The arena is darkened, the stands are packed to the ceiling and everyone's eyes are on large displays showing the athletes in close-up. They don't sit on racing bikes, swing tennis rackets or check whether their soccer socks fit correctly. On the contrary: E-sports athletes look more like the staff at a call center branch in Cologne-Sülz. They wear a headset, have their hands on the computer keyboard and mouse, and stare intently at a computer monitor.
Inexperienced people think they are watching a bad film. Is this supposed to be sport? “E-sports” is the umbrella term for this type of competition, which primarily requires fitness in hand-eye coordination, stamina and reaction speed. While the German Olympic Sports Confederation is reluctant to classify computer games as a sport, in Brazil, Korea or China, e-sports are a thing like basketball, tennis or athletics - sport. While e-sports still rank behind football in terms of popularity in Brazil, computer game tournaments in Korea have long since overtaken football. This is where you'll find the most fans in the world who watch their computer game playing teams click their fingers. But the display-based competition is also gaining more and more fans in Germany. To give just one example: “ESL One Cologne 2015” will soon be taking place in 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 listed makes it clear which regions the former nerd pastime has risen to: A normal spectator ticket costs 41 euros, while a premium ticket costs 217 euros. The game is for a total prize money of $250,000; First place wins at least $100,000.
It doesn't need to be pointed out that there are now professional e-athletes who make a living from computer games to make it clear: a Counterstrike tournament of this magnitude no longer has anything to do with smoky basement holes in which pimply nerds fought night-long battles between mountains of energy drink cans and pizza boxes after spending hours wiring up their painstakingly lugged PC towers and tube monitors. These local network parties, or “LAN parties” for short, were certainly the birthplace of tournaments of this magnitude. It has long been played around the world; You can choose from all imaginable game types, from military tactics games to sports simulators. You also no longer have to lug around kilos of equipment and boxes full of tangled cables. The scene has grown up and the technology is modern: even game consoles, tablets and smartphones have long had a wireless Internet connection and are networked with each other via a gaming center.
E-Sports: What is played and what?
If you take it seriously, even the tennis match played on the home “Wii” console, the car racing simulator in split-screen mode or the billiards game via networked smartphones are “e-sports”. The prerequisite is always that the game has a multiplayer mode; both game consoles - such as the Playstation, the X-Box or the Wii - and PCs serve as platforms. The games are played in individual or team tournaments; the competitions are divided into the same disciplines. Strictly speaking, e-sports only become e-sports when a sporting idea is added. In tournaments, participants are required to naturally be proficient in the game in question and to have strong spatial perception skills, game overview, tactical orientation, and predictive and lateral thinking skills.
The origins go back to the 1950s. Tic-Tac-Toe, checkers and chess were adapted for computers - and “Tennis for Two”, which has gone down as a classic in game history, was the beginning of a long series of sports adaptations. Computer games, which often have the reputation of being a pastime for socially inept, shy and withdrawn loners, have their origins in direct competition between two players against each other. E-sports found its breakthrough in the 1970s when the first globally popular video game “Pong” came onto the market. A little later came “Spacewar!” – and the first organized competition with the self-ironic name “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics”, at Standford University after all.
The emergence of network technology in the mid-1990s and the ever-widening spread of the Internet gave multiplayer computer competition a huge boost. With the introduction of personal computers (PCs) into households, so-called LAN parties became a mass phenomenon. Up to 2,000 players met everywhere in basements, clubhouses or halls and competed against each other. Of course, this development soon led to an organization of computer gamers among themselves: e-sports associations were founded. An interesting detail is that from the beginning these mergers were not limited to individual countries, but either to the whole of Europe or to the whole of North America. The “Electronic Sports League” and the “Clan Base” developed into the largest European leagues.
Now one might think that the network players competed against each other in various sports simulations, perhaps in a football simulator, in a racing game or another sports adaptation. Far from it. Although there were such multiplayer games very early on, the lion's share was made up 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 war. In “Doom,” for example, the player sneaks through a maze of corridors in the role of a “Space Marine” and controls his character through various scenarios in the first person perspective. The highlight: What the character sees, the player sees - he slips into his avatar's field of vision, so to speak. The background plot is as disturbing as the game's goal (kill all enemies) is simple: after failed experiments in the field of teleportation, humanity accidentally opens the gate to hell. This is followed by a demon invasion that the player must fight. “Quake” follows a similar knitting pattern. The escalating violence and horror scenarios during the course of the game at least earned the games the title “controversial”.
In view of the current tactical shooters, where people are no longer shot at hellish fantasy figures, but rather at people who act very realistically, these two scenarios hardly attract any authority anymore. The game of the moment is called “Counter Strike” and is played in tournaments around the world. Other current games include StarCraft (science fiction strategy), “Hearthstone” (fantasy), Fifa 15 (football simulation) and League Of Legends (fantasy). A lot has also happened in terms of merchandise in recent years. Most teams that take part in the championships are provided with everything they need by sponsors. Here there is a gaming chair that is often used at such tournaments.
E-sports strange: Saliva tests against doping for the first time
After the first World Cyber Games were held in Seoul in 2000, the Electronic Sports World Cup took place in Poitiers, France, three years later. In 2005, the CPL World Tour finals in New York had prize money of one million US dollars. At CGS 2007, over five million US dollars were at stake - e-sports have become a serious market. Of course, this also applies to the development of games, which sometimes generate more money than the production of a Hollywood blockbuster. As always, when a lot of money is involved, crooked ways are not far off. The organizers of “ESL One Cologne” have just announced that they will be using saliva tests to combat doping at Germany’s largest “Counter Strike” tournament.
According to the IT news portal “Golem”, the samples should be taken at random and according to the same catalog that all other sports are subject to: steroids, testosterone and, above all, psychotropic drugs that increase the ability to concentrate are now also banned for e-athletes. At a championship held in Katowice, Poland, a Canadian participant made it known that he had taken the psychotropic drug “Adderall” to improve performance. According to “Golem,” it works similarly to Ritalin and is said to improve the ability to concentrate. This situation, which no longer has anything to do with the pallets of energy drinks that were mandatory at LAN parties, should now be cleared up.