World Cyber Games 2008

I didn’t post for a while since I was involved in a quite demanding project. Here an update. I visited World Cyber Games 2008 a while ago. I took some photos. You can see them here.

It was different from what I expected. First, it was much smaller then I thought. It was just one hall and there was not a lot of people. Especially if you compare it to Games Convention. Esports still seems to be interesting only for quite the niche audience. Also, the overall presentation of the matches was lacking. For somebody not familiar with the rules, the matches are almost incomprehensible. I can understand that online but I thought they would would do something different when going in front of a live audience. Too bad since I wrote about that in my intermediate exam at KISD and it still has not changed since then.
The general experience is that you walk into a hall, there are a lot of fenced-off islands of computers. The islands are empty except of maybe one guy playing. And then you have a small crowd behind that single guy. You have no idea who he is and what he is doing. Practice? Then, there are two big stages and if you are lucky, you will accidentally stumble into a somewhat important match. I haven’t seen any schedule anywhere but then again I wasn’t looking. We saw a bit of the Counter-Strike Quarter-Finals and a bit of one of the Warcraft III Semi-Finals. Warcraft III had a huge audience (for a change). Counter-Strike was more interesting but still didn’t work anywhere as well as real sports. Sudden, random cuts between different perspectives made it impossible to understand what was going on.
But then again, there was this cool but useless Colani Truck

and I found that hilarious (I even sent it to Photoshop Disasters but they didn’t feature it yet and they featured it!).

On other news, I just finished Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick (In Germany, there is a very cool Philip K. Dick collection I’m … collecting). I found it interesting. Quite Akira-esque at the end which is impressive since it was written in the 60ies.
The thing I read before that was Lem’s Fiasco. Now that was a disappointment (ha-ha). I heard so much about it and was expecting some serious revelation. What I got was some descent, standard Sci-Fi but as far as world-changing literature goes, Solars is THE book to end all Sci-Fi. Don’t get me wrong, Fiasco wasn’t worse then, say, Dr. Bloodmoney. I just had my expectations pretty high up.
So right now, I’m reading Snow Crash. Filling my voids one by one.