write anything down. He's got a and a filthy mouth, armed with his Zapper he will tear these games down.” -“The Angry Video Game Nerd” theme song written and performed by Kyle Justin34

James Rolfe's YouTube channel for his retrogaming, farcical review-based webseries “The Angry Video Game Nerd” currently has over 734,000 subscribers and over 327,000,000 video views.35 “The show generally revolves around retro game reviews that involve bitter rants against games he [the fictional character of “the Nerd”] deems to be of particularly low quality or poor design.”36 According to the FAQ on Rolfe's website corresponding to his independent production company, cinemassacre.com, Rolfe first began making filmed reviews of and Super Nintendo games in the late 80's and early 90's, as they were released. “But back then, I was just pointing the camera at the TV screen and talking while I was playing them.”37 Rolfe recounts recording his reviews on VHS tapes and circulating them among his friends, in lieu of having a sufficient internet connection. “Later, after YouTube was invented, I began uploading the nerd videos and they rapidly gained a fan following which prompted me to make more. It got so popular, that I decided to make it a steady series.”38 In 2004, Rolfe uploaded a farcical review of the Nintendo Entertainment System game, II: Simon's Quest (1987) to YouTube: “The whole joke was how in-depth I picked apart flaws and how mortally obsessed and angry I was over a game that was nearly 20 years old.”39

In 2006, MTV reported on Rolfe as being a producer on YouTube.40 AVGN's distribution history is notably convoluted. On cinemassacre.com, Rolfe explains his videos were originally hosted both on YouTube as well on his website. In 2006, his content further became available on the website

34 Tuning the TV to channel three refers not to watching channel three, but rather to the fact that classic consoles such as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System displayed output to channel three or four in , and therefore required the TV set to be tuned to one of these in order to play. 35 ”Cinemassacre.com,” http://www.youtube.com/user/jamesnintendonerd [channel statistics recorded 18 Apr 2012]. 36 Website: IndieGoGo, ”Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie,” http://www.indiegogo.com/Angry-Video- Game-Nerd-The-Movie [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 37 Cinemassacre Productions, ”FAQ,” website Cinemassacre, http://cinemassacre.com/faq/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 38 Ibid 39 Ibid 40 2006: Comebacks, Viral Video, Theater Geeks, Video located at: http://www.mtv.com/videos/news/125775/viral-videos-infect-the-mainstream.jhtml [checked 27 Apr 2012].

12 ScrewAttack.com, a showcase platform for video game-related original content, sometimes referred to as “the punk rock of gaming.”41 “In February 2007, MTV’s GameTrailers.com bought an exclusive deal with ScrewAttack, [including access to] The Angry Video Game Nerd [episodes] as well as [ScrewAttack's] Top 10’s and Video Game Vaults. [...] This was the first time I got paid for what I do. It was my big break, you could say.”42 While it may have been his big break, Rolfe points out that due to the resulting contractual agreements with GameTrailers, he was no longer allowed to upload AVGN videos to his own YouTube channel until they were a year old. Instead, he posted trailers for his episodes on YouTube, directing his channel subscribers to GameTrailers, where, despite what the website's name would suggest, the full videos were hosted. GameTrailers was originally founded by Geoff Grotz and Brandon Jones in 2003, with start-up investment from Jon Slusser's company, Hornet . In 2005, GameTrailers was acquired by MTV Networks for an undisclosed sum.43 Ninety- five of Rolfe's Cinemassacre episodes are currently also hosted on Blip.

Illustration 2: A still from James Rolfe's popular webseries, "The Angry Video Game Nerd." Still from Episode 41, 'Rambo,' 2008

Rolfe's production history seems to have largely been undisturbed by claims of copyright infringement, which suggests a policy difference between film and rights holders. One such event did however occur in 2008, as a mishap on the part of GameTrailers: Rolfe's AVGN account on YouTube was suspended for nearly 24 hours due to a copyright claim laid by his distributor, GameTrailers, whose own YouTube account was also suspended during this period. In this short amount of time, a fan outcry managed to take place, with Rolfe's viewers speculating as to

41 ScrewAttack Entertainment LLC, ”About Us,” website ScrewAttack, section published 18 Jun 2011, http://www.screwattack.com/about-us [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 42 Cinemassacre Productions, op. cit., http://cinemassacre.com [paraphrased] 43 PR Newswire, ”MTV Networks Acquires GameTrailers.com,” website PR NewsWire, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mtv-networks-acquires-gametrailerscom-55710812.html [checked 27 Apr 2012].

13 potential culprits behind this suspension.44 While GameTrailers admitted to the suspensions being accidental, a certain degree of damage had been done:

Not only did the incident hurt Rolfe by denying him access to his YouTube account, but also damaged YouTube’s reputation, caused something of a miniature revolt from other YouTube members, hurt the reputation of other reviewers, even though they had nothing to do with the suspension. Worst of all, it resulted in the suspension of not just GameTrailer’s own account, but the account that provides some of the best promotion for them.45

That this mishap came about on the part of MTV's subsidiary GameTrailers, and not on behalf of a game production company, should be of note. While Doug Walker repeatedly suffered false copyright infringement claims from rightsholders of the TV shows and movies he reviewed and satirized, Rolfe's webseries, done in an almost identical style of nostalgic, retrospective, farcical reviews, has not been subjected to the same treatment from rightsholders in the video game industry. Even more remarkably, Rolfe's YouTube channel, which currently boasts such honours as being the #30th Most Subscribed Director's Channel of All Time on YouTube globally46, bears the username “JamesNintendoNerd,” despite Rolfe's complete lack of affiliation with Nintendo. Nintendo is, of course, one of the world's most influential game manufacturers, developers, and producers, and was listed as Japan's third most valuable company in 2007.47 One can only speculate as to how an independent, unaffiliated filmmaker with an equally popular director's channel entitled “JamesDisneyNerd” or “JamesWarnerBrosNerd” would be received, but it's doubtful such a channel would have been left in peace – especially if revenue was being generated.

Rolfe sells a variety of AVGN merchandise via ScrewAttack, including 5 volumes of his show on DVD in various packs, as well as shirts, plushies, stickers, and posters. His website features AVGN apps for iPhone and Android for fast-access to viewing AVGN episodes in high quality on mobile platforms. He also sells adspace on cinemassacre.com. In addition to the AVGN series which numbers over 100 episodes, Rolfe produces two other review-based shows, “Board James” and “Monster Madness,” as well as a third miniseries entitled “You Know What's Bullshit.” His website also contains over 90 short unrelated to the above material, such as 48-hour film projects and Rofle's earlier work and side projects, produced by himself and Cinemassacre. Rolfe is currently also working

44 YouTube search results for ”nerd suspended,” http://www.youtube.com/results? search_query=nerd+suspended&search_type [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 45 Jonathan Bailey, ”AVGN Loses, Regains YouTube Account,” Plagiarism Today, 21 May 2008, http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/05/21/avgn-loses-regains-youtube-account/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 46 ”Cinemassacre.com,” http://www.youtube.com/user/JamesNintendoNerd?ob=0 [Statistics located under ”Honours,” checked 27 Apr 2012]. 47 Kiyoshi Takenaka, “Update 2 – Nintendo sets $85 bln high score, thanks to Wii, DS,” Reuters U.S, 15 Oct 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/10/15/nintendo-market-value-idUST30751820071015 [checked 4 Apr 2012].

