I’m no hardcore gamer, that’s for sure. But I have my share of gaming history. I think my first game was Rygar, which I played on a pc with a monochromatic monitor (yellowish). That was in the late 80′s. Then eventually, as many kids of my generation, we had the Nintendo. Wow, that was high tech. In any case, I’m not here to talk about my childhood. The gaming industry has tremendously progressed and although I’m not a hardcore gamer, I do appreciate the creativity and brains that are put in making game titles. There’s some really awesome stuff out there. For instance, the other day I stumbled on this article that shows a video of a physics engine. Wow, that is just insane. Having a physics background, I’m no stranger to particle systems and numeric simulations, so this kind of stuff gets my attention.
Well, another aspect of gaming that got my attention lately is gaming tournaments. There’s a huge gaming community out there and there are some companies that specialize in organizing video game tournaments – some of which are HUGE. Take the World Cyber Games for instance. It’s literally the Olympics for e-sports. In addition to the WCG, you have multiple other organizations and events of varying size that hold live tournaments. But what I noticed is that most of them, as far as I can tell, take place in the USA or different places in Asia and Europe. What about Canada? Aren’t there enough hardcore gamers to participate in such events, or is it just that we don’t have organized events?
Thankfully though, there’s one tournament taking place this fall in Montreal, and promises to be quite nice with over 400 participants. It’s the WCG Canada tournament organized and hosted by LAN ETS (http://wcg2010.lanets.ca/). It’s taking place September 3 – 5 at ETS school. I’ll be passing by to see the action. But that’s one event. What about others?
Is it just that I haven’t heard about other serious events? Are Canadians just not hardcore gamers? Let me know what you think.
