I watched a mini documentary (if it can be called that) the other day on youtube about the growing popularity of esports and the increasing money involved in these domains.

I was fascinated to learn that in the US pro-players are now being offered scholarships and that esports are starting to rival actual physical sports - 6 figure numbers for income now. This has happened incredibly fast and the same thing has happened, as you now, with various other forms of “entertainment” (meaning podcasts and streaming by just about every single type of person you can imagine about anything you can imagine). Literally anything have interest in is out there with tutorials, free exchanges, critiques and crowd funding. We’re truly living in the age of plenty regarding choice, chance and opportunity.

One comment really struck me about the possible pitfalls of the esports industry. In traditional sports people can play football, or whatever sport they choose with relative freedom, yet in esports the organisations literally “own the ball”. In broarder terms we’ve seen over recent years people being “banned” from various platforms on the internet so it seems we’ve created a double-edged sword. We have freedom to communicate, but intellectual/cultural divides in place dictated by the whims of the major organisations. We’ve seen attempts by governments to inhibit freedom on the internet and whilst unsuccessful (meaning they cannot shut down everything they dislike) it is reasonable to assume it is having a greater global impact given that content that is harder to reach/distribute effects the global culture/s.

(Note: As a pop-culture reference the recent movie “First Player Ready” takes this to an extreme conclusion with the influence of the online gaming industry in the future).

With every stage of human social evolution we’ve found ourselves in revolutionary positions where freedom abounds, wealth increases and then freedoms are quickly bound up to avoid self-destruction or to push some political ideology - note I’m talking about this on a grand scale not merely over the past few centuries; such as how binding ourselves to the land through farming led to physiological changes and societal changes too.

In terms of youth there are many positives to esports in schools. In the US many schools now have their own esports teams that compete with each other - as with football. This has been very beneificial for the “geek” community and helped bring people together who would’ve previously have spent their time alone in a room communicating via video chat/messaging. Now they meet in the real world and have a real world social group, ironically, because they are interested in playing games online.

In the mini documentary it is easy to see how parents struggle with this huge shift. To most of us (I imagine) this is a strange world. I did play League of Legends myself to relax a year or two ago whilst listening to the radio, and now I play the popular game PUBG every other day. One thing I have noticed is that there is a HUGE space in the market for more advanced gaming; meaning that if a group of people really got to together and created a vaster and more far reaching gaming platform for the whole world, much like the above mentioned movie, we could all easily be sucked into this. The question is then what this would look like? What “game” would appeal to the majority of an adult audience?

Here it is: Esports: Inside the relentless training of professional gaming stars

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=box4SFtGvA0