The world is changing! Along with the advance of technology many traditional activities have also changing with time and under the influence of technology. Like the area of sports. Today a new form of electronic sports activity has emerged and picked up huge momentum.
I am a long and frequent player of various strategies and competitive games, enjoying the excitement of the competitions as far as the skills development the electronic games can provide you if you play them intentionally and with specific goals in your head.
Why Electronic Sports (eSports)?
Even though I can not declare professionalism in the area of an extremely advanced in my competitive skills, my strategic interests pull me to study more the area of eSports.
Focusing on seeing intentionally what a well-written game can cause to a player (beyond the obvious one of advancing some mechanical and visualization skills on a PC like speed accuracy, problem-solving coordination of numerous different entities, etc.)
Originally I started replaying my old-time favorite electronic games on my PC (not the network versions) like the:
- Sid Meier’s Civilization V: The Complete Edition,
- Baldur’s Gate,
- Total War: Warhammer Limited Edition,
- Doom 3,
- Starcraft II: Battle Chest,
- Darklands,
- Age of Empires, and of course, the
- Warcraft
The network versions of such games added an extra level of complexity in the existing games and make the players compete in real-time with players from all over the world.
The winning in such situations was not more a matter of speed or other computer skills but a matter of higher-order strategy as well. And the strategy (along with the objectives) is what makes the best systems around to adapt and evolve.
Besides the fun and enjoyments of the casual play, after a while, I start finding many similarities with real-time situations and pay more attention to the restraints each game poses to the player (I can compare some situations with real business scenarios or you can find many analogies with business cases.)
This leads me to study some more the inner mechanics of eSports in relation to behavioral models and the strategies can trigger not just in the limited virtual worlds of each game, but in real situations as well.
Excellent reading in this area (if you are interested in eSports and want to learn more, I strongly suggest you take a look at them) are the following resources:
- An Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Exploding World of eSports: Understanding the Commercial Significance of Counter-Strike, League of Legends and DotA 2,
- Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports,
- Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture,
- Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation,
- Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture,
- Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,
- Games People Play,
- Finite and Infinite Games,
- The Inner Game of Tennis,
- Roguelike,
- Spelunky (Boss Fight Books Book 11),
- Gamelife: A Memoir,
- The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World,
- Game Over Press Start To Continue,
- The Legend of Zelda: Hyrule Historia, and the
- Power-Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life.
If you want to go a little bit deeper, I strongly suggest reading Sebastian Marshall‘s The Strategic Review’s issue with the title: IN THE HOT SEAT. You will find many analogies of competitive video games to real situations.
The rise of the tide of eSports related subjects provides rapid growth of the eSports industry, demanding many resources and innovative approaches to perform effectively.
The eSports Business
As you already figure it out, eSports is becoming gradually a “leading” industry in modern online business, expanding as well as the limits of the current job market.
eSports is a form of competitive video games which:
is facilitated by electronic systems, particularly video games; the input of players and teams as well as the output of the eSports system are mediated by human-computer interfaces. (Wikipedia: eSports)
With the advance and growing interest of eSports, came and growing demand for related jobs in the area. Today there is a constant demand for jobs in the area as:
- eSports Reporter,
- Social media expert,
- Game Tester,
- Researcher,
- Visual artists,
and much more.
To have a better overview of the careers in eSports Industry, consult the following infographic, created by Computer Planet:
This is presently the situation in the eSports area.