14 on an Angry Video Game Nerd feature-length movie, which has been fan-financed through the crowd- funding website, IndieGoGo. “The film is a blend of comedy, adventure, science fiction, some B- movie elements, and the nerd you all know.”48 With an initial goal of $75,000, the campaign raised $325,927 in fan donations between October 2011 and February 2012.49 By November 11th, one month after launching the campaign, the initial funding goal had already been surpassed by over $25,000.50 In one of his video updates during the campaign, Rolfe states: “We thought before that only a portion of the budget would be fan-donated and the rest of it would all come from investors. But now it seems that this whole thing could be totally fan supported, and that would ensure that we would have 100% creative control over the project.”51 This is a level of fan-producer interaction far beyond the scope of casting your vote via text during a reality TV competition; and close attention should be paid to the growing phenomenon of crowd-funding for online content, through sites such as Kickstarter.com,52 or video hosting platform 's recent deals with The Pirate Bay founders' new microdonation system, Flattr.53

Rolfe is not inexperienced in film-making. By 2002, prior to his internet-based career as AVGN, he had already created a total of one hundred shorts, largely done in a B-horror movie style. “THE CINEMASSACRE is myself,” he writes on his website's FAQ, “I’ve been making movies in my backyard since I was a little kid. To begin with, I always had a 'do-it-yourself' attitude, without any outside support. Things have improved since the old days, but I still have that raw & simple approach to filmmaking, seemingly 'massacring' any rules or trends.”54 Fellow students of Rolfe's at the

48 Thank You, Uploaded 11 Nov 2011, Video located at: http://cinemassacre.com/2011/11/11/thank-you/ 49 Website IndieGoGo, op. cit., http://www.indiegogo.com/Angry-Video-Game-Nerd-The-Movie 50 Thank You, op. cit., Video located at: http://cinemassacre.com/2011/11/11/thank-you/ 51 Ibid 52 For example, projects in Kickstarter's Video Game category netted a total of $1.7 million in pledges in the first two years of Kickstarter's existence. In 2012, the Video Game category had netted $2.9 million in pledges in just one month and a half following the successful funding of “Double Fine Adventure,” a game by a fan and critically acclaimed developing studio with a track record of releasing titles with poor initial sales which later become cult classics. That $2.9 million does not include the $3.3 million raised by fans for Double Fine Adventure in February 2012, which reached its initial project goal of $400,000 within the first 24 hours of the campaign's start. Thus, the total $1.7 million pledged for video game projects in two years compares to over $6.2 million in only the first three months of 2012. I believe similar developments may occur in the realm of film, especially should an already-established cult film- maker popularize the use of a crowd-funding website, as Double Fine has done with Kickstarter for the game industry.

Source: Erik Kain, “Double Fine Adventure's Kickstarter Success Pumps New Life Into Crowd-Funded Gaming,” Forbes, 30 Mar 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/30/double-fine- adventures-kickstarter-success-pumps-new-life-into-crowd-funded-gaming/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 53 "To say that we’re excited about the partnership is an understatement. With over 100 million unique visitors clocking up 1.5 billion video views every month, and 20,000+ new videos uploaded every day we couldn’t have hope for a better partner to introduce Flattr to the masses. If you’re a film maker then all you need is a Dailymotion MotionMaker account and a Flattr account." Source: Siim Teller, ”Dailymotion opens up fan funding for film makers,” FlattrBlog, 2 May 2012, http://blog.flattr.net/2012/05/dailymotion-flattr-integration/ [checked 17 May 2012]. 54 Cinemassacre Productions, op. cit., http://cinemassacre.com

15 University of Arts in Philadelphia made a documentary about his 'amateur' film-making in 2002, entitled “Rolfe: A No-Budget Dream.” Showing a very shy, introverted side, the direct opposite of his later, loud-mouthed and aggressive AVGN persona, Rolfe stutters and avoids looking at the camera while describing his hopes for the future: “I think my dream would be to, to maybe make a really big cult sensation. [...] Maybe I just want people to look at me like I'm the life of the party, or that.. in a way, really, I.. without my movies, I'm nobody, really.”55 A top-rated comment on a clip from this documentary, which Rolfe uploaded to his YouTube channel in April 2012, gives insight into the appeal of webshows like The Angry Video Game Nerd, highlighting aspects of liveness, co-presence, and viewer-producer intimacy:

This is what I like about many internet stars of today. They're not terribly well spoken. They stutter, or often seem unsure of themselves. They don't come off as big stars, but just average people like everyone watching them. To me, that's what makes James cool. He's just another person like everyone else, yet he has a creative vision that can be neither seen nor heard in his everyday mannerisms, only his work. If I had to make a list of people I'd like to meet one day, he'd be at the top.56

Illustration 3: A still of James Rolfe signing a stack of thousands of AVGN photos for donators to his upcoming, independent film based on his webseries. Source: still taken from video at http://cinemassacre.com/2011/11/11/thank-you/

55 ROLFE: A No-Budget Dream (2002), Uploaded by JamesNintendoNerd, 22 mar 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XacN05uJY00 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 56 Comment posted by user RevoltOfAges in April 2012 on ROLFE: A No-Budget Dream (2002), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XacN05uJY00 [checked 27 Apr 2012].

16 eSports: Casting and Casters

Modern eSports are much like traditional sports: they have leagues, teams, matches, tournaments, organizations, corporate sponsors, professional players, live online and televised casting with audiences both on-site and online, and well-known caster and player personalities, both beloved and controversial. ESports, or competitive gaming, has a robust and nuanced history that is difficult to summarize within the confines of this thesis. Therefore, the examples I have elected to present will be those most applicable to the specific goals of this thesis, and further regulated by the availability of information. They should not be taken to represent a conclusive report on all eSports tournaments and casting, as such an undertaking, if at all possible, would stretch well beyond the limits of this thesis.

“The Space Invaders Tournament held by Atari in 1980 was the first video game competition, and attracted more than 10,000 participants.”57 A number of arcade-based tournaments were held in the 80's and 90's, including the Nintendo World Championships in 1990, whose finals were held at Universal Studios Hollywood in California.58 Prizes included a $10,000 USD savings bond and a car for each winner within various age brackets.59 The Nintendo World Championships were notably not global, as the name would imply, but held within the alone, and targeted at children and teenagers. The incentive behind this particular tournament was potentially related to the success of The Wizard starring Fred Savage, a 1989 hit children's film about a fictitious video game championship. The Wizard may arguably in turn have been created for the purposes of marketing the then yet-unreleased game Super Bros 3 and Nintendo's “Power Glove,” an early (and very imprecise) motion-sensor controller peripheral for the Nintendo Entertainment System; both of which were featured prominently in the film.60

57 ”Electronic Games Magazine (March 1982),” Electronic Games Magazine, Vol 1, no 2 (1982), http://www.archive.org/stream/electronic-games-magazine-1982- 03/Electronic_Games_Issue_02_Vol_01_02_1982_Mar#page/n35/mode/1up , pg 36 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 58 Chris Kohler, ”The quest for the golden Nintendo game,” arstechnica, 12 Sep 2011, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/09/the-quest-for-the-golden-nintendo-game.ars? utm_source=&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 59 Ibid 60 The aforementioned James Rolfe did an episode covering the Glove in his AVGN webshow in 2006; and Doug Walker likewise reviewed The Wizard movie as The Nostalgia Critic in 2008. A quote from the film's arrogant, “bad boy” child antagonist, who was the primary vehicle for advertising the Power Glove, has since 2004 been a popular internet meme: “I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.” Website: Know Your Meme, “I Love the Power Glove. It's So Bad,” http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i- love-the-power-glove-its-so-bad [checked 27 Apr 2012].

