Last week, we held our annual Satellite Gaming Showdown. It is our biggest event of the year, hosting several tournaments, carnival games, a raffle, and more. We had over 100 students show up to compete in Smash Bros, Fortnite, Minecraft, and Rocket League, and we had even more people there to spectate. That spectator experience is actually what I want to talk about today.
In years past, the Showdown included Family XP workshops where families could come and learn while their students competed. In fact, it is where Family XP started. We held our first family workshop at a Showdown back in 2018. But this was the first year since then that we did not have any dedicated workshops for families.
Why is that? Well, because last year was a bit of a dud. Okay, maybe “dud” is an exaggeration, but we did have very low attendance for the Family XP workshop. I still ran the session, and I actually love facilitating with a small group because it means we can really get into the weeds on the topics. It was far from a bad experience. Still, it was weird because the previous two years we needed to bring in extra seating to accommodate the full Family XP lounge.
So what changed? We started asking the family members at the event why they skipped the workshop, and we overwhelmingly heard one response: they wanted to spectate. Okay! We can work with that.
This time around, we cut the workshop, transitioned Family XP’s presence at the Showdown to a resource booth in the main lobby, and doubled down on the spectator experience.
Spectating video games still feels like a weird idea to a lot of people. Watching other people play video games has grown immensely in popularity on platforms like YouTube and Twitch, but it can still be confusing to outsiders. I think it makes more sense when you think about traditional sports. I have never played hockey a day in my life, but I LOVE the NHL. There is something cool about watching competition that takes it from a single-player experience and makes it communal.
The Showdown is a unique place to spectate because a lot of the students competing rarely get a chance to be cheered for by anyone, let alone an auditorium full of cheering people. If we have a growing number of people showing up just to watch, we need to make them a priority, too. Let’s look at what we added this year to make that happen.
The first thing we added was a sign-making station. My wife and I are big fans of professional wrestling (judge me if you must). In pro wrestling, even though everybody is in on the fact that it is staged, the crowd gets incredibly involved while spectating. This March, when we saw the wrestling show traveling through Portland, we saw hundreds of signs people had brought to cheer on their favorites. I thought that was awesome and immediately stole the concept for the Showdown. We set up a station in the auditorium where people could go and make a physical sign to cheer for their student while they competed.
The next thing we did was work hard on the tech side to make sure the screens ran smoothly. The tech part is funny because I do not have a very interesting story to tell about it, but it took our production team dozens of hours in the week leading up to the event to ensure everything functioned. It is the exact kind of thing you do not notice if it is going well, but you absolutely notice if it is going poorly.
Lastly, we implemented a number of changes to streamline player identification. You do not always think about it, but it can be really hard to tell who is who when you are watching a game play out on a big screen. To fix this, we unified player tags to make them clear and readable. We also brought in live commentary for the games and made sure the commentators had notes to help them keep track of storylines developing as the night progressed.
I think this year offered the best spectator experience we have ever had at the Showdown, but we want to do even more. If you have any ideas to help improve the spectator experience, please let us know over on the Family XP Facebook community group!