This is esports (and How to Spell It): An Insider's Guide to the World of Pro Gaming

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About the Authors

Paul ‘Redeye’ Chaloner is one of the most prolific and recognisable broadcasters in all of competitive gaming, having hosted or commentated on esports tournaments for 83 different video games in 44 countries on six continents in a career spanning two decades. He has appeared on Sky, MSNBC and Eurosport and hosted The International, the biggest tournament in all of esports, four times. In 2016 ESPN called him ‘the voice of esports’. You cannot beat him at Unreal Tournament, probably.

Benjamin Sillis is a writer and historian who has covered technology and video games for over a decade. He lives with his family in London.

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WITH BENJAMIN SILLIS

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BLOOMSBURY SPORT Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY SPORT and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright Š Paul Chaloner, 2020 Paul Chaloner has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on page 237 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication data has been applied for ISBN: TPB: 978-1-4729-7776-2; eBook: 978-1-4729-7777-9; ePDF: 978-1-4729-7778-6 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Typeset in Dante MT by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Bloomsbury Publishing Plc makes every effort to ensure that the papers used in the manufacture of our books are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. Our manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

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This book is dedicated to David, Anita, James, Ellie, Maggie and Steph.

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Contents

Glossary

ix

Introduction: Then and now

1

PART ONE

11

1

This is esports (and how to spell it)

13

2

From arcades to esports: Where it all began

24

3

1995–2004: Esports 1.0

39

4

2005–2008: Boom and bust

55

5

The revolution will not be televised: How Twitch and StarCraft 2 saved esports

6

The accidental MOBA millionaires: How a home-brew genre changed esports forever

7

8

83

Mod makers versus game owners, or the secret to making money from esports

102

Two sides of the same coin: Are fighting games esports?

115

PART TWO 9

69

131

Good luck, have fun: When esports rivalries go beyond the games

133

10 Prison or holiday camp? What it’s really like to live in an

esports team house

144

11 Game of throws: Growing pains in esports’ teenage years

158

12 From rags to riches: An esports fairy tale?

174

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13 Balancing the game: Five perspectives on the challenges

women face in esports

188

14 Going live: Two takes on tournament day nerves

200

15 Game over? Esports’ retirement myth

211

16 New games, mind games: The positive future for esports

222

Epilogue: Good luck, have fun

234

Acknowledgements

237

Further reading

238

Index

239

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Glossary

Platforms: The hardware games are played on PC (Personal computers, played at a desk and controlled with a mouse and keyboard) Consoles that plug into your TV (Nintendo, Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, controlled with a controller or gamepad) Handheld consoles (Nintendo) Arcade (Arcade cabinets, played at arcades or tournaments using built-in joystick and buttons) Mobile (Smartphones and tablets, controlled using a touchscreen)

Esports genres and games MOBA (Multiplayer online battle arena) One map, two teams of characters with bases to protect – or destroy.

Dota 2 (Developer: Valve) League of Legends (Developer: Riot Games) Heroes of the Storm (Developer: Blizzard)

RTS (Real-time strategy) Make armies, order units about from a God’s Eye view and crush your opponent.

StarCraft: Brood War (Developer: Blizzard) StarCraft 2 (Developer: Blizzard) Warcraft 3 (Developer: Blizzard)

FPS (First-person shooter) A first-person perspective and a gun – shoot to kill.

Call of Duty (Developer: Activision) Counter-Strike (Developer: Valve) Doom (Developer: id Software) Fortnite (Developer: Epic Games) PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Developer: Bluehole)

IX

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Quake (Developer: id Software) Overwatch (Developer: Blizzard) Rainbow Six Siege (Developer: Ubisoft) Unreal Tournament (Developer: Epic Games)

Fighting games Punch, kick and combo your opponent until they’re knocked out.

Street Fighter (Developer: Capcom) Super Smash Bros. (Developer: Nintendo) Tekken (Developer: Bandai Namco) Dead or Alive (Developer: Tecmo) Marvel vs Capcom (Developer: Capcom)

Sports Sports simulators.

FIFA (Football. Developer: EA) Madden (American football. Developer: EA) F1 series (Formula One. Developer: Codemasters)

Digital card games Make your deck, unleash magical chaos turn by turn.

Hearthstone (Developer: Blizzard) Clash Royale (Developer: Supercell) Magic: The Gathering (Developer: Wizards of the Coast)

Auto battler games Chess with 150 different pieces and more than two players.

Auto Chess (Developer: Drodo Studio) Dota Underlords (Developer: Valve) Teamfight Tactics (Developer: Riot Games)

Esports tournaments and events BlizzCon (StarCraft 2, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone) Call of Duty League (Call of Duty) DreamHack (Various) ESL One (Counter-Strike, Dota 2) Electronic Sports World Cup/ESWC (ESWC) (Various) EVO (Various fighting games) Intel Extreme Masters (Various) The International/TI (Dota 2)

X

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Glossary

League of Legends World Championship (League of Legends) Overwatch League/OWL (Overwatch) QuakeCon (Quake) World Cyber Games (Various)

League and tournament organisers Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) DreamHack ESL Major League Gaming (MLG) World Series of Video Games (WSVG)

Major teams 100 Thieves Alliance Astralis Cloud9 Complexity Counter Logic Gaming Dignitas Evil Geniuses FaZe Clan Fnatic G2 Esports Immortals Invictus Gaming MAD Lions mousesports Natus Vincere (NaVi) Ninjas In Pyjamas OG Origen SK Gaming SK Telecom T1 Team Envy Team Liquid Team Secret Team SoloMid Team Vitality Virtus.pro

