 Hi everyone. Thanks so much for joining us tonight. I'm titled up on behalf of the American Institute of College. We want to welcome you to tonight's conversation on e-sports and the future of entertainment. Tonight's event is being presented by Future Tens. Future Tens is a partnership of Slave Magazine, New America, and Arizona State University that looks at emerging technologies and their transformative effects on public policy and society. So it is in that spirit that we're going to have tonight's conversation. A couple of household things really fast before we get started. We are recording and live streaming tonight's discussion, so please tweet and live tweet and make this an interactive discussion. We're going to get to an audience Q&A portion at the end, so be prepared for questions then. And I think that's it for questions or for housekeeping things. I'm just going to introduce our moderator for tonight, Seth Stevenson, as a contributing writer for Slave Magazine and is written for basically every other publication that's out there as well. So I'm going to refrain from listening to them all. But thanks again very much for coming everyone, and I'm turning it over to Seth. Hello. Hi. Welcome everybody. So we will be talking about e-sports. I don't know what everyone's knowledge level is. I am personally terrible at video games. I just don't have the thumbs for it, but I do know that e-sports is basically competitive video game planning as opposed to mind sports, which is chess back in ago, or like sports, which is basketball or hockey. Tonight on our panel we have at the far end Victoria Jackson, who is a sports historian and lecturer at Arizona State University. And I have been told there's also a former collegiate and pro track and field athlete. Victoria would like to vault this table or shop for a water glass. Go ahead. Here we have Craig Lumi, who is CEO of ESL North America. ESL is the world's largest e-sports company and operates some of the world's highest profile e-sports leagues and tournaments. I don't know if you were a collegiate athlete, but if you'd like to shop for your water glass you can too. More like maybe a comic strip or something. Perfect. Next to me is T.L. Taylor, who is a sociologist and professor of comparative media studies at MIT. She's the author of Raising the Stakes, which is a book about the professionalization of e-sports. So let's get started. My first question. So I heard about e-sports tournaments with millions upon millions of viewers and selling out soccer stadiums in Korea. Can we talk a little bit about the size and scope of this business just so we have a sense of how big this market is and how large this world is? I am very low to privilege the other male voice on the panel, but I'm going to start with Craig because he's in the trenches running business. Craig, maybe you can start as I'll talk a little bit about the size of this business. Yeah, I mean I think there's been a lot of new data that's come out over the last two years for the first time. A company called Nuzuz has done a couple great reports. Super data is another one. I think they size it up at something about 139 million e-sports enthusiasts is what they call, that's global number. So that number represents a certain amount of interest and cadence watching and engaging with e-sports content. For ourselves, we've done the big stadium events and we live stream all the competitions that we do. Our most recent event was the World Championship in Poland three weeks ago. We had over 113,000 people live on-site. We literally did a sports stadium in an expo hall and created this whole festival. We had about 80 million online live video sessions over the course of the week. So it's a huge market, it's growing, it certainly had started in Asia, it grown into Europe and certainly even here in the U.S. over the last few years in particular has really started to take off. And is it fair to compare the sizes to some of these professional traditional sports leagues? I've heard that some of these tournaments, the finals compared to the radius of like NBA finals, is that accurate in your experience? Yeah, but I think it's a little deceiving, e-sports is a broad topic and category. So e-sports is like sports. So within the sports of NBA and NHL and NFL, within e-sports you have the tight game. So if you're game sort of an independent community of League of Legends or Counter-Strike or Dota or Hearthstone. So as an aggregate, certainly the market scales up pretty well against traditional sports. And even within the world, you know, large events or even just on a weekly basis, the broadcasts are drawing the attention that are comparable to or exceeding your traditional Tuesday night mix game. There might be more people watching Cloud9, TSM, League of Legends match. And Tio, I think you sort of embedded yourself in this world and really dive into it. On the competitor side, how do the lives of these e-sports athletes compare to a professional athlete that we're familiar with? Are these people getting unionized? What are their lives like at the top levels? And are the sponsorships and the brains involved? Are they the kinds of things that we would see in basketball or baseball or hockey? I think at the top most levels, people who have secured contracts for themselves in competitive gaming, who maybe are living in a gaming house, who are on some kind of circuit and going around the world playing, you're seeing, you know, it would be very familiar to many of you if you follow traditional athletes. I think the thing that's important to remember, though, is even like in traditional sports, and maybe Victoria wants to jump in, is that, you know, you have the top most layers that are really famous and making big money. But most athletes are sort of daily athletes, not making tons of money, doing something because they really love it. And it's the same in e-sports. There are tons of people out there who are striving to have a professional career or striving to kind of improve their skills but still have day jobs or trying to get on a circuit. So there's still a pretty significant sort of lower chunk that's not, that doesn't look like the top rock star athlete that we often see. And Victoria, I'll direct this to you. So when I told some friends that I