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The World Series of Video Games, or WSVG, will be airing in several episodes on TV. Yet it's not siring where you'd think. G4? Try CBS.

Now playing for three hours on Saturday afternoons.

Kotaku reported that the series will be shown in four episodes spread out over several months, and each episode will be some kind of recap. Perhaps CBS is testing the waters to see if viewers bite, and they're afraid more robust coverage is too risky. I mean really, how many non-gamers are going to watch competitive games? Heck, I'm a gamer and if I watch PvP matches of The Burning Crusade, I have no idea what the heck is happening. And I've played WoW, just not the PvP aspect.

Kotaku says: "CBS plans to air footage of WSVG events on its CBS Sports Spectacular program. I know I'll be watching other people play video games instead of actually playing them myself for literally minutes at a time." It's interesting that they're choosing to show it on a sports show. I know we have terms like cyber athlete and e-sports, but to the rest of the world, videogames are not sports.

Whenever I've discussed the idea of games as a spectator sport with non-gamers, I've gotten two responses (usually simultaneously). The first is that it's a joke to suggest games can be sports. They almost find it insulting to the notion of a sport. The second is "Why would anyone want to watch people play videogames?"

To a certain extent, that question is quite legitimate. In sports, the human expression and emotion is tied directly into the action itself. With games, you can only really look at the gameplay or the player's face separately. Sure you could do picture-in-picture, but the integration of emotion and action just isn't there.

It's really a difficult sell in our culture. Even amongst the gamers, unless they play a game and know it well, they can't see the deeper stuff the pros are doing, which is what makes watching sports so fun. You want to see people do things that you can't do.

Anyway, here's the schedule:

7/29 - Louisville, Kentucky (covering 6/21-6/24)
8/19 - Dallas, Texas (covering 7/5-7/8)
11/17 - Los Angeles, California (covering 10/18-10/21)
12/15 - Jönköping, Sweden (covering 11/29-12/2)

Hey, thanks: Kotaku

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Blackbolt

Posted at: 06/04/07 at 6:45 PM PST

Oh dear gawd...? Video games a sport? That's an insult to all sports and athletes around the world. I like video games as much as the next gamer, but I agree with you Keast. Video games are not sports. Heck, I beat two of my friends who considers themselves "god" at Halo by pure luck of randomly throwing grenades and shooting at anything that moves. I also beat them in Soul Calibur by being cheap. I'm not great at either games, but I'm decent. Even Korea broadcast StarCraft as a national sport, but we know it's not a sport. But you definitely can get major cash by being in those types of tournaments though. CBS has gone to a new low trying to find any competition and broadcast it as a sport. Maybe they are desperate since they lost a lot of broadcasting rights to some of the major sports in the US.

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