17 Competitive gaming can be said to have grown notably since Microsoft's Deathmatch '95 tournament for the first-person-shooter Doom II,61 and the 1997 Microsoft-sponsored Quake tournament, Red Annihilation. Quake was an incredibly influential first-person shooter released in 1996 to essentially universal fan and critical adoration, and noted for its challenging gameplay. Quake also sported an ESRB rating of Mature, due to animated blood, gore, and horror; as did Doom and Doom II. The winner of the Red Annihilation Quake tournament, one Dennis “Thresh” Fong, received game programmer 's red Ferrari Cabriolet as part of the first place prize, and by 1999 had personally won over $250,000 USD in prize money and endorsements from playing Quake professionally.62 The popularity of Doom, Quake and their related eSports scenes may have influenced the competitive gaming swing away from children and back to young adults, as was its arcade origin.

Examples of eSports Casting: Past and Present

International tournament organizers were swift to follow the Red Annihilation tournament, such as the launching of the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) in 1997. “Under [founder] Munoz's -year management, the CPL hosted 60 international tournament events in North America, South America, , and . The CPL also directly sanctioned 600 international qualifiers and awarded over $3 million in cash prizes.”63 The 2005 CPL World Tour, sponsored largely by semiconductor manufacturers Intel and Nvidia, had a total prize purse of $1,000,000 USD, and was televised by MTV.64 There are currently several large regional and international eSports organizations for competitive gaming, and their tournaments have been broadcasted in a variety of ways. The MLG or organization in North America, founded by two former ad men in 2002 at a launch sum of $35 million USD, initially spent $6 million to fund two seasons of a to cover their tournaments.

The former ad guys learned that sponsors didn't want to buy television ads to reach young men. They thought Web ads were a better way to get their attention. So Major League Gaming pulled the plug on its television shows. Now the [Emmy] award-winning

61 Business Wire, ”DWANGO to Host World's Largest Deathmatch Tournament,” Business Wire New York via FindArticles, 21 sept 2005, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_Sept_21/ai_17453687/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 62 Mark Leibovich, ”'Thresh' Rules Online Subculture of ,” The Washington Post, 23 Dec 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26675-1999Dec22?language=printer [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 63 Mass Luminosity, ”Angel Munoz,” company website, http://www.massluminosity.com/angel/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 64 Business Wire, ”The Cyberathlete Professional League® $1,000,000 World Tour Finals to Culminate Nov. 22, 2005, in New York City as MTV Televises All the Action,” Business Wire New York via FindArticles, 12 Oct 2005, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2005_Oct_12/ai_n15685489/ [checked 27 Apr 2012].

18 producer handles Major League Gaming's Internet programs. The league says it has more sponsors than ever and expects to be profitable in the fourth quarter. "We can give you five times the number of young men on our Web sites than any television network," [co- founder] Sepso boasted. (2008)65

That same year, MLG's main competitor, News Corp's own eSports tournament organization, Champion Gaming Series, was terminated in its second season. Despite major sponsors Dell and PepsiCo's Mountain Dew, and gimmicky attempts at enticing a young male audience such as televising from the Playboy mansion, the CGS folded in 2008 and was dismantled, leaving MLG as the most prominent eSports tournament-hosting organization in North America.66 67 The CGS had “a minimum web presence” and “pour[ed] most of its resources into television instead.”68 “Directly bankrolled by three of News Corp's satellite television providers: DirecTV, BSkyB and Star,” the CGS had a potential audience of 450 million viewers worldwide69 – the key word here being potential. CGS's decision to pool resources into television rather than online casting seems to have spelled its own doom. By contrast, the MLG, which after testing the TV waters quickly changed focus into online casting, have shown to be more adept in structuring their organization in accordance with the audience's needs (even if it was a lack of sponsorship that initially pointed them in the right direction). The MLG currently enjoys such sponsors as BenQ, Dr Pepper, BiC Razors, and partners such as Sony Xperia, Sony Playstation 3, and Full Sail Univeristy, a for-profit trade school which offers degrees in art, music, film, and video game design and production.70

It seems logical to conclude that the now-defunct CGS received support from satellite television providers during its inception due to the fact that it was created by News Corp, one of the world's largest media conglomerates. The readiness with which television providers were prepared to back News Corp's eSports tournaments may likely have blinded CGS management as to their target audience's desire to view casts online, rather than on the television set. By contrast, the MLG's lack of multinational corporate networking on the scale of News Corp seems to have ultimately worked to their benefit. Without a name like Murdoch attached, investors were, as co-founder Sespo recounts, less willing to back a televised eSports organization; while sponsors such as electronics manufacturers BenQ and Sony were more willing to partner with an internet-based MLG. Indeed,

65 Devin Leonard, ”Calling master chief,” CNN Money, 21 Aug 2008, http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/05/technology/mlg.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008082113 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 66 Ibid 67 Tameka Kee, ”Championship Gaming Series Folds,” paid content, The Economics of Digital Content, 20 Nov 2008, http://paidcontent.org/tech/419-championship-gaming-series-folds/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 68 Devin Leonard, op. cit., http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/05/technology/mlg.fortune/index.htm? postversion=2008082113 69 Ibid 70 Website: Major League Gaming, ”Partners,” http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/partners [checked 27 Apr 2012].

19 News Corp's attempt at focusing resources into televising eSports at the expense of internet streaming seems almost absurdly misguided.