was moderating a panel on e-sports, some of them were like, oh, really cool. Some of them were like, that's, those aren't sports. Some of them were very dubious and, you know, this isn't a real sport. I know you say the history of sports and maybe how our culture receives sports. How would you answer someone who questions whether these are real sports or whether you consider them the same way we consider traditional sports? Well, I think there are many ways you can answer that question, actually. The first way I would answer it is, does it matter? And my response to that would be, well, everything about this looks like sports except for probably the participants. So, from a historical perspective. So the fandom looks the same. The way this is being commercialized, issues of professionalism and amateurism, kind of all those components of it, the competitiveness, all of that. The fact that, you know, we have these in large sporting stadiums and arenas in that kind of sense as well. But I resist because it doesn't look like sports to me for the participants because of the kind of historical constructions of modern sport and the uses and the educational value and the people who are speaking about the purpose of sport in the only 19th century. So in that context, and so what I mean by that is enlightenment ideas of sound mind, sound body and using one's body in a way that's positive and progressive that we can use science to perfect our sporting human forms. And so you have educators, it's part of why sports are part of the educational system in the United States as well because there's a belief in the good of using one's body and that using one's body physically also contributes to a healthy mind. And so that component in that context is what makes me hesitate to call it sport for the participants. Oh, yeah, I see that. I think it's a really great point to remember these historical and sort of the way it's situated in culture. I think one of the most interesting things that's happening with the professionalization of eSports you would ask me about unions, for example. We're starting to see unions haven't happened. They probably aren't going to happen anytime soon despite I maybe think they should. But we are starting to see top players get much more legal representation. I mean the number of eSports lawyers I know now is dramatic compared to even just a few years ago. And I think to get to your point we're starting to hear people grapple with that rhetoric more and more. So the idea that you might have a trainer or you might think about being a healthy athlete as an eSports athlete for me what's interesting is it's always been the community is constantly trying to find ways to situate themselves in the culture. So sometimes that language gets used to make it more legitimate to make it interpretable to people who don't understand eSports at all. And to build off that I mean I think sort of this new form of entertainment, this new device that didn't exist 200 years ago like the Javelin. So people are interacting in new ways and I think the same sort of skills that you see in other sports like NASCAR or Formula One where it's dexterity and decision making and all these not strong as tall as fastest type of person. I think those are shining through with eSports into TL's point. You're seeing now the top players are having sports psychiatrists and really as the stakes get higher trying to squeeze out whatever competitive advantage you can. Training sessions with keeping your body healthy, recognizing that drinking nine Red Bulls a day and eating Cheetos on your couch like stereotypes might be for gamers isn't really the path to master your craft. So I think that's an evolution that just started to happen now in a pretty decent kind of industry and a decent sport. But I think when I think sports to me it's about competition and I think that's something that eSports really does embrace through history as well as that element of competitiveness. And maybe for people out here who haven't really watched competitive eSports or have seen what it's like so maybe you guys can explain a little bit what kind of challenges are these eSports athletes coming up against? How are they working together? What makes a great eSport athlete and what are these games like? What do they look like? What do they feel like? It's from a fan. You're going to head scratch where it's two people sitting at either one-on-one or team-based competitions, five-on-five, seven versus seven, whatever that might be, playing against another team connected through their computer or gaming console. So if you don't know what's going on you just look like ten people playing video game. But within they're connected virtually and then they're competing against each other and there's dexterity for in-game movement, so a lot of strategy and teamwork for team compositions and for item builds and for team battles and how you work together. So there's a lot of dimensions to it just like if you start to sketch out the X's and O's of a football play. Why does the team hook to the left and how does that create the hole for the running back to go 50 yards into the end zone? So I think that's sort of an element that as a player of these games people start to become an issue of the skill that it takes to excel at the highest level. And the most famous of these eSports athletes, what kind of rewards do they get, how famous do they get and maybe Victoria you can address this, why do we venerate athletes at all and should we be planning to venerate this next generation of athletes? That was multiple questions. I know that you first addressed sort of what happens if you are a very top gamer what kind of reward do you expect and how famous do you get? Well depending on the country you live in you can get very very famous. Of course I think a lot of people often look to South Korea as sort of this almost an eSports mythical land where the celebrity eSports top eSports players have is huge. That's certainly growing of course in North American Europe. If you go to any of these large tournaments Craig described you'll see people with a lot of fame and celebrity and depending on how savvy they are, money, you know, they're cutting sponsorship deals, they're contracted to a team if they recruit a lot of