eSports: An Analysis

Introduction
Competition in Gaming
Players and Organisations
Gaming Culture Across the World
Tournament Circuit
Future Implications

Introduction

Hi. I'm Ken. One thing you need to know about me is that I'm competitive. It's what drives me;

whenever I find someone that shares a hobby or interest of mine, I like to constantly push

myself to be better at that skill or field of knowledge. For example, I play the piano, and I can't

resist a good riff-off.

More than being competitive, however, I thoroughly enjoy the spirit of competition. That is, it

always interests me to see someone truly skilled at something, to see them push boundaries

and see what people are truly capable of. That's why I love sports. Let's take basketball: I grew

up watching people like Michael Jordan, Alonzo Mourning, and Reggie Miller, all household

names to those remotely familiar with the sport.

Standing at 5'7" 140lbs, I was never on a varsity team. But I'm no slouch either; I've played on

intramural teams and it's really satisfying to be able to pull off plays with my teammates.

Watching these pros, however, is on a different level. Watching them play as a child--and

watching names like Dwayne Wade, Kobe Bryant, and Steph Curry today--brings me closer to

the sport and allows me to see what high-level play truly looks like.
Furthermore, just the concept of watching teams from different places play against each other is

thrilling to me, being able to see which areas produce the best natural talent and watching the

sacrifices managers make to create the best team they can. And that's just for basketball!

Needless to say, a year where the Olympics or a World Cup is happening makes me very

happy.

As a child, I also played a lot of video games to pass time. I started out small, with a Gameboy

Advance, playing role-playing games such as ​Golden Sun or ​Kingdom Hearts: Chain of

Memories and the ​Pokemon series. When I made friends at school, it was always exciting to

find those that played the same games as me. Naturally, I wanted to be better than them. I

distinctly remember carrying a link cable and my trusty copy of ​Megaman: Battle Network

around with me in case of any challengers. As I grew older and made more friends, the level of

competition increased. Soon I found myself playing such games as those in the ​Halo ​and

Starcraft franchises. It was here that I discovered a vast community of people who were like me,

but so much better than me. Today, while I still play my single-player games, I find that a large

chunk of my free time is devoted to competing against others in skill-based video games,

including ​Rocket League​ and ​League of Legends.​

 1

Much to my delight, I found that a lot of these games have a devoted enough fanbase to warrant

worldwide, high-stakes competitions, a phenomenon known as “eSports”.

Like physical sports, I became fascinated with the ​histories of these games, the players, and

the organisations that host them. To fully understand the phenomenon that is eSports, it is

crucial to realise that these ​aforementioned factors are all components of the whole; one

cannot simply try to analyse eSports as it is today, but must delve into a study of these

properties individually​. It is my intent to provide information about these in order to better

provide an understanding about competitive gaming. In addition, once that basis of

understanding is reached, I will attempt to ​extrapolate the future trajectory of eSports as it

relates to gaming as a whole and the societies surrounding it, based on its current iteration.

1
A goal being shot. Digital image. ​Xbox Store.​ Microsoft. N.d., Web.
<http://store.xbox.com/en-US/Xbox-One/Games/Rocket-League/>
Competition in Gaming

To begin with, we have to look at the types of games that have garnered a competitive

following. Much like physical sports, these have to have both a small learning curve with a high

skill cap, making them easy to pick up but hard to master. In addition, outplaying your opponent

should bring a sense of accomplishment and pride.

A good place to start would be arcade games; simple yet addicting, these games were only

gated by the amount of money you were willing to spend on them. Situated in public places,

these games typically had leaderboards in which the best players to touch that machine would

be immortalised on the screen. Well, at least until a better player surpassed them and knocked

​ nd
them off the screen. This style of games brings to mind titles like ​Pac-man, Space Invaders, a

Tetris.​ Having no end, these games only got harder the further you progressed, and so the

purpose wasn’t to defeat the game but to beat all other people to play it. Notably, games that

allowed cooperation or opposition eventually emerged, such as the 1976 ​Heavyweight Champ​,

widely regarded as the first fighting game. If we fast forward to the 1990s, more and more

people gain access to personal computers with their own connection to the internet; consoles

dedicated to gaming such as the Famicom were also surging in their own popularity from the

