Grassroots Growth: How Game Communities Built an eSport Scene from the Ground up

All right, I think we'll get started. These blinding lights, so okay, yeah. Uh welcome to the next session in what I think is turning out to be a really fantastic day about e-sports. And I think uh Frank and Pat deserve tremendous credit for curating today because I don't know about you, but I think we're hearing from some of the most interesting folks so far who are doing really fantastic dynamic stuff. And I think for me, um so I've been studying e-sports for a while now, and for me one of the most exciting things about what we've been hearing so far is how much it's getting away from just kind of the mainstream hype conversations and really digging into what's happening in the grassroots and how organizations are working through this stuff. So I'm I'm really excited about today. So thanks to to Frank and Pat for curating today. Um my name is T.L. Taylor. I'm a sociologist. I'm an academic. I'm a professor at MIT. I've written a few books, uh one of which was on e-sports, came out in 2012. It's a history book.

It was a history book the moment it came out in part because live streaming broke before I finished the manuscript uh after I finished the manuscript. So I'm currently finishing a book on live streaming right now to kind of bring that conversation up to date. Uh you can find a lot of my work online. Um I'm on Twitter, so there's some ways to follow me. And I also keep if for the more academic folks in the audience, I keep a literature page at my website on e-sports literature. There's actually lots of academic research being done in that field. I maintain a page that links to lots of academic research. So if you're interested in that. So today I'm actually going to talk about the roots of e-sports in particular and the powerful role communities have played in the scene and the transformative work they do. And I actually think it's a really important thread to uh filter up right now. And I loved how it came up in some of the other conversations today because we are at a such a huge commercialization push that I think and hype that I think it's really important to kind of think

historically and what are the lessons we can learn from those early moments of e-sports. So, I'm going to show you a variety of photos, number of them, a lot of them, most of them are from my field work over the years. I started doing research on e-sports in 2003 way before the hype bubble and sort of lived through, you know, followed it through a kind of first crash and now we're on this interesting resurgence point. So, I want to start by just very briefly talking a little bit about the roots of e-sports and hobbyist and enthusiast communities because this is really where e-sports comes from. For those of you who may be new to the scene, you know, you may be used to thinking of e-sports as like maybe League of Legends and live streaming. The roots are quite different and I think both Nick Allen this morning and Tom Cannon when he was talking about the fighting game scene gave us glimpses of that right now gave us glimpses of that. Historically, communities have been where titles get identified as competitive and the scenes that are developed up around them and those titles get worked over and through by

competitive communities and I think one of the lessons we can take from the early days of e-sports history is really thinking about how play and competition is not a static thing. Play evolves over time. It often involves in conversation with new uh hardware that comes out. So, those of you who witnessed the transformation from LCDs to CRTs may remember how entire ways of playing in the competitive scene had to be tweaked to accommodate for that. So, play is not a static thing and communities are the places where this gets worked over. So, the history of e-sports, you know, I trace it all the way back of course to the arcade period. Probably some of you have seen King of Kong so you may be familiar with some of that stuff. But the other really important note when you think historically about communities are LANs and where kind of people were dragging their machines together to play together and competition emerged really naturally in those spaces. Of course, LANs have also long been a place where e-sports has been commercialized, but this kind of interesting mix of emergent

community enthusiasm and excitement around competitive gaming has always been there. So, these are some older photos. This is the first e-sports event I ever attended in 2003. It was a Danish national final, but you know, 30 people in the room for a national final. And again, super enthusiast community that was really working hard to make that come together. And I think one of the things that's so interesting about that early moment in e-sports is how you had people who were kind of always working to professionalize the scene, but within community frameworks. And in fact, I I think when you know, we're at a moment right now, too, where we're hearing a lot about collegiate e-sports, which I am super excited about. Collegiate e-sports is another great example of a place where, you know, something like the Collegiate Star League actually formed because handfuls of students got together and said, "Let's have matches where we're battling each other." And so, a whole sort of scene and organization

