A while back it was announced that CBS, home to a large portion of nationally televised NFL games, was going to air four hour-long episodes from the WSVG competitions. Most of us saw this, in general, as a good thing. When finding out about the games to be included (Guitar Hero II, World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, Fight Night Round 3 and Quake 4) the reaction was a bit mixed. How would PvP action look to people at home? Where's Counter-Strike and Starcraft (two of the most popular competition games)? Personally, I was excited to see the shows and how they'd be covered. Hit the jump for my impressions of the first airing.

Right off the bat I saw that the producers for the show need to learn that you can't force something to be cool. It doesn't matter how young and pretty your hosts are, if they're a tool, they're a tool. I'm sure these folks are probably decent people but the script for their stand ups was pun-ridden trash.

After a short segment describing what the WSVG is and what games were to be played they hopped right into the Guitar Hero II finals. This immediately struck me as a ploy to get most of the audience sucked in to the action. No one can blame the producers for doing this. GH II is the most recognizable and audience-friendly game in the competition. How much of a ploy it would be only became obvious after the two finalists took their turns, but I'll get to that in a second. Shortly after introducing the game and "how it's played" we were told that the finalists would be judged on three different accounts: Difficulty, Accuracy and Showmanship.

I'll give you a second to read that again.

Why you need judges for difficulty and accuracy is beyond me. Showmanship shouldn't even be part of the competition, it should only matter how you play the game. That's it. The difficulty judge tried to justify his existence by explaining to the contestants how they made it harder on themselves (playing behind their head, etc.) and while that's minimally understandable the girl who was the accuracy judge might as well have just stayed at home and phoned it in. All she did was read what the screen said after the song was over. As for showmanship, if there's anything to be judged that the game doesn't supply you with already, it's this. Should it be? In my opinion, no. However, my opinion did not factor in to the decision to include it, so it's there.

Even though there was a starting field of 32 (an online write up told me that, not the show) we only get to see the final two: a guy in a black shirt and another guy who went by "Wulfe" or something like that. When the guys played their songs the show kept cutting away from the in-game fretboard. That's what we need to see to be able to make any kind of sense out of what's going on. Even more than that, we need to see the full song and not a cut up version. "Psychobilly Freakout" is what, two and half minutes? Evidently that's way too long for the show. "YYZ" was even shorter and more chopped up. The two guys ended up with a tie score, which is where the true nature of how much this a ploy to make the show more exciting showed its ugly head. Do they go right into the tiebreaker? Nope, they saved that for the end of the show, of course.

During the Fight Night segment they kept cutting to these terribly posed shots of the two finalists like they were in a real boxing match. The producers also saw the need to disturb the player by talking to them in between the rounds. Again, they cut up the fight and broke the flow of the match.

Televised PvP in The Burning Crusade, as done by CBS, is truly awful. Most hardcore players seem to play zoomed out as far as possible in order to see everything that's going on around them, which makes everything tiny on television. Also, these matches aren't short so again, they were drastically cut up. The one good thing they did was to add a lower third graphic that constantly displayed the health bars of each team member. The thing is, with how much the match jumped around these health bars were constantly changing. As anyone who follows this site knows, I've spent A LOT of time playing WoW and I had NO idea what the hell was going on. How's Joe Schmoe viewer at home supposed to understand? Oh yeah, there was a little, tiny graphic in the corner that was like a live glossary of certain terms that the announcers were using. I guess that was supposed to help.

Quake 4...no where in sight. Evidently CBS didn't want to air "violent content" on a Sunday afternoon. It's a good thing that NFL games (and all their beer commercials) aren't aired on Sunday after....oh yeah.

Back to GH II. The tiebreaker was set up as a face off competition like you'd play in the game. The judges chose the song, "Jordan" on expert. To their credit, the two finalists were pretty amazing at it. In a final bout of riggedness the last judge to give their score decided the victor and ended the drawing-out and milking of GH II's popularity for the sake of viewership.

I give full credit to CBS for even airing the WSVG because there is an audience for televised gaming competition, BUT this is not the way to do it. It felt forced and a bit tacky. You never saw ESPN doing anything special when they started televising Hold'Em and look where it is now. Dedicate a single hour-long show to one game's competition so you can show full songs or full PvP matches. The audience will come in time. They're not going to win anyone over by confusing the hell out of them.

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