XI

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Terminology gg (Good game; Typed in to the in-game chat box in some titles to concede defeat) glhf (Good luck, have fun; Often said at the start of a game as a sign of sportsmanship) Map (The virtual level, space or arena in which a game takes place) Draft or Character Select (The point before a match where teams or players select an in-game character; making an effective draft is sometimes an important tactic or mind game) Frag To frag or kill an enemy character. Often, but not always, a point scoring objective in a game Kill streak A chain of unbroken kills. To be on a kill streak is to have momentum in many FPS games Meta (The type of effective play the rules of a game encourage; e.g. the current meta encourages aggressive rather than defensive play) Patch (When a game is updated, to fix software bugs, introduce new features or tweak existing rules) Buff (When a patch is believed to make an in-game character stronger, they are said to have received a buff ) Nerf (When a patch is believed to make an in-game character weaker, they are said to have been nerfed) T, T-side (The team in a Counter-Strike match playing as terrorists) CT, CT-side (The team in a Counter-Strike match playing as counter-terrorists) AWP (A powerful sniper rifle, an essential weapon in Counter-Strike. Someone who uses it heavily is an AWPer.) Top lane, mid lane, bot lane (The top, middle and bottom lanes or roads on the map used in League of Legends matches, separated by jungle. A player who specialises in the top lane is a top laner.)

Jungler (The player who lurks in the dense jungle during a League of Legends or Dota 2 match to help teammates) Carry or ADC (Attack Damage Carry; the powerful champion or hero in a League of Legends or Dota 2 match that the rest of a team will rally around) Support (A player in many types of multiplayer games who focuses more on healing or strengthening teammates, or setting traps for, rather than inflicting direct damage on, the enemy) Hadouken (Iconic fireball special move in the Street Fighter series of games)

XII

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Introduction Then and now

A good sports commentator doesn’t just call the shots: they tell a story.

They ground every action in context. That pass, that player. Does he or she normally connect? Do they whiff it? Is that injury they’re recovering from playing havoc? Is this their 500th appearance in a league, the debut of a youngest player ever, the swansong of an old one, or the longest dry spell they’ve endured? Why should we care? Why should you care?

I work in esports, but I’m still a sports broadcaster. My heroes are Murray Walker, John Motson and Jim Nantz. It’s just the games I cover happen to be electronic ones.

And as for why you should care about competitive video gaming? Even if you’re not a fan, you’ve probably heard of esports, read about it in the papers, seen it on the news, caught a glimpse over the kids’ shoulders online. Likely something about the shooter Fortnite, which is as much a media starmaker now as the music industry used to be (and as we’ ll see is actually only one small part of the wider esports world). Esports has caught the public’s imagination. It’s why you’re holding this book in your hands right now.

Esports is having a moment – more than that, in fact. The esports industry in 2019 was valued at over a billion dollars. A billion. While I actively campaign against making sweeping comparisons between a single sport and esports, I’m going to break that rule here for you, just so you can understand the size of esports and understand how much further it still has to grow: that’s roughly a sixth of what both F1 and the tennis industry are valued at already. Pro gamers are now stars in their own right. The best players can become millionaires overnight, sell out stadiums or use their skills to take over Twitch, television, even flog phones or shampoo with their endorsement.

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This is esports (and How to Spell it)

But esports had a ‘moment’ once before, and that didn’t work out. I know, I was there. Let me tell you a story. * * * It’s July 2007. The Raleigh Studios, Hollywood. Charlie Chaplin once filmed here. William Shatner is shooting Boston Legal next door. Today 200 cheering fans (albeit mostly paid) are squeezed on to bleachers in front of a giant screen to see a showdown of a different kind.

It’s the grand finale of the first ever North American Championship Gaming Series (CGS), News Corp’s attempt at kick-starting an esports revolution. Yep, that News Corp, the one that owns Fox, Sky, DirecTV, Star TV, every newspaper. They’ve spent millions buying up some of the most talented esports teams and signing their players to a new league they want to become the next NBA. There are hundreds of staff working on the production. It’s one of the first major events in all of sport to be broadcast in high definition.

After 12 weeks of battling, just two teams are left. We’ve got our heroes and our villains already. The Chicago Chimera, babyfaces, carried effortlessly through the season by the squad’s incredible Project Gotham Racing 4 drivers, Wesley ‘Ch0mpr’ Cwiklo and Jason ‘JaSoN-X’ Exelby. Our heels: the Carolina Core. Rebels, outsiders, managed by Mark Dolven, who is never seen outside without a flashy suit and a dour expression on his face.

He bellows at his players from over their shoulders, but are they listening?

It’s hard to say: Core are the bad boys and girls of the league. They listen to no one.

Everyone wants the Chimera to win.

As we head into the final game, it’s almost neck and neck. Each team contest is a medley of games, with points awarded for performance in each, and a different player or squad specialising in each title played. Core’s Nick ‘peekay’ DePalmer, until this point possibly the worst FIFA 07 player in the league, has kept them in it against the odds, and so their route to the world championship, as well as almost half a million dollars in prize money, will be settled by this final Project Gotham race.

I’m in the commentary booth, still pinching myself. We’re live, on air to millions of homes across the world. Up until this point I’ve usually been sat at the back of a sweaty hotel conference room, a disused warehouse or even a racecourse pub, hunched over my laptop, mostly being ignored and almost 2

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definitely not being paid. But the Murdochs, no less, the Murdochs now see what I’ve been saying all along: that competitive video games aren’t just as exciting as any sport, but maybe even the sport of the future. The Next Big Thing. And mainstream TV is esports’ big break.