The MLG remains both active and successful. In June 2011, MLG's Pro Circuit hosted from Columbus, Ohio, reported 22.5 million stream views over three days:

MLG compared its 22.5 million viewers with the 11.4 million viewers who watched the NFL [National Football League] draft online. But the NFL draft was also televised, wasn't it? The numbers I found suggested that about six million people watched the draft, putting it at a combined total of 17.4 million for NFL vs. 22.5 million for MLG.71

It should be noted, however, that due to page and stream refreshing, one stream view does not necessarily correspond to one unique viewer. Team Liquid, a StarCraft II website, community, and professional player team, estimated the 22.5 million viewers as corresponding to roughly 450,000 unique viewers. 72

Since the CPL, essentially all eSports tournaments have been webcast online through official livestreams in association with the tournament organizers. Outside of , which has a 24- hour TV channel for eSports (OnGameNet), televised broadcasts do not appear anywhere near as lucrative or popular as internet-casting for eSports tournaments. For example, at a recent DreamHack festival in June 2011, the three-day live coverage of a tournament for the action real-time-strategy game League of Legends “drew a total of 1.69 million [unique online] viewers,” with the final match clocking in at 210,000 unique viewers on the livestream cast from Jönköping.73 DreamHack is the world's largest computer festival, hosted twice annually in Sweden, and holds world records for the world's fastest internet connection speeds (120Gbps), the world's biggest LAN parties (by number of participants), and the world's greatest internet traffic generation for an event, utilizing a capacity equal to what would be needed in order to view over 2000 HD-TV channels simultaneously.74

Despite the collapse of the CGS, News Corp is not without a presence in the eSports scene (or indeed, internet-based media in general). In 2005, News Corp acquired entertainment website IGN for $650

71 John Funk, ”More People Watched Major League Gaming Online Than the NFL Draft,” The Escapist, 13 Jun 2011, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111008-More-People-Watched-Major-League- Gaming-Online-Than-the-NFL-Draft [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 72 Website: Teamliquid, ”MLG Delivers Record-Breaking 22.5 Million streams,” thread created 13 Jun 2011, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=233102 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 73 John Funk, ”League of Legends Championship Draws 1.69 Million Viewers,” The Escapist, 24 Jun 2011, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/111254-League-of-Legends-Championship-Draws-1-69- Million-Viewers [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 74 Website: Dreamhack, ”DHW11 slår alla rekord,” http://www.dreamhack.se/dhw11/2011/11/30/dhw11- slar-alla-rekord/ [checked 27 Apr 2012].

20 million, including its subsidiary sites GameSpy, Rotten Tomatoes75, AskMen.com, TeamXbox, and more.76 At the time of acquisition, IGN had roughly 28 million unique users – more than half of News Corp's online monthly users prior to the acquisition.77 IGN itself runs an eSports tournament organizer called the IGN Pro League or IPL, whose first event was held in April 2011. The IPL's fourth event during Easter 2012 was held in The Cosmopolitan in , featuring StarCraft II and League of Legends tournaments with prize pools of $100,000 and $50,000 respectively.78 The event had notable partners including the world’s leading video game webcasting network, Twitch.tv,79 GOM.TV (a popular South Korean streaming service), AMD (an American multinational semiconductor company), megalith game developer and publisher Blizzard (StarCraft II) and developer Riot Games (League of Legends), among others.80

Illustration 4: On-site public in the Kinnarp arena in Jönköping during Dreamhack Winter 2011. The two soundproof booths on the far left and right onstage contain two opponent StarCraft II professional players. Onscreen is caster and former progamer, Sean “Day9” Plott, who is seated on the couch to the left of the caster's table. Sponsor AMD's logos are clearly visible, and common for StarCraft II tournaments. Source: http://kotaku.com/dreamhack/

75 has since been sold to Flixter (2010), which was purchased by Time Warner in 2011, and is therefor now a subsidiary of Time Warner. Source: Cisionwire, “WARNER BROS. HOME ENTERTAINMENT GROUP TO ACQUIRE ,” Press Statement released 4 May 2011, http://www.cisionwire.com/warner-bros--home-entertainment-group/r/warner-bros--press-release--- warner-bros--home-entertainment-group-to-acquire-flixster,g569293 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 76 Bloomberg Businessweek, ”News Corp. Acquires IGN for $650 Million,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 11 Sep 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/sep2005/id20050911_550700.htm [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 77 Ibid 78 Website: IGN, ”IPL4 at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas,” http://www.ign.com/ipl/all/ipl4/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 79 ”Each month, TwitchTV attracts 16 million people from all over the world who tune into live gaming competitions and events.” Website: Major League Gaming, “Major League Gaming Partners with CBS Interactive,” 17 Apr 2012, http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/major-league-gaming-partners- with--interactive [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 80 Website: Teamliquid, ”IPL4 at the Cosmopolitan - All Information,” thread created 6 Mar 2012, http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=318055 [checked 27 Apr 2012].

21 Games played as eSports vary as to the level of developer involvement in the organization and support of tournaments. Developer Riot Games, for example, is unprecedented in their level of active support and promotion for League of Legends as an eSport. Following the aforementioned success of their first official competitive season which lasted nearly all of 2011 and culminated at Dreamhack in June of the same year, Riot Games, in conjunction with partners Intel, MLG, and the IPL, have increased their total prize pool for Season Two from last year's $1,000,000 USD to a staggering $5,000,000, to be spread across “local, national, and international tournaments with varying amounts of prize money [allocated to each].”81 Of that five million, two million is slated for the Season Two World Championship final and its qualifiers, and one million is being allocated to “hundreds of community- organized Prize Events, [which are] tournaments run by third-party organizers [...] designed for players interested in taking their play to the next level of competition or advancing toward a professional gaming career.”82 This level of developer-to-eSports community support should be understood as remarkable, making it clear that Riot Games is very interested in the eSports scene for their competitive game, League of Legends.

This level of downward pressure from the developer is understandable when taking into consideration the (for the game industry) long history other games have on the eSports scene – such as Blizzard's real-time strategy game franchise, StarCraft.83

StarCraft II is the sequel to an immensely popular game that was released in 1998 and is still being played twelve [now fourteen] years later--an eternity in the fast-paced world of computer games. Particularly in South Korea, StarCraft has become a veritable institution: there is a vibrant professional market, complete with televised matches, corporate sponsorships for teams, and cheating scandals; and the franchise is popular enough that characters even show up on bags of Doritos.84 (2010)

Unit sales for StarCraft II had reached 4.5 million within a year of its 2010 release85 – unsurprising given its predecessor, StarCraft's unit sales topping 11 million by 2009, making it one of the best-

81 Adam Beissener, ”League Of Legends Season Two Prize Dwarfs Valve's $1 Million Tourney,” gameinformer, 15 Aug 2011, http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/08/15/league-of- legends-season-two-prize-dwarfs-valve-39-s-1-million-dota-2-tourney.aspx [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 82 Website: League of Legends, ”League of Legends Season Two,” http://competitive.na.leagueoflegends.com/competitive/season-2/introduction [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 83 “Starcraft II is a real-time strategy game. It is a game of economy, resource management and combat between large armies all set in a futuristic sci-fi world. The game uses three distinct playable races –- Terran, Protoss and Zerg –- to create intense and varied battles between players. The objective of the game is to capitalize on the various strengths and weaknesses of a race to defeat your opponent.” Source: Jeremy Pennycook, “Video Games And Their Evolution Into A New Breed Of Spectator Sport,” National Public Radio, 29 Jul 2010, http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/07/29/128846098/-placeholder [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 84 Mart Kuhn, ”Blizzard: StarCraft II tournaments are copyright infringement,” Public Knowledge, 26 Jul 2010, http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/3171 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 85 Activision Blizzard, Activision Blizzard, Fourth Quarter and CY 2010 Results, 9 Feb 2011, http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ACTI/1792072858x0x440263/2a37de98-400f-4916-9bb3- ae5ddf1b86b8/ATVI%20C4Q10%20slides%20FINAL.pdf , pg 13.

