The Crowd Who Wasn't There

The Crowd Who Wasn’t There

WindandRain 2022-01-24 04:13:08

Five men take the center stage. They raise their hands to wave at the crowd. No doubt, they have been told to make what they are doing look jovial. They look at each other and laugh; none of them are taking it too seriously. The camera pans around them to reveal an entire wall’s worth of empty stadium chairs. Their silence is deafening. My first memory of watching the International Dota 2 Championship comes from 2013. The year after this memory, I began a short lived tradition of inviting all of my friends over to watch the tournament on a TV screen from my bedroom futon, but then I didn’t know how important the tournament would become to me because I watched that game from the client. And I don’t even actually remember what game it’s from, I just remember looking at a Storm Spirit walking along through the map. It wasn’t burned into me the same way Na’Vi vs iG was or Na’Vi vs Alliance from the 2014 grand finals were. What I remember is the caster opening their microphone and hearing the crowd, hundreds of voices, coming through that microphone, and someone typing in the spectator chat the three words “woah. The crowd.” Yeah, the crowd. It sent chills down my spine. This massive energy that came through my headphones pounded on my eardrums so powerfully that I can’t help but surrender to the cliche and call it ‘electric.’ Nothing else really does the trick. Maybe if I hadn’t been so formed by that first experience, I wouldn’t have been sitting at home, watching the International 10 streaming on Twitch, and feeling a jolt of sadness every time I heard that fake crowd churn through my speakers into my unhappy ear holes.

Also read: Valve .... Why You Do Dis?

I did not enjoy the fake crowd. I’m not saying I wanted a real one, I understand the necessity of no crowd, and I understand why—objectively speaking—it’s far better to have a fake crowd than no crowd at all. They understood in production the same thing I understood from my gamer chair. I also understand that it was very likely necessary to cancel the Major for the same reasons they couldn’t have a crowd at the tenth International. But it still made me sad. Whenever I mentioned this to my friends, they said, “what else were they supposed to do?” Nothing. They did exactly what they should have done. Aren’t I allowed, at least, to be sad about it? Recently, Valve canceled the winter major. Twitter has been awash with people who have various opinions about this, but there’s been a few trendy reactions that stick out to me. The first is that this was incredibly inconsiderate on the part of Valve considering many of these players rely on tournaments for income. Many players in NA in particular do not receive salaries from organizations. It’s kind of like the wild west of esports never ended for Dota; while League of Legends pros receive sizable salaries, Dota 2 players must strap their wallets to their hands, and keep their bank account open on another tab. Having a job and performing in any esport at the top level is impossible now; every tournament is a day at the races where you bet everything on your own horse. Even if you win you know you’ll be back next time. This results in a lot of fairly romantic stories. Rags to riches stories. The game itself is more thrilling when you know what the players have on the line; the money is what makes Dota 2 great and terrible. Would Team Spirit’s rise have been as powerful if they had not begun the tournament in such a small room? Then the tournaments are canceled, and a Valve representative allegedly refers to it as a passion project. People begin vocally wondering what they’ve been dedicating their lives to this video game for. Suddenly, everyone is smacked upside the head with some kind of class consciousness. They realize Valve doesn’t need The International, not nearly as much as they do, and they say, “Valve is a business, I understand; that’s fine” and I have to wonder. Is it? Is it fine? If you understand why Valve has to make the cold, calculated decisions that make them the most money, then why are you complaining in the first place? Meanwhile, the crowd that isn’t there looms large. An entire year of majors without applause. We all keep our eyes locked on the screen; in the end, Dota is still Dota. As a profit driven society struggles to deal with something that requires humanitarian action and not profit to deal with, we watch systems we thought would always be there collapse one after another. None of us want to pack ourselves into auditoriums and jump at the sound of someone coughing in the same way we’d jump at a gunshot. We don’t want people to get sick, we don’t want other people to get sick, but we are slow to let go of things that give us pleasure. Everyone in the modern world lives paycheck to paycheck in one way, or another, whether that paycheck has money or happiness. Are we asking Valve employees to walk the halls of the stadiums and auditoriums, empty of anyone to smile at them, tense with masks that make them have to speak louder to be heard, so we can have our tournaments? We say we understand that they have to make money, they’re a company, but at this point I think what we are really starving for is a little humanity. Everyone is suffering. Is it too much to ask that we put profit to the side for just a little bit and focus on getting through a tough time? If we can’t do that, then maybe it’s time to ask some harder questions.

If you enjoyed this piece, follow the author on Twitter at @JSMcQueen. Image courtesy of Valve.

The Crowd Who Wasn’t There

Latest Poll

first poll

Breaking News