Esports Research: Critical,Empirical,and Historical Studies of Competitive Videogame Play

Electronic sports or “esports” is a rapidly growing form of entertainment scheduled to increase its global audience to 380 million this year. Of that total audience, 165 million tune in multiple times during the week and see themselves as enthusiasts. In 2018, esports revenue is expected to reach US$908 million globally with North America contributing an expected US$345 million. This is almost a 40% year-over-year growth (Pennekeet, 2018). Esports viewership and professional salaries have risen to the level of traditional professional sports. Take, for example, the comparison to the National Basketball Association, whose 2017 championship averaged 20.4 million total viewers (Holloway, 2017). The esports League of Legends World Championship had 60 million unique viewers (Li, 2018). Top esports players can now earn as much as or more than traditional athletes. Case in point: Faker, a world-famous player, earns US$2.5 million annually base salary with an additional $1.1 million from prize pools and revenue from streamed games on Twitch (Newell, 2018).

Esports are similar to other, nondigital sports in their competition, league organization, and physicality (Guttmann, 1978). As with other sports, they are defined by individual or team competition and challenge, where the goal of each athlete and team is to win against competitors (Jonasson & Thiborg, 2010). So too are they league organized and both amateur and professional (Hallmann & Giel, 2018) satisfying basic human needs such as individual success in the face of challenge and team camaraderie (Martončik, 2015; Weiss & Schiele, 2013). Despite their seemingly obvious contrast to court and field and track games and the like, esports are also even physical, demanding dexterity, coordination, quick reflexes, visual acuity, and mental focus just like shooting and archery (Hallmann & Giel, 2018; Witkowski, 2012).

Esports grew out of the avid enthusiasm of informal game-fan grassroot communities, beginning with online “clan” tournaments and local area network (LAN)-parties in the early 2000s (Wagner, 2006). Players gathered with their computers and game consoles to create LANs between their devices to play multiplayer games together. Over time, the size of gatherings grew, and corporations entered the scene offering sponsorship packages to events, funding prize purses, and providing equipment in return for advertising; this led to competition becoming increasingly organized (Taylor, 2012). A qualitative study of the forms of participation characterizing collegiate and professional esports (Steinkuehler, 2018) found that, by 2017, the esports ecosystem was comprised of a broad collection of coordination and production roles that went well beyond competitive gameplay to include strategists, content creators, entrepreneurs, and organizers.

Today, global game companies who make and publish the most popular titles (e.g., Riot Game’s League of Legends, Blizzard Entertainment’s OverWatch, and Valve Corporation’s Counter-Strike) host some of the largest and most established competitions, yet amateur leagues continue to flourish out of the voluntary participation of players and fans. It is not unusual for successful local events to become commercialized (and legitimized) by game companies (Chao, 2017). Blizzard’s network of collegiate esports clubs called Tespa, for example, grew out of a small social club of the University of Texas and now includes five different nationwide collegiate esports league competitions and more than 1,200 participating schools (Tespa, 2018). Among young people in particular, interest in esports is flourishing with over 100 collegiate teams emerging in the United States over the last 3 years, many featuring athletic scholarships for their athletes (Reitman, Cho, & Steinkuehler, 2018).

Still significant challenges still face esports collegiate, professional, and amateur leagues alike: professionalization of players, toxicity in the spectating community, the lack of diverse competitive players, challenges to player retention among the commercial titles, and the intense temporal and cognitive demands of competition. Research on esports is slowly emerging, but to date there is no coordinated volume of empirical work, let alone one that spans a broad range of issues, methodological approaches, and theoretical paradigms.

The purpose of this special issue is to address just this gap. Here, we present a diversity of research exemplars from scholars both within and outside the United States that has been culled from the top papers presented at the first annual Esports Research Conference (https://uciesc.org) held October 2018 at the University of California, Irvine, attended by more than 200 academic researchers and esports industry professionals. Four papers that were given highest marks in blinded peer review were selected for this volume; together, the collection of articles represents a range of theoretical, methodological, and thematic perspectives in contemporary esports research—from historical examination of the institutionalization of esports compared to traditional sports that came before it (Summerley) to analysis of the effects of streaming on in-game performance using a combination of Twitch streaming data and summative match results obtained via Riot Games application programming interface (API) (Matsui, Sapienza, & Ferrara, 2020).

