As digital technology has brought elite athletes closer to amateur athletes and to fans, it has also brought amateur athletes closer to the world of the elite athlete. Whereas once sophisticated performance monitoring devices were available only to elite athletes with extensive resources and experts around them to interpret the data, today’s amateur runner or cyclist can track his or her performance with a wearable digital band or a mobile phone. Serious amateurs have long used new technology to monitor or improve their performances. What distinguishes the digital era is the rise of the “quantified self” (Wolf 2010)—an idea that has recently been popularized to describe the manner in which people use digital bio-monitoring devices to capture information about their biological well-being, whether through exercise, food consumption, or simply sleep. These features are integral to the growth of interest in our increasingly data-driven society and the rise of consumer products that automate the interpretation of that data into simple messages about one’s health and how one may be progressing toward life goals. Though much has changed in a very short time, the origins of these aspirations can be traced back nearly fifty years with the emergence of exercise machines.
Some of the earliest ergometers were designed to isolate certain movements with a view to optimizing amateurs’ training for sports. For example, William Straub’s development of the home-based running treadmill in the 1960s ushered in a new era of domestic exercise machines. What distinguishes the digital exercise devices of the past decade from the analog exercise devices of the 1960s is that digital technology has pushed performance tracking out of the home and into the public sphere. Not long ago, gymnasiums were being developed with similarly sophisticated measuring tools, such as heart-rate monitors and step gauges, built into them. Now such tools—and many more—are available as mobile phone applications, allowing people to re-think where they exercise and what they are doing while being physically active.
Mobile devices deliver data insights into the biological changes a person experiences through physical activity, and this chapter focuses on the many ways in which this is occurring. It observes that physical activity is becoming increasingly mediated through digital technologies, notably through the gamification of exercise and physical activity. This starting point provides a context for a wider inquiry into the relationship between digital gaming and sports, building on the conceptual origins of chapters 1 and 2. The gamification of exercise by digital technology (for example, the application Zombies, Run!1) edge humanity toward a complete synergy between exercise and e-sports, or sports gaming. There are a number of reasons I offer in this book for why it is crucial for sports organizers to look at e-sport as a measure of its future, and this is one of them.
This chapter considers the implications of digital technology for the amateur athlete as a series of gaming experiences. In this respect, it employs the definition of gamework by Ruggill et al. (2004) to characterize the scope of the cultural analysis of the gaming medium. It describes the rise of computer game technology in gyms, the increasing physicality of home game console interfaces, the rise of mobile monitoring devices, and the broader emergence of exergaming as the mechanism through which recreational sports experiences are gamified. This development explain how physical activity is getting closer to digital gaming, but also how the reverse is also true: Digital gaming is becoming more like sport. For instance, at the 2016 Summer Olympics the arcade version of Mario and Sonica at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games—a game that requires players to run, jump, and move their arms as they compete in virtual Olympic sports—was available in the entertainment center of the athletes’ village. Consequently, this chapter also explores how amateur digital sports games demand remarkable degrees of time investment and skill development, which reveals the emergence of a new sports subculture: the e-sports movement. Indeed, to demonstrate the complete reversal of the unreality hypothesis—that a game is a simulation of reality—Ruggill et al. note that some simulation games are the primary means of training people for the real world, flight simulators being a common and widely used example:
Flight games, for example, represent the most complex computer-game genre, often requiring players to master more than a hundred controls. Knowledge of three axes of motion; speed controls; take-off, flight, and landing procedures; tracking and evasion protocols; weapon selection; rules of engagement; and mission prioritization are de rigueur in titles such as Jane’s ATF and Wing Commander V—Prophecy. The instruction books for such games are often intimidatingly thick, the fan communities small, and their members detail-oriented. … In games such as these, players must not only work to understand game play—what must be done in order to win—but also work to understand the complex technologies and rule systems by which a game’s objectives are to be met. Flight games and other simulations actually draw on pre-existing subcultures to form new ones, and these new subcultures in turn encourage new industry developments, new jobs, and new appreciations for the people who do the real work these games simulate. (ibid., p. 302)
This is an eloquent articulation of how transference between spaces of play and work spaces occurs but it also acknowledges that serious gaming requires a work ethic that underpins play—an ethic similar to that of elite sport. When we examine these ethics in more detail, they reveal even richer similarities.