22 selling PC games of all time.86 StarCraft II, just like its predecessor, has a plethora of tournaments, leagues, and tournament organizers. Publisher and developer Blizzard's presence in their games' eSports scenes has increased since 2007, when it came to Blizzard's attention that the Korean eSports Association, or KeSPA, had begun to charge for broadcasting rights to StarCraft matches to Korean television channels OnGameNet and Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC).87 At this point, Blizzard claimed a violation of intellectual property: selling broadcasting rights to StarCraft tournaments, argued Blizzard, was illegal without Blizzard's consent.88 KeSPA refused to agree to Blizzard's demands, and the resulting lawsuit was both convoluted and controversial, rocking English- and Korean-speaking StarCraft communities alike. Negotiations continued with OnGameNet and MBC, until, on May 27th 2010, exactly one month prior to the release of sequel StarCraft II, Blizzard announced an exclusive tournament operation and broadcasting partnership with South Korean streaming service GOM TV, thereby delegating any further negotiations for casting rights to GOM.89

Illustration 5: Screengrab from the official livestream for the MLG Pro Circuit Winter Championship 2012, held between March 23rd and 25th,, cast from Columbus, Ohio. This a moment between game matches in the StarCraft II final, showing opponents Marine King Prime (left) and DRG (right, with coach) in their respective booths. One of the sponsor's logos, Sony Xperia is visible on the left, and viewers are encouraged to tweet or text who they believe will win for a fan poll prediction. Source: Taken by author during the tournament's livestream via Twitch.tv

86 Kris Graft, ”Blizzard Confirms One "Frontline Release" for '09,” Edge, 12 Feb 2009, http://www.edge- online.com/news/blizzard-confirms-one-frontline-release-09 [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 87 Jeremy Reimer, ”The Dawn of Starcraft: e-Sports come to the world stage,” arstechnica, 31 Mar 2011, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/the-dawn-of-starcraft-e-sports-come-to-the-world- stage.ars/1 [checked 27 Apr 2012].

”OnGameNet, a subsidiary of OnMedia (the largest cable and satellite broadcaster in Korea) enjoyed 3-4 million viewers during its 6-to-10 p.m. timeslot in 2007, while its rival MBC Game drew 1.5 million viewers. One should also keep in mind that esports, compared to high-quality dramas, is much cheaper to produce. That same year, the two broadcasters made a combined revenue of $203 million from advertising.” Source: Website: Teamliquid, ”Esoprts, Past and Present,” thread created 29 Apr 2012, http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=333069&fb_source=message 88 Game Politics, ”Blizzard Dumps KeSPA, Signs With GOMtv,” Game Politics, 28 May 2010, http://www.gamepolitics.com/2010/05/28/blizzard-dumps-kespa-signs-GOM TV [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 89 Ibid

23 This partnership also led to the creation of the Global Starcraft II League (GSL), considered by the Starcraft community to be the most prestigious StarCraft II tournament organizer. Blizzard also hosts an Invitational tournament at their annual convention, Blizzcon, but their involvement with the eSports scenes for their record-setting games is nevertheless not on the same level of activity as that of Riot Games. This attitude, however, may change, as newcomers like Riot Games opt for a more active system of developer engagement in organizing and financing competitive gaming.

Sean ”Day[9]” Plott and The Day9 Daily

Web television turned out to be the perfect medium for me: I could talk about a game on air, and the viewers could talk back to me on chat. And that was a ton of fun because the StarCraft community was full of brilliant, hilarious, nice gamers. I started with a couple hundred live viewers—mostly hard core community members—and then before I knew it, the live audience was in the thousands and the views of the old archived episodes were in the hundreds of thousands. And I was getting emails not just from StarCraft players, but from Halo players, and MMO players and console gamers, and even girlfriends of casual players. It was amazing. - Interview with Sean Plott in Forbes magazine (2011)

Sean “Day9” Plott, age 25, is a former StarCraft: Broodwar pro player who, since the release of StarCraft II in 2010, has risen to popularity as a caster-commentator and eSports personality. In 2011, Plott appeared on Forbes “Top 30 Under 30” list in the entertainment section, where he was described as being “one of the biggest names in the world of e-sports.”90 There were 130,000 live online viewers during a game Day9 cast at the recent MLG Pro Circuit in June 2011. In addition to his presence as a caster and commentator for StarCraft II tournaments, his webshow, “The Day9 Daily” found at day9.tv and livecast five nights a week via Twitch.tv, receives over five million monthly views.91 There are currently over 500 back episodes of the show available on Blip, YouTube, and iTunes, and the live show, usually an hour in length, streams to between 5 and 15 thousand viewers every night92 with rare exceptions, such as when Plott has tournament obligations. With the introductory catch- phrase “Welcome to the Day9 Daily, where we learn to be a better ,” the show's genre can be described as edutainment: its goal is to aid StarCraft II players into improving their gameplay skills.93

90 Dorothy Pomerantz, Michael K. Ozanian and David M. Ewalt, ”Top 30 Under 30,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/30-under30-12/30-under-30-12_entertainment.html [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 91 Website: Day[9]TV, ”JinkTV,” http://day9.tv/jinktv/ [checked 27 Apr 2012] 92 Ibid 93 Blizzard's Battle.Net functions on a ranked ladder-system in order to match-make players according to skill level, which is calculated in a complex fashion based on a variety of information gathered from a player's match history, starting with an initial league placement based on 5 unranked placement matches. The ladder tiers are called 'leagues' and divided into Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond,

24 This does not mean the show is all cut and dry number-crunching and technical talk: Sean Plott is known and liked for his tendency to goof off, derail his episodes into tangents, and tell personal (usually humorous) stories from his past and day-to-day life. As Plott himself points out on interview: “We actually get a ton of emails from viewers who tell us that they don’t even play the game but that they love watching StarCraft as an eSport and they watch religiously to appreciate the game more.”94 He was even known to have detailed his autobiography in the show's 100th episode, Day9 Daily #100, entitled “My Life of StarCraft,” during which Plott broke into tears several times while recounting the love and support he received from his mother and brother while trying to succeed as a professional StarCraft: Brood War player.95

Illustration 6: A still of Sean "Day9" Plott dancing during episode #205 of The Day9 Daily Source: day9.tv

The personal touch Plott puts into his Daily has very likely been a significant factor in his rise to fame: each hour-long episode streamed on a nightly basis, during which Plott often interacts spontaneously with the show's livechat, imbues his webshow with a sense of intimacy, friendship, and liveness. Another aspect of this interaction is the show's once-a-week special, the “Funday Monday,” where he reviews a selection of fan-submitted match replays that have been played according to an outline

Master, and Grandmaster (the Grandmaster tier functions by invitation only for top-performing players in the Master's League, and unlike the other leagues, has a set number of exactly 200 members). There is one ladder system each for European, North American, and Korean accounts. For a comprehensive rundown of Battle.net's ladder system, visit http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php? topic_id=195273 94 Paul Tassi, ”Sean "Day[9]" Plott Talks Starcraft, eSports and Nerd Pride,” Forbes, 9 Jun 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/09/06/sean-day9-plott-talks-starcraft-esports-and-nerd- pride/2/ [checked 27 Apr 2012]. 95 Understandably, many viewers reacted with joy and inspiration, but also with a measure of jealousy when hearing Plott recount his family's support of his career choice, as parents more commonly consider gaming to be escapism or a waste of time at best, and a violent or dangerous influence at worst. This is highlighted in the mock-up rap song “Day9 Made Me Do It” (to the tune of Ice Cube's 2008 single, “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It”) by Suspensemusic, whose lyrics recount “If I had support like he did growing up, I could be a pro-gamer, not rapping 'bout this stuff.” Song located at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns6G8QYQJtk

25 detailed on the Monday prior. For every Funday Monday, Plott invents an absurd rule to be used by his viewers in a match on the Battle.net ladder, which usually results highly unorthodox and entertaining matches due to the bizarre restrictions or commands imposed. Funday Mondays are designed to be both silly and entertaining while still educational, as they train players's adaptive and reactive skills when faced with unexpected circumstances in-game. The show has another once-a-week special known as “Newbie Tuesdays,” where Plott specifically analyzes selected replays sent in to him from low-league players, in order to more specifically offer suggestions to struggling low-level players.

