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> Dead simple concept, intuitive mechanics even to laypeople, and the meta game can be explained in 10 minutes. Do you feel like this applies to American Footb

• abfan1127 4y ago
  American Football is extremely simple game relative to other games. It also is piece-wise fast paced. The game goes really fast, then gets a small break. it lends it self easily to television broadcast with its timeouts, changing of sides, etc. I am not of fan of american football, but I can see how it became popular.
• spillguard 4y ago
  Not to entirely disagree with you, but comparing football to Counter Strike is kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison - you're comparing an introduction to something new with something that most American viewers have probably known for their entire lives, so that factor of "explainability" doesn't exactly apply to it.
  • cruano 4y ago
    Eh, I'm not American and I found American football pretty straightforward, at least until you start looking at the play-calling and formations and all of that. And you could say the same about CS, your market is probably "anyone who has played a first-person shooter"
  • tarentel 4y ago
    As someone who has worked for several European companies try explaining american football scoring to a non-american and let me know how easy that is. That's basically just scratching the surface of it. Saying you can boil it down to one side moves a ball the other side tries to stop them is pretty disingenuous. You can boil down basically any game to that. Counter strike you just kill the other team, mobas you just destroy the other teams base, etc. I know you didn't make that point but that's what most of the arguments in this thread are.
    • johannes1234321 4y ago
      The difference: I have an intuitive understanding how hard it is to catch a football if a bunch of people runs towards me. Even if I never touched a football in my life. I have no intuition on what the eSports player can and can not do with their controls and the physics engine.
  • 8note 4y ago
    Cricket would be an alternative example that most Americans don't already understand
• jerf 4y ago
  "Do you feel like this applies to American Football?" Honestly, yes. Protestations that it's too difficult to understand seems to me to stem from people who literally want the game explained in three seconds or less. The core is simple. Team have ball. Team want move ball that way for points. Other team want stop them. Work out the legal ways for them to score points and move ball around as you go. The super detailed lacunae of what penalties are for what exist in all sports, it just isn't generally noticed. The FIFA rules for soccer run 144 pages: https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/dp/160078710X https://www.amazon.com/Official-Rules-Soccer-U-S-Federation/... Not a huge book, probably not huge pages, but a great deal more detailed than you'd try to "explain" to someone just learning what soccer is. Most of the meta around passing plays versus running plays can be explained easily. It really isn't that complicated. To the extent that it is, all the sports are. At the top end everything gets complicated, hence, Moneyball and that sort of thing. Basketball is a simple sport of putting the ball in the hoop while dribbling it, but at the top end you start talking about matchups between this guy and that guy and how being 3% better at three-point shots affects this team's matchups against that team... but that's not something you have to care about to watch it, any more than you have to care about what the name of every position is in every sport initially.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    But you could say the same for most video games: Here is the object. Team shoots their way through until they accomplish the object. The rest is just arcane knowledge of experts.
    • tyree731 4y ago
      I disagree here. I've watched professional sports a fair bit in my life, and I've watched eSports (and played their respective games) a bunch, and from my experience eSports are far more difficult to pick up. To try and give a reason others haven't really mentioned, professional sports tend to have predictable camera angles and pacing, making it easier to get a complete picture of who is doing what and when. In eSports, the arenas are typically strategically complex, requiring similarly complex camera angles, making it difficult to get a sense of what's going on at any point in time.
• ElevenLathe 4y ago
  Football is dead simple, even simpler than CS: One team wants to go one way with the ball, the other wants to stop them, drive them back or, ideally, get the ball away from them and go the other way. They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries. There are a lot of fiddly details in offsides rules, incomplete passes, extra points, etc. but they aren't necessary to understand and enjoy watching a game.
  • johannes1234321 4y ago
    You can even simplify even more. "They have to cross the line" instead of discussing 10 yards. And as humans have a rough understanding of the world we are in, even somebody with no prior knowledge of football can understand how complicated it can be to catch the ball. Input to eSports, which buttons there were to press at which time and how the game's physics model would react isn't as intuitive.
  • com2kid 4y ago
    > They get four tries to go at least 10 yards and if they don't the other team gets the ball. If they make the 10 yards, they get another 4 tries. Born and raised in America, I never knew this. First time I've seen it explained this way. To my mind, Football is overly complicated, with crap tons of breaks, weird jargon, and a countdown clock that apparently means nothing.
• cruano 4y ago
  Well, yes ? Try to get to the end zone, if you do you score 6 points. You have 4 attempts to move forward 10 yards, if you don't, the ball goes to the other team. If you have more points, you win. That's it, that's all you need to know to watch it and enjoy it. Sure, there's more ways of scoring and the details of each position, the routes they are running and play-calling in general is interesting, but it's not needed to just watch the game.
