As an outsider looking in, it’s hard not to get excited about the prospects of eSports. The role of technology in facilitating exponential growth means it can take weeks, not months or even years, for new ideas to take off.

We’ve seen Australia dip its collective toes into the eSports water earlier on in the year, with the telecast of the Crown $55,555 Counter Strike Global Offensive Invitational tournament in October.

The response I received was surprisingly warm, even if a number of sceptics questioned whether this could be considered ‘sport’.

That’s another argument for another day. Today, I’d like to share with you a conversation that I had – over the Internet, which seems appropriate given the topic – with a fellow by the name of Ben Green. Sandman, as he is known in the eSports world, shed a bit of light on eSports from the perspective of somebody within the industry.

Green is what those in the industry call a ‘shoutcaster’, or as Ben calls himself, “the guy that talks really fast and yells a lot about the action”. A commentator, for all intents and purposes.

Ben was the host of the October Fox Sports broadcast, and I touched base with him while he was on the way back from PAX Australia, a now-annual gaming Mecca event.

Ryan Buckland: Thanks for your time Ben. I understand you’re just on your way back from PAX Australia, an enormous gaming festival now in its third year. What goes on at an event like this?

Ben Green: PAX is the culmination of a massive amount of work for a very large number of dedicated people. It really is all about games and the various communities that games and gaming create, and because these communities are so diverse, so is the range of things to do. The exhibitors range from the biggest publishers and developers showing off their newest unreleased titles for you to play (in massive custom designed themed booths), to small ‘indie’ developers who are really just trying to get traction and feedback on a title they have been working tirelessly on for years.

That sounds like a lot of effort! But an incredible worthwhile event for someone in the industry. What could a punter expect to do at PAX?

There are Q&A panels on all sorts of things gaming-related, from how games are made and how to get involved, to social issues affecting gamers and the diverse group of people in which that tile encompasses. There’s concerts, BYOPC (bring your own PC) gaming events, retro games, booths for computer and peripheral manufacturers, computer stores, tabletop and card-game tournament areas, and of course my main interest, eSports.

So when you say eSports, you’re talking of the variety that was broadcast on Fox Sports earlier in October? As in, high-level tournament play?

High-level tournament play as well as semi-pro or amateur competitive play. To me, eSports is any form of computer or console game played in a competitive format against an opponent.

The event that was broadcast on Fox Sports in October was for Counter Strike Global Offensive and was in my view a massive success. It was at the time Australia’s largest one day eSport prize pool ($55,555) and included two international teams. Since then, Australia has surpassed that prize pool mark with a $65,000 SMITE tournament which was held at PAX 2015 on the ESL Arena stage.

That didn’t take long! For the uninitiated, what’s the difference between Counter Strike and SMITE?

Counter Strike is a first-person shooter (FPS) that has been around in one form or another since 2000, while SMITE is a relatively new third person (over-the-shoulder view) action MOBA (essentially, team-based castle defence). Both games are played between two teams of five players, but that is where the similarity ends.

What makes it such a great product for eSports?

Counter Strike is, at its core, very easy to understand. It is two teams of five, one trying to destroy an objective, one trying to protect it, and both using standard military hardware to do so. For someone who is new to watching competitive computer games, this is a pretty simple concept to grasp, because it is based on a potential real-life scenario that we’ve all seen in movies or on TV.

If you compare it to a game like League of Legends, which has over 100 unique characters, each with their own abilities and powers that you need to know and understand, you can see why a game like Counter Strike may be something that could perhaps work better for a new TV audience.

It makes for fantastic viewing. The simplicity of the game, which helps it to draw in a new audience, is complemented by the strategy that comes with high-level play, and that combination creates something that is entertaining to both new and veteran viewers. It has slower moments of tension building as teams set up their players in the correct positions, ready and waiting to attack, as well as the flurry of flash bangs and quick-fire shots as a team tries to find their way onto the objective in the last seconds of a round.

I’m sure people are reading this right now thinking, “wow, this bloke is really into his game”, and they are right, but I am not the only one, and I would suggest that is for a good reason, because it just works.

You’re no more into it than I’m into footy! Are Australia any good at Counter Strike on the world stage?

As a country, we aren’t too bad at Counter Strike. We are certainly not at the top, but we do our best. Our two best teams are called Renegades and Team Immunity. Renegades have played overseas more than any other Australian team and were at one stage considered to be the 10th best team in the world. Recent performances have not been amazing, but a lot of that comes down to the fact that every time they have qualified for a major tournament, they have had to fly to Europe to participate, which can become a little tedious when you are doing it every month or so. It really cuts into their practice and preparation time. Another aspect to this is the lack of quality teams to practice against.

Australian teams can not play with European or American teams from Australia, and they only get to practice against these better teams when they travel for large tournaments. They can play them online, but the location of servers – which are the hubs for where information is sent and received from computer to computer – mean it’s hard for Australian teams to compete on a level playing field. The amount of time it takes information to travel from Australia to Los Angeles is quite substantial, and when you are aiming at a moving target who connects at a speed 10 times faster than you do, it can be very difficult to compete. It would essentially be like trying to race remote control cars via a video link from across the world against someone sitting on the sideline at the stadium.

So it’s quite hard for the best team in a region to improve when there is no one (or very few) to challenge them. Fortunately for Renegades, they have now moved to the USA to pursue their eSports careers, and it has recently been announced that they will be competing in Turner’s Counter Strike league starting next year, which will be broadcast on TV to TBS.

