Over the years I’ve been fortunate to get to run several e-sports workshops that have brought in key folks in the scene to discuss critical issues. The first, called E-sports and Cyberathleticism (I know I know, forgive that “cyber” bit!) was co-run in 2009 at Stanford (while I was on sabbatical there) with the fantastic historian and archivist Henry Lowood and artist and scholar Matteo Bittanti. I’d been working on researching the scene since 2003 and this was the first time I got to be a bit more pro-active and structure and event around some of the amazing people I had met… or wanted to ;) You can see from the program we had a fantastic line-up and though the audio had been lost in my archives all these years, I finally dug it up and have now put it on YouTube for those who really want a bit of a blast from the past.
The second of these events (the “European Edition” in 2010) was held at the IT University in Copenhagen (where I used to be a professor) and we co-organized with one of the smartest e-sports researchers around, Emma Witkowski. It was held in tandem with a PhD course we were running on the subject and once again we were able to get together some fantastic people to join us for an amazing day of conversation. Those videos were up for many years via an ITU hosted page then poofed. I’ve now also put them back online, this time at YouTube, so everyone can get a chance to see that discussion.
I’m increasingly interested in making sure e-sports history isn’t lost, especially given how much folks seem to think these days that the scene only appeared post LoL and Twitch ;)
Visit my YouTube page to check out the audio and video from two fantastic events with some real industry founders.