This issue begins with a literature review by Reitman, Wu, Lee, Anderson, and Steinkuehler that summarizes the extant body of research on esports across seven primary domains—business, law, sports science, sociology, computer science/informatics, psychology, and media studies. Three key themes emerge across domains. First, there is little consensus across domains as to how to define or bound esports itself as a phenomenon. At once digital game, sport, and mass entertainment, “esports” thus far refers to a broad variety of activity and participation, making it difficult to put competing claims and explanations about the phenomenon in relationships to one another in ways that might catalyze the construction of knowledge. Such diversity is not uncommon in the study of phenomena that span multiple disciplines but can actively impede progress in our understanding when cross-discipline conversations are rare. A second theme is a general interest in expert human performance, nested within teams, regardless of discipline. Here, esports is predominantly framed as a new sociotechnical domain for understanding human potential and processing, whether individual cognitive or social and distributed, institutional or grassroots driven, professional or amateur. Third and finally, while the methodologies used to research esports vary, the methodologies used and the definitions of variables and constructs related to esports are still rather nascent, with limited generalizability given the former and heavy industry influence given the heavy use of data made available via industry APIs.

The second featured article by Summerley takes a vastly different approach, diving deeply into the institutionalization of esports as compared to traditional sports before it. Specifically, the author traces traditional sports institutions from mid-to-late 19th century and compares the process and effects to the institutionalization of esports beginning in the mid-1990s. The institutionalization of esports, like nondigital sports before it, has resulted in the universalization of rule sets, the promotion an institutional moral philosophy (e.g., the World Cyber Games espoused stated goal of “promoting harmony of humankind through e-sports”; Taylor, 2012, cited in Summerly, 2020) and the propagation of the game to grow the scene. Unlike traditional sports, however, and in keeping with the preceding literature review, esports is marked by the global movement of talent across national boundaries (among predominantly first world countries) from its very inception. This global movement of talent is one of several effects of the controlling role of corporations (rather than nations) in crucial issues such as intellectual property, media rights, and “ludic diffusion,” demanding further interrogation into the corporatization of play.

In a third, contrasting article on the effects of streaming on player performance, Matsui et al. (this issue) examine 4 months of summative data on League of Legends game matches played by streamers and nonstreaming players, combined with League player data from Twitch, to test for effects of streaming on in-game performance. The authors examine whether streaming deteriorates performance or length of play sessions and find, perhaps counterintuitively, that streaming does indeed deteriorate performance even while increasing the streaming player’s engagement (as measured by length of game session). Thus, gameplay for a viewing audience is different than gameplay for pleasure or sport, highlighting the mutual influence of player and audience.

The fourth and final article features in this issue by Freeman and Wohn expand this conversation to also interrogate the relationships among multiple activities within this “media ecosystem”—playing, streaming, spectating, and giving money—in the context of the game Fortnite. In a series of two survey studies, the authors found relationships among time spent playing, time spent streaming (for those who stream), and time spent spectating—but not with spending (either on in-game purchases or on streamer donations). In-game spending was proportional to time spent playing, but donations to streamers were not. Instead, upon further investigation, the authors found that donations to streamers depended on three variables: attachment to the streamer, valuing the streamer’s talents or skills, and attractiveness of the streamer’s personality—but not physical attractiveness. Freeman and Whon’s work highlights how esports participation is multidimensional with varying routes toward participation and varying motivations, intentions, and pleasures. Again, we see the multifaceted nature of esports as a new paradigm for gaming participation.

Together, these four articles present a heterogeneous survey of research work on esports from multiple disciplines. Each of these four articles is indicative of an important theoretical, methodological, or practical waypoint within this emergent terrain. Our intention in presenting them together is to give scholarly readers of Games and Culture a broad sense of the forms of research currently underway on the topic of esports, a sense of what issues and questions are under investigation and where gaps in the collective research agenda current lie. The theoretical, methodological, and thematic diversity presented aims to be generative for researchers seeking to understand this relatively new phenomenon. Indeed, this special issue is the first such collection of its kind and thus aims to make substantive contributions to the fields of game studies, game research, and game design. It is our hope that this special issue and the conference on which it is based might continue to spur conversation about esports and cross-pollination of ideas related to this quickly emerging industry across our myriad domains.