I am one of two Directors of the VGA along with my colleague, Dominic Mulroy, who invited me to take up the job. The VGA is an alliance of over sixty gaming centres centred in the UK. It acts as a consortium purchaser, event organiser and advice house for all the independent companies. This ranges from obtaining the commercial licenses from game publishers to allow Gaming Centres to charge for game use, arranging discounted hardware and software purchasing, to the more glamourous side of running leagues, tournaments and other sponsored projects.

I tend to spend time on all areas of the business, but my passion is, of course, in the leagues and tournaments. We’ve been refining and improving our Counter-Strike league, which is now into its third full season with 35 location-specific teams taking part in four divisions.

Also the Samsung World Cyber Games (UK) is coming up soon on 3-6 October 2002. As a concept, a Cyber Games with teams from all around the world is just what we need to move ESports forward – for one thing, it gets supporters interested in which teams will win, and also it’s incredibly telivisable. Our UK tournament will be spectacular, we’ve booked out the largest exhibition stand (4,500 square feet) at Earls Court as the central attraction of the Games Matrix within Stuff Live 2002. There’ll be 70 gaming PC’s for the tournament as well as 20 Xbox’s for various competitions that’ll go on each day. On the spectator side we’ll have a main stage for spotlighting major games throughout the day as well as various other ongoing activities. I think placing a gaming competition in such a high profile location is just what we need to get more mainstream attention to this emerging sport.

The tournament will include five games: Counter-Strike, Quake 3: Arena, Unreal Tournament, Age of Empires II Conquerors Expansion and Fifa 2002 World Cup. There will be a series of offline and online qualifiers too, you can get more information on the website: http://wcg.vga.org.uk

While the VGA has only been around for three years now, the actual profit making company with full time employees is only a year old so we’re still in the process of developing our relationships with all the manufacturers and other companies in this industry. We have achieved a huge amount in the time so far, especially our work with software publishers and proving to them how effective gaming centres and tournaments are at showing off their games. The game-playing industry (rather than the gaming industry) is still very young and we’re definitely going to see a lot of changes and growth in the future.

The VGA charges a monthly membership fee to gaming centres, although this is repaid many times over by all the services we provide including the commercial licenses for software and all the various promotional campaigns including a large amount of free hardware and software. For the events, leagues and tournaments we find various sponsors to cover the expenses. Over the last year we’ve found that sponsors are returning to gaming now that we can prove that the marketing does create incredible results.

Interesting question. If I only wanted to make money in life I’d go back to a city job. I enjoy the work I do and I find a lot of it incredibly rewarding. Moving ESports forward has been my cause for a while now and I still want to see top computer gamers considered sportsmen. I’d definitely continue working on the VGA even if I didn’t need the financial income.

With ESReality it was never about money, I’ve always done that because I wanted to do my part in the ESports community so that wouldn’t change.

I’d probably have a beach house in Hawaii with a very expensive laptop and wireless Internet access! But seriously, I’d love to invest in ESReality and make it even more professional. I think the concept of getting users to contribute hasn’t fully been explored yet and we can still do some interesting things with the website. In the future I’d like to set up a reward scheme for the website where users that contribute good stuff are rewarded for their effort – maybe by allowing people to cash in their virtual money for real products from sponsors, or maybe just paying out cash for good content. I’ve got a load of ideas on how it could work, but I do need a bit more time and money to make it happen.

What’s the most satisfying thing about your day-to-day job?

There’s a lot of satisfaction in getting your own projects completed, particularly in running a good tournament. Also I particularly like working in untested waters as we are – creating new events and tournaments that have never been tried before.

What annoys you about e-sports?

I don’t think there’s anything particularly annoying about ESports. Players should probably be more accepting of changes as this is still a very young sport. Also everyone seems to want something for nothing!

You’ve played UT2K3 officially, what do you make of the game after having lanned up with real opponents?

To be quite honest I only played the game for a couple of hours against the other journalists at the media launch. The actual game is not revolutionary in my eyes. It’s the standard first person shooter, which has been done before a hundred times. I didn’t get any kind of rush from the actual game physics, movement, or weapons. However some of the game modes were clever, and the graphics are more advanced than anything we’ve seen yet. I love the way that the game loads instantly and you don’t have to wait ages to start playing.

None of this is relevant to ESports, though. The only way to find out if this is a good game for tournaments is by having matches and competitions. What makes a game good for ESports is slightly ambiguous and everyone has a different take on it. What is good about UT2K3 is that the designers have considered factors such as spectating the game and broadcasting the game, and are putting in tools to make this easier.

Is UT2K3 a pro-game in every sense?

Again I think that’s impossible to tell until people have tried playing serious matches. You don’t find the ESports-related problems until the game is stressed by some hardcore gamers!

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