In pursuing this line of inquiry, I articulate how the development of digital technologies can foster new forms of sport participation and community. Furthermore, I argue that new trends in physical digital culture are transforming computer culture and, as a result, challenging entrenched negative preconceptions of computer game playing as simply promoting sedentary lifestyles or anti-social behavior. Against these hypotheses, I argue that new forms of sports gaming make it possible for computer game playing to support more active lifestyles. I also describe how the term amateur athlete cannot be straightforwardly applied to discussions about digital interaction and sport, since the idea that, say, a computer game player is either an amateur or an athlete is not easily distinguished. Indeed, as will be discussed in later sections, one of the implications of digital culture is the further conflation of the distinction between work and leisure, which the professional/amateur divide typically describes (Miah 2011). Thus, I explore stories of amateur participation in sports, in which there are varying degrees of athleticism. The broad implication of this case is the consequent inability to continue thinking about amateur athletes as isolated from elite athletes, as they are today. To the extent that sports competition is a career choice involving contracts, salaries, and prestige, the emerging e-sport athlete is fast beginning to occupy this space in equal measure. These ideas engage theoretical research in leisure and play theory, but also have concrete implications for how sports industries must think about their communities and the means by which they engage them to develop their sports in the future.
Computer Games in Context
Over the past thirty years, studies of computer game playing have been drawn into media debates about whether or not gaming is psychologically damaging for the players, notably the younger generation. In this respect, computer games have been treated in the same way as new formats in film and in music have been treated in the past: as potentially destabilizing cultural artifacts. These anxieties have been exacerbated as more technology has found its way into the hands and bedrooms of children and as digital systems and devices have become ever more pervasive (Bovill and Livingstone 2001). Furthermore, such worries have, in the case of other media, been subsumed within a broader set of “moral panics” (Cohen 1973) about media consumption. In the case of such moral panics about digital media and living virtual lives, Chambers (2012) notes how they “persist about socially disengaged young people replacing human contact with virtual contact.” These competing views on the effects of media go back much further than digital games. Throughout history, novel cultural pursuits have been placed under public scrutiny, particularly when they have emerged from youth countercultures. The Goth, skateboarding, and surfing subcultures are all imbued with some anti-establishment characteristics, which are used to question (and often subvert) their legitimacy by controlling social structures (for example, the use of anti-skateboarding features in urban architecture).
In various parts of the world, these anxieties gained momentum as government inquiries drew further attention to the speculative and unknown effects of media culture, which elevated doubt to the level of risk. For example, in the United Kingdom the popular psychologist Tanya Byron and the Oxford University neuroscientist Susan Greenfield have publicly asserted that young people should relinquish their digital devices and play outside instead, often receiving criticism from media scholars who question the scientific credibility of their concerns (Levy 2012). The “Byron Review” (Byron 2008) notes further that “children’s use of the Internet and video games has been seen by some as directly linked to violent and destructive behavior in the young,” though it is cautious not to presume that this is a causal relationship. There is a long history of scholarly reactions to such claims, and there is a similarly long history of rejection of these claims by media scholars.
As a relatively young media form, computer game playing has been subjected to similar accusations. Indeed, it has been the most popular scapegoat for isolated violent events that have occurred in the past fifteen years. In the cases of the 1999 Columbine High School killings and the 2013 trial of Christopher Harris (in which the defense cited Harris’ exposure to violent video games), the corrupting force of game playing has been offered as an explanation for wrongs done by young and otherwise innocent people. In the Harris case, a psychologist was called by the defense as an expert witness to support the computer games argument, though the merit of his testimony was undermined when the prosecution asked him whether the game Pac-Man (in which the protagonist eats ghosts) could be considered violent and the psychologist said that it could (Rushton 2013).
