During his interview with BBC, Xavier Woods discussed how E-Sports can borrow a page from professional wrestling and develop characters for their top players. Here’s what he had to say:
I love video games so much. They are my happy place and now that they are a viable source for so many more people than used to be to make money, to feed their families, to have a home, to have a secure life…if that was more in my face as a kid, I definitely would have put way more effort into trying to be some sort of professional gamer.
I think that there are definitely places for Esports to go, and that’s kind of one of the reasons that I wanted to make the gaming channel as well. My thought has always been if someone’s not interested in the game, then we need to figure out how to make them interested in the people. Much like wrestling, because I know people that don’t like watching wrestling, they don’t they don’t like the actual physical wrestling part of it, but they love everything else about it, the dramatics, the promos, and they watch it purely for that stuff. So my thought is that, what if the same thing can be brought to the Esports world? So, I’m not saying that everybody gets personas and is coming out screaming, cutting promos. So rather than just kind of winning and, you know, ‘this is fun, this is cool.’ Winning and being able to be interviewed immediately and speaking coherently, maybe trash talking your opponent a little bit. But they’ve been trained in how to do this too. Now, if I don’t understand Street Fighter, I understand there’s beef right here. These guys don’t like each other.
You can read the interview HERE.
Credit: BBC.