From geek to athlete: the rise of e-sportsmanship

It's mid-October and the new semester is now well underway.

For some university students in China, this fall will see them focus their academic attention on a new and somewhat unusual field of study: electronic sports.

Shanghai University of Sport is offering course on e-sports studies, with graduates scheduled to take their diplomas just in time for the 2022 Asian Games, a Hangzhou-based event where e-sports are expected to make the competition roster.

Similar courses and programs are offered at other schools, which aim to cultivate players, designers, analysts, organizers and even commentators.

But while many agree that any industry needs talented people to help it grow, I worry that students may be limiting themselves and their career prospects by concentrating on such a specialized field where major changes are happening rapidly.

For those who don’t know, e-sports are organized video game competitions that often involve professional players.

Like other professional sports, e-sports boast legions of fans and star players, not to mention a supporting ecosystem of advertising, publishing and merchandizing.

Top players can earn millions from high-profile tournaments, some of which are broadcast to international audiences. The games have their own sub-cultures complete with insider jargon, values and loyalties.

My generation (I’m in my mid-30s) was among the first to grow up with video games. The games we played look absolutely primitive compared to the immersive experiences of the moment.

The simple nature of these early games condemned them to the realm of “juvenile” entertainment; but as video games develop, so too have they started to compete with other forms of “legitimate” culture.

As games become more difficult and cinematic, it’s still surprising that many are now seeing them as sports in their own right.

While successful games can rival Hollywood movies in terms of profit and production-values, some are skeptical about bringing e-sports into the rarefied world of academia. For the most part, skepticism has been countered by growth of the industry, which may have generated as much as US$10 billion last year.

Narrow specialization

Shanghai hosts about 90 percent of China’s e-sports companies. Indeed, earlier this year, the city named e-sports as a plank of its creative and cultural industries. Minhang District announced plans for an e-sports industrial park in cooperation with Tencent.

These results are surprising given the lowly status that video games were afforded until relatively recently. It was only in 2015 that China lifted its ban on imported video game consoles for home use. Perhaps ironically, some credit the ban for pushing forward PC-based games, including several of the most popular titles.

Although I couldn’t tell you the difference between “League of Legends” or “World of Warcraft,” I don’t see any inherent problem with the arrival of video games into the mainstream realms of sports, industry, culture or academia.

If playing games — or watching other people play them — brings joy into someone’s life, I support that. If people can turn a profit from something they love, so much the better.

The sheer popularity of gaming should be enough to make it a subject of study.

What worries me is that academia is becoming saturated with too many of this kind of narrow specialization.

One parallel is with legal education — in the US there is an underclass of out-of-work lawyers because too many bright youngsters flocked to the profession in search of wealth, prestige and job security.

China has seen its own share of “hot topic” majors. Young people poured into IT, only to find a much more competitive labour market after graduation than they anticipated.

How many e-sports commentators, for example, can the industry support? How many analysts? How many organizers? Will these fields provide transferable skills that can be used in related professions? While the industry is booming today, who’s to say it won’t peter out in a few years’ time?

The industry is a product of technological and cultural development, and these very things may sweep it away.

Computer games have been around for decades, and are here to stay, but it wasn’t so long ago that giving them a status comparable to physical sports was unthinkable. Could the tide turn in the opposite direction, and send narrow-skilled young people back for retraining?

Fads come and go. It’s often hard to tell a flash-in-the-pan from something that will kindle the imaginations of future generations. I hope students think seriously before diving head-first into the latest growth industry, even if it does enjoy official support.

Despite imperatives to develop, the industry and schools can help by keeping student places and internship opportunities at sustainable levels.

The promise of e-sports as an industry should be measured in more than just revenue growth and competition prizes; it should also be calculated in the social good it generates.

The author is a former copy editor at Shanghai Daily.