Esports - Video Games

eSports

Videos games have always captivated audiences across the world, with their simplistic beginnings as moving pixel blocks of the earliest arcade games to that of the advanced 3D models and enhanced graphics of today’s video games. As video games have changed over the years, they have always fallen back to their original need for competition with high scores and other ways for gamers need to gratify themselves since their inception. This need for competition and rivalry within the community of gamers had developed and flourished over time into what is now known as eSports. eSports is a relatively new up and coming innovative development of electronic sports or eSports. As videos games have developed over the years it has offered players a means to immerse themselves within a virtual world and has allowed for the development of a competitive scene that has grown to the international level on par to that of today’s modern day sports scene like the NBA, NFL, or even WSP.

Based on the history of eSports, eSports may be classified into two distinct eras tentatively known as the arcade era and the Internet era. During the early arcade era from the1980s to 1990s with the growing popularity of arcade contests, this in turn inspired new innovative ideas about interactive media as a new play technology. Like pinball, the scores from previous competitors are left on the machine to encourage comparison and competition with other players. These encouraged friendly comparisons have come to set the stage for the early beginnings of eSports, with The Space Invaders Tournament held by Atari in 1980 as the first. This first official tournament for eSports brought in over 10,000 participants, which helped to establish the basis of competitive gaming as a mainstream hobby as it is viewed today (archive.org).

Other eSports games gained their popularity with the evolution of the Internet through local area networks (LAN). The advancement of LAN technology helped to bridge together players and changed the perception of eSports from player versus machine to that of player versus player. The history of competitive gaming is typically associated with the release of the first networked first person shooting games (FPS), in particular the 1993 released game “Doom” and the 1996 follow-up title “Quake” by id software (Kushner). Following the inception of competitive FPS games, groups of online players would come to form team or clans and begin to compete in online tournaments. Several professional and semi-professional online gaming leagues had formed in order to facilitate gamers need for competition. One of the most noticeably and still influential “Cyberathlete Professional League” (CPL) whose business concept was modeled after that of the major professional sports leagues found within in the United States (Lee, and Schoensted).

The most popular genres within eSport are first-person-shooter