E-Sports and Its Potential Benefits to the Philippine Society.

Gonzaga, Patrick Aaron R.                                                                                November 23, 2016

2013-27741    BS ChE                                                                                                   ENG 2 – D3

E-Sports and its potential benefits to the Philippine Society.

A Library Research Paper

Electronic Sports or eSports is a young industry that is recently starting to gain popularity and attention. Even though it is still new, its popularity is spreading like wildfire. This can be seen in the viewership of e-sports, which increased in number by 96 million in 3 years according to a research in statista.com in 2016. In countries like South Korea and China where eSports started, the industry is already big. However, in the Philippine context, it is still starting and it is yet to gain popularity in the country’s mainstream media. Because eSports is still new, and perhaps because of the conservatism of the Filipinos, the Philippine society and its government still does not realize that eSports have potential benefits to the society.

ESports is basically video gaming which includes large-scale organized competition as held in tournaments or leagues according to Hamari and Sjöblom (2016). Some of the popular video games in eSports are Starcraft 2, Defense of the Ancients 2 or DOTA 2, League of Legends or LoL, Overwatch, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive or CSGO. These games have different gameplays and have different winning conditions but the end goal is the same for all of these games, which is to beat the opponent or the opposing team. The term “eSports” is still under debate however, because whether or not competitive video gaming can be considered as a sport is still in question by a lot of people and even by organizations. For the sake of the research, it is assumed that eSports can be considered as sports especially in its social sense and less on the physical sense and whether or not this is probable, is not within the scope of the research.

Video gaming, which can be traced back as far as 1947, or gaming in general is already competitive since games include challenge as an element. Even so, the level of competition before is not the same as it is now. According to foxsport.com, from the 50’s to the early 90’s, video gaming competitions were based on high scores and beating your neighbor or your friend (winning 2-player games) but during the late 90’s, multiplayer Local Area Network (LAN) video games and early online video games revolutionized video gaming competition, thus marking the birth of e-sports.

        In the Philippines, there is limited information about the roots of e-sports in the country however its dawn coincides with the start of the millennial generation. Marvin Isaac, a journalist from e-sports inquirer and a millennial, testifies to this in one of his articles in July, 2016 that in his youth, he remembers to have played CS, LoL, and DOTA, all of which are representative video games in the e-sports industry. He also mentions in the article that back then, the internet connection in the Philippines was not dependable, and so LAN “tournaments” were the trend and for this matter the word tournament may not even suffice because the competitions were just held in computer shops (not even between different computer shops) and this shows how enthusiastic the Filipinos are when it comes to eSports.