Introduced by the booming voice of BattleBots ring announcer Faruq Tauheed Jenkins, the players come out onstage, hunker down in their pods and grab their gamepads. I start calling the play by plays. The art of winning in Project Gotham Racing is to stay ahead of the pack and avoid rival teams’ players deliberately taking you out on hairpin bends, and Chicago’s Wesley ‘Ch0mpr’ Cwiklo is peerless when it comes to burning virtual rubber. He drives clean, fast, constantly checking his mirrors.

He inches ahead, extends his lead further. The crowd see the lead Ch0mpr’s built. Halfway round the last lap, it suddenly dawns on me: Chimera are going to win overall, and by a single point. 22-21. Goosebumps.

You couldn’t script this.

I still remember my commentary coming out of the last corner. I was possessed. It matched the moment – what every commentator, or ‘caster’ as they’re known in esports, dreams of. As Ch0mpr blazed across the line, I simply said: ‘Chicago Chimera wins the North America championship.’

Then I just laid out. In my headset, I hear Mike Burks, my producer.

‘Let that breathe.’

Mike is a revolutionary figure in sports broadcasting. He’s changed the game when it comes to how everything from the Olympics to NFL to March Madness is shown. He’s already won a dozen Emmys by this point. What he says goes. I do what I’m told.

Around me, the players lose it. The celebration of Chimera, the commiseration of Core. They’re dumbstruck. I’m sat there, meanwhile, just savouring the moment. We’ve shown all the sceptics, all the haters, that competitive gaming is human competition at its finest. Esports has arrived. * * * What you need to understand is not just how promising the CGS seemed for esports, but how much I needed it to be at the time.

Most of the competing gamers at tournaments in the early to mid-2000s weren’t getting paid, so you can imagine what crumbs the commentators were being thrown. For the first three years of my career, I wasn’t making money, I was paying to work. I was covering my own flights and, if it came to 3

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it, sleeping on convention centre floors. My family and I were in a lot of debt.

My car exploded, and then its replacement broke down right next to it on the driveway. I was pixels away from calling it quits and going back to work as a financial compliance manager, and I did not want to return to the nine-tofive grind. So when I got a call from Neil Porter, one of the CGS producers, I wasn’t just incredulous. I wasn’t just thinking, ‘How the heck has he got my phone number?’, though I was wondering. I was over the moon and a few nearby planets too. This wasn’t just esports’ moment, but mine too.

The producers had seen a video of me and my colleague Marcus ‘djWHEAT’ Graham calling the EuroCup Finals for team shooter CounterStrike in Denmark a year earlier and thought we had potential. Things moved rapidly. It was Tuesday, and they wanted me in LA for Thursday.

They sent a driver to ferry me all the way from Cardiff to Heathrow Airport.

In a limousine. I remember getting on the plane, leaving my family behind, flying over, fretting that this would be my last shot. This seemed like it was going to explode, prove to be what we as an industry had been after for years: mainstream TV exposure.

I was cast, and before I knew it I was in the queue at the American embassy in London to get my work visa (it literally says ‘Shoutcaster’ as my profession, and until someone shows me otherwise, is the first O1 visa to the US for esports ever granted, anywhere in the world). That took several nerve-racking weeks, but somehow time still seemed to fly, and esports suddenly went from first to sixth gear in the space of a few months.

One week I was stocking up on tins of Tesco Value baked beans in the supermarket, the next I was commuting to California for work. I was living in a luxury gated apartment complex near Venice Beach, with my own car, stylist, wardrobe assistant, even a pronunciation specialist. We held the player draft for CGS at the Playboy Mansion, of all places. There were cameras everywhere (though all I could hear were Hugh Hefner’s screaming monkeys), and security swept the bottom of cars, not for bombs but for stowaways.

We got recommissioned for a second, even bigger season in 2008, with more teams for more countries, and things were looking promising for the third. I was poised to move up out of the commentary booth to become the league’s European commissioner, in charge of the teams, the games, the rules. Esports had hit prime time.

But there were tensions, conflict, between the producers and the online esports communities. The games played were picked not for the fan base, 4

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but for how telegenic they looked. The producers went with Counter-Strike: Source instead of the much older (and uglier) Counter-Strike 1.6, even though all the best players and teams had stuck to the latter until that point. They shortened FIFA games to fit between ad breaks. The racing drivers never crashed into each other at other tournaments (bad form) – but they weren’t punished by the CGS showrunners, simply because crashes are more exciting, at least if you’re channel-hopping. Hence the calculated collisions.

At some point, these issues – and, more importantly, the global financial crisis – brought matters to a head. Investment was pulled. One day I was reading the news online when I saw that CGS had shut down – before I even got a phone call.

That was that. With it went not only esports’ shot at the mainstream but also most of the big early teams, like Team 3D and Complexity, who’d sold their names to DirecTV for a franchise. And back at home, the strain the work had put on me cost me my family. Esports was dead.

Or so I thought. It turns out that like a character shot dead in a firstperson shooter only to be resurrected and returned to the melee, it was just respawning. * * * Jump forward a decade to The International 2018 (or TI8 for short), the premiere esports tournament for the team strategy game Dota 2, and in some ways esports has grown and evolved beyond recognition.

We’ve graduated from a backlot to the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, normally the home of the Vancouver Canucks ice hockey team. There’s no ice, no pucks, but two teams of five players doing battle over a virtual map instead. No goal mouths exactly, but an ‘ancient’ in each team’s home base that has to be destroyed – or protected – at all costs.