Computer games have historically also been criticized as inherently anti-social practices that promote sedentary lifestyles and result in diminished social skills and a lack of participation in supposedly richer pastimes. Yet, as for other media forms, evidence to support these claims is limited—particularly evidence to support the more serious concerns that are advanced about such media participation. Vastag (2004) notes that a review of psychological studies of “video game violence” identifies, at worst, temporary modifications, rather than modification of traits. Furthermore, the isolation of gaming as the culprit is a difficult position to sustain. For instance, in the depictions of the Columbine incident in two feature films—Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Elephant (2003)—computer games are present but other things that may have shaped the perpetrator’s lives are also depicted as having been a part of the children’s lives. In Elephant, viewers are shown the young perpetrators playing piano and drawing, two activities the film subtly presents as constitutive features of their leisure experiences.2Elephant urges the viewer to question the attention given to gaming as a crucial determinant of violent behavior. Even in the cases of games that have explicitly anti-social content, such as Grand Theft Auto, connecting game-playing behavior with real-world behavior is, at best, tenuous as a causal explanation.
There are facets of this tension between advocates and critics of computer game culture that shed light on why it attracts such controversy. After all, computer game playing remains understood mainly by young people. Though an increasing number of adults play computer games (those who were playing Pong in the 1970s are likely to be in their fifties now), it has always been primarily a youth subculture. It is a pursuit that is mostly not understood by adults or policy makers, and that even excludes such people. In this respect, there is an inherently antagonistic facet to the problem of understanding what happens in computer game environments, which may explain why many such youth culture transitional leisure pursuits have attracted similar discourses.
One of the problems with isolating gaming as a cause of anti-social behavior is that it neglects to consider the full range of digital game-playing activity that takes place. Though it is often the most violent games that are discussed in the news media, computer games are much more diverse in what they require of players, making it near impossible to identify one kind of game playing, as a catch all term for such experiences.
The impact of this history on the present debate about sport is analogous to how the war on drugs in society has shaped—for the worse—the anti-doping movement in sport. Thus, anxieties about broader societal problems have an impact on sport policy makers and, while there is no background of resistance toward the integration of gaming within sports, the default presumption is that these are not natural bedfellows. However, in the case of computer games at least, all of this is about to change and the beginnings of it are found in the e-sport movement. Further evidence of how this transition will occur are found by also looking into narratives around the need for young people to be more physically active and the rise of mobile health gaming experiences.
Dance Dance Revolution and the Birth of Games for Health
In the past twenty years, a number of gaming experiences have begun to challenge some of the stereotypical assumptions about what gaming requires of players and what kinds of consequences it might have for sociability or physical activity. A good case in point is the game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), which was launched as an arcade game in 1998. Soon after its launch, DDR tournaments sprung up around the world and began to reveal interesting new configurations of computer-game-playing subculture. Video interviews of young players at a competition in the United States by ethnographic researchers from the University of Chicago’s Video Game and Cultural Policy project revealed how the game broke through existing barriers to physical activity in young populations and created mixed-gender spaces of physical activity that were social at their core. Subsequent research by Jacob Smith (2004) found that new communities were emerging around the game. These communities had different gender ratios than traditional computer games and sports communities. DDR was able to attract 50 percent female players, compared to 16 percent for other kinds of games available at the time. Through DDR, some of the major assumptions made by critics of computer game culture were being challenged. Further research has revealed the fragility of these assumptions. For example, Crawford (2005) finds that active game players are also often physically active people, and Fromme (2003) finds that sport participation is not influenced by digital gaming habits. So, as it turns out, not all computer game players lead sedentary lives, stuck behind screens in dark rooms.
New kinds of digital gaming experiences are diversifying what was once assumed to be a monolithic culture. A good example of this is found in pervasive games, which are best described as mixed-reality experiences in that players participate both when they are behind a computer screen and when they are out on the streets (but still behind the screen of a hand-held computer). Describing an example of immersive gaming that demonstrates these blurring spaces, McGonigal (2003) explores a virtual community called Cloudmakers, who were inspired to act after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. McGonigal explains how these gamers were empowered by their problem-solving capacities in game environments and how their example is now one of many in which game players are not sure whether the problems they are solving are real or unreal. In Blast Theory’s pervasive game Uncle Roy All Around You, players are “equipped with handheld computers and wireless networking, journeyed through the streets of the city in search of an elusive character called Uncle Roy, while online players journey[ing] through a parallel 3D model of the city [were] able to track their progress and could communicate with them in order to help or hinder them” (Flintham et al. 2003, p.168).
