"re:Think Games — May 11, 20 Esports Industry Observations"

re:Think Games — May 11, 20 Esports Industry Observations

What makes a game an esport?

I am going to answer that by asking a related but seemingly unrelated question.

Is poker a sport?

While poker is a competition, and people can clearly earn a living as a professional gambler, poking is not a port for three reasons.

1. With poker, betting is integral to the competition and is a critical element in the strategy.
2. High degrees of randomness is an essential part of the game.
3. There is no acceptable “amateur” or youth version of poker.

No sport has betting baked into the rules of their game. What’s more, most sports do their best to minimize randomness or isolate it into areas where only tremendous skill can corral it. (the bounce of a baseball, the odd shape of a football). The fundamental mechanics of the competition are not derived from randomness.

Finally, the youth aspect matters. When something is decent you can do it forever. You do it, your friends do it, and you want your children to do it.

While watching people “play a game for money” such as the “world series of poker” is great entertainment on ESPN, in my opinion, Poker is not a sport.

Many people would argue that sports are limited athletic competition. If you define athletic to mean, “one’s ability to control their body” I would argue that competitive video gaming meets this requirement. In order to achieve the insanely high “actions per minute,” many video games require players to have to think and act fast, with tremendous accuracy and precision, in a team environment while another player is actively opposing them. That, in my mind, qualifies as a sports competition.

So, esports are sports.

But what makes a specific video game an esport?

One of the things that surprised me when we moved into esports was that there was no clear definition of what was an esport game and what was not. I have definitely run into and worked with people who feel they “know” what is an esports title and what is not, and just as many who feel the opposite.

There are no hard and fast rules, and while people will debate their definitions, I would put forward that in fact, not every game is actually an esport. There are many titles that strive to be, some assume they are because of their heritage, but only a tiny select few games (maybe less than 20) actually hit on all the key elements that make a game really an “esport”.

Esport game attributes:

1. The game has a thriving in-person and online competitive community.
2. Top players can earn a living playing this game, so there are both amateur and professional levels to the game.
3. There is a rich set of well thought out, widely accepted rules for the competitive scene.
4. The game technology itself supports both online, and offline tournament competition.
5. The game is not obsolete or discontinued in such a way that that the community is in active deciline[1]
6. The game design contemplates and allows for a viewing audience.

That last bullet is crucial. Games that do not support a viewing a competition make it extremely hard to build an audience, and therefore a real esport scene. It is intrinsic to almost every sporting competition that there is a way to accommodate spectators.