The arena is darkened, the stands are packed to the rafters, and all eyes are fixed on huge displays showing close-ups of the athletes. They are not sitting on racing bikes, swinging tennis rackets or checking that their football socks are properly in place. Quite the opposite: e-sports athletes look more like the staff of a call centre branch in Cologne-Sülz. They wear a headset, rest their hands on a computer keyboard and mouse, and stare intently at a computer monitor.
The uninitiated might think they are watching a bad movie. This is supposed to be sport? “E-sports” is the umbrella term for this type of competition, which above all demands excellent hand-eye coordination, stamina and reaction speed. While the German Olympic Sports Confederation is still reluctant to classify computer games as a sport, e-sports in Brazil, Korea and China are on a par with basketball, tennis or athletics – in other words, sport. Although e-sports in Brazil still rank behind the king of sports, football, in terms of popularity, computer gaming tournaments in Korea have long since overtaken football. Korea is home to the largest number of fans worldwide, all watching their gaming teams’ every click. But display-based competition is also gaining more and more followers in Germany. To name just one example: the “ESL One Cologne 2015” will soon take place at Cologne’s Lanxess Arena – 16 teams from all over the world will compete against each other in the tactical shooter game “Counter Strike”. A look at the ticket prices makes it clear just how far this former nerd pastime has come: a regular spectator ticket costs 41 euros, while a premium ticket is priced at 217 euros. The teams are playing for total prize money of 250.000 dollars; first place alone takes home 100.000 dollars.
There is no longer any need to point out that professional e-sports players have long been making a living from gaming to make one thing clear: a Counterstrike tournament of this scale has long had nothing to do with smoky basements where spotty nerds battled through the night between piles of energy drink cans and pizza boxes after first spending hours wiring up the PC towers and CRT monitors they had laboriously hauled in. Admittedly, these local area network parties, or “LAN parties” for short, were the birthplace of tournaments on this scale. Today, people play all over the world, and every imaginable game genre is represented, from military strategy games to sports simulations. Nor is there any longer a need to lug around equipment weighing several kilos and boxes full of tangled cables. The scene has grown up and the technology is modern: even game consoles, tablets and smartphones now have wireless internet access and are networked with each other via gaming centres.
E-sports: What is played on what?
Strictly speaking, even a tennis match played on a home “Wii” console, a split-screen racing simulator or a game of billiards via networked smartphones counts as “e-sport”. The key requirement is always that the game has a multiplayer mode, and both games consoles – such as the PlayStation, X-Box or Wii – and PCs can serve as the platform. Competitions are played as individual or team tournaments, with the contests divided into the same disciplines. But e-sport only really becomes e-sport when a sporting element is added. In tournaments, participants are expected not only to master the respective game itself, but also to possess well-developed skills in spatial awareness, overall game awareness, tactical alignment, as well as forward-thinking and lateral thinking.
Its origins go back to the 1950s. Tic-tac-toe, draughts and chess were adapted for computers – and the classic “Tennis for Two”, which went down in gaming history, marked the beginning of a long line of sports adaptations. So computer games, often burdened with the stigma of being a pastime for socially awkward, shy and withdrawn loners, actually have their roots in direct competition between two players. E-sports had their breakthrough in the 1970s, when the first globally popular video game, “Pong”, came onto the market. Soon afterwards came “Spacewar!” – and the first organised competition, with the self-ironically chosen name “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics”, held at Stanford University no less.
With the rise of networking technology in the mid-1990s and the ever wider spread of the internet, multiplayer computer competitions experienced a tremendous boom. As personal computers (PCs) found their way into people’s homes, so-called LAN parties became a mass phenomenon. Up to 2000 players met in basements, clubhouses or halls and competed against one another. Naturally, this development soon led to computer gamers organising themselves: e-sports associations were founded. An interesting detail is that these alliances were from the outset not limited to individual countries, but instead covered either the whole of Europe or the whole of North America. The “Electronic Sports League” and “Clan Base” developed into the largest European leagues.
Now, you might think that networked players competed against each other in various sports simulations, perhaps in a football simulator, a racing game or some other sports adaptation. Far from it. While multiplayer games of that kind did exist very early on, the lion’s share consisted of so-called first-person shooters: “Doom” and “Quake” are among the classics. Their scenarios have less to do with sport than with science-fiction warfare. In “Doom”, for example, the player sneaks through a maze of corridors in the role of a “Space Marine” and guides their character through various scenarios from a first-person perspective. The twist: whatever the character sees, the player sees too – effectively stepping into their avatar’s field of vision. The backstory is as disturbing as the game objective (kill all enemies) is simple: after failed experiments in teleportation, humanity accidentally opens the gate to hell. What follows is a demon invasion that the player must fight off. “Quake” follows a similar pattern. The excessive violence and horror scenarios throughout the gameplay earned these games, at the very least, the label of “controversial.”
Compared with today’s tactical shooters, where the targets are no longer hellish fantasy creatures but highly realistic human opponents, these two scenarios barely raise an eyebrow with the authorities. The game of the moment is called “Counter Strike” and is played in tournaments worldwide. Other current titles include StarCraft (science-fiction strategy), “Hearthstone” (fantasy), Fifa 15 (football simulation) and League Of Legends (fantasy). A lot has also happened in the world of merchandise in recent years. Most teams taking part in the championships are equipped by sponsors with everything they need. Here you’ll find a gaming chair that is often used at tournaments like these.
E-sports curiosity: saliva tests for doping introduced for the first time
After the first World Cyber Games were held in Seoul in 2000, the Electronic Sports World Cup took place three years later in Poitiers, France. By 2005, the CPL World Tour final in New York was already offering prize money of one million US dollars. At the 2007 CGS, the prize pool exceeded five million US dollars – e-sports had become a market to be taken seriously. That naturally also applies to game development, where more money sometimes flows than into the production of a Hollywood blockbuster. As always, wherever large sums of money are involved, shady dealings are never far away. The organisers of “ESL One Cologne” have just announced that they will use saliva tests to combat doping at Germany’s biggest “Counter Strike” tournament.
According to the IT news portal “Golem”, the tests are to be carried out at random and according to the same list that applies to all other sports: steroids, testosterone and, above all, psychotropic drugs that enhance concentration are now also banned for e-sports athletes. At a championship held in Katowice, Poland, a Canadian participant had publicly admitted to taking the psychotropic drug “Adderall” to improve performance. According to “Golem”, it works in a similar way to Ritalin and is said to improve concentration. This situation, which has long since gone far beyond the pallets of energy drinks that used to be a staple of LAN parties, is now set to be cleaned up.