Indian Gamers A Reality or a Fantasy

The strength of the e-sports community is now an industry, which cannot be ignored. It has become a force to reckon upon. Besides the increase in the number of tournaments organized and subsequent increase in the number of participants along with the skill-level of competitors there is another aspect of Counter Strike (CS), which cannot be ignored: the Indian aspect.

Since the rise of e-Sports in late 1999 and early 2000 CS has been the most dominating of all major team-based competitive gaming. The numbers of sponsors, ranging from Cybercafés to processor manufacturers, have caused more teams to go professional. However, all this has been happening in the more progressive countries, like USA, Sweden and more recently China. So what exactly do lesser countries, by gaming standards, like subcontinent countries like India and Pakistan, lack?

Indian competitive CS has over a thousand 15 to 25 years olds who wish to make competitive gaming their vocation - or at the very least, their hobby. Moreover, not just the average “Sunday only” hobby, but also their first or second priority during their free time, in comparison to watching TV for an adult. The competitive gaming spirit is present in every country in the world. Living in Pune, I have seen how CS has grown over the years. 5 years ago, CS was played by a handful, in cybercafés where the owner let them install the game and play against each other. Online gaming was not possible due to the very limited internet connection or maybe lack of interest in exploring the wider aspect of CS. Now in Pune alone there are over 700 gamers, who follow professional gamers worldwide, play online, and hope to somewhere along the line win a local or national LAN event. India has a relatively small (in comparison to Sweden, USA, and Russia) but growing CS community. However, the CS scene in India is growing at a very rapid rate. New players nowadays just learn the basics of the game and start their quest to become better or relatively “professional”. They watch demos of top teams to learn new spam spots, angles, flashbangs, and strats and try to instantly form a clan, based on players’ skills, to practice their newly acquired knowledge. This is a radical change from earlier clans formation patterns. Earlier, people normally played for a few months with his friends living in or around the same area, united by friendship more than by skill or experience and with the aspiration that his clan will represent India the 20XX edition of the World Cyber Games (WCG) or the more recently introduced (in India) Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC).

WCG and ESWC were the first international events which saw the participation of countries which had very little skill and even lesser facilities to provide big gamers! These countries knew they didn’t stand much of a chance to get very far. They were clearly underrated and clearly out-skilled at first, but these teams’ intentions were just to get a taste of what it’s like to face the best, play in almost perfect conditions, and learn. Most of these teams try to assimilate these new tactics fast, which in turn raises the bar for all the players in the country. The fact is they are confronted with teams that have played CS since 1.3 and these teams built up their aim, tactics, and game knowledge little by little through the years and long hours of practice. On the other side, you’ve got players who are getting improved tactics, game styles and experience really quickly, and that’s just what their idea for attending the tournament is.

The popularity of CS in India has still not reached its peak: insufficient internet bandwidth (even the best broadband connection of 512kbps has pings which range from 100 to 200 or more), very few sponsors (people consider competitive gaming child’s play and is considered to have no future), and very few major LAN events curb the efficient progress of emerging clans because they only face local teams, instead of top tier teams. Except for national qualifiers for WCG or ESWC, there aren’t enough events where the top teams clash. Many top gamers echo this sentiment. For example, Asim, in-game team leader of the clan Templars (winners of the Ahmedabad leg of ESWC-qualifiers). He says, “We look forward to playing the qualifiers for WCG and ESWC because these tournaments give us the right platform to implement our strategies and match our skills against the big teams here and also learn a trick or two from them.” This statement is a rather apt one and reflects the thoughts of most “middle-range” gamers in India.

However, not all is bleak for Indian e-sports community. With the emergence of better servers, being hosted in India and Singapore, the quality of gaming has increased dramatically. This is also giving Indians a platform to play against and interact with better and more professional gamers in Asia. Exchange of game strategy and playing styles will definitely help our gamers to perform at higher levels and hopefully see an Indian team at CPL sometime in the near future. Promotion is another aspect of CS which is on the rise. Larger tournaments are coming to the fore with big organization investing their money and actively taking part in organizing tournaments. All this is because these organizations realize that India is a place that cannot be ignored when it comes to looking for an increase in sales. Gamers have now started buying graphic cards, better mice, cloth and hard surface mouse-pads, headphones, etc. Hence, manufacturers have pinned down India to give a large boost to their sales and this in turn has proved to be an advantage for Indian gamers.

Moreover, the emergence of new teams such as a+e (winners ESWC India-qualifiers and India-qualifiers at WCG) to give stiff competition to the old strong holds of CS in India, namely ACID, MOD and DX, is a bright spot in e-sports here and gives all of us a glimmer of hope that someday the Indian e-sports community will produce a Complexity, SK or 3D or at the very least a Spawn, Frod or Miller. As I see it, India will put in a more than decent effort in WCG 2006 and even though we may not end up winning the tournament, we will definitely earn the due respect of fellow gamers worldwide. In conclusion, I give kudos to all Indian gamers who, despite all the setbacks and lack of facilities, still put in their heart and soul into practices and scrims and all this….….. Only for the love of ‘the’ game – Counter Strike!!!!!!!

By Piyush ‘knife’ Agrawal