Plan for Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr

Gamer Zone hosts the World Cyber Games for Wichita, Kansas and surrounding areas... instead of our usual $1000 tournaments, players now get to compete for thier part of a $400,000 wad of cash and prizes! (And of course some of my usual .plan stuff in here too ;-)

I'm stoked. Gamer Zone is going to be hosting the World Cyber Games local prelims for Wichita, Kansas (and anyone within driving distance :-) We've done a good number of local tournaments before, but, this is participating on a world wide scale. 1.2 million players are expected to compete this year. For anyone interested, here's the quick schedule of events:

June 11th - Counter Strike
June 16th - Counter Strike League Prelims Begin
June 25th - Halo 2
June 30th - Counter Strike League Begins (Last possible day to register!)
July 2nd - Warcraft III: Frozen Throne*
July 9th - Starcraft: Brood War*

(The * is because we don't normally have Warcraft or Starcraft - our license from Blizzard is a one-shot tournament authorization for the event, then we unload the games. I really want Blizzard to offer us licensing for a MUCH more reasonable cost than they do right now, something like how Valve does it. But I'm not holding my breath.)

You'll notice there's a League in there too - iGames called me last night and asked if we were interesting in hosting a World Cyber Games Counter Strike league. Gamer Zone's plan was to start a league immediately after the 11th - like on a Thursday night, and run it for like 8 - 10 weeks. Oddly enough, the called, and thier plan was EXACTLY what I had planned here locally already without discussing it with iGames or the WCG. Obviously this was just meant to be :-)

My next job tomarrow during the day will be to send out press releases to anyone who'll listen here in town ;-) Which makes me currious - what's the breakover point for "newsworthy" in the eyes of the various media outlets on a local level? I've sent out a press release or two before, but, we never had something that was really "Kick-Ass" to talk about. Games are now sporadically newsworthy these days - I guess this will be an interesting experment :-)

This also comes back to that interesting debate about when / if games will become more like a sport with amature, semi-pro, and pro athletes, sponsors, etc. Right now it's still a little hard to get sponsors for an event (we don't have any, but I haven't pushed real hard for it), but there are tourneys and tournament organizations that find corporate sponsors. I don't think things are quite "there" yet, but in another 5 years? I think it will finally happen. To me there's a fundamental problem with games going big-time sport - spectators. Right now it's not that exciting to watch most games. I've pondered a bit what could be done to enhance the experience for audiences, and really haven't come to any conclusions. Is there a way to do it?

I would have posted Game Design by Observation #2 - but it got lost. Twice. I've written it a third time on Saturday, but, didn't feel like posting it today for some reason. I'll post it this weekend sometime.

Content showed up for one of the games I worked on ages ago - Attack of the Goobers finally has it's boss models and textures. When I get it integrated (sometime this weekend also) I'll post a screenshot, and AotG will start it's Beta run. Yep - that means at IGC this year I'll have something to show. Actually, I should have two games to show :-)

Ok, I've shared my most exciting stuff for the week... now it's back to real work :-)