Craig Whitfield sat at his computer in his bedroom last Friday, trying to get the attention of his colleagues.
“Maybe win, maybe win,” whispered Whitfield. ‘Orange leaf. White leaf, white Bob. Orange roast out. ”
The apparent gibberish was Whitfield’s attempt to communicate about the cybernetic ninjas and robots that crashed into a dimly lit keyway on his screen. A particularly crucial passage of gaming was about to happen in a live match of the popular video game Overwatch that streamed live on YouTube to tens of thousands of viewers.
Whitfield’s job is to capture this action for the audience who were incapable of watching the Philadelphia Fusion play the Dallas Fuel as part of the Overwatch League. Overwatch is a multiplayer, first-person video game that launched in 2015 and quickly attracted millions of players. The owner of the game, Activision Blizzard, started a professional competition it started playing competitive games in 2018.
Since then, OWL, as is well known, has become one of the most popular leagues in the growing world of esports. OWL, like the NBA or MLB, has team franchises based in cities around the world, with teams like the New York Excelsior and the Shanghai Dragons fielding six players each to support it out on a digital battlefield. There are also great rewards involved. For the 2020 season alone, OWL has $ 5 million in prizes for players and advertisers with big names like T-Mobile, State Farm and Coca-Cola.
The league could continue to operate as the coronavirus pandemic devastated at live sporting events. OWL viewers get to enjoy most of the same way they did before the pandemic, thanks in no small part to people like Whitfield who are known in the industry as observers – virtual camera operators who provide live gameplay and catch slow-motion substitutes.
The catch? There are no players on a field, the cameras are digital and the slow motion replacements may have an armored monkey attacking a hamster in a mechanical suit. Instead of trying to track one game, Overwatch observers usually try to track a flurry of activity that can suddenly shift, forcing observers to anticipate and react or otherwise miss important action.
Jessica DiPaola, 28, a replay observer, said the multiple avenues of attack and defense of Overwatch create a game that “moves very fast, all the time, always.”
“If you are not on top of what someone else is doing, you will lose track of what is happening,” she said. “A lot of it is just having your head on a lathe and making sure that when something happens, you have to react quickly enough to make sure something needs to be done.”
It’s a high pressure job. If observers do not do a good job of capturing the action, they can become the subject of criticism from viewers in sports media.
Derek DePontbriand, the acting director, said because of the fast pace of the game, the team has developed code bases to speed up communication. His observers will call these expressions “orange blade,” and help Depontbriand keep track of what’s going on between the multiple points of view. To a newcomer, DePontbriand’s commands can easily get lost in a flood of non-stop communication in which each member of the team seems to be talking at the same time, while also moving to make sure they catch the action.
“Where that language comes from is fair, it’s trial and error,” said DePontbriand, 28. “We know these things happen fast and we need to communicate it quickly.”
The growing sports scene has continued to grow and is attracting new viewers year after year with market research firm Newzoo predicting that global sports revenues will surpass $ 1 billion by 2020 and attract half a billion viewers. Blizzard, the maker of Overwatch, has organized its own competitive competition to get a share of the sports cake.
This has ushered in a new sector that has not only made playing video games a potentially lucrative pastime, but also generating many other jobs associated with sports competitions – and even some that did not exist before.
“If you come from a traditional sports background or traditional TV background, you could equate this with camera programs and a director, and that’s fair, but the workflow is completely different,” said Frank Laspina, director of Global Broadcasting at Blizzard. “Comms in Overwatch are two-way, with observers telling the information to the director and informing everyone on the team.”
OWL employs a team of 10 observers, all stationed at their homes in Southern California. When the coronavirus pandemic ended their trips to the office, so did trips to the league matches, which would otherwise have meant that observers around America and around the world would be on the sidelines for games.
The team is young, mostly in their 20s, with varied backgrounds, but united in navigating the ups and downs of working in a job that not only existed a handful of years ago.
Isaac Jimenez, 22, received a scholarship to play Overwatch for the University of California, Irvine, esports team and later joined OWL as an observer. He said his family had a hard time shaking their heads over the concept that her son was working as a virtual cameraman for an international video game competition.
“My parents always had, like, no negative stigma, but other family members would judge them,” Jimenez said. ‘Oh, do you let your son play video games all the time? Oh my goodness, some terrible parents. ‘
DiPaola said her father, skeptical about her career path, continued to offer to keep a space open for her in case it did not work and she had to come home.
“Since this is such a new thing, in terms of just esports in general and video games as a career in general, it’s understandable that there was some kind of lack of connection about what this really is and how legitimate it was, “DiPaola said. “And it took some convincing, but I’m still here and I’m not thrown home again.”
Maikol Brito, 27, the team’s chief observer, said there was still a stigma against video games as a real sport, and people questioned whether his career was sustainable. Brito, who was born in Cuba, said his immigrant parents trusted him to make the right decision after he was convinced by Brito’s older brother. When Brito got his lead job at Blizzard, his parents finally said, “You have a career, you have a great young job.”
Whitfield said the job offered him some satisfaction, especially during the pandemic.
“What drives me to go through this COVID scenario is that there are so many people looking for something to be happy about right now,” Whitfield said. “And I feel like I and my team need to be a part of that experience that people can look forward to.”
“Even if it’s practical,” Whitfield added. “I think it’s such a uniqueness of our platform that despite the location, we can deliver that experience.”