I’m still there, presenting. I just about weathered the storm in the years that followed the collapse of CGS. But now I have a desk, co-presenters, analysts, roving reporters. And this time, the fans are here too; 17,000 through the doors, every day for a week, with costumes, foam gloves, even LED signs, from every corner of the globe. The entire floor of the main stage has been transformed into an LED screen.

The esports teams, too, are actually from all over the world this time – the cities given teams in the CGS were picked seemingly at random. No fewer than 24 countries are represented across the 16 competing teams. The grand 5

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This is esports (and How to Spell it)

final of TI8 sees Chinese heavyweights LGD (sponsored by French football team Paris Saint-Germain, no less) take on wild cards OG, comprised of a Dane, two Finns, an Australian and a Frenchman.

OG have won plenty of tournaments before, but here they’re the underdogs. Unlike LGD, they weren’t invited to TI8. They scrape through via European open qualifiers, and their coach, Sébastien ‘Ceb’ Debs, is standing in as a player for lack of any other signings. Ceb hasn’t played at The International for six years. This is the esports equivalent of Ryan Giggs having retired for Wales and then six years later taking them to the World Cup final. OG really shouldn’t be in form, and yet here they are, one match away from the world championship.

In Dota 2, you win by selecting the right mix of characters, or ‘heroes’, from a pool of over a hundred, then having them compete for resources (like gold, to buy more powerful items) and fight each other; whichever team takes the others’ base (or ‘ancient’) first wins, to put it simply. It’s a best of five, and on paper it looks like LGD should have won four of these, based on the lead they built up. But nope. OG snatch back wins to keep them in it, and suddenly it’s 2-2. It all comes down to the final game.

Then in the draft, or hero selection phase, Ceb makes a questionable pick out of nowhere, Magnus, a walking rhino that packs a powerful punch but only up close, and can be all too readily manoeuvred around – the hero is seldom seen in big finals for good reason. I’m not on air when it happens so I can scoff and swear: What the fuck is he doing? He’s thrown it all away. He’s looked a gift horse in the mouth and then kicked it in the teeth.

LGD, meanwhile, can’t believe their luck. The final game kicks off, and sure enough, LGD are ahead in gold at 20 minutes, usually a good indicator of which side is stronger. But OG dive into a huge team fight and in an instant there he is: Ceb’s Magnus comes wading in to devastating effect. It’s a slaughterhouse. LGD lose valuable time and gold reviving their dead heroes.

Suddenly OG snowball and at 36 minutes they lay waste to LGD’s ancient.

They’ve done it. They lift the Aegis of Champions.

The next year they return, no longer the underdogs, and win the whole thing again, an astonishing, unparalleled feat in professional Dota. * * * Why do I single out these two events? On one level, a decade’s a nice round number. It’s how long the Odyssey took, and esports has certainly been on 6

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a journey in that time. So have I. I thought we’d arrived in 2008. I thought I was made for life, I thought we’d be on live TV every week. It turned out I was hopelessly wrong about all of those things, blinded by faith, passion, ambition.

But here we are now, and it’s finally happened. We don’t need to pay fans to show up any more. We are worldwide, we are global, we do have big-name sponsors, we do go out to millions of homes, and – crucially – fans in those homes are actually tuning in now. We’re not looking for the ESPN of online coverage for esports, that’s just ESPN now.

And this time, we’ve done it without bending the knee. We’ve done it without having to change the games and the format and how they’re played, to cater to the needs of TV (and TV advertisers). We’ve stayed authentic, and it’s finally working.

Just look at the numbers. The League of Legends World Championship tournament in 2018 brought in 76 million unique viewers across the globe.

There were 3,446 paying esports tournaments held in 2018 alone, and $694 million was spent by brands looking to cash in on esports’ exposure, including Amazon, Audi, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, DHL, McDonald’s, American Express and Gillette. (I call this the dad factor: Has my dad heard of these names? Then it must be big news.)

More than 300 sports teams have invested in esports so far, and in 2019 there was an estimated esports audience of 456 million people. Esports will even be featured at the 2022 Asian Games. And get this: as of the start of 2020, 83 esports athletes have made more than a million dollars in prize money alone across their careers. We’ve made 83 millionaires already.

Speaking of which, I was backstage when Ceb walked back in after winning TI8. He was shaking. He just kept saying the same words to me: ‘This isn’t real, this isn’t happening.’ He was a ringer for his own team, and now he’s a world champion – and a multimillionaire.

You see, that’s another thing that’s changed: the prize money. The Championship Gaming Series gave away $500,000 to the winning team in 2008. That in itself was unimaginable even 18 months earlier, but The International 8 prize pot still dwarfs it – a staggering $25 million, with over $10 million for the five winning OG players alone, more than the entire FA Cup winning football team gets for its efforts each year (oh, and at The International 9 in 2019, it was $34.3 million).

I’ ll admit that in some other ways we’re still chasing that CGS dream.

I still don’t have a stylist, and that LA penthouse is a distant memory – I 7

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live so close to the airport I can hear the planes landing. We do have those television production values now, but there’s no big TV contract, and we definitely don’t have 200 people working on every show yet.

But you know what? That prime-time TV dream was just an illusion. It turns out esports didn’t need the couch potatoes, the casual viewers who only want to watch for 12 minutes at a time before flicking over. We could turn watching other people play video games into a spectacle, something as exciting as any sports final, without them.

There was an audience of gamers out there who didn’t just love to play, but to compete, and to celebrate that by watching and learning from the very best. And not just create those magic moments, but the games themselves.

We just needed the internet to connect them all.