winnings, maybe they have a lucrative Twitch presence that they monetize. So depending on their level of success they can do okay. It's still a very precarious living I would say for most folks. It's by no means stabilized or settled so it can really range. And then you're trying, you know, why didn't we worship these people who throw a ball through a hoop or, you know, twitch their thumbs on a little gamepad? Why is this such a huge part of our culture? Well, I would answer that by saying Dave Ziren who's a sports journalist and does just fantastic work as an educator as well. He kind of has this idea that there's two ways to achieve kind of iconic status. The first is the route of Muhammad Ali and that is becoming a humanitarian and caring about the world outside of sport and using your sport as a mechanism to do good. And the second is to be the richest athlete of all time. In the vein of Michael Jordan who we have these great quotes from him in the past where, you know, he's been asked to endorse candidates, you know, in his home state of North Carolina, for example, when a black Democrat was running against Jesse Helms, he said Republicans buy sneakers too, right? So he represented Nike, right? That was the Jordan brand specifically which we saw last night in the tournament. And so, you know, Ziren likes to pose this question, you know, and he uses LeBron James actually who's trying to do both. And Ziren says you can't do both, it's one or the other. And so are we drawn to the all these? Are we drawn to the Jordans? And, you know, as a sports historian I studied sport in a proper historical context. I'm drawn to the all these. And, you know, we can't look at sport in a vacuum. We have to see sport in the broader world in which it exists. So I think that's why we find sports icon so compelling is it's a way to look at humanity in a different way. I think one of the interesting things that happens around gaming too is that for many people they are not only fans of the e-sport, they play the games themselves. I can tell you, I go to Red Sox games, I do not play baseball. I have never played baseball. So I don't have that same affect of relationship with the game. And I think this is an interesting kind of moment where people are playing the game maybe even daily and often can have aspirational, even if it's like false aspirational, but like being a better player, I play that game in a kind of affective feeling about it. So computer games are interesting that way. I don't know if there's something we can learn from sports history that helps us understand that. Well, I think action sports is actually another space in which we see participant fans to the point where you'll watch the X games and then go try to do those tricks once it's done. And, you know, the people write about the thousands of kids out on the streets with their skateboards right after our next games because they're trying to emulate their sporting heroes. I think there's an element of accessibility through video games and e-sports that's hard with other sports. If you're not a certain height, a certain build, you're probably not going to dump anything anytime soon. But, you know, there's this element of massive participation, a virtual field to play that I think brings a larger community of more evenly matched people together on a more common basis than going to your playground to pick up game of basketball. So I think it does have a sense of fulfillment that you can get on any level by having these micro steps of improvement with the hopes of being the best at your group, the best of your class, the best of your school, the best of your area and kind of progress up a little bit quicker that way too. Is there a Muhammad Ali of e-sports yet? Does that exist? Maybe not Muhammad Ali, probably the Michael Jordan. No, I mean, it's interesting actually. I mean, even within e-sports, Twitch is the biggest live streaming platform for it and a huge part of it actually and some of the biggest personalities, even if they're not the players, are actually around sort of charities. And there's all these different instances where the community crowd funds and raises literally millions or tens of millions of dollars for these causes in a pretty remarkable way. So I think just very endemic to the community aspect of gaming and e-sports being the centerpiece of that, there is a lot of humanitarian support built into it. And we saw one interesting thing. I think it was sponsored by ESL. Was it last year where one of the top e-sports players came out to encourage people to sign up for Obamacare? So they had part of ESL had sort of done a partnership with the White House to try to get young people to be understanding the process and they used an e-sports person to do that. I think it was the first time I've ever seen that happen. Yeah, we did it with his names in control. He's a famous StarCraft team player. You've been in this car accident and so on. There's just all about healthcare awareness basically for the different programs out there. So using that as a platform just to talk to millennial audience who might not be reached through traditional media. So we're talking about the e-sports community here. What can we see about the demographics of that community and how it compares to traditional sports or to mind sports in terms of age, in terms of gender, in terms of ethnicity? Has any data emerged without what kind of community we're looking at? I would say there's a lot of really bad data out there. Yeah, I think we actually don't have a very good handle yet on how to measure interest, participation, audience around e-sports. I'm involved with an initiative called anykey.org. It's a website you can go to. We're very interested in supporting inclusion and diverse participation in e-sports. It's a partnership with Intel and ESL. And one of the things I certainly see is women have long been a part of gaming culture and they've even been a part of e-sports from the very beginning. So how do we still tackle the challenges that happen? There's still a lot of sexism in the space. Racism, homophobia. So really thinking about how to address some of the structural inequities that keep coming up despite the numbers of women participating there. And in terms of diversity, different scenes are more or