CoDeSports Championship

As you may know, Dan works for Activision, specifically Beachhead Studios which puts out Call of Duty: Elite. This tends to be awesome. We've gone to some epic parties and of course met some rad people. Although, it is a lot of work for Dan, especially when a new game is announced/released, he loves his job which makes me very happy! It makes having to live in LA okay.

Activision recently put on an event with Treyarch and Xbox for eSports. But what are eSports?

I actually asked myself the same thing before going. Dan wanted me to come and take photos, but was worried I would be extremely bored all day. That of course put me on edge thinking this was going to be really lame. Wow, I was completely wrong.

eSports is basically professional video game playing. It may sound boring to watch other people play video games, but believe you me, it is not when they are as good as the people we saw. At least Dan and I were very entertained. We will probably keep up with eSports now. Cause.. it rocks! I can't promise you that if you look this up you will fall in love with it. I had a great Sensei to help me understand what was going on, and of course the atmosphere helped get the mood set and being able to walk around and watch them play up close and personal was a huge plus. And this was a serious event. They had commentators and everything. I felt like I was watching the Euro Cup or something. It was very professional.

I also know that there has been some negative press on eSports because of the cussing and what not, but they were very well behaved at this event. Granted they had to sign agreements that they wouldn't taunt and swear, but honestly there is plenty of swearing in other sports as well. They are also an average age of 18. And how many of you don't rage when playing CoD? I definitely do. But in all seriousness, these guys really did have good sportsmanship. It only took the iron fist of ATVI to get them to settle down.

So the basic premise behind this event was like most sports. There was a bracket of the teams (from around the world!) and as you would expect they played matches against each other. The beginning of the first day was really confusing for me because there were so many teams and matches going on. They were still in the group phase.

By the second day I had my 'favorite' team. Really, they were the only German team. Who would have thought I would route  for the German team? They were called Killer Fish by the way. I enjoyed a lot of the teams though. OpTic Gaming was great. So was Fariko Impact (who won). And I didn't really get much of a chance to closely watch many other teams. Remember, I was there to take photos.

Back to the game. So they played a different number of matches per bracket level. But it mostly boiled down to Search and Destroy, Capture the Flag, and Hardpoint.

Here: https://elite.callofduty.com/esports/championship I watched Dan post the brackets by the way! Super awesome.

So anyway, the event was great. Dan got me a V.I.P. pass which meant I could go anywhere. This included backstage. I was really impressed with watching how the whole event was put on and getting a hands on view of social media's roll during something like this. And although there was plenty of fun to be had, there were also hiccups and moments of terror. A site went down, admin tools were breaking, during the final match the stream started to go out. It was very stressful to watch at times. Luckily most of the problems happened after the event was over for the day.

They had some crazy spreads, but sadly none were edible. On the up side, Dan was able to expense his meals and there was a VeggieGrill a block away. Score! So we were well fed. Oh, and there were salt and vinegar chips.. noms. They also had an open bar for a bit in the evenings.

Overall, it was a blast! I have added a handful of people and groups to my twitter account since. :] I recommend checking it out if you have possible interest in this. I know plenty of you could care less. Video games are for dorks! >_<

Time to go play some Black Ops II! Double XP weekend ftw!