1980s. Consequently, the material role of community-based video gaming was starting to

change from a more centralised role at the arcades to the more scattered personal system that

we know today. It is during this era that people could more freely devote their time to practicing

and playing games. First person shooters (FPSs) and LAN parties became widespread,

enthralling people with “cowboys and Indians” fantasies worldwide, though with the 1999

publication of ​Half-Life: Counter-Strike by Valve, that soon became “terrorists and

counter-terrorists”. Though many different games exist in that genre today, such as the ​Call of

Duty series, the ​Team Fortress series, and the upcoming ​Overwatch,​ ​Counter-Strike still

remains the most competitive, enjoying widespread success in its current iteration, ​Global

Offensive.​

However, the most important development to competitive gaming was the genre of Real-Time

Strategy (RTS), in which the player controls an army and an economy, and has to macro- and

micro-manage all the resources at his disposal in order to be able to achieve victory. The most

well known--and considered by many to be the father to many of today’s strategy games--is

Blizzard Entertainment’s ​Warcraft III (​ WC3), released in July 2002. Infamous in the gaming

community to have been dominated by Koreans, ​Starcraft​--also developed by Blizzard, and

amusingly lauded by many as “Warcraft in Space”--launched a boom in the competitive aspect

of the genre. WC3 also boasted a level creator, in which players can create their own game

modes to their heart’s content. Most famously, this spawned a map called ​Defense of the

Ancients (DotA), which spawned its own genre, multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs). As

opposed to RTSs, in which the player gets to control many different units, the player controls

only one powerful unit, and is pitted against a team of five players with a team of their own

across multiple lanes. Similar to the 1985 novel ​Ender’s Game,​ the only real objective that

matters is the destruction of the enemy team’s Ancient (hence, the name), forcing strangers to

innovate strategies to complete this goal. Naturally, teams of skilled players--or more frequently,

real-life friends--grouped together as to have an easier time in this game. DotA is succeeded

both as a stand-alone game in DotA 2, published by Valve, and spiritually by ​League of

Legends​ (LoL), developed by Riot Games.2

2
​Please note that delving into the history of these two games and their developers is an entirely
complicated matter on its own, and as such I’m choosing to gloss over it at this point.
 3

Other companies have noted the massive popularity of these last two games, and have tried,

with varying degrees of success, to create their own variations of the game, like Blizzard’s

Heroes of the Storm (HotS), in which team gameplay is rewarded much more than individual

gameplay, and Hi-Rez Studios’s ​Smite,​ which is played in a third-person, rather than a top-down

view.

Players and Organisations

While I do still follow big names like Stephen and Seth Curry, and of course Tim Tebow (and

soon maybe Jeff Driskel), I also follow the careers of people with names like Ryan

“fREAKAZOiD” Abadir and William “Leffen” Hjelte, who play under the organisations Cloud9

(C9) and Team SoloMid (TSM), respectively. These gaming collectives work under a sort of

horizontal integration: they recruit players to represent them in various video game circuits. For

example, the aforementioned TSM currently employs twenty active players to represent them

across six games, Leffen being one of those for the fighting game, ​Super Smash Bros. Melee.

3
Various MOBA promotional images. Digital image. ​DVSGaming.​ N.d., Web.
<https://dvsgaming.org/moba-a-history/>
Players who have to work in a team typically live, eat, work, and do everything together. In the

North American circuit, when these professionals are off-season, they usually practice with a

camera for the whole world to see, in a process called “streaming”, taken from “video

streaming”. In this way, they are able to interact with their fans and teach them their thoughts

and internal strategies, a practice not commonly seen in physical sports. In return, these players

gain revenue from playing adverts or from donations from their fans; the most popular streamers

are able to sustain much more than a living wage from this. Understandably, a portion of the

money earned by professional gamers funds the team they are working under.

These umbrella organisations I have just described are rare, however. A sizeable amount of

professional teams are only interested in one video game, and rely on themselves or generous

benefactors in order to keep playing. Historically, these teams are viewed as underdogs,

because their organisations tend not to last. That doesn’t stop them from competing well,

however; the new LoL team Immortals (IMT) boast a 17-1 record in the most recent regular

season of competition.