I should know. In nearly two decades working as a broadcaster, I’ve hosted hundreds of events, including every major tournament in the esports calendar across nearly every game played competitively today. I’ve seen the highs, the lows, and everything in between. The last-minute Hail Mary plays, the underdog stories, the rivalries, the betrayals, the triumphs, the fumbles and fuck-ups, the cheaters, the careers made and careers crashed, the winners, the losers, the legends born.

This is what makes esports so exciting. It’s what makes it the fastestgrowing media phenomenon today. It’s the thrill of human competition, colliding with technology in a way that’s never been possible with a pig’s bladder and a bike pump, VAR or not.

Allow me to be your guide inside this world. In part one, I’m going to introduce you to the esports scene today – what the big games are, where they’ve come from, who plays them.

I’ ll dig into the surprisingly long history of competitive gaming; video games have never been the solo activity TV and movies imagine them to be, and it turns out that even the earliest pioneers of the medium couldn’t resist skiving off work for a quick death match with money and bragging rights on the line, even if the computer they used happened to be the size of a house.

I’ ll even attempt to define what makes an esport. You might think that sounds straightforward, but consider how many decades chess has been trying to make itself a thing at the Olympics, and how many people you know who will argue loudly and at length that it is or isn’t just a board game, and then let’s talk. And then there’s the bigger question: are esports even a sport? Are pro gamers really athletes?

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Then in part two I’ ll take you on a journey inside the lives of esports’ biggest stars. There are the players, of course, holed up in team houses and training through the night with monastic pursuit; the Korean prodigies; the grizzled veterans with retirement looming; the Twitch stars, and even those prepared to throw it all away for a quick buck in a match-fixing scheme.

What’s it like to step into their shoes, to use their mouse and keyboard?

But there are also the coaches, managers and team owners finally reaping the rewards after years of paying players out of their own pockets. There are the developers making the games we love to watch the best athletes play. How do they keep tweaking games to make them not just entertaining but fair?

There are the mod makers, the hackers who tweak and change games to make them more esports-friendly. And then there are the tournament organisers and everyone else working behind the scenes – the referees, physiotherapists, psychologists, trainers, the whole fabric of esports. Oh, and the on-screen talent too (Hi).

I’ ll attempt to answer all your questions along the way. What’s it like moving from tournament to tournament on the circuit? How do you stay on top when the rules – and even the games – keep changing? Where do the deals happen, and who makes them? Is esports really a boys’ club? (Answer: No.) And am I too old to get involved in esports? (Again: You, no. Me? Probably.)

But first, let’s start at the beginning: how to spell the damn thing.

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PART ONE

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1 This is esports (and how to spell it)

‘They need to be careful, SK, but the damage they’ve got they can probably finish this one off. They’re going to go for that middle inhibitor turret.’

It’s January 2013. The Intel Extreme Masters at the Spodek Arena in Katowice, Poland. Thousands of chanting fans are here to see two giants of esports, the teams SK Gaming and Fnatic, collide in the latest big title: League of Legends. You can barely hear the commentary over their roars. ‘xPeke still got 45 seconds until he can spawn back into this one.’

League of Legends is a very similar game to the one I’ve already described, Dota 2 (they are so similar, in fact, that lawsuits have been working their way through the system for years, but we’ll get to that): two teams of five, one map, two bases that need to be smashed up, and lots of different heroes (or ‘champions’ in League of Legends parlance) to pick from, each with different powers that counteract each other. And if you die, you’re forced to sit out a countdown timer before diving back into the melee, which is currently what Fnatic’s Spanish star Enrique ‘xPeke’ Cedeño Martínez is being forced to do, leaving his team at a big disadvantage in the meantime. SK should clean up right here.

‘They’re going to try and finish this as soon as possible.’

In the space of a few short years, Fnatic have already won the first ever League of Legends World Championship, had all of their best players poached, and struggled to regain the same form, winning just a handful of tournaments in the year following. Already, crunch matches between these two teams have been dubbed El Clasico by the community, in reference to the titanic clashes between Barcelona and Real Madrid.

‘Two men down for Fnatic now.’

This one is living up to that reputation. At stake this time: qualification from the group stage, and a shot at the title and $15,500 top prize. Despite

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the heavy losses, Fnatic manage to repel SK, led by fellow Spaniard Carlos ‘ocelote’ Rodríguez Santiago, out of their base. xPeke spawns back in and Fnatic immediately launch an ambitious counter-attack and take down several of the turrets around SK’s own base, leaving it exposed, but it’s short-lived, as SK slay Fnatic’s Christoph ‘nRated’ Seitz and Paul ‘sOAZ’ Boyer and leave xPeke’s champion critically wounded. Suddenly the momentum shifts again.

‘Fnatic not quite able to finish the job … And now there’s super minions, a massive wave of them going in towards the nexus turret right now. Fnatic have to get back and deal with them.’

Fnatic have to dash back across the map to stop another SK siege, and it looks like it’s all over. There’s just one thing – xPeke’s heavily injured Kassadin is not accounted for. Too late, SK realise they’ve left him unsupervised in their own base.

‘Peke’s trying to take the nexus down!’

The in-game camera jumps back. I’m on my feet in the VIP area by the stage now. This is madness. There’s a reason no one has tried this before: he won’t survive. But sure enough, xPeke is bashing away on their precious nexus (base) anyway.

SK track back; just one hit will be enough to put a stop to xPeke’s play, but suddenly he’s dancing around the nexus, teleporting away from his enemies.

How is this possible? In the blink of an eye, it is. The nexus is destroyed, and Fnatic are through.