arose up around that. And one of the things I think that's important about thinking about these hobbyist and enthusiast networks is the role of the social in it. You know, it's not about individuals making independent decisions about competitive gaming, but building play and conversation with each other and in competition with each other. Um and I think, you know, one of the things that it's interesting right now is I know I have over the last few years certainly had, you know, random game developers come up and say like, "Oh, why don't we turn X into a pro game?" Or X into e-sports. And I'm like, "Well, that's a good ambition, but do the communities want that title?" And communities are really good at sussing out whether or not a title is going to be good for competitive play and in what ways. So, I think considering the work that folks on the ground are doing to make sense of high-end player competitive play is pretty important. And in this regard, I don't know if any of you have been to DreamHack, but I think DreamHack is a kind of great exemplar of the kind of passion that goes into communities to produce playful

spaces. DreamHack is essentially mostly a volunteer organization. If you've ever been to it, it's a massive LAN party. It's now also a huge e-sports event. But you know, thousands of people come together, they drag their machines there, hundreds of volunteers build up that space over the period of time. And I think one of the things we can learn from some of these early roots of e-sports is the power of something we often call serious leisure. People are willing to invest time and money and energy. They may not be pros, but they're willing to invest a lot in the space. And that folks who are engaged there are also always finding a way around barriers. I think very much of the early e-sports scene as a kind of DIY hacking ethic that's important to to consider. I think one of the most interesting examples where we can see this push to innovate practices, push to find new ways of organizing things, uh push to new forms of professionalization in e-sports has been in broadcasting. And

so, again, right now we're in a moment where we're seeing a lot of kind of hype and excitement about bringing e-sports to television or developing the live-streaming scene. But there are actually a number of groundbreakers early on that were doing important work in e-sports broadcasting that I think we can learn a lot from. We can learn a lot from the attempts that they've made along the way, the kinds of practices they've been engaged in. So, this is a picture of uh Paul Chaloner, maybe some of you know him, Redeye. He's a long-time e-sports broadcaster. This is when I met him at DreamHack in 2006. And in 2006 at DreamHack, this was the only media e-sports thing happening. Paul was set up with a laptop and was audio broadcasting. And I think some of these early broadcasters were an interesting testament to people just taking whatever tools were at hand and trying to make something more of of it. So at the time it was things like shoutcasting. Do we have audio? Can I broadcast over an audio feed something that's happening in

the game? And when you look at the kinds of work they were doing then, again, 2006, 2007, dragging together machines, trying to figure out how do we create media production in this space with pat- and these were passionate, kind of committed folks. They were not only creating jobs, but creating services that I think we're now building on and extending. They were also coming up with ways to think about esports that hadn't been thought of before. So, do we, you know, how do you think about in-camera observing? What's the role of the in-camera the in-game camera observer? The role of commenting, building storylines. All of this was innovative work that was coming up from the grassroots at the time. And in fact, some of the most important early organizations founded around media, uh, got frag, uh, Team SportsCast Network and Radio ITG, I think were early foreshadowings of some of the media stuff we're seeing right now. This is one of the favorite quotes I have from one of the people I interviewed for the current book on live streaming, talking

to them about kind of what it looked like on the grassroots, on the forefront, building a media space around esports. And he said, "I think in some regards this world is pushing technology or using tools that traditional broadcasting uses in a very set way and jackknifing it and doing stuff it was never meant to do. Little things like the basic ATM switcher you can buy from Blackmagic and a lot of churches and other public service things have certain limitations. That's the way it is. But if you're a nerd, you can get around those things. You can make hacks and macros and things that they don't tell you about. It's not an add-on you buy, so there's nerds that build computers. We have all these guys that are nerding out on capture cards. And I think that hacking DIY aesthetic that so informs the e-sports industry, whether it's from the player side or the media production side, is important to not get lost as we start commercializing more as

more mainstream media com- companies are becoming interested as sports entities are becoming interested. How do we retain this DIY hacking mentality because it has been so transformational in pushing e-sports to where it is now. We wouldn't have the media space in the same way if we didn't have these folks working 10 plus years ago. The other thing that I think is really important to keep in mind if you're thinking about e-sports, um especially those of you on the development and design side, is thinking about the ways e-sports is constructed in relation to communities and not just computation. Um computation is a really important component of e-sports, but humans and communities uh lend a very powerful uh have a very powerful role in constructing what the digital plain field is. And I think one of the things that's hard for developers sometimes is that they overly privileged designed