Yes I remember seeing that a couple of weeks ago. It all looks to be moving very quickly! Since I wrote my first eSports piece on CSGO tournament, I’ve come to learn that you’ve got a pretty important role in the Australian eSports scene as a shoutcaster, or caster for short. Again, for the uninitiated, what’s a caster?

A shoutcaster is essentially an eSport commentator, and plays an almost identical role to what you would expect from a commentator for football or any other kind of sport. I’m a play-by-play caster, aka the guy that talks really fast and yells a lot about the action you are seeing on the screen as you watch the game. There are other commentators who do more in-depth analysis and really break down the different aspects of a game to its base level.

Due to the nature of eSport and its audience, you may find casters who are perhaps more over-the-top or grandiose in appearance or manner than traditional commentators, but again, that varies between games and their audience. Counter Strike is quite mainstream as far as computer games go, and as such my style would probably fit in with your traditional style of sport commentating.

So you’re more Dennis Commetti than Leigh Matthews. Makes sense. This eSports thing is resembling more traditional sporting mannerisms by the minute! One way that it’s different, at least right now, is the actual telecasts of games. How does that side of things work?

You are right on both points (sport similarities and telecasts, I’ve no idea who Mr Commetti is, but I suspect that is because I am from Queensland). While the Counter Strike event was broadcast live to air on Fox Sports, this is something that certainly does not occur very often. The vast majority of eSport events are live streamed (broadcast) on the internet to content hubs such as Twitch.TV and Youtube. These websites operate like large, interactive, online television stations with mostly user-generated content.

Is there much money in it, at this point of the industry’s development?

Most of the channels are free to watch, and make their money through sponsor funding, premium subscriptions and donations, though in reality, the majority of user-generated content is generated at a monetary loss to the creator. Events such as the Counter Strike Invitational at Crown, which was broadcast live on Fox Sports, had an experienced eSports broadcast team and their setup was quite substantial.

At the very highest level, eSports is broadcast on the internet from sophisticated television broadcast trucks to live audiences of over 1 million concurrent viewers. At the other end, I’ve streamed professional Australian tournaments from my bedroom computer to audiences of a few thousand. The technology and viewership may be different, but often, the quality of play and dedication of those participation are on par. That is the nature of something like eSports which is growing at such a pace. One year an event may be held in a small hall to a live audience of 15, and the next, the same teams are in a stadium playing to thousands.

That’s partially what has me so interested in this space (the other part is I’m a closeted geek, and I love the idea that video games are evolving in this way). So if you had to pick where Australia was in an eSports sense compared to, say, the United States, where do we sit?

I would suggest we are probably 18 months to two years behind the USA. A lot of that comes down to a smaller overall user-base and a lack of funding for players and organisers. Often, games will not gain major support until the developers place game servers inside Australia. Servers are what the players connect to, and for many games, those servers have been located in America or Singapore.

But there are opportunities for growth, right? If we’re coming from such a long way back, in an industry that is enabled by technology, catch up has to happen.

As the Australian gaming scene grows, more and more developers turn their sites to us, and as they start placing servers for us to play on within Australia, they also start to support our scene with bigger events and larger prize pools. Developers such as Blizzard (the makers of games such as Starcraft and World of Warcraft), HiRez (SMITE) and Riot (League of Legends) have all recently installed servers for their games at data centres around the country, and this has seen these games prosper.

Another aspect that holds us back as a country is the lack of access to quality Internet speeds. For players, unstable ADSL or wireless connections can see them disconnect during a grand final and lose via forfeit. For commentators and broadcasters like myself, it means that some times we are forced to stream in very low quality video due poor upload speeds, and this means international audiences are far less likely to watch. For every other Australian eSport enthusiast watching at home, poor download speeds result in viewers either watching streams on the lowest settings it will allow, or in some instances, not even being able to watch at all.

We care about our games and teams just as much as football supporters care about theirs, and it can be amazingly frustrating watching the grand final of the world championships in a stop-start manner as the broadcast pauses or drops out due to what is really sub-par Internet infrastructure.

I think most of us right now are waiting on the day we are awoken by people digging up the footpath to install our NBN.

I reckon most of the country is with you on that last point. If I’m a cricket fan, and I’m looking to try something new, what’s the best way to go about watching a tournament, or competition?

Probably the simplest way to start watching is to head over to www.twitch.tv and see what they are showing. While you will find both tournament streams and user-generated content (mostly people streaming themselves playing a game), the best content will always be listed at the top of a particular game’s channel.

FPS games like Counter Strike or Call of Duty are probably some of the easiest to get into, but other more involved games such as League of Legends or SMITE are definitely worth the effort. The League of Legends World Championships and Counter Strike Major in Romania have also only recently finished, so I would suggest looking up the replay videos on YouTube for some fantastic games held in impressive venues like London’s Wembley Arena, which is something most people would have thought impossible a few years back.

Wembley! Goodness me. When’s the next big tournament? And when will you next be casting?

The next competition that may be of interest to those of us in Australia is the League of Legends International Wild Card All-Star Tournament to be held at Margaret Court Arena in Melbourne at the end of this month. It is essentially Australia’s best League of Legends players placed into the one All-Star team, fighting it out against international opponents for a spot in the world All-Star event to be held in Los Angeles in December.

From what I can tell, it should be the Australia’s largest live eSports audience to date, and there are still tickets available for those who are keen to check it out.

For me, I think I might have the rest of the year off as events draw to a close before Christmas, although I do not mind the break as I have both a full-time job and the commitments that come with casting eSports. While last year I only cast at two live events, this year I have done seven, and my hope is that 2016 will be even bigger.

This has been a great conversation, so once again, thanks for your time. And I’m sure there’ll be a few more fans tuning in after reading this.