Naturally, entrepreneur Sean Plott does not work alone. His career choice itself was likely influenced by the success of his elder brother, Nick Plott, who is a professional caster via GOM.TV (a popular South Korean streaming service). In 2010, a year before graduating with a Master's of Fine Arts and Interactive Media from Harvey Mudd College, Sean Plott and fellow graduate Eric Burkhart founded the company Jink.tv, “capitalizing on innovations in internet broadcasting technology,”96 for which The Day9 Daily is considered a flagship. According to their website, “Jink.TV also produces gaming events, gaming materials, manages shoutcasters and pro gamers, and consults to game publishers and gaming communities on game design and .”97 In an interview with Forbes, Sean Plott stresses: I should point out that I don’t produce the show alone even though it is my face you see on air. I’m lucky because I have a small group of dedicated people working with me behind the scenes to handle technical issues (you’d be amazed how much time and energy maintaining a website or encoding and distributing the show takes) and business issues (legal, booking and contracts.) I also have fantastic business partners in Justin.tv (now Twitch.TV) and Blip.tv, who have both been incredibly supportive.98

Day9, while a unique example, is still one caster among many for StarCraft II. John “TotalBiscuit” or “TotalHalibut” Bain (website cynicalbrit.com) is known as “The UK's #1 variety gaming commentator,” and in addition to casting-commentating StarCraft II matches, runs a YouTube channel that delivers game-based video content 6 days a week, produced by himself, his spouse, and a colleague. The channel has over 670,000 subscribers and over 232 million video views.99 Mike “Husky” Lamond is another such entrepreneurial StarCraft caster-commentator-webshow creator with similar YouTube channel statistics, at over 630,000 subscribers and over 293 million video views.100 In 2010, Husky and colleague Kurt Hugo Scheider created a band entitled Nerd Alert, which has to-date

96 Day[9]TV, op. cit., http://day9.tv/jinktv/ 97 Ibid 98 Paul Tassi, op. cit., http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/09/06/sean-day9-plott-talks-starcraft- esports-and-nerd-pride/3/ 99 ”TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit,” http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut?ob=0 [channel statistics checked 30 Apr 2012]. 100 ”HuskyStarcraft - StarCraft 2,” http://www.youtube.com/user/HuskyStarcraft [channel statistics checked 30 Apr 2012].

26 produced four StarCraft-themed songs complete with music videos parodying recent pop hits, such as “Banelings” (a parody of Justin Biebers “Baby”), or “Void Rays” (parodying Rebecca Black's “Friday”). The songs are purchasable on iTunes, and their videos currently have over 14 million combined YouTube views.

Illustration 7: Sean "Day9" Plott (right) casting a game with Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham (left), a former Quake 3 proplayer, at the recent MLG Pro Circuit Winter Championship 2012. This casting combination is sometimes referred to by fans as “DayJWheat:” a combination of the casters's names, as well as an in-joke referring to Day9 Daily #200 when Plott accidentally referred to the letter “J” as a number. Sponsor Full Sail University (aforementioned) is currently being shown on the monitors behind. Source: Taken by author during the tournament's livestream via Twitch.tv

Televised or Online Casting?

The YouTube channel of one of the world's most successful sports television networks, the ESPN or Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, has less than one third of either TotalBiscuit or Husky's channel subscribers, at only 200,000.101 I do not mean to imply that the latter are more popular than the ESPN, but rather to highlight that online viewers and television viewers may still be considered segregated categories – at least when it comes to how media companies organize their target demographic. It is my impression that just as channel hits for a global network such as the ESPN may be lower than those for an entrepreneur with no prior sports casting experience, such as Husky, televised eSports events may be unnecessary or even inherently incompatible in the era of streaming and webcasting.

101 ”ESPN,” http://www.youtube.com/user/espn?ob=4 [channel statistics checked 30 Apr 2012].

27 This impression has been influenced by a variety of factors. Online and offline viewership is often tied to different age-groups and demographics with different media consumption habits. The PC-based nature of modern eSports is in itself more compatible with online viewing. Inadequate or mismanaged platform cross-over attempts by media corporations, or inflexible broadcasting policies from the past may dissuade future attempts at televising eSports tournaments. As we saw with the example of News Corp's failed Championship Gaming Series, even costly and seemingly well-networked attempts can and do misfire, encouraging media conglomerates to invest instead in acquisitions and partnership deals with already popularized online eSports communities, rather than attempt to create their own in a different venue. As a timely example of this, on April 17th 2012, CBS Interactive, a division of the CBS Corporation, announced partnership deals with Twitch.tv and the MLG, granting them advertising, promotional and sponsorship rights to Twitch.tv and its 16 million users, and exclusive online broadcasting rights to the MLG's Pro Circuit tournaments.102

Perhaps televised and online casting are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Both have been prominent in South Korea in the past. There is no doubt, however, as to the current supremacy of online casting when it comes to eSports, because a televised presence is currently barely existent. Is this likely to change? When asked about the future of eSports casting and the role television might play, Sean “Day9” Plott delivered a interesting outlook:

With major events now breaking 100,000 concurrent online viewers, and over 20,000 live attendees, professional StarCraft matches already have the viewership numbers they need for television. Being on television would certainly bring a lot of mainstream attention and help defeat the misconception that professional gaming is a geek niche.