systems. And sort of imagine that the game off the shelf or the machine can can take care a lot of the messy work. Um so this is an I love him, I don't think he's here, I love him dearly, Ernest Adams and his colleague talking about video games do not require written rules, but the machine implements and enforces them for the players. The computer is the thing that sets the boundaries. And as a sociologist, you may guess that my pitch after many years of studying competitive communities, is this is not at all how it works. In fact, it was one of the funny things when I my the first work I did the my first book was on MMOs, and I saw a lot of this emergent and iterative behavior in the MMO space. And when I started turning to e-sports, people a couple people would say to me, "No, maybe though the stakes are so high in e-sports, things will get formalized more in the machine. Maybe the computer, the system will lock it down a little bit more cuz the stakes will be so

high." In fact, that wasn't the case at all. And then when you look at e-sports communities, they are regularly debating, tweaking, iterating the conditions of play with an eye towards skill, virtuosity, and even aesthetics. What counts as beautiful play sometimes matters. So, this means that if you actually sort of start looking at competitive communities in practice, what you see are lots of conversations over things like maps, characters that can be used or can't be used, cards that work well or don't, weapons, the number of rounds, configuration settings, mods, exploits, bug use, moves that are preferred or not preferred. What kind of gets validated as legitimate, skillful, virtuosic play? And that's stuff that while the computer, while the design system certainly is a part of that conversation, it's really important to understand how communities are also um

extreme interrogators of competitive systems and will tweak and modify and work with them to make them something that they want them to be. And so, I would say in my experience spending a lot of time at e-sports events and watching tournaments and competitions, you know, paying attention to the ways communities are doing that work is really important. Again, I think we're at an interesting moment where, you know, game developers used to if they didn't shun e-sports, they didn't care. They didn't pay much attention. And so communities were also, you know, we're often pretty free to kind of iterate in ways that made sense to them. And I think we're at an interesting junction right now where developers are getting more interested in e-sports. The question for me is how do we not lose the value of the social work that the communities do to make games playable. And I would say this ties to a kind of meta point I want to make, a final meta point, which is that we really need to understand that play is a form of transformative work.

It's not simply that players, including professional players, including e-sports players, take a system as given. In fact, transformation, if you think about it legally, means things like adding new expression or meaning, or producing value by creating new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings. And what I want to argue to you is that games and e-sports are always doing that. And I think that raises the bar both for designers and how they're thinking about what they're building, but also for us culturally in what we understand e-sports can be. Um it's not just rules that players are debating, but they're also making decisions all the time about preferred modes of play, what's aesthetically pleasing. I remember once a long time ago talking to Counter-Strike players about a move that was typically prohibited in tournaments, the duck jump. And uh asking them why that was prohibited, and

time and again they would say, "It's ugly." It doesn't really look good. It doesn't have a feel of like skillful play. That's a really nuanced um assessment of what virtuosic virtuosic play can and should be. And I think for designers there's an interesting challenge there about how do you kind of put out um artifacts into the world and let them still be iterated by communities. So, this close connection, I think, between communities and their competitive artifacts is something that we risk losing sight of if we think too narrowly about things like intellectual property. So, in fact, competitive communities have been powerful developers of some of the most important spaces in the scene. A very, you know, long-standing, hugely popular map in Counter-Strike, Dust, uh goes back to modding community. And in fact, Counter-Strike itself has its roots in modding. Dota, which we now take for

granted as a title and a genre, again, has its roots in the modding community. And then there's also really fascinating projects like uh Project M, where players are trying to, again, weave together iterations of other games to present, to have a space to do the kind of play that they find most competitively satisfying. Now, the risk with talking about transformative play and transformative work, of course, is that we also have a climate of very narrow intellectual property boundaries. And we, in the MMO period, we saw skirmishes around IP. For example, when players would say things like, "Well, I own my avatar. Shouldn't I be allowed to sell it on eBay?" And companies got very nervous about that. I think we're entering a new period uh around intellectual property debates, where it's often third parties and not individuals. So, it's game developers and third-party organizations who feel they also have a stake. Uh my call today, my challenge to you, especially

