[weeA]

Introduction

E-sports are an abbreviation for Electronic sports. When video games are played competitively they are called as e-sports. Video games are played competitively at amateur and professional levels. All around the world there are various leagues and tournaments that keep happening for certain genre of games such as Real-Time Strategy, First person shooter and racing games. In this essay I will be talking about the evolution of e-sports and its impact on the society and also its impact on the video games industry. I will also be talking about the impact of technology on e-sports.

History of E-sports

There are four main eras in the evolution of e-sports known as the arcade era, Unix era, early PC era and the global tournaments era.

The arcade era – Arcade games are the games that are played on arcade machines. Arcade machines are the coin operated entertainment machines. The first arcade game, which had an ability to keep a track of high scores, was ‘Twin Galaxies’. In the year 1983 the first ever video-game team was formed and in 1987 they ran various number of competitions. Later on in the 1990 Nintendo held their first world championship and in 1994 blockbuster video ran their own world championship with games like NBA jam and Virtua racing .

The Unix era – Chris Guthrie and Ed James, who were undergraduate students at Berkeley, created the first computer based multiplayer game called Netrek in 1988. In this game a maximum of 16 players could play against each other at the same time. During 1995 the first Netrek tournament was held in United States of America and since then there have been enormous number of Netrek tournaments being held all over America. “The sport thus becomes a fast-paced game of strategy and tactics not unlike basketball. Team members charge toward a planet in a kind of power play. The defense responds in its well practices formations. But in Netrek there are twenty or more balls loose on the court, so it can get pretty frantic. “Team play is very important, ‘says Northrop, a Seattle player (Wired Magazine, 1993).

The Early PC era – Doom was released on December 10 1993. Doom was a first person shooting horror game. This was the first game with had features such as Internet relay chat (IRC), in game chat rooms and also had multi-player death match facility. Doom 2 was launched after 2 years of Doom and to make the popular Microsoft started organizing Doom 2 tournaments in 1995. These tournaments were organized on local area networks (LAN), where all the players had to go to single location where the tournament was held. This method of tournaments got standardized for all the tournaments that are being held right now (Doomworld, 2003).

In 1996 iD software launched there first person shooting game called Quake. Quake dominated the E-sports scene since its launch, as the prize money for the Quake tournaments was much higher then any other game tournaments. In 1997 the winner of the Quake tournament was given a Ferrari 328 GTS .

The Global tournaments era – The first ever-gaming league that was hosted was called Cyberathlete professional league (CPL). CPL started in 1997, since then has kept growing every year. CPL “has organized huge competitions across five countries and distributed more than 3 million USD in prize money” (Millington, 2006).

CPL gave birth to a lot more gaming leagues such as World Cyber Games (WCG) which started in 2000 and it has participants from 70 different countries playing under one roof for a whooping prize pool of more then 460,000 USD (Wikipedia, 2010).

In 1998 Blizzard Entertainment launched there game called as Starcraft. Starcraft took the e-sports scene to an entirely different level. Starcraft found it home in South Korea were Starcraft leagues were being organized. The players started getting paid in six figure salaries and all there games were being telecasted on TV. Korea has 4 TV channels dedicated to Starcraft. Starcraft players were getting pain an average of 200,000USD per annum. Gamers started getting celebrity status and could be seen on Television advertisements and television drams (Greatest.com, 2004).

Impact on Society
E-sports have opened up new opportunities and new career paths for people. People who use to spend around ten hours on gaming a day can try and become good at it and play in the professional leagues. The society now does not see playing of video games as a pass time but as a sport. E-sport has changed the way people think about gaming. With the help of E-sports players can now have a positive approach to play games. There are companies, which create electronic gadgets especially for professional gamers to help them play better.

Impact on the gaming industry
Thanks to the monumental success of E-sports, game development companies started creating games for the E-sports. There has been an increase in the sales of copies sold. The piracy has been reduced, if people wanted to play competitively they had to buy get the game to play online, as almost all the tournament qualifying rounds are hosted online and only users with a valid game CD-key are eligible to register.

Impact of technology on E-sports
As the technology kept improving day by day, games started incorporating modern technology and became easier to access. Thanks to the technological developments players could play games online. There were chat rooms included in games so players could interact with other players. This helped form a gaming community all around the world. A gamer in India could meet a gamer in Europe and share their views about the game.


Here is some MUSIC!!!!!!!!!!!! K-POP
Every SC2 player has to listen to these!!!!!1

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

You Tube

[Apth]

That was a really good read. Even though there's a lot of text there, the formatting and bold headings really helped my eyes not explode. I like how you looked at the subject from a few angles as well, that was cool.

[Cute]

Good read! Made even better by the addition of K-pop (All articles on SC should have at least one mv embedded )

Not too sure how accurate that $200k average figure is though. I thought that kind of money is reserved for Boxer only?

[weeA]

Boxer gets around 500k

[Cute]

Ah, I thought he got 200 personally, and then 300 more for his team. Either way, it's a lot haha

[Maro]

Originally Posted by weeA

Boxer gets around 500k

Do you have his phone number? I'd like to be his best friend please.

Lol.. Insane $$$ lah~

[weeA]

lol i dont.. I got that from an interview of Grrr . If you read my other article u will find the exact references there