The integration of digital and physical interactions reveals how gaming is becoming increasingly demanding physically and more like a sport. This is not to say that a requirement of being designated a sport should be relative to the amount of physical exertion required of the athlete. But insofar as the amount of physical exertion may be one relevant factor, it is useful to note how it is changing in digital game playing. Even if the communities devoted to such novel forms of game playing are now smaller than those devoted to the top-selling games, which tend to involve only indoor game playing, these new experiences are growing quickly and the trajectory toward greater simulation leads to further integration of such physical exertion.
Extending the idea of gaming as a social form, consoles such as the Nintendo Wii have transformed computer game playing into a physically demanding activity. This changes the expectations one must have of game playing and the kinds of people who one would expect to play. The Nintendo Wii franchise is the fourth-highest-grossing video game franchise in the world, after Mario, Super Mario, and Pokemon (Wikipedia 2015). Nintendo Wii has also brought with it a shift in how families interact around gaming, moving the consoles from the bedroom to the living room (Chambers 2012)—a phenomenon assisted by the emergence of large flat-screen televisions, which tend to be located in living rooms and which can provide extraordinary, immersive gaming experiences.
In various bodies of literature, active gaming is referred to as “ExerGaming” (Kamal 2011), though Millington (2014) criticizes this characterization for its neglect of how such technologies exert a disciplinary force on people, compelling them to comply with government agendas and social norms around healthy behavior. Instead, Millington draws on Foucault to introduce the concept of “Bio-Play” and “Bio-Games” to emphasize these dimensions of the digital healthy games experience. Rich and Miah (2009) also highlight the theme of surveillance that is apparent within digital games for health. As part of the culture of statistics that surrounds digital environments, gaming for health—often through mobile health (mHealth) applications—has incorporated this dimension.
Today, people use mobile phone apps such as Run Keeper to track their physical activity, but also to share what they have done across social-media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. What was previously mostly an individual activity for many people has become a gamified, social experience through mobile technology. This act of using devices to share performance achievements should be seen with caution, as it is not simply about celebration and sharing. Rather, the act of publishing bio-play data exerts a disciplinary effect on players by holding them accountable to the public gaze and any subsequent evaluations the public may make upon the conduct of our lives. Nevertheless, the new wave of computer games (e.g., Eye Toy, Eye Toy Kinetic, GameBike, Nintendo Wii) offer full-body immersion and greater interactivity, providing new ways to enjoy a healthy, active lifestyle. They are a new chapter in how society appraises the worth of digital gaming experiences.
The Growth of the E-Sports Industry
The rise of digital gaming culture more widely is also a significant cultural phenomenon, which has an almost entirely distinct economic value compared with wider computer culture. The 2014 Global Games Market Report valued the worth of the industry at $81.5bn, more than double the size of the film industry (Wikipedia 2015). The total estimated revenue for 2016 is $99.16 billion, up 8.5 percent from 2015, and 37 percent of sales are on mobile devices (Newzoo 2016). The range of computer game cultures is vast, spanning a number of genres from first person shooting games to strategy and role-play games. Kuhn (2009) cites five categories of electronic games: “console/handheld, wireless, online, PC, and arcade.” This usefully reveals the range of spaces that gaming occupies from the household to the high street and even the gymnasium. For many years, the gaming market was dominated by three major manufacturers, which, according to Kuhn (2009), “account for 80%” of all game revenue: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. The demographic targets of these devices vary: Sony targets 16–24-year-olds, Microsoft 18–34-year-olds, and Nintendo 8–18-year-olds. Sony’s dominant share of 69 percent includes “having sold more than 120 million PlayStation2 units worldwide and more than a billion software units from its library of over 1,500 titles” by October 2007 (Kuhn 2009, p. 258). This is beginning to change, but some key characteristics of the offer by gaming companies remains the same. For instance, the prices of game consoles have remained relatively low—indeed, below cost—to provide a platform for software units to reap the profits. Kuhn also reveals that, despite massive growth in recent years, the mobile gaming market was expected to remain smaller, while online games are the fastest growing segment of online entertainment (including such games as SecondLife, World of Warcraft, DOTA2, League of Legends, and Starcraft II). It is also worth noting that, almost a decade ago electronic games represented “one-third of the toy industry in the US” and that “50–60% of all Americans over the age of six now play, with an average of 35 yrs” (Kuhn 2009, p. 260). Today many toys are considered to be cross-over games. A good example is the Hot Wheels toy car franchise, which is accompanied by a playable mobile game. A user can purchase a physical toy car and then use a QR code to scan the purchase into the mobile game and play with the new toy car within the mobile game. Kuhn notes that, although the gamer demographic tends to be “males in their twenties,” the Entertainment Software Association estimates that 41 percent of gamers are women or girls. The motivations for gaming are also interesting to observe, as they bring into question our assumptions about the characteristics of this subculture. Thus, “challenge and competition, enjoyment, social aspects” (ibid., pp. 261–262) all feature in the reasons why players seek games, which may not differ much from what motivates people to get involved in sports. Chambers (2012, p. 77) also draws attention to how the rise of digital games corresponds with the changing family in the 21st century:
Social gaming such as Nintendo Wii corresponds with transformations in family relations, home-based leisure and images of the digital game industry. Radical changes in family life coincide with changing forms of communication technology, social ties and spatial configurations in the home.
