I will dare to make a small reflection on the present and future of eSports as sports. This reflection is based on certain thoughts and observations I have done since #CopenhagenWolves closed their competitive team, some article my friend Mario show me some days ago, and a conversation I had with Daniel, who pretty much knows my perspective concerning the topic. I am also basing this reflection on a comparison with traditional sports as I know them from my home country. This reflection is full of ignorance, particularly as local eSport scenes might change a lot, and I ask my friends that understand more the dynamics of eSports to help me filling the gaps of my reflection and to start a fruitful discussion around the topic.
The problem with eSports is not if they are or not sports. A professional sport is created under certain conditions, like having professional leagues dedicated to them. My best example of this is the chess, which is not more a sport than it is a game, or rather, it is a game with the status of sport. Some people say “it exercises the brain” and that’s why it is a sport. But to be honest, there are other games that are mentally more challenging (e.g., Shogi and Go), and even MENSA has created games that are highly demanding cognitively (e.g., Quorridor and Quarto). They do not have the title of sports because they do not go out of the local scene and they do not have international associations bidding for them as a sport. Just to inform you, I base that last point on conversations I have had with a couple of Sports Education professors.
Now, the eSports seem to have the same things the chess has, it demands high cognitive abilities and demands them heavily, it also demands a high dosage of expertise and skill, Additionally, it demands high fine-motor skills, and it has an international scene to support it. The big problem with eSports (or at least as I see it) is that they did not grow naturally (in Occident), but it seems to me that people saw some potential on it as a business, making it grow in a forced way. I will explain this in the next paragraphs.
Let’s see how football (Although some people calls it soccer, I rather call it football) works in Latin America. I will take this mildly as football is more a religion than a sport there. People in general are interested in sports (football). Since they are children, people might develop a passion for practising it as a ludic activity or as a professional activity. Some people just want to watch others playing it. There are some local clubs where you can practise it, you can play it at school in physical education, or you can go out on the streets with your friends and play it in an informal way. Schools have their own teams, universities have their teams, and there are teams that want to be professional and others that want to be a ludic space. There is a whole local fauna of expertise and compromise with the sport at many levels, with the high-ranked athletes being the ones performing at cups.
Now, lets switch to South Korea. Why? Because it is where eSports have their biggest impact, championships started there, and there are huge eSports stars just like there is a Ronaldo in football. Talking with a Korean friend, she was telling me how the society is permeated by this. After school she went with her friends to the local gaming café, they have a match of SCII, and the loser team paid the dinner for the winning team. She told me she wasn’t the best player, but she was told what to do, she coordinated with the others, and this made her feel included. Indeed, if you were not to play the game at all, you were excluding yourself. Does it sound any familiar? For me it does, in Colombia, guys go out from school, they challenge each other to a football match, they make teams and the losers pay the drinks for the winners. If you do not play football you are simply out of the social circle (which was actually my case).
So the sportsmanship and play culture starts from a young age, permeate the social circles, and is sponsored by local institutions which support the teams with space, equipment, time, and knowledge for the local teams of growing professionals and amateurs to practice the sport.
When we talk about eSports, it is like this structure practically does not exist (in Occident). Although the scene is starting to organise (e.g., organised institutions for high-schools (http://hsstarleague.com/), universities (http://ueg-liga.de/), or even learning eSports in secondary school (http://www.hoejerefterskole.dk/da)), finding a local scene is not easy. In other words eSports, at least for the occidental world, was born upside down. It didn’t developed bottom-up, it didn’t start with the interest of many people gathered to have fun after school, it didn’t start creating spaces for people to interact both in game and F2F; instead it started by the top, showing us how the big teams do, how they train, and what they require to be on the top. In that sense, eSports were born top-down, showing us how “good” a professional player can live and earn by “just playing games”, and then creating a culture of people interested in the game either for ludic reasons or for professional reasons without really showing a connection between the two of them (top and bottom).
This last part generates two problems, the lack of spaces for people to practice together and match against each other, and the lack of a scene where professional players can be acquired. The first problem takes us to a ludic scenario where no-one know each other. Some people are fortunate enough to have friends who also play an eSport, but the rest have to match with and against random people, which generates and fosters problems proper of the media interaction (not tackled here). At the same time this generates problems, as there are no spaces where teams can be created, developed, improved, and challenged.
This takes us to the second problem. Traditional sports have associations, clubs, unions, ranked leagues, and hotbeds. eSports, at least in Occident, have none of these (or very few), and people pretty much associate themselves in a pretty messy way, maybe with (lucky) friends who are also players. But the lack of these leagues prevents people to meet, to create bonds beyond the game, and even to extend the bonds inside the game, maintaining bonds that are pretty much subject of the messy anonymity of the current mass media. However, the F2F bonding, exchange of information, group rotation, and challenging is necessary for teams to grow; this is why professional eAthletes are in a gaming house playing and practising instead of being at their own home connecting from their computers.
In other words, the problem with eSports, at least in Occident, is that it is not a natural hotbed. People are willing to invest in winning teams that are already on the top, but not to develop the environment for the scene to grow. You can see how many top teams change their “local” players for Korean players who are better (of course they are, they grew with the local scene of their country), as sponsors are more willing to pay for a good player than to develop the local scene to have prepared players to represent them. Buying players is not bad, but it is bad (at least for the eSports scene in Occident) to invest only on winning teams and winning players and not sponsoring the hotbeds and the environment to let the sports grow.
I will stop this reflection here as it was supposed to be small and it has gone pass the words to be small, and it might also be biased by my naïveté. But I will let you with the proposal of creating a better space for eSports, supporting more local scenes, and creating spaces of interaction for the scene to grow both in a professional and in a ludic way. Trying to prevent the mess of the scattered internet interaction and harnessing the power of F2F bonding, challenging, and assessing the scarce ‘bottom’ scene of players so the foundations for the ‘top’ scene of players can be stronger. In the end, these games are about cooperation and team-play, and that is something the classic sports can teach us a lot about.
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