Changes
Multiplay's i-series continues to evolve, moving ever closer to mainstream UK gaming festival from its roots as a nice competitive gaming event
“I turn to simplicity; I turn again to purity”
– Genghis Khan, 1221
The first and greatest of all Khans had these words carved on a simple stone pillar somewhere between Persia and Mongolia as he and his victorious troops rode home along the same invasion route that they’d been using for decades to conquer the entire Middle East, and that his generals would soon be using again for the invasion of Russia and then Europe… But his stunning conquest of Muhammed Ali Shah’s whole empire in less than a year had left the Khan weary of war. He had proven his point and now he was going back home , leaving his generals, Jebe and Subedi, to pillage the rest of the world in his name. The splendours of the fallen Persian empire had amazed him at first, he said, but he soon tired of one golden temple after another full of veiled dancing girls and endless feasts in his honour. “My sons will live to desire such lands and cities as these,” he said “but I cannot.”
I used to go to a lot of music festivals and spent a brief period masquerading as a music journalist, which ended briefly after a disastrous attempt at an interview with a then little known, yet pampered and arrogant, Avril Lavigne. She wasn’t a big deal back then and from the disgusting scenes I had witnessed on her first UK appearances I thought it safe to assume that she never would be. Alas, I was wrong. Regardless though, there was a certain allure to it all… To drunkenly swagger around festivals writing about various bands performances while ripped to the tits on psychedelics and hallucinogens all in the name of “honest” journalism. Festivals back then were the place to be, the last place in modern Britain where you could grind in the dark like animals and gnaw on one another without anyone finding it repulsive. All of this to the soundtrack of the generational zeitgeist.
I stopped attending somewhere at the turn of the century. There was an unacceptable presence creeping in to the festivals… A slither of middle class scum who went to these things solely to try and attain some sort of life experience based credibility they had been denied elsewhere in their cotton wool enclosure. These were the kind of morons who think that pissing in a field is edgy, or tipping over a chemical toilet put them in the same league as Guy Fawkes. Now festivals are overrun with them, the occasional lone dancing hippy, swaying to a drug fuelled memory of better times, is the only remnant of the old guard. They’ve become part fashion show, part boarding school retreat and while they remain popular amongst those kind of people, for those who were there before the change the negatives of change are highlighted and underscored in bold ink.
Now, I do this… A weird deviation to be sure but here we all are. The closest I get to a music festival these days is the I-series and after doing so many of them consecutively, I started to hear the same sort of sentiment that I would express about these rotten music festivals. If you go back a certain distance it’s likely that you’ll have heard or said one of these… “It’s not as good as it used to be” “the state on some of the people that go now…” “All the veterans have moved on, now it’s just a bunch of chavs” “the best competition was <insert first I-series you attended>”. It’s an old game and it’s the kind of thing usually done by grizzled veterans. In e-sports these words are uttered by spritely twentysomethings.
Yeah, the i-series has changed somewhat since I started covering the, the turning point as I see it coming round about i30. After being taught how to survive LAN by the missing in action Ben “mixa.rar” Bush that was my first taste of LAN coverage and it was the time when it radically shifted from being a CS:S community event that just so happened to have a tournament in place, to being the UK home for serious CS:S competition with a community event somewhere in the background. It was the first of the series that saw an all European final. It ran the biggest prize tournament that CS:S had seen in the form of the ebuyer competition. The changing of the guard occurred in organisations, the worst kept secret in e-sports seeing 4kings (the old CSA line-up) being dropped for a fresh line-up comprised of Reason Gaming with a few alterations perhaps the most obvious signal of the incoming skill shift.
Now, having just attended i40 I found myself looking round and seeing fewer faces I recognised and younger faces in general. “Am I getting old or are the people coming getting younger” I found myself mumbling as I made the sodden trips to and from the press room. Of course the answer is, as it always is regardless of the situation when you ask it, “both”. I too felt the absence of old friends and I even had to document the “retirement” of others, another one down and a lack of comprehension where the replacements are coming and who they really are. There was a moment when those few who remained gathered outside of the main entrance and said “maybe we should all just retire now”. Since as the I-series veteran is rarer than one of those colossal, grey beasts, it is understandable that they often think about making the trek to the elephant’s graveyard.
Yet while this may be something that fills some of you with a pervasive gloom, I’m supposed to be in possession of an objective, or at the very least analytical, brain. Placing I-series in context and looking at its evolution, is there also not plenty deserving of positive focus? Forget the endless skirmishes of e-sports politics and look at what is there that is tangible. We now see more competitions across more games than before, the TF2 community being the most welcome addition to the table, although there’s no reason why HoN could not follow in their footsteps. Do we not see more exhibitors coming to want to see what our demographic is all about? Do we not see the slow creep of mainstream media attention, even on a weekend obscured by those afore mentioned music festivals? Do we not see more people travelling from across Europe to attend, a long pilgrimage just to see how we do it across the water? And was it not, once again, full of people of all different kinds – I won’t say shapes and sizes as gamers can generally be summed up in two – brought together by a common interest?
All those things that we used to think of as being great about the I-series are still there. It’s just that they are now being discovered by a newer generation, different people in possession of different mindsets than we would have now after having been exposed. Everyone who has been around e-sports for long enough knows that an “e-sports year” runs at approximately three months, so in the four or five years that proclaimed “old guard” has been going… Well, it’s like a time machine experiment when the two collide. It’s clear though that for the new breed the I-series still makes an impression. Those first timers or newcomers all post their “lift to i41” threads the day they get home from LAN. They’ve been bitten by the bug and it may well last as long as ours did.
A part of it, of course, comes down to personal change. An I-series of old for me was a very different experience to what it is now. No more sleeping face down in piles of gravel, no more downing bottles of vodka with a male escort and watching him do an impromptu striptease in exchange for burgers, no more bleak’s tent, no more b0x1d’s tent, no more stealing sleep under a desk in between prods from security guards, no more community barbecues, no more boat race… Slowly but surely the party became the job and that’s the advancing of time. I now become Indeed, those people who used to treat the event as the place to have the ultimate freak outs are either now all settled down out of the scene, or somehow in positions of responsibility within in. And in that moment of generational hypocrisy that will curse us all we might look to the young ones doing the same and decry it as “stupid” almost as if someone erased our memories.
The i-series still remains the spiritual home of UK e-sports and while those who no longer attend, or do so for different reasons to what they used to, might want to try and obscure that fact but what alternative is there? There’s a lot of myths perpetuated about the state of UK competitive gaming, that there’s no corporate interest, that there’s no media interest and that there’s no young talent coming through. Yet I’ve seen all of it with my own eyes and even though I’m probably supposed to be on the roof with the rest of the inmates, throwing tiles like an ape flingling clumps of shit at a zoo wall, it’s not the truth. People are interested, people are involved… Just not with some of you. Failure to keep up, keep involved, will always turn you into an anachronism.
Sometimes change isn’t good or bad. It’s just change. There can be no valued attached to it because both sides of the argument are so hugely subjective that neither make sense when put alongside each other. They simply become established “facts” to those who want to believe them, a faith rather than a science. Those that no longer want to fight the good fight can leave those behind who can. In truth both sets have played a part and in time those who stay will always become those riding off. It is unavoidable. Take it from this one veteran, if from no other, that the i-series is the same as it ever was, pure and simple and no doubt will be for some time to come.