What does the rise of eSports mean for the rest of well… sport?
There are two types of people in the world.
Those who poop with their pants around their ankles, and those that take them all the way off. People on either side are unaware that the other exists.
I guess there are other people that don’t ever wear pants. Oh and lots of Eastern countries tend to favour squat toilets, so I guess they’d have a whole separate system of clothing-to-defecation differentiators.
This has been an odd parable, but the point is that you should always be aware that your context has established your ‘norm’ and be open to the concept that there are others as confused by your choices as you are by theirs.
I had a bit of a pants-pooping moment myself this afternoon when I read that a DOTA competition in the US had a prize pool of $23 million dollars (US). My first reaction was; what the fuck is DOTA which was quickly followed by; that is a shit-tonne of money.
For those as uninitiated as myself it’s an MMORPG or a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, an MMO for short. DOTA or Defence of the Ancients is a mod (which I think is like an expansion) on the Warcraft universe of Blizzard, who is the biggest online gaming developer there is. Blizzard’s numbers of users read more like country populations than game subscriber data. They’ve stopped releasing their numbers but it’s estimated that over 100 million user profiles have played one of the Warcraft franchise games.
While playing a game is one thing the real avenue of growth in the last couple of years for eSports has been the viewership. It’s where the market are rubbing their hands together. According to ESPN, who have serious skin in the established sporting sector, almost 15 million people tuned in to watch a League of Legends final last year. What’s more, that number is only pegged to grow. Withe vast majority of viewers under 35, eSports could be the ‘sport’ of the future. Even in Australia established sports clubs are beginning to cotton on. AFL team the Adelaide Crows purchased the Australian ‘Legacy eSports’ team in May this year in what I can only assume was a bid to ‘diversify their portfolio’.
It’s a canny move. The wider market have been scrambling for ways to ingratiate themselves into the so called ‘millennials’ hearts (and wallets), and I guarantee we will see eSports touted as the next groundbreaking way to do it. Any established sports franchise knows they live and die by one thing and one thing only; the consumer’s eyeballs. And the eyeballs are watching monsters and heroes kill each other.
Canny or not the idea of (let alone the term) eSports probably has many people up in arms. People love definitions and using just your thumbs to kill a demon doesn’t feel very ‘sport’-y.
Personally I like to think I am a pretty open minded guy, but I’ve always taken a pretty dim view of professional gaming. Before this year I would never called it eSports. It somehow seems like a lesser pursuit than sport. I know that I have always approached it very differently. Not that I am anywhere near professional at any sport, online or in real life.
I play a bit of FIFA (probably the largest sport based game) and in my time have played some Call of Duty but I do so in a wholly unproductive way. I do it as a means to switch off, I don’t really try to improve either at the game or in life in general while playing. There is no reflex training, no mental agility nugget of self growth. There is no secret muscle I am training. It’s as close to mental masturbation as you can get. I take great satisfaction in playing against the computer on a relatively easy setting and scoring heavily.
I contrast that with sport where I am competitive and (sometimes) focused on improvement. I use sport as means to (unsuccessfully) stay fit and to socialise. It feels productive. It seems as far removed from my version of gaming as could be. So this was why when I thought of eSports, I thought of time-wasting and laziness not athleticism.
But that’s like comparing kicking the footy in the park with playing AFL. As much as I say the words in my own head, I am not Joe Daniher taking pack marks. I am just a man doing my best not to fall over. So why did I think that eSports would be different? I just accepted the concept that people who played too many video games drank eons of Mountain Dew and generally took on the physical properties of the op shoppe furniture on which they sat.
So I did a bit more research.
I found that (according to some) the best of the best in the eSports sector share many qualities with high level traditional athletes. In a study conducted at the German Sports University in Cologne, led by a bloke called Prof. Ingo Froböse, researchers found that eSports athletes achieved up to 400 keyboard and mouse movements per minute (that’s four times the as much as the average person). The ability to instantaneously balance crucial decision making with minute dexterous movements can separate the good gamer, from the best eSports star. Couldn't that be true for any sports star?
Froböse also goes into bat for the eSports professionals oft stereotyped gelatinous bodies . He points to the combination of high amounts of cortisol (a hormone that is manufactured in the adrenal glands) coupled with the elevated pulse of some competitors (reaching up into the 160/180 bpm ) as evidence for their classification as athletes.
Realistically the only way for eSports to get recognition is for the whole ‘sport’ to gain some mainstream attention and there are two key indicators of success that are starting to fall into place. Firstly, they’re starting to get their ‘college’ styled competitions in place to grow and scout top talent. Secondly, the cash money is coming in. With the viewership have come brands. Big, traditional brands are cashing in on this new ocean of content hungry consumers.
Undoubtedly there will be a bunch of older white men screaming at their TV’s silently somewhere when the media takes a poke at The International prize money being dolled out sometime next week. Kochy will make some quip about kids and their games and entirely gloss over the fact that a whole slice of the entire world now follows eSports more closely than their parents ever followed traditional sports. I think it’s time to give in. ESports and regular sports are really two sides of the same coin and if that makes you uncomfortable maybe you should try taking off your pants to poop.
The moral of the story, don’t be afraid of something just because you don’t understand it.
Hell, tomorrow you might even see my bare ankles under the stall as well.
Just kidding, I’m not a maniac.
