Lets's Talk About Why eSports Has Gone Viral.

           In the last decade, we have seen an enormous amount amount of growth in the gaming community in both the amount of participants and the popularity that is seen around the world. A large part of this is how easily accessible it is to view an eSport's game and how "viral" the videos can take off. Much like watching football or baseball on cable television, watching an eSport competition like League of Legends or Rocket League, is incredibly easy, free, and accessible.

           One of the most popular and widely used platforms to watch these games is through the streaming service of Twitch. Twitch, which is a website built and designed for streamers to upload and live stream their gaming content, is also an avenue for viewers to watch their favorite streamers and professional players. Twitch offers a wide variety of game play, and offers special offers and deals for their viewers to have. Unlike having cable television, Twitch is completely free and can be downloaded on any mobile device, computer, or tablet. What makes Twitch the ideal streaming platform, is that it allows a lot of these games to go instantly viral across the world. Since anyone can watch a live stream on Twitch, this gives the endless possibilities that anyone around the globe can view the games in real time.







         Twitch also supports its "viral" videos by sharing them and allowing the most popular videos to be up front on its main website for anyone to view. This gives plenty of opportunity to instantly tune in and watch without much difficulty. Overall websites like Twitch have only increased the ways we can watch eSport's events and have made them even more popular as Twitch continues to grow. This is one of the reasons why we see eSport's videos go viral, with millions of viewers watching them daily.

Lets Talk About Fitness

             If you were to ask me what makes eSports, a "sport", what do you think some of the underlining values that makes eSports, a sport in relation to physical sports like football, soccer, tennis etc..? Is it the teamwork that comes involved with many of the different games or even the mental capacity of understanding the strategy involved with playing against an opponent? While we never consider eSports to be in a category with physical fitness,  a vast majority of professional eSport players have a daily regiment of physical activity mixed in with their regular practice schedule. 

          Major professional eSports teams like Cloud9 or SKT Telecom hold their own athletic facilities and hire private trainers for their players. In the most recent years, teams have found that mixing physical fitness with  their daily playing has helped increase performance, energy levels, and overall health to the players. When considering that many of these professional gamer play anywhere from 12-16 hours a day, mixing in a different training regiment is often healthy. 

        What is interesting to hear is just how recent teams have included physical fitness into their training programs for their eSports players. In fact we do not see such a change in a players overall fitness until the mid 2000's, where eSports finally started to grow. 

Lets Talk About Community.

When we talk about the gaming community, what would be some of the first things, off the top of your head, that would best describe the community as a whole? Would it be the toxic environment that some communities hold, due to their younger audience members? Or would it be the rather dedicated, hardcore gamers, that play the game for its competitive reasons? In all honesty, there isn't an exactly right or wrong answer primarily because the gaming community as a whole is well diverse, and holds great potential.

One of the great things I find in any gaming community is that there is usually always a great following of people, who love a certain game, and can greatly become impacted by it. One of the first games in which I held great respect for is community, was the Pokémon games Ruby and Sapphire, off of the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. At the time I was 9, me, along with several friends, and people I didn't even know well at the time, had formed a strong bond and connection, simply by all having one thing in common, and that was playing Pokémon.




While many can argue that video games may not be the best platform to form connections and friendships, I find that it is a great avenue to become part of a larger support group and friend group who all have one thing in common, and that is playing games. Over the years, as the gaming community has grown and developed, so did the need to create sub groups for support groups, and other forums began to arise. In todays age, it is in fact extremely common to find support forums on certain games, and even advise on how to play the games, understand the community, and so forth. In fact games like Pokémon Go, the most recent Pokémon phenomenon, that occurred just shy of two years ago, had brought millions of people together all for the sake of catching Pokémon online. Such a thing had never truly occurred on such a scale.

eSports: Quick View of Overwatch

One of the exciting new formats to hit the stage of eSports is none other than the infamous Overwatch, created by Blizzard. Overwatch which is predominately a newer game created in May of 2016 has finally hit the stage for its new competitive format. Just this January, Overwatch had launched its new Overwatch League Season 1 system for competitive and companies around the world have taken advantage of this.

A majority of these companies including the Miami Heat, Texas Rangers, Golden State Warriors, and Cloud9, have already funded and sponsor multiple teams for the new league. In fact 12 teams have already been formed and are currently competing that started January 10, until July. What is also interesting is the current prize pool is an astounding 3.5 million dollars, with first place winning a million dollars.