  • jedberg 4y ago
    Ok but you can say the same about Counterstrike. The object is to diffuse the bomb. You shoot your way through the enemy until the bomb is diffused. The rest is just details for experts.
    • HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Which is why OP said CS is the game most likely to become popular. It's the simplest/most realistic esport.
    • musicale 4y ago
      > The object is to diffuse the bomb I assume in this scenario the terrorist team is trying to plant and detonate the bomb, thereby diffusing its (perhaps damaging, poisonous, or radioactive) components over a wide area, while the counter-terrorist team is trying to defuse the bomb and prevent it from exploding in the first place.
• Workaccount2 4y ago
  The thing about computer games that I think will put off most people is that they exist in a custom reality. In regular sports people can rely on their intuition to know what can and can't happen, to some degree. No football player is going to start flashing yellow while taking off down the field. A lot of video games are packed to the brim with custom physics and mechanics. No solid intuition, you really just have to learn them. CS benefits from more or less functioning exactly how even a 75 year old lady would expect it to. A sniper is a sniper. A pistol a pistol. An assault rifle is an assault rifle. Bullets kill quick, and bombs go boom.
  • kibwen 4y ago
    I think the biggest argument against the idea of CS becoming a household sport like football is the fact that, today, nobody bothers to watch competitive paintball. The fact that it's a simulation means it can do things you can't do in real life, sure, but it also means that it's harder to care about what's actually happening. In a real sport, you watch the players. In an esport, you watch avatars. People don't empathize with avatars nearly as much as they do with flesh-and-blood humans, at least not today.
    • user_named 4y ago
      What? CSGO is the most watched esport in the world. Paintball analogy, what?
• specialp 4y ago
  The difference with American Football is although there have been subtle changes in the rules, it has been mostly the same for over 50 years. With esports (like in the case of Overwatch) they do not have that lifespan. So unless you are someone who is currently playing that game, you don't know how it works really. And if you were someone once playing that game 5 years ago, as in the case of Overwatch 1, they literally shut it off and it can't be played anymore.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    The other difference is that American culture lives and breathes football, right from pee-wee to middle and high school, to the state college team level. It's easier to build a multi billion dollar business around something people have been exposed to since birth.
    • rvba 4y ago
      Most commenters here also dont realize that American football is completely irrelevant outside of USA. Most other countries dont know the sport, apart from maybe Commonwealth who play rugby at schools.
• Ekaros 4y ago
  American football to me sounds very messy and extremely overly complicated? Like sometimes they throw, sometimes they kick, there is some goal but not goal thing. And stopping all the time? Like why not immediately get up and start running away? Or just dripple the ball all the way across the field? What is the point anyway?
  • simmerup 4y ago
    Both teams work within the same constraints with the goal of beating the other. Same as any other sport. They stop after a play because that’s part of the rules of the game.
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    You could probably find a video or article and understand all this in a few minutes. You have four attempts (downs) to move the ball 10 yards or you lose possession. Nearly everything else makes sense with that context.
• dylan604 4y ago
  >Do you feel like this applies to American Football? As someone that grew up in the US and watching it with family, no, it's not the same. What is the same is watching Cricket. It probably has an even larger viewing audience than American Football in the US. As someone that has grown up with it, and they will start spewing rules at you that might as well be spoken in Klingon for the sense they make, but are perfectly understood by those that grew up with it. To be fair, reversing the conversation for me to explain rules to them is met with looks like I have 2 heads. Video games are similar. I grew up in the "golden age" of home console games starting with Atari 2600, NES, and through today. However, I still spent time doing other things other than games. So to me, sitting around watching other people play video games is a non-starter. Maybe if I was at a bar and it was on the screen, but usually I just find a different screen. For people that are younger that don't have memories of playing outside and only know "playing" involving a computer device of some sort, then this seems perfectly reasonable that's what they'd rather watch.
  • WHYLEE1991 4y ago
    just curious, how old are you that you think current youth have no memories of playing outside? what an amusing and out of touch statement, have you been outside in the past decade? Maybe not in a populated area because I see kids playing outside basically everyday. I also don't believe that you've never watched someone play a game, you didn't have siblings or friends growing up?
• listenallyall 4y ago
  American football in 20 seconds: You have 4 opportunities to advance the ball a cumulative 10 yards, upon doing so, your 4 opportunities reset. Advance past the goal line = 6 points + opportunity for 1 additional. Fail to move 10 yards? Ball possession transfers to opponent. If it's 4th down (final opportunity) you can hedge -- punt the ball (transfer possession, but about 40 yards further away) or attempt a field goal (place kick through yellow uprights), which is worth 3 points. Obviously there are nuances but that's 90% of it right there, in a lot less than 10 minutes.
• rg111 4y ago
  American Football watchers grow up watching American Football. Compared to that number, nobody grows up watching Dota.