craveonline

Welcome back to our coverage of this year’s E for All. By the time you read this, the show will officially be in the books. A lot of cool things took place over the weekend that will have all sorts of effects on how, why, and where gamers might go to play games, watch games, or simply find out about new ones. One particular aspect of gaming has become very popular overseas but hasn’t quite caught on yet in the good ol’ US of A, competitive or pro-gaming. We sat down with Abe Zarran the Editor in Chief of Pro Gam3r magazine and asked him about his publication still in its early stages, and about the world of competitive gaming in general. He also helped shed some light on a few of the latest technology used to managed the world of eSports.

CraveOnline: What is Pro Gam3r 's connection to mygameroom?

Abe Zarran: Mygameroom is our parent company, they produce software for game and LAN intergration and they decided to put a magazine together and I’m buddies with one of their programmers, and I’ve been in publishing for the last eight years, and they said, “Hey why don’t you come down and do some consulting with us because we’re putting a magazine together”. So they flew me down to Curacao and I explained what it entailed to put together a magazine and all that stuff, and I was like what’s the subject matter that you guys are going to cover, and they said ,”Professional gaming.” And I was like, “Are you kidding me?” He was like yeah that’s the stuff we always talk about over the phone, so I ask him if they have an editor and if I could get the job. They said yeah, so I left my job and decided to go work for Pro Gam3r and I’m trying to live my dream and my passion through Pro Gam3r.

CraveOnline: What is the SLANT system?

Abe Zarran: The SLANT system is produced by mygameroom. I’m not really the best person to tell you, but I’ll tell you as much as I know. The SLANT system is a web based statistics engine. What it does is it manages tournaments in LAN scenarios, like for example we ran QuakeCon this year, and what it does is it calls info up on a web interface, set up on a local LAN, the player goes to the tournament, registers, and what the system does is it quickly sets up all the brackets, if you’re the player it will tell you what time your matches are at, when you get to your match time you log in with your name and password, and if you have to vote on maps, then the SLANT system handles that as well. It sets up all the rackets with the maps and the times, pretty much automating and streamlining what a LAN event or LAN tournament would be.

CraveOnline: Was the QuakeCon this year the first time you guys used the system?

QuakeCon is one of the largest LAN events in the country.

Abe Zarran: It was the first time we tested it on a big system I think there were what? 150 machines? Anywhere from ten to twenty matches going at one time. There were a lot of glitches that popped up, because there’s no way to test a large scale system unless you have a large scale to run it on. So testing it on 16 machines isn’t the same as turning it around on 160 machines, so it was a great test run for us, the tournament staff were initially having issues, bugs were popping up, but our programmers where there on site and they fixed all the bugs really quick, by the end of the tournament the staff was very impressed by hopw easily the matches ran, they ran on time, and the players were just happy to not have to keep all the scores by hand, no matches being set up by hand on pen and paper, you didn’t have to go to the tournament staff to get all your scores down, it was finally nice to have something automated. There are lots of people developing software for [this], we were just the first to have it ready to go. So, we’re trying to beat other companies to the punch when it comes to the SLANT system.