if you're developers and designers, is how do we have, how do we think about a much more robust and nuanced understanding of the role of communities and IP that understands it's sort of a co-creative process between the two. Um of course, game developers, you know, you pick your favorite game, you can go and find the guidelines and terms of service and use that guides using those. Again, they're often about non-commercialism or content regulation. I think generally they're too narrow in intellectual property frame for the transformative work that we're seeing in these spaces. And, you know, as I mentioned, you know, I've try I'm working now to update the eSports book to take into account live streaming and I think when you start looking at the impact live streaming has had, and I don't just mean the big tournaments, I mean everyday people broadcasting their play, transforming private play into public entertainment, this question of, you know, co-creation, who owns what is really important. But

you can also just quite frankly watch on the ground people iterate strategies, communities produce preferred modes of play together collectively. So I'll leave on one very big meta, which is I actually think uh my call is broad because it's not just a kind of quirky design question or a thing about development. I really think we need to understand eSports as cultural products with real stakes. They matter to the culture, and that means we have to take them seriously as transformative spaces, that they're not owned by anyone person, that communities play a powerful role in constructing what they want their play to be. And I think if you're interested in understanding how to make a eSports space that is actually going to be vibrant, you'll be thinking about communities and iteration from the get-go. All right. I'll end there. Thanks.

There's a lot of time for questions, if anybody has any. No? Thank you. Um oh. Uh just a quick question about where do you see speed running fitting into all of this and the sort of growth in that area? Yeah, I think speed running is fantastic. Again, it's one of those things there's a history, right, to it? Um but it's another great example of people taking the bounds of the system and pushing them to their limits and exploring what they can do. And I think it's really fascinating to see what the way speed running has garnered now an audience through live streaming and a spectatorship where people are participating in that form of play. And of course, depending on if it's utilizing glitchiness, too, you know, designers, I mean,

not all, but some designers can be very precious about their objects. And I think there's something quite lovely when players go in and kind of push and play in ways that weren't always intended. So, I don't know if that gets at what you're Hi, I'm Sam Osborn, a student. Uh so, one of the things that I think about mostly with competitive games is sort of the morbid reality that uh depending on how a developer might change either a certain mechanic or uh take away a skill from a certain character, that that might ruin like a professional e-sports player's career either because they can't either compete anymore or they just aren't as viable as another player. So, I just want to know what What is your thought Yeah. on that? Yeah, no, I think it's a great point. Um and we of course see this happen all the time when com- when a developers roll out patches that the community isn't

prepared for, sometimes right before a tournament. So, you're right. I mean, in some ways it's a very precarious playing field. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that in traditional sports, equipment also changes and can change the shape of play, but I think one of the key things there is that especially as developers decide that they want to be more involved in e-sports, that they have to be sensitive for the ways those ripple effects kind of work through the community. All right. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. It was a great talk and I really like the line as well about thinking about sort of beautiful play as that act of creativity. Um I wanted to ask you, you kind of said in in regards to sort of legal um frameworks that you perhaps perceived some of the I'm assuming some of the larger commercial companies as being a little bit too restrictive, but the need for companies and and for competitive e-sports to come out of those creative and that history and modding communities. Do you perceive I guess sort of a lot of the large heavyweights in that space at the moment to be too restrictive with their games and and with and how tenable that

situation might be, but if and if if so or if not, where where are the spaces you might see um other sort of titles coming from? Yeah. So, my feeling right now when it comes to the IP stuff in games is that developers are generally happy if people tinker as long as it's non-commercial and or doesn't affect the brand. And I think both of those are insufficient models for cultural production. So, I both think people have a right to make money off of remix, reuse. Um that that is the work of culture. Right? We are always working over artifacts. Um and that if you really want to take games seriously as a cultural product or a sports product, that you can't always control the brand. So, um I think the battles around this are we're probably much more likely to see them through the live streaming stuff that's happening.