less diverse. The fighting game community, for example, it has historically been incredibly racially and ethnically diverse compared to what are traditionally kind of PC-based titles. So there's not one whole take on it. It's a little bit of a mix-back. So I personally played a lot of League of Legends for it. I spent a few weeks playing a lot of League of Legends for a story. And I did encounter... It was not the most welcoming atmosphere. I would say, hey, for someone who's a beginner, people are not always incredibly warm in the way that they would handle you not playing well. But I also, you know, there were sirens, slurs. There was something going on. And maybe I'll direct this to you, Craig. So as a company, how do you go about trying to weed that stuff out or create a more welcoming environment, a friendlier environment, a more egalitarian environment? So I don't think it's specific to gaming or eSports. I think it's a culture of the Internet, which obviously gaming is, you know, leverages so heavily. So I think it's much more pronounced in there. But I think it's through awareness. It's through initiatives like NEC. There was an instance where another top Counter-Strike player made like a comment about another player from another team who'd come up. And we were basically here from the Ukraine and basically it was bullying them. So they started, as a result of that, there was actually this big uproar and that player's name's Frick is doing sort of an anti-bullying campaign. So trying to create awareness around instances of this happening in a high level and then really trying to lead, you know, from a top-down mentality to set the tone for others to follow. But it certainly is a very big problem or big hurdle, you know, big area to really try to tackle. And it's not anything that's just going to happen in one, two, three. I don't think there's a quick fix to it. It's just time and a little bit of maturity to be honest. I think as we recently seen the U.S. Women's National Soccer team demand more comfortable play with the men. In the world, professional e-sports athletes are their top-level female e-sports athletes? Does that exist? Yeah, there was an example. So the two different divisions for a game called League of Legends, one's called the Championship Series and one's called the Challenger Series. The Challenger Series and a female that qualified up through the Challenger Series and qualified for the Championship Series and I think she actually set down for her team and she didn't want to compete because of some of those pressures. But it was interesting just to see that you can make it up and it doesn't matter man or woman that if you're good enough there's no reason that these, you know, the whole e-sports community at the highest level shouldn't be a, you know, blended 50-50. Yeah, we're in a really tricky moment right now because we're, you know, we want to increase women's participation in the space and grow it. There's a lot of structural problems, cultural problems around harassment so there's often women's tournaments and that causes a lot of debate and angst in the scene and I think a lot of us are just trying to figure out how to move the ball forward to get better equity but there remain really serious problems and the women's teams don't make as much. So there's still, you know, when it comes to kind of the amount of money and it's still a huge struggle. It's a struggle for all e-sports teams and certainly when it comes to tournaments. Yeah, I mean even traditional sports seeing how the WNBA came however many years after the NBA and how does that separation and nurturing a certain gender sector of the sport, how does that impact the growth? I don't know. Well, and women's basketball is a fascinating example of kind of this idea which is false in our society that there's this kind of linear progressive trajectory of women in sport. It's more like a roller coaster and the best way to look at this is women's basketball. So men don't play basketball when the games, sorry this is too far of a tangent but I think it's relevant. Men don't play basketball when the sport is first invented. It's sissy, it's boring. And that improves our manliness by playing football. It's the end of the 19th century. There's a fear of emasculation in U.S. society and Theodore Roosevelt embodies this, right? You have kind of industrial ideas coming to the creation of all these modern sporting forms and then you have a Canadian invent basketball and it's not the sport that we think of today. It's slow and there's not as much physicality, there's not running. So it's a great game for women to play and play it in a respectful female way. They stand back and give a respectful distance when they guard. There's players who only play offense, players who only play defense, but women love this because it is a way for them to do something that's liberating. It's like the bicycle. All the bicycle is amazing for women in the 19th century. But the rules change. The women start to become more competitive and athletic. They're flowing. They're playing these long flowing dresses at first and then bloomers, then shorts. And by the 1930s, men start to play as well. And their uniforms look the exact same. Men and women have the same uniforms by the 30s, the little short shorts and the tank tops. But girls' basketball is incredibly more popular than boys in the 1930s. States hold high school chaffy chips in basketball and the girls sell out and boys don't. And there's professional basketball opportunities for women in the 30s and 40s as well. There's the textile mill leagues. So you can be a professional female basketball player in the 1930s and 40s and that's in fact far more popular. There's more opportunities for women than men. But then we have this kind of conservative backlash coming off of World War II. States cut high school tournaments for basketball for girls. And the boys who had been cheerleaders, girls were not cheerleaders until this time, cheerleading becomes a female pastime. So now we have the boys who play the games and the girls who are supportive on the sidelines. But this is new. This isn't how it's always been. And so I think that kind of longer and my students are always fascinated by this of course because they assume again that there's