Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming

"This is T. L. Taylor’s. She is just a wonderful academic, a sociology-trained researcher of video game experience. She was early in looking closely at e-sports, and e-sport has now become this huge phenomenon in gaming. So I think this is a great book if you are puzzled by this idea of professionalised video gaming. This book really unpacks it, because she doesn’t play competitively – she comes from the outside in and does a nice job of showing the world of e-sports, how it is evolving, how the players are becoming professionalised. Sports networks are starting to show tournaments now. And I don’t know about the UK, but here in the US they are even starting to have collegiate leagues… Who knows? Maybe video game scholarships will soon follow. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter One interesting takeaway from the book is how much players customise hardware for play; often they have special mic, special keyboard, special track-pad even, to give them a little bit of a physical edge. Yes. And, you know, you normally think of gaming and think that they are just sitting there – it is not physical at all. But in fact there is a lot of performance aspect to this sport. Well, I think the difference is that now games are being created for competitive play, to produce a very satisfying spectator experience. So if you think of, you know, a sport like basketball, sports were invented and then evolved in relationship to their audience, so I think that is one really interesting thing to think about is how the game designer is shaped by the need to cultivate expertise and spectacle. Exactly. There is this hilarious game Rocket League , essentially car soccer… You can find YouTube videos of people playing this at a very high skill level and it is just this rapid fire, round-based, competitive game, and it is a kind of thing you sort of can’t imagine evolving without an audience. It is so clearly about this goofy, over the top spectacle. That is another thing you may not realise when you first think about game design, is that it differs so much when you are thinking about spectating to when you are thinking about people playing alone. It stays in your brain and in your hands. And I think too there is something beautiful about expressing yourself through performance in that physical way and games because they augment and heighten your capacities. It is basically like you are a bionic version of yourself, then it heightens that crazy spectacle. Like if you are in Tony Hawk , and doing these crazy skateboard’s routines, it allows you to do a performance that is an exaggeration of yourself that is really satisfying to you and to others"