In contrast, the bigger organisations that succeed tend to do very well across the board. TSM is

best known as one of the earliest teams to be present in professional ​League​, and are still

competing to this day, having undergone multiple roster changes since LoL’s season 1 in 2011.

The money and talent that these groups have allows them to attract star players from across the

globe. For example, even though their home is the North American circuit, the TSM LoL team

only has two Americans on it; two are Danish, and the last is a French national.4

4
Marshall, Paul. “A brief history of TSM” ​LoL eSports​., 21 Jan 2016. Web.
<​http://www.lolesports.com/en_US/articles/brief-history-tsm>
 5

Gaming Culture Across the World

Note that the culture I have just described is that of the North American circuit. Across the

globe, the players themselves and gaming in general are treated very differently. In this country,

professional gaming is seen with scepticism at best in the eye of the general public, and the

usual response is to scoff when even the word “eSports” is uttered.6 Therefore, many of the

North American-based organisations are started up by those who already tend to have an

interest in competitive gaming, and they have to find funding and sponsors among those circles

with which they are already familiar, giving the whole scene a grassroots feel. Abroad, the same

5
Team SoloMid’s current League of Legends roster, with Reginald and shoutcasters. Digital Image.
Headlines News.​ N.d., Web. <http://images.hngn.com/data/images/full/191450/team-solomid.png>
6
​ ross, Hailey. "Gross: Professional Gaming Not a Real "sport"" ​Iowa State Daily.​ Iowa State
G
University, 23 July 2013. Web.
<http://www.iowastatedaily.com/opinion/article_c7339eda-f313-11e2-80e8-001a4bcf887a.html>.
may not necessarily apply. For example, South Korean legislators in the 1990s deregulated

advanced telecom applications, resulting in a boom of the country’s broadband infrastructure.

Needing content to fill that space, telecom companies turned to online gaming and television

broadcasts to document the matches. These factors “resulted in a gaming culture in which

individual...players are able to gain a cult-like status similar to professional athletes.”7 The

ramifications of this can still be seen today, as teams and individual players are contracted not

by umbrella organisations, but by large corporations such as SK Telecom, one of the country’s

largest telecom providers.

In places where Internet cafes are still the norm, competitive games, with their short match

times and quick gameplay, rule. This can be seen in the American continent’s largest eSports

audience: Brazil. However, even though there is much community interest, with millions of

people visiting Portuguese-language eSports sites quarterly, there is no investor interest; unlike

other circuits, Brazil is lacking in large tournaments with substantive exposure and cash prizes.8

Tournament Circuit

Unlike the more modest tourney circuits of old, the largest tournaments are great events of their

own: people are willing to travel around the world for a seat in the back row, and live streaming

of the event ensures that millions more are watching worldwide. Some of the biggest

competitions are hosted for a specific game by its own developers; Riot Games’s League of

Legends World Championships and Valve’s ​The International for DotA 2 are among the most

7
Wagner, Michael. “On the Scientific Relevance of eSports”, ​Proceedings of the 2006 International
Conference on Computer Games Development,​ ICOMP, 2006.
8
​ uxent, Adrien. "The Brazilian ESports Gap: "There Is the Public, but Not Enough Investment.""
A
Esports Observer​. N.p., 09 Oct. 2015. Web.
<http://esportsobserver.com/the-brazilian-esports-gap-there-is-the-public-but-not-enough-investment
/>.
famous. In fact, because of its crowdfunded nature, The International is actually infamous

among followers of eSports for consistently having the largest prize pool among any gaming

tournament, with the most recent one in 2015 awarding over 18m USD as its grand prize.9 More

numerous, though, are tournaments which host multiple games; these are split between an

invitational and proper knockout tournament systems. A comparable event to this would be UF’s

own GatorLAN, which serves to attract gamers of all video game genres. The oldest and most

famous one would have to be the Major League Gaming (MLG) tournament, having been active

since 2002. That being said, niche tournament circuits do exist to cater to a specific audience:

Apex, for example, hosts only fighting games with the main event being the ​Super Smash Bros.

series.

