When you open your inbox to an e-mail from some guy named Robert Summa and the text includes the words ‘Playboy Mansion’, you can pretty safely assume you’re gonna see some beautiful naked women, and maybe Fred Durst. Sadly, Rob totally let me down earlier when just such an email appeared and happened to be about Pro-Gaming’s first ever draft, which just so happened to take place in Hugh Hefner’s backyard.
The entire event, which has been framed as one gigantic leap for mankind toward the acceptance of gaming as a professional sport, was covered by those spritely ragamuffins over at Epileptic Gaming. You could view the entire episode live about three hours ago or, if you don’t have access to the TARDIS, you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow when they start dropping all the excess footage they couldn’t jam into a single show.
I realize the concept of mocking satirizing emulating the draft selection process used by, say, the NBA seems like a clever way of pushing the idea that your event is somehow comparable to such things, but do we really want gaming to become a pale shadow of the sports it aims to copy? I think the only way gaming can be taken seriously by the mainstream media, and then the mainstream in general, is to completely differentiate itself from what has come before. Gaming is not a sport, it is an entirely separate entity that must forge its own way, instead of piggy-backing on the shoulders of giants.
Also, the entire thing needs way more bajingoes.
