How Players Learn Team-versus-Team Esports: First Results from a Grounded Theory Study

This preliminary study examines how amateur and semi-professional players learn team-versus-team esports games, with a focus on the contemporary online media environment that includes streaming, training bots, and statistics services. Existing research on game learning has largely concentrated on serious games and gamification, or on massively multiplayer online role-playing games studied with data from the mid-2000s, leaving individual and peer learning in modern esports comparatively underexplored. The authors address this gap through a grounded theory approach combining semi-structured interviews and contextual inquiry, with the aim of informing game designers about how players use existing tools to learn and how support for learning might be improved.

The findings are based on interviews with 12 adult, UK-based male players, four of Dota 2 and eight of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, whose recorded playtime ranged from roughly 8 hours to over 5,000 hours. Analysis proceeded iteratively, with data collection, coding, and theorising cycling through constant comparison until the reported codes reached theoretical saturation. Three analytic dimensions emerged: learning processes, including identifying knowledge gaps, consuming and internalising information, applying knowledge in new contexts, and deliberate practice, with deliberation acting as a meta-quality shaping what is learned; learning tools, which span in-game modes and add-ons as well as external streaming services, forums, statistics platforms, and voice communication applications; and learning goals, ranging from basic controls and mechanics to motor skills, evolving strategies, the shifting "meta," and general and meta-learning skills such as teamwork and understanding how one learns best.

The authors situate these results against prior work on MMORPGs, finding broad resonance while identifying two distinctive features: the meta as a constantly moving learning target, and the growth of professional, commercial learning-oriented streaming and statistics services that were previously fan-made. The strong emphasis on reflection and deliberate practice connects esports learning to research in professional education and sport expertise. The authors acknowledge that their sample is small and homogeneous and that the findings remain abstract, and they plan future work on the transition from single-player human-versus-bot play to multiplayer human-versus-human play with a more diverse group of players.