this kind of trajectory and that women's professional basketball has only started in the last 20 years with the WNBA and that's actually not true. And I lost my train of thought. That's fine. I love this point because I think it's so important to remember that sports and leisure is so tied up with cultural ideas about identity and gender and sexuality and race and ethnicity. And they move and flow over time and we see it in eSports all the time we see it in any sport. So it's such a fantastic point because it is easy to get very presentist and imagine all this stuff happening in eSports. This has never happened before and there are lessons we can learn. So it's great to have a historian here because it's a really important part of the overall eSports story. I'm going to put you back on the spot which I know you studied NTA athletics in Title IX and I think eSports is just starting to get a foothold in college athletics. Have you looked at that at all or have you thought about how that might play out? Well speaking to people who have the ability to shape the future of eSports and if they would like to enter college I would say be innovative and don't fall into the NCAA model. And I see this as someone who studies college sports is a great opportunity to innovate and an idea that a number of people have been discussing is kind of a way to solve the problem in a big time college sports is to kind of double down on their educational value and allow student athletes to major in sport. So a woman. Oh, I got a round of applause for that. So there's a woman at the University of North Carolina who directs a Center for Research under her collegiate athletics. Her name is Arianne Waite and she's published on this. She's researching it. She's a policy person like me. I can just talk about the past. She's actually studying what will work in the future. But I see eSports as a way to kind of show us old traditional sports folks how to innovate in this and maybe majoring in gaming and in a liberal arts education. You could really do something fantastic with that so that you're not falling into this kind of scholarship model where eSport athletes have to be amateurs. It's educational. And then because you've stripped away the amateur label they can't still, on the weekends, maybe make some money. Kind of like musicians are able to you can major in music and make some money as a musician on the weekends. So I actually see this as a great pathway out and that sports could follow eSports in this realm. Yeah, I think there's a lot that's happening. You're starting to see some universities start to get supportive of it. You see Irvine, I think in California was the most recent to start to add some Roger Morris, I think. Yeah, Roger Morris, sorry. Has some scholarship programs. I agree there's a lot. There's a green pastures ahead for us to pave. So Twitch has been mentioned a few times. Twitch.tv is this interactive live streaming site where people play video games and other people can watch them play and interact in the chat box and talk to them. It seems like a different kind of celebrity than you get. You know, we don't have NBA players just sort of shooting practice hoops and chatting with fans. Are the celebrities here because of things like Twitch because of things like live streaming? Are they more accessible? Are there different expectations about how accessible they'll be and how much they need to interact with fans? This is like real-time interaction. I think it's cultural. It's an on-demand lifestyle that everyone lives now. You're on your phone. You've got access to all this information. You're tweeting at each other. So there's just become a much more, I'll explore a personal relationship or one-to-one relationship instead of just a one-way conversation of publishing something and people just consuming it or it's on TV. So I think Twitch embraces that with an interactive chat panel through the live video session which is really a different way for now people fans to interact with sort of these celebrities. And I think that if people, the technology existed in a way and even if they just started doing it right, if Tiger Woods started periscoping or live streaming from Twitch, practice around it. I think people would be intrigued to watch what that was like or Steph Curry shooting three-pointers on a Thursday night and an off night. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I think you'll start to see them even start to follow to some extent but the personalities of Twitch are I think also what makes it unique and they're such unique quirks. It's just things that people can relate to. I think that's the biggest thing through it. I think when it comes to, at least esports individual players, Twitch has two really interesting things happening or live streaming is, one is it often gives savvy esports players an additional revenue mechanism which is really important. I mean a number of years ago, a really top player named Grubby was able to sort of jump off of team contracts because he was able to kind of have this portfolio of revenue generating activities of which Twitch was one. The other thing though I do think is fascinating to see esports players navigate and try to figure out what is that genre of practice as entertainment and esports players will regularly also hide strategies and not broadcast them as they're going into big tournaments so sort of that strange balance between broadcasting out a mundane practice making it entertaining and then figuring out what are the things that I have to actually keep to myself or maybe do a handful of other people. So it's all still kind of under process very much. And to take it even a step further we're really far down the wormhole here. I think it's interesting because there's actually been the game called Counter Strike in North America and a lot of the top pros are making so much more money live streaming than sponsorship or prize money that they're actually practicing wrong. So they're not having the right type of practice and therefore for months or years they're getting destroyed on the International Competitive Circuit because they were more concerned about being a live Twitch celebrity making money through that platform versus excelling sort of at their craft and now you're starting