I was really excited when Ren Reynold’s of the Virtual Policy Network invited me for a chat about my new e-sports book for his podcast, Social Change Technology. Ren’s an old friend and very knowledgeable about gaming (not to mention virtual worlds and all sorts of net-related stuff) so getting a chance to talk to him about this stuff was particularly fun. Ren was a participant in the recent Beyond Sports vs. Games workshop we held at the ITU so I also knew he’s been thinking quite a bit about the intersection of these categories. I definitely recommend the podcast as a whole, and you can check out my own episode here!

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The MIT Press, publisher of my new book, has a podcast and they interviewed me on the subject of e-sports. The episode just dropped and you can listen online. I sound a bit like a sniffly robot but hopefully still some tidbits of interest there for those wanting a little intro about pro play.

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Sometimes people ask me if there is a particular clip of a player or video from e-sports that really illustrates the scene. This is actually something I became more interested in during the course of my own fieldwork as I found myself taking more and more pictures at tournaments – words sometimes feel like they alone don’t do it justice. Indeed my e-sports research has got me thinking a lot about visual sociology, something I hope to build into projects from the outset more in the future given how incredibly useful and illustrative this kind of material can be. Tournaments are active spaces, full of movement, affect, intensive player action, and often equally focused spectatorship. At some point I hope to put at least a selection of my own images up (sadly the handful in the book are only in b&w) but for now what I point people to, and what I often open my own talks with, is the truly beautiful short movie of EVO 2011 “Moments” by Richard Li. The EVO Championship Series is one of the largest fighting game tournaments out there (2011 had 2,400 fans and players on site and huge online audience via Ustream). What is so terrific about this video is it captures the energy of the crowd, fan passions, and the intensity of play. So, here you go. Well worth a watch!

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As I mentioned in my last post, perhaps the one clear absence at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference panel on e-sports was Justin Kan and the Twitch.TV site. If you are interested in gaming, especially pro e-sports, and you don’t know about Twitch yet, it is worth checking out. It’s a spin-off venue launched in June 2011 from the Justin.TV gang, one of the early sites that helped facilitate “live streaming,” real time video broadcast over the internet. Back in the ‘90s our broadband and tech were usually struggling to keep up with our ambitions of connecting through internet video but things have changed; fast net, solid processing speeds, good graphics cards, HD cams, and all at a pretty affordable cost. Justin.TV, UStream, and a variety of other sites are quirky outposts where you can find average folks broadcasting everything from their own entertainment and talk shows (formatted with all the common television tropes) to strange, beautifully mundane feeds of empty rooms or puppies sleeping. Most recently the Occupy movement was also using these sites to broadcast ongoing local events or just simply open feeds of their camps. Perhaps because so many of these “channels” tended to the almost painfully everyday in their content they haven’t been as strongly on our radar as they should. But these sites, while clearly having some link with old cam culture, are also moving it forward.

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When I was finishing up my book on e-sports (Raising the Stakes, just released from MIT Press) I wrote that it felt a bit odd to be spending all this time talking about professional computer game play amidst the rise of the Wii and Facebook games. Though I’d started my fieldwork on professional e-sports in the early 2000’s, a kind of heyday for the scene, by the time I was wrapping up the manuscript the future was very uncertain. There had been some major shake-ups and while there were signs on the horizon of things that might re-energize enthusiasts (SC2, fighting games), I was pretty unsure where e-sports was headed.

Jump forward to March 3^rd of this year, day two of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (hello moneyball), and the panel entitled “E-Sports: The Future of Competition.” Go figure. The line-up was sharp, and telling. It was great to see them use an insider to chair the panel, Stewart Saw (long-time e-sports commentator known as “TosspoT” to the community). Panelists were Alex Garfield (CEO of the team Evil Geniuses), Sundance DiGiovanni  (one of the founders, and CEO of, Major League Gaming), Sean Plott (popular e-sports commentator known as Day[9] to his fans), and Mike Morhaime (co-founder and CEO of Blizzard – you know, that little company whose titles have sucked up more eyeball hours than anyone may care to calculate). You may note I didn’t lead with Morhaime’s name, despite his being the only one you perhaps recognize. Even though Blizzard’s titles are prime drivers of a major part of e-sports, much of what is brewing right now and propelling things forward is happening well beyond the game companies. (The big omission on the panel imo was probably Justin Kan of Twitch TV but I’ll save that for another post.)

There’s a lot packed into that video and I encourage you to check it out. It’s an interesting peek into how e-sports experts explain to an audience that may not know anything about the scene – but a hell of a lot about sports – exactly what is happening in pro-gaming. A few things that really caught my ear:

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