‘I do not believe it! PEKE STOOD IN THERE!’ Fnatic are up from their chairs and hugging. xPeke is exhilarant. SK are standing too, but shell-shocked. Hands on heads. ocelote is openly weeping onstage. He’s still wiping his eyes when I go out onstage to interview him. xPeke has just made esports magic. * * * Part of almost any job is preaching to the unconverted. Our particular priests in this match happen to be legendary esports commentators Joe Miller and Leigh ‘Deman’ Smith, and it’s their words, their excitement that I like to use to draw people into esports. It’s not just the play, the crowd, the moment; it’s the soundtrack provided by these two that makes this the perfect jumpingoff point for newcomers. I spend a lot of time dealing with executives, PRs and other professionals who don’t work in esports, so when I try to help them understand this somewhat baffling world – all the virtual spells and 14

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guns pew-pewing, colliding pixels and explosions – I always like to start with this moment: xPeke’s legendary ‘back door’.

Not just because I was there to see it happen, and to speak to everyone involved and witness the elation, heartbreak and tears first-hand, but because of the magic that moment, those stakes, that rivalry created. Forget the flashing screens and crackling animations for a moment. This is what esports really is: human competition. This is a concept almost everyone can get behind.

Once you’ve seen the crowd baying, the noise in the arena when xPeke makes his last-ditch sneak attack, the tears, you get it – you understand its importance to a whole generation today. Then, just like I’m going to here, I start at the beginning. League of what now?

Esports, you see, is a catch-all word, an umbrella term. Exactly like sport is. Just as you’ve got football, basketball, tennis, F1 and other sports all vying for sports fans’ attention every day of the year, there are numerous games with a following big enough to attract a tournament scene year round, as well as professional teams with salaries. And not unlike how you can break down sporting disciplines into categories like ball sports, motorsports, track and field and so on, these games break down into several distinct genres.

So before we go any further, let me give you a noob’s guide to the different esports genres and games popular in 2020, along with a rough measurement of just how big they all are – prize money to date, according to the good folks at esportsearnings.com. Prize money’s not always the best way to measure the scale and popularity of the world’s biggest esports, as we’ ll see, but it’s a start.

Real-time strategy games (RTS) A very old and established genre of video game that traces its roots all the way back to the Dune and Command & Conquer games of the early 1990s.

You’re a god/general with a bird’s-eye view of the theatre of war, and can summon units (which all have a Rock- Paper- Scissors-style strength/ weakness) with the press of a button, if you have the right resources. Can you overwhelm your opponent first?

‘Real time’ of course means there’s none of the etiquette of waiting for your opponent to take their turn; you just go, and go hard. Think of this as a form of virtual chess, only one where reflexes as well as strategy count. Who can click the fastest, and in the right place? Typically, this format 15

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of game is played one-on-one, in bursts of intense mental concentration, lasting between 20 minutes and an hour per round.

The big RTS esport nowadays is Blizzard’s StarCraft 2, which as you can probably guess from the name alone features various alien races duking it out across the galaxy. Its predecessor, StarCraft, was the original professional esport, with a gripping history that stretches back 20 years, full of titanic clashes between hemispheres, vicious legal battles, and even match-fixing scandals – and it is still going too. Neither are the biggest esports today, but in many ways both titles are the template for all esports.

Total StarCraft prize money to date: $8.2 million USD USD Highest-earning player: Lee ‘Flash’ Young Ho, $558,000 USD Total StarCraft 2 prize money to date: $32.2 million USD USD Highest-earning player: Cho ‘Maru’ Seong Ju, $808,600 USD

Multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) We’ve already touched on both Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot Games’ League of Legends; these are both multiplayer online battle arena games. An offshoot of RTS titles, and still played with a top-down view of the map, MOBAs usually only let each player control one on-screen character (of which there are typically hundreds to choose from, all with different abilities), but in a team of five.

It’s this cooperative element that makes these games so deep and compelling. And where most other esports games use different maps, MOBAs always have the same map, which I think of as a virtual basketball court. There’s only one layout, but there are limitless strategies to win within it. And like basketball, there’s a hoop at each end, though my analogy falls apart here as each team can only dunk once – and it takes anywhere between 20 and 100 minutes to do it.

(Oh, and yes, no one is happy about this terrible acronym, so I’ ll try to avoid using it too much. But after we dig into the bloody origins of these two games, you’ ll understand why it’s probably still necessary.)

Total League of Legends prize money to date: $73.2 million USD Highest-earning player: Lee ‘Faker’ Sang-hyeok, $1.3 million USD Number of League of Legends millionaires made so far: 1 16

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Total Dota 2 prize money to date: $219.7 million USD Highest-earning player: Johan ‘N0tail’ Sundstein, $6.9 million USD Number of Dota 2 millionaires made so far: 63

First-person shooter games (FPS) First-person shooter games are the third of the big esports genres, again with roots that can be traced all the way back to the early 1990s, with id Software’s gory shooter Doom, though nowadays these are usually played in teams of five-on-five or six-on-six. They’re a mixture of strategy, fragging (killing) and completing an objective such as capturing a flag or setting off a bomb at a specific point on the map. Mostly blowing shit up.

The big FPS titles played competitively today are Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Activision’s Call of Duty across its many iterations, and Blizzard’s Overwatch, all of which pull in hundreds of thousands of viewers online at big tournaments, or more. This is an easy genre to comprehend on paper – see enemy, shoot them in face with your big gun – but these games can sometimes be harder to follow at first since there are as many different fields of view in the game as there are players, especially in emerging ‘battle royale’ FPS games where up to 100 players face off in a Hunger Games-style scrum to the death, such as Fortnite.