to see the pendulum swinging back the other way. These guys are competitors at the heart of it all and just don't like losing. And I was saying okay well wait a minute there's a better way to do this. So it's interesting to see. I'm going to open up to questions in just a minute if I want to ask two questions before I do the first and then I want to go back in time and then I want to go forward. So I'll start with our historian going backwards. So this feels like something new in the world of sports. Is there anything we can compare this to where a new kind of sport emerges or a new kind of cultural recreation emerges like this or anything else we can point to like this? Well I mean I kind of mentioned it briefly earlier I think the best comparison would be action sports and it's kind of innovative new sporting forms but then also the commercial structure and the potential to create a new professional sporting form and specifically the X Games and ESPN is the driver of that and then the way in which action sport athletes are brand ambassadors and the way that they're promoting a lifestyle more than necessarily a sport spectatorship so that a fan isn't just going and consuming and sitting passively and the team wins or loses and then that affects their mood. It's more of a lifestyle thing kind of an artistry as well where an action sport fan is also a participant goes and there's a lot more going on with action sports than just two wins and loses. There's a creativity to perform and I think the best example would be Tony Hawk performing at 900 for the first time in 1999 in San Francisco and this was televised on ESPN and ESPN too and his time was up but he kept going and he kept attempting it and he failed 12 times and ESPN kept the feed going and on the 13th time he performed a 900 and that just changed to action sports and what spectators were consuming was something very very different from traditional sporting farms and I think we see kind of similarities between action sports and esports in that way I'm curious what the 900 esports would be before I open up to questions I'll ask you to look ahead just a little bit what's coming next down the pike in the world of esports and how big is this going to get and how soon will we be watching League of Legends instead of the Super Bowl It's happening for some people already I always say it's incredible to think of this for 15 years starting as a player and running LAN parties and all this stuff and to be honest it's hard to think that we'd ever be at this point where we are now where we're literally selling out sports stadiums and there's tens of millions of people tuning in to watch it so it's pretty incredible just to think how far we've come but still I think when you think about all the generational and demographic and socioeconomic things happening and culture that's changing there's still like step 3 of 10 and I think it's only going to continue to get better technologies change the way people interact with media the way they talk to other people and esports is sort of at the centerpiece of all these different kind of things that are video games are at the centerpiece of all this different things that are happening drone racing and virtual reality and esports is such a broad term so I think in 10 years or 20 years it will look very different probably from what it does today the same way you describe basketball and we're like that's not basketball but the same type of evolution will continue to happen as technology goes and competition embracing that is the form of energy I always say I'm a sociologist not a futurologist so I'm going to slightly dodge that question and just say when I finished my book it came out in 2012 but it was done in about 2011 and for me the period these last several years have really been the moment of seeing the power and the shifts that are happening because of media and broadcast media so for me what I'm most interested in critically over the next handful of years is looking at how the media domain esports as a media property and not just a sports property is really going to be under some interesting scuffles and tensions and an industrial process so that's broadcasting fees, rights of publicity for players you know who's going to license this stuff how is it going to go out across the world for me there's a lot of really interesting stuff still yet to happen in that space alright let's open it up to questions I think we're going to use microphones right please thanks, if I wanted to get a real bird's eye view of what's happening what's it now wow maybe one or two sites like where would you recommend I start the easiest two sites I would say is actually just go to esports.yahoo.com or espn.com as an esports section as well that'll probably help give you the most bird's eye perspective on it I think we won't send you to the depths of red again yeah reddit.com slash esports question on that last point about fees broadcasting rights media one of the reasons we started we started to work around esports because we got tired of trying to battle all the media rights that we're so telling of the traditional sports world and recently I heard that Riot Games will start charging broadcasting fees for some of their tournaments so this is probably going to happen here as well and probably driven by the big number in the audience these events are getting so how is that going to change the game how is that going to change and the culture that has been so strong among gamers to preserve their own craft I think it will be interesting to see I think from a business perspective it creates opportunities with diversified revenue streams for more traditional sports leading models to start to apply and trickle down and provide more stable bases of salary and longevity of careers to players so just as you see in the NBA right it's a league owned by the teams and within there there's collective bargaining with players and unions and so on so I think it's good to create value around that media it will start to feed the ecosystem prop it up on the day to day culture Riot offense says hey I want to I can watch this in a hundred different places I will probably start to direct them towards one or two different platforms and we'll see there will be a change to some extent it's already