eSports has a battle on its hands for hearts and minds

A couple of months back, I downloaded League of Legends. I can’t remember the trigger that made me do it. It’s likely I had read something on Reddit about the ongoing League of Legends World Championships, a professional gaming event, that caught my eye.

Despite the pretty basic and lightweight onboarding process, I got more hooked than a Bronze V ADC in a lane matchup against a Master Blitzcrank. That’s very hooked by the way.

For those unfamiliar, League of Legends is a MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game which pits five players, playing five characters with distinct skillsets and powers against each other to see who can destroy the others’ base. In many ways, it feels like a sports game. The main arena doesn’t change, similar to say a soccer pitch, and there are tactics as well as technical skill which decide the victor.

After playing for a while, I ended up on the Twitch/YouTube rollercoaster, watching people more learned than I play the game, in an attempt to learn from them. After watching some tutorials, I branched out into watching some highlight reels, and despite not really understanding what was going on, I could from time-to-time, see something that I knew required a high degree of skill.

I’m still a noob. I’m not even at level 30 yet, the prerequisite level required to play in LoL’s more serious ranked mode (despite playing about 150 games — this is the standard that the game expects from its playerbase). At this point, I enjoy watching professional games, similar to the way I’d watch a football match. The only difference being that I haven’t figured out how to align myself or support a team yet. There’s no national/regional teams (with the exception of a Ryder Cup like divide between continents e.g. NA is the North America region, EUW is Western Europe as well as KR, the Korean server — South Korea being the absolute hotbed of top level League of Legends play.

A couple of weeks ago, after missing a flight with some colleagues from work, we retired to a pub to wait out our replacement flight. The conversation was steered toward competitive gaming and my colleagues opined that they couldn’t imagine anything more boring. Deciding to rid myself of any credibility I could have claimed to have had, I outed myself as an interested bystander of the competitive gaming scene to much ridicule.

As I thought about it, I happened on the reason that competitive gaming will probably never reach the same levels of popularity as more conventional sports. With the learning curve being as high as it is, it takes a lot more investment to understand even the core facets of a competitive video game. By comparison, when Lionel Messi skips past four tackles and curls a ball into the top corner, nearly anyone can appreciate the difficulty of that, we all played football on the street or in the garden as kids. But when a pro LoL player nips in and steals Baron completely blind and escapes in a 1v5 situation, your average punter on the street probably won’t understand what just happened.

Until that obstacle is defeated, it’s unlikely that Riot Games, the company who make League of Legends, will get to fulfill their vision — that League becomes a global sport that lasts for generations.