Gaming

Meet the professor of eSports

We speak to eSports academic TL Taylor about pro gaming and the importance of live streams.
Written by Philippa Warr
10 min readPublished on
Fans at the 2014 League of Legends All-Star event

Fans at the 2014 League of Legends All-Star event

© Philippa Warr

There's a lot of attention on the world of eSports – massive prize pools and multi-million spectator tournaments will do that. But as competitive gaming itself gets bigger there are a lot of people who want to find out more about how and why it works – what drives pro gaming and how it's evolving. One of those people is TL Taylor whose 2012 book Raising the Stakes took an extensive look at how eSports grew into the behemoth it is today. Now an associate professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT she's turning her attention to the phenomenon that is live-streaming. We got in touch to find out what's changed in the two years since Raising the Stakes came out and the power of broadcasting to change the gaming landscape!
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in eSports research? My interest in eSports developed originally out of a prior project. My first book was on an early massively multiplayer online game, EverQuest. During that research I found myself drawn to wanting to explore in more detail a style of play called power gaming (we often now think of this as “min maxing”). What struck me about that approach was how it upended many assumptions about games simply being “fun” versus hard-work. Talking to, and spending time with, MMO powergamers got me thinking quite a bit about how gaming could often have an instrumental stance that was also pleasurable. You may not be surprised then that, back in 2003 when I first learned of people called pro-gamers, it definitely caught my ear. Even though it was worlds apart in many ways from my original areas of research (virtual environments and MMOs), it was incredibly compelling. Once I went to my first tournament and learned it wasn’t just about players, but a whole group of people – from owners to casters – working to professionalise, I was hooked.
It's been a couple of years since the publication of Raising the Stakes - how would you say the world of professional gaming has changed since then? I made a joke on Twitter this year à la Battlestar Galactica that "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again." It’s a tricky time. On the one hand there has been big growth in the space. More developers are taking eSports seriously and supporting the scene in important ways. Live-streaming has had a tremendous impact. And at the same time, eSports continues to struggle with serious issues around gender and diversity, long-term sustainability for all sectors of the industry, and continued experimentation (and wrangling) with various economic and broadcast models. It remains a work in progress.
You're currently specialising in live-streaming games. Is that the biggest or most important development for eSports at the moment? Or at least for widening access to or interest in eSports? Definitely. When I was finishing up the manuscript for the eSports book a big bubble (CGS – Championship Gaming Series) had popped. The future of the scene was incredibly uncertain. I briefly mentioned live-streaming in the book, but the platforms hadn’t really broken in a major way. As a researcher, the last several of years have been a scramble to keep up with how much this emerging form of networked broadcast is impacting not just eSports, but gaming broadly.
Within the live-streaming research you've been doing, what's been the most interesting or unexpected idea you've been presented with? There are so many fascinating things happening in that space it’s hard to pick just one angle. I'm interested in moments where the platform allows players or commentators to develop new relationships with their fans and audiences and, importantly, develop new economic possibilities through it. I’m looking at how some streamers talk about a desire to professionalise which presents some interesting – and incredibly important – challenges to the way user-created content has typically been framed (as mostly about fandom and non-commercialisation). I’ve also been amazed to see the level of work happening with third parties who are producing eSports content – often for multinational audiences. Following their work behind-the-scenes at events has been fascinating. It’s getting to watch a new media industry emerge.
Is live-streaming changing anything about the current eSports set-up? It’s certainly brought to the foreground the power of spectators and audiences as prime participants, something I became keenly interested in when I was doing the eSports research. Live-streaming has made spectating eSports and being a fan so much easier. It used to be a ton of work (getting ahold of replay files, tracking down VoDs, etc) and now it’s pretty easy to pop online and catch games. This is incredibly important when you think about growing – and extending – audiences. That said, much still needs to be done around how the industry is conceptualising that audience. I’m disappointed when I see the minimisation of potential growth by relying, for example, on pretty outdated models of who plays and enjoys games. There are diverse participants and audiences out there and eSports has a fantastic opportunity to grow in ways that match what is happening in the broader culture (from traditional sports to gaming). Relatedly, there remains much work that needs to be done really taking seriously the challenges of online audiences and spectatorship. Whether it is community management (always neglected in online ventures but so key) or thinking creatively about large scale crowd experiences online (Drew Harry is one of my favourite people who’s given that serious thought), there are still significant challenges that, if they don’t get seriously attended to, will really waste the potential of the platform.