Sports-related computer games continue to be among the best-selling titles each year, giving rise to impressive digitally mediated communities (Kuhn 2009) and new forms of media practice (Marik 2013). A comprehensive report on the e-sport industry published by SuperData (2015) revealed some key insights into its growth. For instance, it recognizes the e-sport market to be worth $748 million, likely to rise to $1.9 billion by 2018. It also notes the dominance of so-called first-person shooter games, and a growing prize pool in competitive e-sports of around $41 million. The report also draws attention to the creation of dedicated e-sport arenas around the world and the ability of competitions to fill such venues as Madison Square Garden with large audiences.
Despite the growth of sports computer games, there has been little analysis of this within sport studies, media studies, or cultural studies. However, there are some exceptions. For instance, in 1995 Dennis Hemphill introduced the notion of cybersport to the literature. At that time, studies were beginning to explore the role of virtual-reality applications in sport. Seven years later, my article “Immersion and Abstraction in Virtual Sport” appeared as one of three chapters on digital gaming and sport in the volume Sport Technology: History, Philosophy and Policy. Richard Lomax (2006) published a history of the highly successful “fantasy sports” genre, the roots of which extent back about fifty years to “game boards, player cards, dice, and/or markers,” which recalls my emphasis in chapter 1 on the connections between sports and digital experiences and game playing as a broader aspect of human life.
In the past ten years, the growth of e-sports has been significant, as has the growth of research into this field (Consalvo and Mitgutsch 2013; Crawford 2005; Crawford and Gosling 2009; Taylor 2012). In 2000, the World Cyber Games were established, sponsored by Samsung Electronics and Microsoft. At their peak in 2008, the World Cyber Games brought together 800 participants from 78 countries, and in 2009 the prize money amounted to $500,000. Because it was the first major event at which sports digital gaming took place, the importance of the World Cyber Games in the development of this subculture is beyond question (Taylor 2012). Moreover, the fact that one of the main sponsors—Samsung—was also a Worldwide Olympic Partner raises interesting questions about the crossover between these two types of sports events. Indeed, in 2014 another longtime Olympic partner, Coca-Cola, came on board as an e-sport sponsor of the Riot Games League of Legends, and its role in e-sports is set to grow (Gaudiosi 2015). The alignment of these Olympic stakeholders with the e-sport industry may be no coincidence. Hutchins’ (2008, p. 858) overview of the WCG values shows clear common ground with the Olympic movement:
The WCG slogan, “Beyond the Game,” means that the WCG is not just a world game tournament, but also combines the world to create harmony and enjoyment through shared emotions. Further, the WCG slogan hopes for peace to emerge during its tournament, which fosters mutual respect amongst all participants from all over the world as we strive together to build an attractive “World Cultural Festival.”