Um but yeah, I'd like to see a I would like to see co-creative models really flourish a lot more than they do right now. Hi, thank you for the talk. It's nice to hear from like academic background. And I'm checking your website right now. It's that it podcast and everything. It's very interesting. Um, my question is um, how do you like what do you think e-sport is? Like for me, right? I I I do competitive gaming. Is it Is it for glory that you're better than other people? And e-sport right now there's a lot of money following around. So it got a lot of media attention. Is it because of Is it for money? Is it for glory? Or you like what you were saying there's a social aspect for Is it for the both men's? So what do you think e-sport is? Um, all of the above and in different iterations. So I think that can it can vary over the life of a player. I think it can vary over the context of

a scene. So in my experience interviewing pro players over the years at the root of it is a fundamental passion for not just competition, but getting and being better. Just And it And it is the thing It's the thing that when I when I did MMO work I sort of distinguished power gamers. Like the folks who are willing to fail and go over and over and over again. That fundamentally it's that. It's the thing I don't have. It's why I would give up after a handful of tries. Um, but I think as people inhabit e-sport spaces, of course you know the fame, the glory, the satisfac- That That can all play a role. But it fundamentally at the root, I think it is something about this Usually a deep passion for the game and a deep passion to keep getting better. And it's part of, you know, one of the earlier talks today, it may have been echoed put a couple of them. I think it's really important to think about the socialization process of an e-sports player. You don't just start as a pro,

you know, and often the trajectory is, you know, you kind of start beating everybody in your friends and family network, and then maybe it's everybody in your town, and then maybe it's everybody at the local sort of level, regional level, and you keep going up, but I think that's often what drives folks. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, this is really hard. So, hi. Um I was just wondering, you were mentioning about obviously now companies are sort of eyeing e-sports and their games as e-sports in that sort of oh, maybe we should be doing more or getting more involved. Um I was interested in which companies you think are doing that in healthy ways or in interesting ways cuz I mean, you know, you can just sort of throw a kind of well, here's an API, do something, but Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't I don't know that I'm I don't know that

I have a name to name for you in that regard. I think there are companies who are trying to work, for example, with teams. So, like the expert users become the teams and they solicit feedback, but I think, you know, again, if you heard the team owner's panel earlier, I think you can begin to sense that it's, you know, these aren't flats flat systems. They're still like, who owns the stuff and where do we get feedback from, and what are the layers in which we say, "Okay, we're not going to listen to that, but we're going to listen to this." So, um I think Yeah, so I as I mentioned, there's I think that you know, there are interesting projects out there trying to do stuff, but I don't know that I would say any one company has it perfect yet. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Professor, thank you for your great talk. I'm a professor from Taiwan, as well. My question is you mentioned the community does matter, right? And can you see the e-sports have moving from the uh PC to

mobile? Yeah. Can you see the difference between the community on traditional e-sports and the community Yeah. on mobile? It's a great question. I was in India this last year and it was the first time I started thinking more about that question because in India they just simply don't have the same infrastructures of play that we do here in North America and Europe. And so mobile is a thing that they were thinking a lot about. And I think this is exactly where the power of communities to figure out how to piece together a system that's going to work for them is going to be really important. So, you know, if folks are developing in those spaces, watching the emergent practices that are already bubbling up is going to be pretty key. Um it's not a model that we've had so much here in part because of the dominance of PCs and consoles, but I tend to not be a purist. Like people find ways. Uh you know, so I wouldn't I would not be surprised if that becomes a viable path. But what it looks like is going to matter a lot to how networks are

configured, the context of play, and the kind of organizations that are already on the ground. Okay, thank you. Yeah, sure. What do you think of uh fantasy leagues in the whole context of e-sports? Yeah. Makes perfect sense to me, right? I mean uh people love fantasy sports. It's a huge industry when it comes to traditional gaming. I think it makes perfect sense. I probably the most interesting thing right now is around the regulation of that stuff. The same way with like skins gambling. Um but it makes perfect sense to me. I think probably the trickier bit will be the churn issue in e-sports. So, whereas in fantasy sports, people may be pretty assured that they have a player or a team that they're following year in and year out or there's some fandom that's continuous, we know there's a lot of churn in e-sports and that may be a

trickier thing to have to navigate when it comes to fantasy stuff. All right, I think that's time unless I'm Yep. Thank you all for coming. Stay for the remaining e-sports stuff. It'll be good. All right, thanks.