On the other hand, traditional television may not be able to deliver the eSports experience as well as internet television. Watching content at a computer allows the audience to engage continuously with one another in chatrooms, forums and social media—and that appears to be a key component of their enjoyment. Word of mouth is powerful, promotional efforts often go viral, and viewership numbers for online shows are high. It may just be that eSports will be the phenomenon that will help propel web television into mainstream Western culture.103

Plott identifies some key elements that I feel bind modern eSports to a predominantly online presence – namely, its interactivity and target demographic (“geek” subculture). Therefore, when it comes to the mainstreamification of either eSports via a television presence or webTV via the growing popularity of eSports, I feel this implies an inherent incompatibility – at least with the eSports structure we have today. As mentioned in my bachelor's thesis, early adopters

102 Major League Gaming, op. cit., http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/major-league-gaming- partners-with-cbs-interactive 103 Paul Tassi, op. cit., http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/09/06/sean-day9-plott-talks-starcraft- esports-and-nerd-pride/5/

28 of new technology (and I argue, new forms of entertainment by extension) are often alienated when that technology breaches the 'mainstream' market.104 Part of the fundamental appeal behind eSports communities is their intimate nature, as exemplified by the popularity of Plott's daily webshow. I believe that a significant aspect of the popularity of individual eSports casters, commentators, and pro players is the personal touch: daily updates, one-person webshows, daily life anecdotes, and own opinions. Their co-presence is indeed eSports currency. Compare this to ESPN's YouTube presence, which essentially amounts to a faceless corporate logo:

YouTube Channel Descriptions: ESPN: ESPN is the leading multinational, multimedia sports entertainment company featuring the broadest portfolio of multimedia sports assets with over 50 business entities.

Husky: High Definition StarCraft and other gaming footage. Subscribing is free and is the best way to help me out... for reals. Hello and welcome to my channel! Gaming is my life and my life is gaming :D!

TotalHalibut (TotalBiscuit): The UK's #1 variety gaming commentator. I do not take requests. I do not create WTF is videos about old games. I do not make Minecraft videos. Content 6 days a week, day off on Sunday.

Day9: Starcraft 2 strategy from a 12-year veteran and top player. Now with Diablo 3 and other video games!

Could a 'mainstream' eSports company still provide, or sell itself on the presence of a personal touch? Or would an even greater increase to its current audience of hundreds of thousands replace its internet personalities with a more ESPN-like presence? It is my belief that the current popularity of eSports is riding on its appeal as a niche, even if it is a large niche; and that, much as with the casual/mainstream versus hardcore/old school dichotomy in the modern game industry,105 a mainstreamification of eSports could lead to responses of elitism and resentment from the pioneering supporters of the medium, should they feel betrayed by the changes that arise when a niche medium goes for mass appeal.

Esports tournaments, as we have seen, do enjoy A-list corporate sponsors, from computer

104 Dee Majek, The Cinematisation of Games: Aesthetic and Commercial Convergence in the Film and Game Industries (BA thesis Department of Cinema Studies, University of Stockholm, 2011,), 31.

Referencing: David Wesley and Gloria Barczak, Innovation and Marketing in the Video Game Industry, (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Group, 2010), http://www04.sub.su.se:2124/lib/sthlmub/docDetail.action? docID=10392158 [checked 30 Dec 2012], 1. 105 Dee Majek, op. cit.

Referencing: Mikołaj Dymek, Industrial Phantasmagoria: Subculture Interactive Cinema Meets Mass Cultural Media of Simulation (Doc. Thesis Industrial Economics and Management, Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, 2010), 166.

29 hardware manufacturing giants such as Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, to the Coca-Cola Company, to multinational electronics conglomerates like Sony. These sponsors contribute to tournament prizepools in exchange for background logo displays during casting and advertisements between matches, but they are not tournament organizers. As might be expected, those best suited to the organization and operation of eSports tournaments have thus far been companies founded with that specific intention in mind; as well as game developers, publishers, and certainly not least, gaming communities. The growing popularity of eSports is attractive for companies and corporations of all sorts, and the history of this relatively new market has been carved by the efforts of multinational conglomerates and students in their 20's alike.

At the root of all of this, though, are still the games, the players, and the viewers that flock to watch. After the final match of the GSL Season 2 Championship in November 2010, “GOM TV translator John (Jun Kyu "Junkka" Park) gave an impassioned speech that touched a nerve with thousands of people:”

First of all, I want to say that I have great respect for NesTea, not just because he won the tournament, but because this guy had the courage to do what he wanted to do, and prove he was right. I'm saying this because too many people, even in Korea, consider playing games a waste of time. I myself was unemployed for two years—about a half, a year and a half—before I joined GOM. All I did was play games at home, and my friends would say that I'm wasting my life. Well, who's laughing now? I ask them: "Can you honestly say, do you like your job?" And I ask them: "Do you have a fan who draws a fan art just for you?" That shuts them up.

So every time you feel ashamed of being a nerd because your friends, teachers, neighbours, or even parents think gaming's a waste of time, you remember: there's no such thing as wasting life as long as you have the courage to do what you like and be passionate about it. You remember: if NesTea listened to all of those criticisms, he wouldn't be standing there with a trophy. And you remember that even if you feel nobody around you supports you, I, Jay, , Tasteless, and everyone at GOM will support you. Why? Because we believe in e-Sports.106 107

There would certainly be a powerful sense of accomplishment in tearing down negative stereotypes about gaming, were eSports to go 'mainstream.' But would it be more powerful than the passionate appeal of the underdog? A speech such as Junkka's imbues his company with a powerful cocktail of audience interaction, personal touch, and care and support for their fans. I am not questioning the

106 Jeremy Reimer, op. cit., http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/the-dawn-of-starcraft-e-sports- come-to-the-world-stage.ars/2 107 Lim “NesTea” Jae Duk is not affiliated with Nestle or the beverage Nestea. According to an interview via GOM TV, he chose the ID “NesTea” because there happened to be a Nestea bottle on his desk when he was making his StarCraft 2 account.

Interview With Lim Jae-Duck (NesTea), video located at: http://www.gomtv.net/2010gslopens2/gomcam/1258 [checked 30 Apr 2012].

30 sincerity of Junkka's speech: a reserved and generally quiet individual, his words shocked and struck a cord with eSports viewers because he described a struggle with discrimination that many, if not most gamers experience. At the same time, however, the speech has undeniable public relations value. It intimates a very personal relationship between streaming service GOM TV and its viewers: even should your closest friends and family members belittle you for your choice of hobby or lifestyle, GOM and its casters will support you – or so Junkka claims.

If we further compare this speech to the CGS's failed attempts with casting from the Playboy Mansion, we may conclude that an emotional appeal about overcoming difficulties that viewers can identify with, such as facing the social stigma surrounding gaming, can be a more effective method of forging a company-customer connection than generalized sexual appeal, based not on the viewers' experiences as gamers, but on assumptions about their age, gender, and sexuality (18 to 35, white, male, heterosexual). The CGS's sexual pandering misfires because it stretches out into presumptive generalizations (men watch eSports, men buy Playboy magazines, therefore the two are compatible), rather than inwards into the personal experiences of eSports viewers (gamers are often ridiculed for their choice of hobby, therefore we should offer support). Naturally, the mode of broadcasting is also crucial: GOM is an online streaming service, while the CGS had only a minimal online presence. Here, likewise, the attempt at translocating an online audience into an offline audience is likely not as apt a business strategy as catering to the desires of an already-existent online audience. Alternatively, attempting to popularize an online-based form of entertainment among an offline audience unfamiliar with the concept, and using Playboy bunnies as the proverbial grease in the gears, suggests a severe disconnect in the CGS's comprehension of customer wants and needs. GOM's official partnership with game developer and producer giant Blizzard is undoubtedly another significant factor in their current success with eSports streaming. And so we've come full circle: the technological, social, and business aspects of eSports seem to make online casting a better match than televised casting. CBS Interactive's brand new partnership deals with webcasting service Twitch.tv and the MLG only support this; as does SVT's recent streaming of the Dreamhack Eizo Open Bracket tournament online via Sveriges Television Play (SVT Play), rather than on broadcast television.