The World Cyber Games came to an end in 2014 when the president announced there would be no further tournaments. Though they were informally referred to as the “e-sports Olympics,” there was actually only one sports game within the competition: FIFA’s soccer game. In an interview published on the website Tech in Asia (Custer 2014), the WCG organizer Lin Yuxin rejected claims that the WCG was brought to an end because of increased competition from other events or because of the failed move toward mobile gaming. Instead, Yuxin identifies the shift in Samsung’s strategy toward mobile gaming as crucial, since the WCG was a PC gaming competition. Yuxin also argues that the Olympic style of the WCG was in excess of its brand value, leading to over-commitments and excessive administration. Finally, Yuxin notes that the WCG failed to capitalize on its “golden age,” and that losing the interest of Samsung was catastrophic to its future.
Yet the WCG was not the only games competition out there, nor was it the only competition to cease doing business. In 2008, the Championship Gaming Series founded by DirectTV came to an end after just two seasons. The Electronic Sports World Cup, which featured Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer in the years 2004–2007 and has featured FIFA soccer since 2009, has been more successful. With the slogan “e-Sport for all,” the ESWC has brought together competitors from more than 100 nations and has offered more than $2 million in prize money since its inception. Also, since 2008, e-sports has had its very own federation—the International e-Sports Federation (IeSF)—which has set out to champion e-sport as a legitimate sports industry. The importance of this should not be overlooked, as the emergence of a dedicated federation may be akin to the codification of traditional sports that took place in the 19th century. Bringing together an increasingly fragmented and commercially diverse community is no minor challenge. Nevertheless, important achievements have taken place in this direction. Since 2013 the IeSF has become an official signatory of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and in 2014 it became a temporary member of the Sport Accord, the first step toward being fully ratified as an International Sports Federation. The IeSF e-Sport World Championship (not to be confused with the electronic Sports World Cup) took place under that title for the first time in 2014, having previously been called the IESF World Championships. FIFA soccer was a major feature of that tournament, and baseball, racing, and combat sports all have made appearances on the schedule since the inaugural tournament in 2009. Furthermore, the IeSF has managed to win recognition as a sport from more than fifteen national governments in its short history and is also working with other sports federations. For instance, in 2014, the IeSF and the IAAF launched a joint program with the slogan Athletics for a Better World, which set in place a basis for their continued collaboration. And in May 2016 the World E-Sports Association was launched by the Electronic Sports League, which aims to establish professional standards across the industry.
Despite these events and organizations, there is an absence of games with explicitly sports-related content within these international tournaments. For example, the three titles played at the 2015 IeSF World Championships were League of Legends, Hearthstone, and Starcraft 2, games clearly located in the fantasy genre. The absence of sports related titles is explained by the relative numbers of gamer communities or the challenges associated with developing worldwide tournaments of this kind that focus only on sports. It might also reveal the nature of e-sports team structures, which tend not to be restricted to just the sports genre. Nevertheless, for now, the term e-sports is used as a catchall term, into which any form of competitive digital gaming is being included, whether or not the game has any sports-related content. This may prove to be one of the limitations in achieving full ascendance into the world of traditional sport and further fracturing may ensue in coming years.
With the creator of World of Warcraft saying that it is time for computer games to be given sport status (BBC 2014), it may just be a matter of time before they are brought into the fold of traditional sports. However, if the games played at major tournaments are more like military games than sports games, it is difficult to see this leading to any kind of ascendance into traditional sports territory. Moreover, to the extent that military titles rather than sports titles are the most popular, it could be a financial disaster for the games industry to walk away from those other titles and focus on sports. Indeed, examining the lists of the most prominent international e-sports tournaments in the world makes it apparent that games such as League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients (DOTA) are the most prominent kind of game (e-Sports Earnings 2015). Thus, playing fast and loose with the concept of sport may be a strategic necessity at this point in the history of e-sports. Nevertheless, discussions are beginning to take place about making e-sports fit more widely into the traditional structures that describe traditional sports. The media coverage of such communities has also recently provoked questions as to the relationship between these sport-like communities and more traditional sports, with the BBC asking “Are pro video-game players our 21st century athletes?” (2012) and “Is Computer Gaming Really Sport?” (2015).
