Design of a Serious Game to Teach Esports Concepts and Career Pathways

This paper presents a conceptual design for a serious game intended to teach players about esports, including its history, competitive game genres, industry ecosystem, and career pathways. Its central argument is that serious games and games-based learning offer an underexplored route to informing students, teachers, and newcomers about a rapidly growing industry, one that has moved from a niche spectator activity into a billion-dollar sector with expanding roles in education, content creation, event management, and business. The authors position the project as a response to a gap in the literature, since prior esports research has concentrated on psychology, health, business management, and performance rather than on educational game design.

The methodological plan is mixed, beginning with conceptualisation and proceeding through a systematic literature review, interviews, surveys, focus groups, and a user requirements analysis drawn from esports and serious games experts. The paper draws on established serious game frameworks such as the Activity Theory Model of Serious Games and the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics model, and it grounds learning outcomes in Bloom's Taxonomy. Supporting evidence includes market figures, such as a projected games industry revenue of $455.60 billion in 2024 and a serious games market of $11.67 billion, alongside a genre-by-genre table of popular esports titles, including shooters, multiplayer online battle arenas, sports, and fighting games.

The paper is explicitly preliminary. No prototype has been built or evaluated, and the design decisions, including a Windows PC platform, Unity or Unreal Engine, a stylised art direction, and a hub-and-spoke level structure, are described as initial considerations. The planned game places the player in an esports arena to build a professional career through challenges and social media interaction, with an integrated learning environment on esports history and ecosystem. Future work will involve a small prototype, iterative refinement, and evaluation through questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and focus groups.