31 Conclusions

In the realm of web video, whether a producer's show has aired on television or in the theatres is a poor judge of professionalism. Likewise, the assumption that online video is equivalent to amateur video has proven to be inadequate. Web TV producers, independent or niche though they may be, can be professional film-makers in the highest sense of the word. While a sense of intimacy and the personal address are said to be characteristic of traditional television, they are also in fact significant aspects of the popularity of webshows like “The Nostalgia Critic” and “The Angry Video Game Nerd,” both of which are largely based on the nostalgia factor of referring to viewers' common childhood experiences with media consumption. This 'personal touch' is likewise of importance for eSports casters like Sean "Day9" Plott, whose daily webshow mixes comedic, slice-of-life accounts of his personal experiences and embarrassments, with detailed analyses of professional gaming strategies and techniques. Entrepreneurial video-makers like James Rolfe and Sean Plott have carved out careers for themselves as their online viewerbases swell into the millions, and small and large companies alike flock to set up what they hope to be mutually beneficial advertising and distribution networks. Media conglomerates such as , News Corp., CBS, etc. have been swift to acquire online networks whenever these sites and networks reach a degree of popularity deemed of financial interest. Blip.tv and Twitch.tv are stellar examples of online viewing alternatives (or complements) to YouTube, which thus far remain independently owned. Both Blip and Twitch started small, but quickly expanded into world-leaders in webseries hosting and game streaming respectively, filling audience demands not previously met by YouTube.

While it is certainly true that not everyone is a producer in the internet age, small, independent producers can and have tapped into audiences previously gone unsated by large-scale productions. Though there may be no easily-traced, linear developments in the realm of web video, forcible acquisitions and buy-outs do seem to be the method of choice for media conglomerates that have missed out on the monetization of a certain audience, or that have been unable to tap it despite attempts, such as News Corp and the Championship Gaming Series. More often than not, if a non- affiliate company rises to prominence outside of their jurisdiction, acquisitions occur like clockwork – as was the case with MTV and GameTrailers, or News Corp and IGN. Rather than absorbing independent production companies such as Cinemassacre, media oligarchs are more likely to move to acquire their distribution networks. It may only be a matter of time before Blip and Twitch are seized, as their ability to connect independent film-makers directly with A-list sponsors and advertisers

32 currently displaces the importance of media conglomerates with regards to sponsorship and distribution. On the other hand, internet-based corporations such as Google may yet again be swifter to action; and on the horizon, the phenomenon of crowd-funding websites for media productions has perhaps yet to come into its own. Though I have explored a small handful of popular webseries and webshow examples, there are many others yet to be examined, and more much to be said on eSports casting, both past and present. While industrial changes in the media landscape are perhaps not so revolutionary as cybertarianism would suggest, new platforms and players are emerging, and the ownership of hosting and distribution networks are in a state of flux. This, coupled with the recent rise of crowd-funding in film, gaming, and other media, posits a fascinating development for future study.

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Leonard, Devin. ”Calling master chief.” CNN Money, 21 Aug 2008, http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/05/technology/mlg.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2008082113 [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Major League Gaming. ”Partners.” Website: Major League Gaming, http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/partners [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Mass Luminosity. ”Angel Munoz.” Website Mass Luminosity, http://www.massluminosity.com/angel/ [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Meyer, Ann. ”Growing breed of accidental entrepreneur has recession to thank for business creation.” Chicago Tribune, 6 Jul 2009, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2009-07 - 06/news/0907050116_1_kauffman-foundation-entrepreneurship-older-entrepreneurs [checked 26 Apr 2012].

Pennycook, Jeremy. “Video Games And Their Evolution Into A New Breed Of Spectator Sport.” National Public Radio, 29 Jul 2010, http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/07/29/128846098/starcraft-placeholder [checked 27 Apr 2012].

37 Pomerantz, Dorothy, Michael K. Ozanian and David M. Ewalt. ”Top 30 Under 30.” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/30-under30-12/30-under-30-12_entertainment.html [checked 27 Apr 2012].

PR Newswire. ”MTV Networks Acquires GameTrailers.com.” Website PR NewsWire, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mtv-networks-acquires-gametrailerscom-55710812.html [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Reimer, Jeremy. ”The Dawn of Starcraft: e-Sports come to the world stage.” arstechnica, 31 Mar 2011, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/the-dawn-of-starcraft-e-sports-come-to-the-world- stage.ars/1 [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Schonfeld, Erick. “Blip.tv Lands A Big Distribution Deal With YouTube And Others; Redesigns Dashboard.” Techcrunch, 28 Jun 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/28/bliptv-lands-a-big- distribution-deal-with-youtube-and-others-redesigns-dashboard/ [checked 26 Apr 2012].

ScrewAttack Entertainment LLC. ”About Us.” Website ScrewAttack, section published 18 Jun 2011, http://www.screwattack.com/about-us [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Stetler, Brian. “Online Video Start-Ups Seek to Carve Out a Place Beside YouTube.” The New York Times, 5 Jun 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/business/media/06blip.html?pagewanted=all [checked 26 Apr 2012].

Takenaka, Kiyoshi. “Update 2 – Nintendo sets $85 bln high score, thanks to Wii, DS.” Reuters U.S, 15 Oct 2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/10/15/nintendo-market-value-idUST30751820071015 [checked 4 Apr 2012].

Tassi, Paul. ”Sean "Day[9]" Plott Talks Starcraft, eSports and Nerd Pride.” Forbes, 9 Jun 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2011/09/06/sean-day9-plott-talks-starcraft-esports-and-nerd- pride [checked 27 Apr 2012].

Teamliquid. Website: Team Liquid, http://www.teamliquid.net [checked 29 Apr 2012].

Teller, Siim. ”Dailymotion opens up fan funding for film makers.” FlattrBlog, 2 May 2012, http://blog.flattr.net/2012/05/dailymotion-flattr-integration/ [checked 17 May 2012].

38 Printed Books and Articles:

Miller, Toby. “Cybertarians of the World Unite.” In The YouTube Reader, edited by Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009, 424 – 440.

Uricchio, William. “The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television.”In The YouTube Reader, edited by Patrick Vonderau and Pelle Snickars. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009, 24 – 39.

Kirsner, Scott. The Future of Web Video. CinemaTech: 2007.

Videos:

2006: Comebacks, Viral Video, Theater Geeks. (MTV, 2006) http://www.mtv.com/videos/news/125775/viral-videos-infect-the-mainstream.jhtml

Thank You. (James Rolfe, 2011) http://cinemassacre.com/2011/11/11/thank-you/

ROLFE: A No-Budget Dream (2002). Uploaded by JamesNintendoNerd, 22 mar 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XacN05uJY00

Interview With Lim Jae-Duck (NesTea). (GOM TV, 2010) http://www.gomtv.net/2010gslopens2/gomcam/1258

39 Stockholms universitet/Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm Telefon/Phone: 08 – 16 20 00 www.su.se 40