Total Overwatch prize money to date: $21.2 million USD Highest-earning player: Hong ‘Gesture’ Jae-hee, $220,000 USD Total Fortnite prize money to date: $84.5 million USD Highest-earning player: Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf, $3.1 million USD Number of Fortnite millionaires made so far: 12 Total Counter-Strike: Global Offensive prize money to date: $90 million USD Highest-earning player: Andreas ‘Xyp9x’ Højsleth, $1.7 million USD Number of CS:GO millionaires made so far: 6

Sports sims No complicated acronym needed here. Football games. Motor-racing games.

You know the score, even if you’ve never played one. These esports are a replication of everything that happens in a real-world sport, albeit with the 17

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twist that one player controls every on-screen team member. Ever fancied being a QB in the NFL? You still can. Want to be not just the next Ronaldo, but the Ronaldo? You still can.

I always like to start newcomers off with EA Sports’ FIFA series. FIFA is the gateway drug to esports – it’s virtual football, and with the right stakes, every bit as exciting.

Total FIFA series prize money to date (FIFA 17, 18 and 19): $7 million USD Highest-earning player: Aldossary ‘MSdossary7’ Mossad, $526,900 USD

Card games People will play virtual versions of anything, but the fact that virtual card games such as Blizzard’s Hearthstone and Supercell’s Clash Royale have attracted tournaments and big-money prize pools shows they can be just as exciting as any flashy FPS. If RTS games are Rock Paper Scissors meets Chess in 4D, then esports card games are Blackjack meets Poker meets Game of Thrones. On steroids. Lots of powers, lots of cards, lots of decks, lots of intrigue. It also helps that since they’re virtual, there are far fewer arguments about rules – the computer has the final word.

Total Hearthstone prize money to date: $19.2 million USD Highest-earning player: Thijs ‘Thijs’ Molendijk, $451,000 USD

Fighting games I’m asking for a hadouken to the face from fans in the fighting games community (FGC) by including these games in a wider book about esports, but I hope by the end of this they’ ll see the parallels between FGC and other top titles – elite play, professionalism, excitement.

Fighting games (people of a certain age might think of them as beat’em ups) such as Capcom’s Street Fighter series, Bandai Namco’s Tekken and Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. are generally played one-on-one, with the goal of knocking out your opponent’s health bar. Think UFC meets boxing in 2D with superpowers.

Unlike most other popular esports, which are played on PCs, fighting games trace their roots back to the arcades of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Remember Ken and Ryu from your childhood? Pushing coins into the 18

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machine and winner stays on? All that, but played at a zen level where the best players can see each frame of the TV screen flash by individually. The FGC is a fairly siloed community with little overlap with other esports, though I’ve worked my fair share of fighting game tournaments as a broadcaster before, and the magic, the thrill of competition is still very much there.

Total Street Fighter V prize money to date: $2.2 million USD Highest-earning player: Du ‘NuckleDu’ Dang, $296,200 USD * * * That’s a brief overview of the different esports genres that matter. It’s not comprehensive, but it is a large percentage, at least by money given away at tournaments. It’s also not the order in which I introduce people to the different games. You see, despite their immense size and popularity, as well as the welcoming nature of fans, Dota 2 and League of Legends are still daunting for newcomers, with a learning curve that at first glance looks like a brick wall shooting straight up into the heavens.

If you want to see what the fuss is about with esports (and you do), start with competitive FIFA and fighting games. You’ ll understand them straight away. The score tells you who’s ahead so you know who’s winning at any point. Then move on. The next stage is Counter-Strike or Call of Duty. FPS games are harder to understand but still quite human, albeit in a rather violent way. There’s still a scoreboard, even though there are different viewpoints for all the different players, and tactics that can appear baffling at first. Why is that team jumping on each other’s heads like a troupe of heavily armed acrobats? Ah, for the sniper to get a better view across the map. Of course.

Once that clicks – and trust me, it does – only then do I introduce people to Dota 2 and League of Legends.

Everything you’ve learned up to this point is now thrown out the window.

This is why I’ve left these games until last: in both games, the scoreboard lies.

A team could be up 7-4 in kills, but still be losing. They could be up by gold, but no, the other team could be ahead in experience points used to level up in-game characters. But then maybe they’ve got an advantageous late game team composition, so perhaps they’re ahead. Who the hell is winning?

It takes scores of hours of watching to understand the principles of both games, the interplay between all the different abilities and items and 19

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characters, of which there are hundreds. Don’t let that put you off though.

Both games have a massive player base (in the tens of millions or more) they can draw viewers from for a reason: they’re deeply cerebral and compelling battles of team coordination, strategy, skill and willpower. The time you invest in them will pay dividends, even if The International doesn’t make you a millionaire. * * * That’s how I explain esports to newcomers, and it’s how it invariably hooks them. They find their game, whether it’s StarCraft or sim sailing (yes, a thing). Then once that’s done, I follow up with a bit of friendly advice: for fuck’s sake, don’t spell it wrong.

It sounds trivial, but this matters, in the same way that it would be odd if commentators started suddenly calling football a ‘game of round things and rules’ on TV broadcasts, or Formula One ‘that race with the vroom vrooms’. But because esports is a new industry, it’s somehow tolerated, even by those within it.

Not by me though. I’ve taken a stance on this, and do my best to name and shame the companies that transgress (I’ve even managed to get many of them to see the error of their ways, for my sins). I’ve waged war with Associated Press’ house style over this and won. I’ve convinced the likes of global football brand Paris Saint-Germain to change their ways. I’ve even got a helpful infographic pinned to the top of my Twitter account, but that’s apparently not enough, so here’s my non-exhaustive checklist of all the ways I see people spell esports wrong on a regular basis online: eSports e-Sports E Gaming ESports eAthletics V-gaming iSports Are you seeing a trend here? I love my iPod as much as the next person but Steve Jobs opened Pandora’s iBox when he started putting lower-case letters in front of everything. Camel casing is a pox on the English language.