With the longtime Olympic sponsor Coca-Cola sponsoring e-sports since 2001 and the emergence of online streaming platform Twitch broadcasting tournaments live, there are many questions about how e-sports may adopt or destabilize traditional forms of monetizing broadcast content. The Twitch model of monetizing broadcast content may mean that e-sports bypass television deals altogether. Moreover, this signals a longer-term shift in sports broadcasting more generally as everything moves to online only. Alternative, the in-game micro-transactional economy of e-sports gaming may offer a completely new model for monetizing digital media experiences.
With an average age of 21 years for Twitch viewers and an average age of about 54 years for American television viewers, there is a huge disparity between these audiences (Thompson 2014). Moreover, since Twitch was purchased by the leading online retailer Amazon for just under $970 million in 2014, there is even more reason to conclude that the online-only model for distributing gaming content will span far into the future. However, in the year 2014 ESPN broadcast the finals of The International—the major DOTA 2 tournament—despite the fact that its president, John Skipper, said in the same year that e-sports are “not a sport” but rather “a competition, more like chess and checkers than ‘real sports’” (Skipper, cited in IGN 2014).
e-Sports Athletes as a New Elite
Cyber-athletic competition cannot be thought of in terms of media or sport or computer gaming. The institutional and material boundaries separating them have imploded, leading to the creation of a new social form, e-Sport.
Brett Hutchins (2008, p. 865)
As e-sports have become more professionalized, there has been greater recognition of the participants’ achievements. For example, in 2013 e-sports athletes gained formal recognition from the US Immigration and Citizenship Services, which decided to assign professional e-sports players the same visa status as other athletes (Robertson 2013). An important part of the professionalization of e-sports is its integration with broader elements of the entertainment industry, specifically around the licensing of computer games. Though the prefix ‘e’ in the quotation from Hutchins and in the wider world of e-sports may not stand the test of time (as is also true of countless other Internet-isms that have come and gone from digital parlance), the ‘cyber’ lexicon serves as a way of emphasizing an important cultural and economic shift within society that is brought about by digital technology.
In sports, perhaps the one dimension that connects the elite athlete with the amateur athlete, beyond their competing in a similarly designed arena and with similar apparatus, is the area of computer gaming. Gaming culture has already given rise to subcultures of cyberathletes in which computer game players have celebrity status as athletes, including their own sponsorship deals. For example, the renowned cyberathete Fatal1ty (Jonathan Wendell) won more than $450,000 in prize money in the years 1999–2006 (e-Sports Earnings 2015). In the period 2009–2014, Jiao “Banana” Wang earned more than $1.8 million from e-sports (ibid.). Since 1998, the total prize money for e-sports tournaments has grown considerably. (See table 4.1.)
As e-sports become more professionalized, it becomes increasingly difficult for critics to deny that playing computer games requires the same kind of skills and perseverance that any athletic endeavor would. Even the absence of gross motor activity does not go very far in discounting e-sports activity as un-sport-like, since athletes train their bodies in ways that are analogous to what, say, a racing-car driver does in preparation for his athletic performance, which involves mostly sitting. Like drivers of racing cars, e-sport athletes sit down for their competition, but each has to be in a state of high fitness in order to be competitive.
One of the most interesting dimensions of the integration of virtual and physical worlds is the way the real-world career of an athlete or a team has blurred with the in-game narrative created by game developers (Silbermann 2009). This is most obvious in the player-manager games; for instance in FIFA’s soccer game, the avatars for players are created with the skills and performance characteristics of the real players from the most recent season. This layering of fantasy and real-world contexts is a further indication of how the worlds are becoming interdependent. Indeed, Silbermann notes that “soccer video games were successful in helping athletes have a better understanding of various styles of play” (ibid., p. 169).
Through computer games, the career of an elite athlete becomes part of a new narrative, which, in turn, extends the fictive space of sports to a new territory in the pursuit of leisure. It is even apparent that data on players uploaded to games feeds into the analytic discussions that surround actual players and their recruitment. For example, the simulation game Football Manager works with ProZone Sports to extract data from within the computer game environment and integrate it with the professional recruitment database owned by ProZone. Stuart (2014) explains this as follows:
To ensure authenticity, Sports Interactive has spent the last 22 years building its own network of “scouts,” dedicated Football Manager fans who attend real-life matches and training sessions, and then file detailed reports on players so that the game’s database is authentic. Some scouts watch a single team, others a whole league, and all remain in regular contact with the development studio while swapping tips and experiences on the company’s buzzing forums (online).