happened in our content ESL we've been exclusive on Twitch for several years we now have a semi exclusive we're on different platforms but people will find it and I think the question will be if it goes behind a piggy and it starts to become inaccessible yeah I think that's a great point so I don't know what will happen but I do think one of the interesting tensions that's always been at work so as you jump in you disagree but is the tension between many people you know the eSports really comes from a hobbyist enthusiast seriously your sports community so people feel like they have ownership stakes in eSports and I think we're just at this moment it's been happening for a decade now but where you know big media industry companies are coming in it is getting commercialized and commodified and taken up and I think it is going to be interesting to see is going to make that shift it has been for a while but make that shift from kind of enthusiast roots we own it how can you say that digital playing field I don't have a right to be on it to a more commercialized system so and we can see how this you know battles out in different ways globally around the right to sport I mean I could try sure Victoria could give us some really great insight on like that you know is the right to sport a fundamental human right actually says it is what does it mean about ownership of digital playing field so the cultural tensions I think are lurking there how it actually gets sorted out will be really interesting thank you this was I think mentioned very briefly in passing but in the last couple of years there's been I think a burst of investment in organization in drone racing and I was wondering if anybody could say any more about how that stands in relation to traditional e-sports I was talking about this yesterday with our global CEO and he goes we're talking about he has some very rough ideas he hadn't had any real real personal hypothesis behind him he goes something can crash in real life that's not e-sports it's okay interesting perspective I don't know I think there are crossovers right the same sorts of skills that make a great drone racer probably carry over certain types of video games and simulators or other titles so another one of those up in the company that will be interesting to follow my question is more along the lines of e-sports and its relationship with broadcast television you have specific companies like Turner Broadcasting when you're on e-sports in America and Sky doing e-sports tournaments in the UK I just wanted to know with streaming platforms like Twitch and as we hitbox driving e-sports viewership is broadcast television even needed in the growth of e-sports I think we see it as an opportunity to broaden the base of fans to create new content for different platforms so we think the live digital platform live streaming is probably very good for the live competition we think there is an opportunity to tell a story with different channels that traditionally talk to different demographics of people I think it will be interesting to see with e-league from Turner if they can bring the younger demographic that's not there to their medium by also featuring that content I think that's TBD here in the US that has worked in other parts of the world we've seen success our World Championship in Poland was on six or seven different TB channels and outperformed other content on there we did something with the CW here in the US with Mortal Kombat X a couple of weeks ago that performed very well relative to other content that's a lot and so on so still new I think it will have success but it'll just depend what that content is I will say ethnographically this has been one of the biggest shifts I've seen when I was doing my field work for the book like 2003 2010 pretty uniformly when I would talk to folks who were trying to build the scene they would say if we could just get on television it was a legitimizing thing for the audience and I swear in the last two or three years more and more I hear we don't need television we know where our audience is so I'm really curious to see if they can pull off the transition there's a lot of finicky, finessey things in esports to quirks yeah quirks we'll call it but that's to me been one of the most interesting sort of just internal stances of a lot of folks I encounter that's fine when you think about traditional media sorry esports looks at traditional media we see it as a way to validate and I think traditional media when they see esports they think of it as a way to grow their digital platform so it's this very interesting intersection that's happening where there's this brief moment of time where I think we both need each other and where the path goes from there I think we'll change this is directed to the entire panel now Rick Fox former NBA star and current owner of Echo Fox recently made a statement that esports would be bigger than hockey I'm just curious about your panel's opinion upon that if that's true if that will come true and then so in what way I think it was referencing some of that new zoo data that kind of sized up the markets we referenced earlier so you know globally again according to this research firm there'll be more esports enthusiasts than hockey enthusiasts but I think it's still more deeply ingrained in the larger communities of generations speaking as now I'll put my athlete hat on speaking as a former professional collegiate athlete in a dying sport that will never fully die because it's the foundation of all sports track and field I mean it's called athletics everywhere but the United States well I'll take it to the last question too like TV is a horrible mechanism for like promoting our sport the product of track and field on TV is just oh it just hurts my soul because it's in many cases done so poorly and the narratives aren't there and they cut to a commercial break when a key move is made in the race and they come back and it's the last laugh and you miss it anyway I think again I think traditional sporting forms have a lot to learn from eSports and TV is one component of that but you know you also have athletes like Gordon Hayward the Utah Jazz Mall forward who's written about I think it was in defensive gaming or something like that where he plays and he gets it and this