Part of the mystery for the author of that article is apparently she's oblivious to costs of consoles vs high performance gaming computers. A PS4 can be had for three or four hundred bucks. Conversely it's pretty easy to sink two or three grand into a gaming system. And that's not getting into the relative access to the kind of high speed internet you need for online gaming.
You don't actually need a high-end gaming computer for a lot of games though. Maybe you don't get the buttery 60fps high quality graphics without some expensive, but a lot of times can play a game well enough to excel an it on more ordinary hardware.
I think gswift is right about the high speed internet though. Lack of availability can be due to cost, but its also a question of which neighborhoods have shitty cable broadband vs. nice fiber.
"Why aren't more black kids going into esports?"
Definitely a worrying concern. Black kids should stop spending all their time playing basketball and football and fantasizing about getting a college scholarship, and instead spend all their time playing Dota and fantasizing about being a celebrity in Korea for two years.
https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWtkwU9cp8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8QzizhhS0
Watching my gf's nephew and his buddies play gta is reliably amusing for me.
Did gamer culture suddenly become much less anti-non-dudebro?
So, NCAA Div I sports have this vast host of deleterious effects, including, but not limited to: A culture of sexual harassment and assault; massive financial corruption in every facet of the enterprise; robbing student athletes of an actual education via fake courses, pre-written essays, etc.; encouraging all kinds of violent and anti-social behavior among players, other students and people unconnected with the school; financial drain on the university's actual mission; conditioning participants and spectators into an authoritarian mindset where a shouty old white man is always right; and the like. But Heaven forfend we should get rid of them, because how else will dewy-eyed underprivileged youth from the violence-ridden inner city get to college? Here's an idea, you want Black kids in college? Put more Black kids in college. It's not that hard. Certainly it would cost less to simply cover the expenses of an average student than to invest all the money in staff and infrastructure would per player.
tl,dr: SKI-U-MAH!
The weird thing is that "emall" (for online shopping, of course) and "ereader" and every other kind of "e" bullshit show up routinely now in the crossword, but I don't remember seeing "esports". The "e" in front of random things to mean "computer" vaguely 90s to me.
So maybe it's due for a comeback. Invest in my new startup, eLawyer.com.
Also, an appropriately miserable Good Friday to those who celebrate.
One more thing: machine learning has now made it possible for your console to imitate your gameplay perfectly, thus allowing you to play with yourself. We call it the iSport.
7: I have done the NYT crossword for a while and seen a lot of weird e-prefixed words, ezine being the one that most stands out, but never emall. Where do you see it?
12: It is now in the official Scrabble dictionary. Emailing and emailed to boot.
Flying Air China last month, we were flicking through the sports channel in search of skiing, and found a group of videos showing Dota 2 and Call of Duty championships. It's the first time I've seen esports get that mainstream. (There was no skiing, or any other winter sport. The programs were almost entirely European football, golf, and I think motor racing.)
The console/PC divide is real, or at least I often hear my kids referring joke-contemptuously to "console peasants."
The phrase "PC gods" is used a lot for the other side, in my experience somewhat seriously. PCs are objectively better than consoles, of course.
Oh yeah, PC gaming blows the doors off console gaming. Better hardware, sure, but also tons more games at reasonable price points.
Stormcrow never got the email about the emall.
The X-box just sucks because you need to type in very long passwords about eight times to do anything.
The other thing about all the esports on Air China was that we couldn't watch them, because they were for Chinese flights only (presumably domestic ones). And we were heading either of Osaka or London
Consoles are just a lot cheaper than gaming computers. You expect poorer kids to be console gamers and rich kids to be PC gamers. How many poor kids go in for skiing or paragliding as opposed to basketball or baseball? When I was a kid, the cheap sports, the ones we played, were handball - you needed a hand and a ball - and stick ball - which used a recycled broomstick and a ball. The girls played jump rope - you needed a clothesline - or jacks - maybe a dime for the ball and metal things of death.
So, which demographic is worth more to advertisers? Is it the one with money for a PC or just a console? To paraphrase a Kurt Vonnegut character, "I have nothing against poor people. They just don't have a lot of money."
I recently semi-built* my own PC and was surprised how much it cost for something that wouldn't even be that great for gaming if I bought a GPU, which I'm not going to do in the near future unless the market changes. It transcodes video a hell of a lot faster than my old PC, though, has a smaller footprint, and has more expansion/upgrade capacity, so there's that.
*I wanted a small case and went with a Shuttle that came with a motherboard, power supply, USB ports, etc. already installed. I added CPU, memory, drives, peripherals. I probably could have saved more with a larger case and buying each component separately.
For all that, it can't even spell you name.
+r. I hate it when typos happen while mocking typos.
Ok, because this is the PC gaming thread, how the hell is RBI Baseball 2018 available on all the consoles but not PC? Who does that?