As a gamer, like a player of traditional sports, you, along with the other 400 million competitive players, want to win. For traditional “stick and ball” sports, there are structured programs for learning, practice, drills, training, and coaching starting with youth leagues, through high school, college, and professional athletes. Athletes in traditional sports learn to assess and train their abilities and strategize to expose opponents’ weaknesses.
If you’ve watched pro esports athletes, you know that the level of skill, like speed and precision of movement, is stunning and the team strategy is at least as complex as in any traditional sport. Yet, unlike in traditional sports, there are few opportunities for learning, metrics for assessing your ability and health, or training methods for improving your performance efficiently (to prevent burnout). Outside of college or pro teams, there are few opportunities for coaching to improve strategy.
While some can pay for the services of a qualified coach, like most gamers, you may have turned to web-based sources like Twitch, Discord, YouTube, and Reddit for gaming advice where you received generic or crowd-sourced suggestions. By contrast, would anyone think it would make sense for a kid to learn to play soccer by watching the World Cup on TV? Nope. Instead they’d be in a neighborhood soccer league, with a structured and standardized curriculum for learning.
Training, assessment, and guidance for competitive gaming should, in principle, be easier than for traditional sports because every action and position of every player in every game or practice session can be recorded and analyzed down to mouse & keyboard or controller movements. Instead, the vast majority of the hundreds of millions of gamers around the world are on their own, learning to play with their friends, and by watching live streams and competitions. We can do better.