eSports feels like it's edging towards the mainstream in EU and NA, especially with platforms like Twitch coming to consoles as well as being available to PC – do you think that's the case or will it always be pretty niche? I always say I’m a sociologist not a futurologist, which is my way of side-stepping prediction questions. I have no idea what will ultimately happen, though I can say it’s hard to imagine walking back the amazing developments occurring as live-streaming grows the space. Gaming, and by extension eSports, continues to develop as just yet another everyday leisure space. That said, there remain deeply serious open issues around things like intellectual property, gender and exclusion, and economic sustainability. I know enough to know nothing is a given.
In Raising the Stakes you point out that competitive gaming developed in South Korea because a lot of different factors converged – favourable government policies, commercial incentivisation and so on – in Europe and North America. What are we still lacking from that framework in terms of eSports support? Absolutely, and this is key. South Korea is often held up as an aspirational model, but the structural conditions there have historically been tremendously different from Europe and North America (which themselves have critical differences that facilitate game culture in slightly different ways). Of course, we can’t simply replicate – each space has their own unique context. We can see, for example, how broadband growth in the US has shaped not only online play, but viewing possibilities. This in turn means broader issues we face in the US, such as net neutrality, will have a profound impact.
Or perhaps, have we gone in a different direction? Is our approach markedly different from the approach in South Korea? I’d have to lean on one of my favorite scholars working on South Korea and games, Florence Chee, of Loyola University Chicago, to give us a better sense of the state of things there now to really make a solid contemporary comparison. Crowd shots of eSports events certainly now look a lot like what we see coming out of South Korea 10-plus years ago. But we are also worlds apart from the organised structure, one that brings even high-schoolers into a formalised training regimen (and if you’ve seen the fantastic documentary State of Play, you may pause as I did about if that is really something to emulate).
Dota 2's The International achieved a prize pool of $10.9m thanks to community contributions – do you think that's something which could work for any company besides Valve? Good question and one I think many of us are curious about. One of the big issues the industry faces right now is scalability and sustainability. The prize pool, and Compendium sales overall, was a tremendous testament to the love the game has and how much some folks really were keen to support eSports. That said, I’m wary about building a scene on crowd-funding this way. There needs to be long-term, structured, and consistent mechanisms in place. Right now we have a system that (still) churns through many players, does not scale up well as people advance in their careers, and that relies – often precariously in the long-run I think – on developers.
A lot of games are being launched or announced which clearly have eSports aspirations. How possible is it for companies to build games which are basically ready-made eSports? I don’t think it is. This is, of course, one of the longest-standing debates (and for some, a quest!) in eSports: can you build something that is out of the box an eSport? I’ve long thought not – that it’s an organic, emergent process that is hard to predict. Lots of factors, often deeply tied to player communities, have historically driven what rises as a competitive title. While it may be easy to cull out what won’t work based on the internal structure and mechanics of a game, it’s generally harder to say what will rise within that remaining pile. That said, League of Legends has confounded my stance a bit!
Which game or which game's pro scene has been most interesting to watch develop? Tough one. I’ve long been drawn to the StarCraft (and previously, Warcraft) community. It was a game/genre that drew me in as a spectator and I found its own relationship within the ecosystem of games (Counter-Strike, for example) fascinating. Add to the mix Riot’s League of Legends, especially when you are interested in formalised processes and institutionalisation, or the fighting game scene to think about community-based models of organisation, audience, and participation and your hands get full quickly for things to keep an eye on!
Which other areas of pro gaming and eSports are you keeping an eye on or do you want to investigate next? Two things continue to ping my radar: the state of third party organizations in the eSports ecology and the continued need for progress around gender and diversity.
Which pro gaming event or match has stuck with you over the years – is there a personal favourite? Heh, nah, I can’t pick one. And I’m probably unusual in that, as a researcher, often the events that are most helpful in providing insight are the ones with breakdowns, glitches, and less than polished veneers (cold, rainy WCG Monza anyone?)
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