Play as Spectacle
When do you think the first game tournament with an audience happened? October 19, 1972, at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It wasn't organized by a game company but by Stewart Brand, a writer for Rolling Stone. Its name was the "Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics." First prize was a year's subscription to the magazine and free beer. The winner was Bruce Baumgart, a doctoral student, and a nine-thousand-word article about it ran in the December 7 issue that same year (the article can still be read in the archives today). In other words, Spacewar!, sitting on this map's "onto the screen" band, had an audience within ten years of being born. It became an industry much later. Starting in 1999, Korean cable channels began broadcasting StarCraft tournaments with the conventions of established sports coverage — commentary, a studio, interviews — and by 2000 "professional gamer" was recognized as an occupation. In Japan, a culture of live commentary grew out of Niconico Douga starting in December 2006. And then there's Twitch. It wasn't built "to be watched." It began as an experiment by Justin Kan streaming his own life 24 hours a day, and when users flocked to stream games on it anyway, the company spun off a game-focused version on June 6, 2011 — the site as we know it now. The places we watch were, more often than not, never designed for watching.