This is not the first time that there has been a transfer from a game environment to actual sport. In 2012, Football Manager also created a real-life manager “when Azerbaijani student Vuagar Huseynzade was put in charge of FC Baku’s reserve team based on his success in the game” (Rumsby 2014).
All these transformations to e-sports reveal that there is nothing inherent in traditional sports that permits their being afforded a special status as physical cultural pursuits that should be distinct from computer-based sports games. As the conditions of the gaming industry align with the values of the elite sports world, and as the overlap between these two imaginary worlds of performance grows, we may yet see a world in which computer gaming is given serious consideration as a future Olympic sport. Indeed, at the e-Sport World Championships in 2015, representatives from the International Olympic Committee were in attendance, and so there may be a will to understand how the world of sport is changing toward gaming from the most ancient of sporting institutions. Indeed, if BMX biking, mountain biking and surfing can make it into the Olympic Games, then why not gaming? The economic argument alone may see sponsors quickly shifting their investments into the growing market of e-sports gaming and away from traditional sports events, unless the latter begin to adapt and embrace their inevitable digital futures.
Yet there are also deeper, ideological reasons for why e-sport may be a sign of the times for traditional formats. Consider how the modern Olympic Games revival was predicated, in part, on a desire to bring about social change. Today, one of the key aspects of such change is the ability to be active in digital environments. Indeed, one might even argue that Internet access should be a matter of human rights, or might think of it as a public utility comparable to electricity or water. As more of civil society moves into online space, there comes a point at which failure to access information may limit one’s democratic rights. In this respect, e-sports should be seen as a vehicle toward creating a more digitally literate society, a crucial aspect of ensuring that people are optimally placed to respond to some of today’s most important global issues, one significant element of which is about getting the entire world’s population online. In this sense, advocates in e-sport can peg their social mission on the basis of promoting digital inclusion and access to digital skills development. After all, if a nation is to become competitive in e-sports, it will have to develop a globally competitive digital infrastructure. At a time when architects are building the world’s first e-sport stadiums it is worth considering that what happens in such environments need not just be competitions. Instead, the future arena may include various kinds of exciting learning initiatives, designed to solve society’s biggest problems. This way of imagining sport’s future would be appealing from the perspective of sustainability, but also would allow sports to appeal to the importance of still having physical arenas, in an increasingly virtual world. The future of the sports competition venue is reliant on its capacity to be a focal point for much more than just sport. However, this is not the only social issue around which e-sports can seek to make a difference. At present, one of the big problems in e-sport competitions is the absence of female players. Yet instead of feeling unable to make significant changes in this area, e-sport may institute interventions that allow it to become a leader in addressing inequalities in digital competencies between genders.
For people outside of the e-sports world, a world in which digital games could become Olympic sports may seem a very unlikely scenario. Indeed, there are many hurdles to be overcome before this could ever be possible; one important one is whether the e-sport community even aspires to such a status. Even achieving a situation in which e-sports could have their own equivalent of the Olympic Games, in which a range of games would be played, is difficult to envisage, as at present only a few titles can claim to have large enough communities to stage such events, and combining theirs with others is not obviously valuable. Yet this is also what makes the future of e-sports so interesting, as, to some extent, it will be a test of the value of human solidarity to see whether e-sports embraces the more traditional sporting ethos that allows a range of federations to come together in a common endeavor. While there is more that the larger sports federations can do to support the smaller ones, there at least exists some sense of common purpose and the future of e-sport may be to discover this and realize that, games that may be quite “niche” or emerging are nevertheless crucial to support by the larger titles and publishers, so as to nurture the evolution of gaming and the diversity of its player community. Such aspirations would also allow gaming to occupy a more central and influential political role in sport and outside of it.
However, for the skeptic, it is crucial to consider that the trajectory toward e-sports is not solely in the rise of gamer communities but also through the digital gamification of traditional sports. As sports evolve, more digital elements will be brought into the gaming experience for athletes, transforming them into mixed-reality encounters. These kinds of e-sports will have a significant impact on what one considers to be either gaming and sport.