younger generation coming up in the NBA the traditional sports folks have a lot to learn and I think it's his youth demographic plus the global plus the digital hey sorry so I used to watch a lot of StarTrap and they had a lot of different personalities in the athletes you had some very talkative and chatty and smack talking players and then you had like traditionally a lot of the Korean players like whenever they got handed a microphone except for a select few and when sponsors also come to play and some players also have inherited kind of the culture of certain like bad things from the internet like sexism and the racism and stuff like that I'm wondering what can we do possibly to learn from traditional sports of like getting our players to like present themselves in a more media friendly play I guess not trying to like water them down but just like trying to you know make it so like an everyday person sees them playing and doesn't like get offended like because they're starting to say racist things or whatnot I think it's understanding themselves as a brand and the platform that they have to speak to the audience and I think again even traditional sports athletes a longer window of time a broader base of exposure have now really just really become super savvy and I think it just takes a little bit of education self-awareness and some training probably and I know that is a process we work with players on a lot of the different publishing partners that we work with more and more are now trying to work with players to kind of educate them on what to do and how things will be received well and what they can do without realizing they can damage their brand as well so I think it's a process I think it's been great too to see you know there's a handful of teams who've actually stepped up spoken out penalized folks you know find them it's hard to kind of they don't make a lot of money to begin with some of them do some of them do that's right so I think that's been terrific too is when teams actually start stepping up and taking responsibility also and kind of managing the players so I have a question around sort of to set the point around aspirational where do you guys see this going as Oculus Rift and HoloLens and Oculus VR get pulled into this space in terms of because the ability to game together right the sort of chat and interaction maybe on Twitch you know with Oculus Rift at some point you'll be able to be in the game with the professional gamer possibly walking around commenting maybe giving you a bite so I don't know I appreciate it There's a good article actually just today Fortune.com I think who is Fortune about Valve's virtual reality system the HTC Vive and Esports and they said it's going to start as a spectator element right where you're going to be immersed within the universe watching people play and it'll over time likely evolve if developers create a ground up that is now the new keyboard and mouse and how you're competing and that's a physicality to this virtual world and it'll be interesting to see yeah Fortune you say? I think it was Fortune or I think it was Fortune.com today I need a question I thought Esports came out of accessibility like you're especially at your point saying that fighting games are very ethno-levers and I sort of feel like that would come from the fact that there were always three fighter pizzeria in the ghetto and that sort of competitive make it was cheap to get into, it was always available unlike traditional sports I in South Burrams had no access to hockey at all when I went to college I was like oh I want to try hockey until I saw the equipment prices I was able to get an Xbox and Halo way easier than it was for me to get a full hockey set I feel Esports isn't able to keep things accessible while still trying to push the limits of things helping that out with free to play mobiles and what not but we can see the line between trying to go big but still trying to keep it where the next kid can just learn Accessibility is important I think the diversity of platforms everyone has other numbers but a lot of people have smartphones certainly lining up in quarters on the arcade you know for 25 cents and the pizzeria was the easiest way but you know an Xbox is 300 or 400 bucks which isn't nothing or more I think just as technology is more pervasive everyone's got some form of this and more and more in their households so I think it's just technology going and brought to the base and new types of games you know coming out that you can play on there like Hearthstone is a digital card game that you can play on your phone, your tablet, on your PC where you don't need a $2,000 gaming machine to run it like some other titles to the previous to last point I want to point out we keep talking about eSports as is the players and the audience and one thing that it's important to point out is that there are several layers of participation you have the publisher of the game and then you have the modders the people that modify the games and then you have the gamers and then you have the people who watch the gamers and then you have people who create shows create shows about the gamers and it just keeps building up layer after layer after layer making a very rich ecosystem where everyone is just adding a little bit of value throughout the entire chain and so I think I'm not sure this is more of a question because it's more of a statement one of the important parts of the contributions of eSports is to think about that internet culture of participation into making the whole ecosystem work it's not someone putting the show and everyone else at home watching TV we are all in it one way or another and that's what makes it so rich in many ways do you agree? I remember there was a point I was writing the book where I was debating with myself if I wanted to use the word industry and I decided to in part because of the point you're making which is it is exactly that a tremendous number of third party organizations and companies and all kinds of things that filter and they're even more now with live streaming so I think you're absolutely right I have my microphone back which I think means that is the end of question time thank you all for coming thanks to our panelists thank you all and I think we're going to main role