I remember when I stumbled upon competitive gaming circa 2006. Major League Gaming (MLG) was hosting events of a scale that at the time seemed massive, in both attendance and prize pools, all whilst donning a logo resembling that of the major American sports organizations such as the MLB. Everything seemed so, legitimate. Like MLG had conjured a portal into the future, a future where top gamers were heralded as athletes, their skill worthy of the same appreciation as pro basketball or football players. As esports has grown and thrust itself onto the world stage, many sports fans are disgusted that people would even draw those comparisons, or refer to gaming competitions as “sports”.

Ironically for these naysayers, their heroes: professional athletes, do not share in their disgust. In fact, pro athletes are some of the largest investors and champions of esports. This is because they as competitors see the incredible potential present within this nascent industry. Esports is simply a new entry into a market that conventional sports has long dominated. That market? Human competition. Like any new player in a long existing game, esports must combat the immense history and tradition that conventional have built for themselves. But history and tradition can be a double edged sword.

Despite the word “sport” carrying with it a great deal reverence, the reality is that most sports were not conceived to be played in stadiums or even at professional level. Sports were created as leisure or exercise games. Luckily for these games the human body is an amazing tool for raising the skill ceiling of any physical contest. Humans can be honed like an instrument towards mastering physical challenges, whether that’s kicking a soccer ball, shooting a basketball or hitting a baseball. It is this physical mastery coupled with sharp decision making, that make LeBron James or Tom Brady so exciting to watch.

However, at times cracks in the design of these sports emerge when we see them played competitively at the highest level; cracks that are often difficult, or impossible to mend. The size and power of top American football players has brought about controversy over the innate dangers of the sport, as injuries ramp up in frequency and severity. The usage of intentional fouling in basketball has frustrated fans who feel it ruins the flow of the game. The subjectivity of the officiating across many sports is an issue I see arise again and again on social media. Did that referee’s questionable call determine the outcome of the game? These are problems that cannot be reasonably “patched” without major overhauls to the game’s basic systems.

Interestingly, the design of video-games would follow a very similar pattern to conventional sports when they rose to prominence in the late 1980’s. Video games were created as leisure activities targeted towards casual fans. Gaming companies wanted to broaden their audience by making games easily accessible. Advertisements for game systems often featured images of “the whole family” playing together in the same way they would a board or card game.

As people started mastering these early video-games, (as humans will invariably do when you create a popular game system) such as Billy Mitchell’s quest to get a perfect score in the original PacMan, they were seen as fanatics. Few game studios embraced their “hardcore” audience (Id Software and Blizzard are a couple that come to mind) and players who spent their time mastering games, were not lauded as athletes, but instead accused by society and their parents of, “wasting time in front of a screen”. By the turn of the millennium people like Jonathon “Fatal1ty” Wendell proved that there was enough interest in competitive gaming to make it a career, that this culture of, video games being solely leisure activities, was starting to erode. But the gaming industry as a whole still clung to this philosophy.

Many games that were, accidentally or otherwise, programmed to have a high ceiling for execution (Halo 2, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Quake) were overhauled in subsequent expansions or patches to lower their difficultly level. Despite the game studios and publishers efforts to insist that video games were simply leisure activity, the competitive communities marched onward. Tournaments would continue to be hosted for old games, fans would plead with game developers on official forums or at conventions to balance their game’s for competitive play. The rise of the internet provided a whole new and accessible means for competition. As online games like Starcraft: Broodwar, Counter Strike 1.6 and Warcraft III gained more traction and featured more tournaments players and teams, advertisers started to take real notice. A paradigm shift occurred where the competitive communities were no longer a small subset of the larger casual audience, they were the larger audience. Many gaming companies finally conceded that they had been looking at video games all wrong. And then cometh esports.

The birth of esports is well represented by the actions of Nintendo. In 2013, the competitive Super Smash Bros Melee. (a 2001 Nintendo title) community made their way into the lineup of “Evolution”, the worlds most prestigious fighting game tournament, by winning a donation drive for breast cancer (they raised over $94,000).



Before the tournament kicked off, the Evolution staff were notified by Nintendo that they would not be allowed to livestream the Melee tournament. It was assumed that Nintendo didn’t want Melee, and by association the Smash Bros. franchise as a whole, to be seen as a restrictive and difficult to play competitive title by anyone who may stumble upon the Evolution stream. Internet backlash to the streaming ban was colossal, and Nintendo quickly folded their position. The tournament went on to be one of the most memorable in the game’s history.

Now fast-forward less than one year later and Nintendo announces their own Smash Bros. invitational tournament for their newest iteration in the series Smash Bros. for WiiU inviting many of the competitive Melee community members to showcase their new title, the same community members whom just eleven months prior, they had sought to stop from being watched compete online.

Many companies smelled the coffee far before Nintendo. An aroma that smelled eerily similar to large stacks of cash. Esports juggernauts like Riot Game’s League of Legends and Valve Software’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive got into the scene early and have reaped massive rewards.

Sports are huge, esports are becoming huge (they already are by some metrics); they’re both industries based around human competition, so their subsequent growth should follow similar patterns right? Wrong. There is one major difference piloting the future of esports that has long been missing from conventional sports: the free market.

If the romanticized ideal of capitalism i.e, “Companies competing to make the best product with which to woo a consumer” ever truly worked it is in esports. The major conventional sports are essentially set in stone. If I represent an amazing new sport, let’s call it, “Bolf” a pioneering fusion of Basketball and Golf; the chance of Bolf actually capturing a significant market share from the major sports is a pipe dream. In esports it is a reality. In esports there is competition for competition. Thousands of games and thousands more designers each trying to court as large a share of that lucrative 18-32 male demographic that advertisers salivate over. And the best way to do it? Make the sickest game. A game designed from the ground up for competition, for spectators, for players, for fans. There has never been a market competing to make the best competition before and that is so incredibly exciting! Why? Because true to capitalist dogma the real benefactor here is the consumer. The consumers who will get to play or watch these amazing games.

Games with evolving design. Everything that humans understand about what makes competition exciting for both players and spectators alike will be poured into these titles. Selected traits. New ideas and systems that have never been implemented before will be theorized and tested, set against others in the Darwinian arena; all whilst the structure for the perfect human competition is slowly chiseled away at…