Last weekend we were fortunate to host some visitors from Tencent China for an extended two days of gaming and conversation. You can read the full write-up over at our GameLab blog.

One of the things I did during the weekend was offer some opening remarks at a panel on the positive values of esports. Writing it was an interesting challenge given so much of my research and writing takes a slightly different angle, one that looks at everyday lives and institutional practices often through a critical lens. Trying to distill into just a couple pages a very straightforward account of the positive side of the scene was a great exercise. Below are my remarks that will perhaps be of some interest to folks.

The Power of Playing, and Competing, Together.

I want to speak today about the power of playing, and competing, together. I’m a sociologist and over the past two decades I’ve dedicated myself to the study of the internet and gaming, some of the most exciting domains a scholar can work on. In 2012 my book on the professionalization of esports in North America and Europe came out. It was the culmination of research that began in 2003 and involved interviewing players and organizers, visiting tournaments, and following how the growth of computation and the internet was facilitating a whole arena of sports.

In this era of huge tournaments with massive prize pools, we may sometimes forget that esports originates in grassroots communities that took their passion for gaming and transformed their play into vibrant competitive spaces. They took the games developers made and pushed them to their limits. They built entirely new sporting scenes out of these digital playing fields.

When I finished my esports book, it was unclear how popular competitive gaming would become. It was still a subculture, a niche gaming space.

Live streaming has, of course, changed everything. Continue reading →