What many people do not realize about the culture of eSports is the player base itself. A majority of the professionals who play the game average an age of 20 years old, with players who are 18 being some of the younger players. There have even been cases where players as young as 16 have been signed for contract to play the format with a starting contract of 50,000 per season.

Lets Talk About The Media

Over the years I have found that media in particular, social media, plays a huge part in how we identify and judge  certain aspects of life. This could be sports, TV shows, or even our friends, and largely what we find on these websites such as Facebook or Twitter, generally leaves us with a positive or negative impression. Of the many news that dominates the news world, eSports is one, that hardly receives any recognition or notice when considering the large scale events that occur for certain games, like League of Legends, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or even newer games like Rocket League.

Many of these competitions that occur on a yearly basis are massively wide scale, with some championship matches holding a stadium of 30,000+ fans and millions of dollars as prize pools. For instance the LoL 2016 Championship held a total viewer count of 43 million people. However the issue with such an event was hardly publicized towards any major news platform, and news channels such like Sports Center had only made a brief comment on the standings.






This brings up the question as to why popular gaming events receive such a small amount of spotlight in the media world? Part of the reasoning behind this lies with, where exactly does eSports fit, in terms of media coverage? Is it a traditional sport like Football, Lacrosse, or Basketball? Or does it play into a new hybrid of entertainment/strategy game?

Lets Talk About Impressions.

Lets Talk About Impressions.


When considering the eSports world, our initial impressions on how we want to perceive ourselves and how others view us, are often lost in the electronic world that we plug ourselves into when we are playing games, surfing online, or posting something online on one of our numerous media platforms. When we play a new game for instance, we are often found creating a new avatar or character that portrays no significant resemblance to us, and because of this we would act and behave differently in the game than outside of the media/digital world.

If we look at the different media platforms that are in popular use including Facebook, Instagram, Snap chat, Reddit, etc, we come to the conclusion that we want to be perceived differently depending on the platform. For instance, ones profile on Facebook might be portrayed as more casual with your posts being centered around close friends and family. While on the other hand, ones Instagram page might be centered around a focus point of blogging about alcohol or food.

One of the most recent trends that has formed in the gaming community and that has potential to impact the eSports industry are the VR consoles, or Virtual Reality consoles. One of the newest games that has been released under the console is a game called VRChat.  When considering the values of first impressions or building a reputation among others, VRChat examples those values and solidifies what the online community desires, a new and ever changing image.

For those who do not understand what VRChat is, it is primarily a chat room where people of all ages can use their VR headsets to communicate, interact, and play with others across the world. However without using your physical appearance to engage with others. Players can pick and choose an endless array of appearances, voices, and usernames to identify themselves. The problem that could arise from this? VRChat could potential stimulate trolling behavior in our society and ironically might change social behaviors with younger audiences. Why talk and communicate with others face to face, when I can talk to others in the comfort of my room online?

An Intro to an Intro.

                       So before I began on the weekly news and updates of the eSport world, I figured it would be best to at least explain what eSports is in todays society, and how it has grown to be one of the largest growing trends in my lifetime. But first lets talk about where it all began. The eSports industry or competitive playing has existed for as long as video games have existed. From the earlier games such as Space Invaders, came one of the first, if not the first gaming competition held by Atari in 1980. Afterwards came a huge influx of different competitions that would range across all platforms. However the eSports era did not fully bloom until the early 2000's, where the gaming industry had grown both in size and developed new technology to play more advance games. With computers become smaller, more compacted, and more powerful at this time, the PC era had official dominated much of the games being played. It was in 2000 where one of the largest competitions at this time had taken place under a game called Quake. The game itself was being played at a competitive level, with nearly 2,000 competitors, each of them fought one another in order to win a new Ferrari from the owner of Quake.

                     Fast forward to today's time, MOBAs or Massive Online Battle Areas, have become of the largest and most popular form of eSports that the world has ever seen. A couple of these games includes League of Legends and Dota 2, are being played on a multinational level with millions of daily users playing the games. For instance, League of Legends has broken a multitude of records held by a game, including being of the most played games, and also holds one of most views in its competitive format. In 2015, LoL held one of their largest championship competitions, with an astounding 360 million views over the course of a week in which the competition was being held. The prize pool, 2.13 million dollars to the winning team.