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At best, it’s a product variation, and esports isn’t something you can buy in the shop. Imagine if we started doing this for every nOun. Life’s just too short for that.

It also sends people with good intentions off down tragic paths. I remember the time Twitter, getting green-eyed with envy over Twitch.tv’s success streaming esports competitions online, came lumbering into the space, talking to fans about ‘eAthletes’ and, worse, ‘eXcitement’. What the hell is that? Should we all start using Z instead of S as well, like it’s the 1990s all over again? Twitter’s official gaming account was a joke among esports fans for a year after that. Just use normal language; we have enough acronyms to deal with already. * * * That’s how I usually introduce people to this industry. When they ask ‘What exactly is esports?’, I have that lecture memorised and ready to go. But I’m afraid I have a confession to make: despite the rant I just went on, I don’t really care how esports is spelled. I didn’t set out to become the Samuel Johnson of pro gaming. I don’t otherwise check people’s grammar and, frankly, anyone making casual chit-chat about parentheses, colons, and Oxford commas is not someone I want to party with.

It’s hard to care that much when there are better words that could be used to describe what we play, what we do. Esports as the definitive term didn’t emerge until the mid-2000s; there are older, better phrases around. Before that it was electronic sports or cyber-sports (still used in Russia and central Asian countries, but let’s all agree that cyber-anything now just sounds like a euphemism). In America it was even ‘V-sports’ for a while. Professional or pro gaming is a good one, although it doesn’t quite capture the amateur element – it’s only the elite ranks of players who earn a salary, after all, but there are millions below them in the ladder trying to fight their way up still, and taking it just as seriously. I’ve always preferred ‘competitive gaming’, which captures more of the spirit as well as the financials (or lack thereof ) of what we do.

But 10 years ago esports was a shorthand, an easy way of framing competitive gaming to newcomers, to separate it from just playing video games on the toilet. ‘Oh, it’s competitive, and people watch it as well as play.

Like sports!’ That’s why it stuck. Now, though, many more people get this.

They don’t need a frame of reference for esports. So I’d actually be happy to stop using the term ‘esports’ entirely.

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The reason I make a big deal out of spelling ‘esports’ is simply to vet anyone who wants to get into this space. Not because I want to keep out ‘brands’ or gatekeep, but just to check for their sincerity. Like the ban on brown M&Ms Van Halen used to stipulate in their tour rider, the correct spelling of esports is a tripwire. Is the person I’m talking to actually paying attention? Has this marketing exec who’s read a few blog posts about the huge audiences we now see at tournaments done any more research than that? Do they give a shit, or are they just trying to cash in quickly?

Esports as a term also puts us in a pigeonhole, especially to outsiders.

Quarantined off in our own little basement from the grown-ups. It lumps all these fascinating games and genres with their own intricate tactics, strategies and storylines into one flickering, neon blur – and then excuses the lazy from needing to know more. A flickering, neon blur that’s also clearly on a level below ‘traditional’ sports, to the people who use the term. Just for kids.

As we’ ll get to, esports are definitely not just for kids. But if there’s anything you take away from this book, I hope it’s that you’ ll see the boundaries between esports and sports are so blurred as to not exist.

I like to think of esports as the intersection between competition and technology, but even that definition doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. Sport has always relied upon technology. And I’m not just talking about VAR in football, or Hawk-Eye for tennis. What about motor racing? That stretches back to the 1800s. What’s the difference between sitting in a cockpit trying to tame the technology in front of you, and doing the same sitting at a desk?

The G-force involved? Maybe. But if you think you don’t need to be fit to succeed in esports, you’re in for an eye-opener here.

The harder you try to separate the two – sports and esports – the more you start to see the parallels instead. The differences between xPeke’s Hail Mary play and Ronaldo scoring an overhead kick against Juventus in the Champions League, or LeBron James rallying the Cleveland Cavaliers to a comeback in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA finals against a dominant Golden State Warriors, aren’t so vast. Usain Bolt breaking the 100m world record at the Olympics with his laces undone isn’t so different from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player Oleksandr ‘s1mple’ Kostyliev’s legendary takedown of two opponents at the ESL One Cologne in 2016, casually dropping down from a ledge into what would normally be certain death and not even bothering to use the scope on his rifle to aim.

In every case, it’s the same result of years of dedication. Ronaldo spent his childhood playing academy football to get where he is. s1mple had to 22

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emigrate from his native Ukraine to the US and leave his whole family in order to pursue his career as a professional Counter-Strike player.

In every case, as a fan, you experience the same feeling. The same one I had as a boy in the stands at Silverstone, seeing Ayrton Senna blasting past in the rain: bewilderment. That shouldn’t be physically possible.

Emotion is the key here. That’s what makes me click on the thumbnail for all of these moments yet again whenever I see them on the sidebar on YouTube. That’s what ties it all together, every sporting event, digital or analogue. Emotion linked to a competitive piece of play.

Are esports sport? Honestly, I’m still not sure. Perhaps it’s best if you read on and decide for yourself. This much I’m sure of, however: though they may be firewalled from other sporting disciplines, esports offer all the same things – competition, excitement, opportunity. It’s well past time they were treated with the same respect.

Esports matter as much as sports matter. Forget the spelling, that’s the hill I’ ll die on. Go on, frag me.

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