Future Implications

Well, what does all this mean for us? In order to understand the future trajectory of eSports, one

must understand the current trajectory this phenomenon is on and the changes that are

occurring. It might be simple to think of competitive gaming as merely another outlet for

competition; entry is gated only by the cost of a decent computer or console and an internet

connection. In addition, those who would normally be barred from physical sports are always

welcome to play games, granted that they have the means to. Furthermore, the level of play that

one can enjoy is dictated by--like all other competitions--talent, hard work, and his knowledge of

the game. For example, a player that I mentioned earlier, Ryan “fREAKAZOiD” Abadir, is

physically striking: he has a muscular physique and a propensity for tank tops. Jake “Stewie2k”

Yip, another ​CS:GO player employed by C9 and who performs the same role as Abadir in the

9
​"Largest Overall Prize Pool in ESports." ​E-Sports Earnings.​ N.p., n.d. Web.
<http%3A%2F%2Fwww.esportsearnings.com%2Ftournaments>.
team, is noticeably smaller. The same can be said for Bryan “OddOne” Wyllie and Dennis

“Svenskeren” Johnsen, who both filled the same role on TSM’s LoL team. These examples

aren’t egregious, either; If you look at professional gamers worldwide, you’ll find that they are

hindered by their skill in the game and not by physical limitations.

10

What these games were to what they are now is especially striking. I don’t think that game

developers expected competitive gaming to be this popular and mainstream, yet now entire

companies revolve around making competitive games or even just organising tournaments. I

have broken down eSports the way I have because it truly is an assemblage, and these are the

main component parts. As it becomes more and more popular, in turn it grows much more

influential. There is no doubt that eSports’s “territory” is now uniquely different from that of video

gaming in general; it attracts those people that enjoy being engaged, that enjoy watching

someone like them reach the upper echelons of play. However, I personally don’t think that

eSports will integrate new components anytime soon; instead, the components that it does have

10
Deato, K. A physical comparison of Stewie2k and fREAKAZOiD. Digital image. ​Cloud9.​
will expand rapidly as it continues to interact with the societies around it. With their level of

accessibility, a dedicated fanbase can only go up. This may include people of wealth and power.

It already has in Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, who has expressed interest in

buying a ​League of Legends team.11 It’s all a positive feedback loop: as interest surges, so does

funding, and therefore production values, prize pools, and tournament circuits, generating even

more interest and motivation to follow eSports.

12

An interesting thing to note is that development in this area may spur telecommunications

improvement, as (1) the different regions would have incentive to do well against each other and

(2) more and more people would flood a nation’s broadband to play and watch professionals

compete, straining the bandwidth already in place.13

11
​Smith, Kerouac. "Mark Cuban Is Thinking about Starting a League of Legends Team." ​FOX
Sports​. FOX, 1 Feb. 2016. Web.
<http://www.foxsports.com/nba/story/mark-cuban-is-thinking-about-starting-a-league-of-legends-tea
m-020116>.
12
​Shark Tank​ personality and businessman Mark Cuban being interviewed at IEM San Jose 2015. Digital
Image. ​Game Informer.​ 22 Nov. 2015. Web.
<http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2015/11/22/shark-tank-39-s-mark-cuban-really-likes-leagu
e-of-legends-calls-out-espn-39-s-colin-cowherd.aspx>
13
​Rai, Laxmisha, and Gao Yan. "Future Perspectives on Next Generation E-Sports Infrastructure
and Exploring Their Benefits." ​International Journal of Sports Science and Engineering​ 3.01 (2009):
027-33. World Academic Press, 10 Feb. 2009.
Of course, this last part is a hypothetical. I still play sports. I still play video games. But as a

student, I love competitive video games: they’re easy to pick up and drop, and provide me with

a form of stress relief. Of course, there are still many sceptics, especially here in America, and a

lot of PR needs to be done if legitimacy will be acknowledged by certain groups. But even if

games don’t interest you, the spirit of competition surely would, and I believe it’s worth a try.

Thanks.