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Electronic sports, abbreviated e-sports or eSports, is used as a general term used to describe computer and video games that are played as competitive sports. Less popular terms include competitive gaming, cybersports, cyber athletics (used by the CPL) and V-Sports (used by the GGL)

Games which are considered e-sports normally belong to the first-person shooter, real-time strategy, or sports game genres. They are played competitively at both amateur and professional levels.

Playing e-sports

Over the Internet

The easiest way to play an e-sports match is over the Internet. General online play is subject to the lessened ability to detect cheating and the more unpredictable network latency not being the ideal environment for high level competition. However, due to its convenience, even players who are used to LAN games use Internet games for fun and practice.

Usually clans will need to contact each other prior to matches. Internet Relay Chat is very popular for doing this due to the ability for each clan, league, or other gaming related organisation to set up its own chat channel on the network, making them easy to find. IRC has become so popular among gamers that the largest IRC network is Quakenet, a network originally created for players of the first-person shooter Quake and now used by players of many different games. The matches are then carried out on the server according to the rules of the leagues the teams are familiar with.

Popular online leagues include the Cyberathlete Amateur League, ClanBase, and the Electronic Sports League

Over a local area network

Playing over a LAN has a number of advantages: the network conditions are much better suited to playing computer games than on the Internet, and when the person is in the same building or room as you it is a lot harder to cheat without someone knowing (at professional events administrators will normally be present to ensure fair play). It is also a much more social atmosphere. Due to the advantages of LAN many gamers organise LAN parties or visit LAN centres and major tournaments almost always conducted over LANs.

Professional e-sports

File:Eswc quake3 final.png

A Quake III final at the ESWC

The history of professional e-sports

Professional events have grown dramatically since the first tournament in 1997. A tournament that year, hosted by the Cyberathlete Professional League and founded by Angel Munoz, had a turnout of around 300 competitors for a single Quake tournament. Since then, the attendance and size of the venues for these events has grown greatly, and now thousands of spectators connect over the internet to watch the final matches. The prizes are also larger; in 2005, the CPL paid out a total of $1,500,000 USD in cash prizes.

The CPL have remained a pioneering force in e-sports and in 2005 moved to a world tour format. The 2005 world tour focused on the one-on-one deathmatch game Painkiller and had a total prize purse of $1,000,000. The winner of the grand finals event, Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, went home with US $150,000; the largest cash prize in e-sports history.

The most widely recognised professional tournaments are those run by the Cyberathlete Professional League, the World e-Sports Games , the World Cyber Games and the Electronic Sports World Cup. The prize money for these events is mostly provided by the large technology corporations who sponsor the events; these same companies also sponsor many of the teams. A team sponsorship usually includes travel expenses and whatever equipment the company produces. It is now common place for mainstream news to cover these events in some way.

Professional teams and the introduction of player contracts

In e-sports, what was once traditional clans have now grown out to be professional organizations, much like for instance a professional football club, rather than just a social group of players. By contracting players and sponsors, and facilitating for the players, they hope they leave their mark on the e-sports world and its fans. Many clubs have contracted players for multiple teams and for different games, spreading their chances and their name. This also relieves players of the managing tasks, so they can rather focus on gaming.

On February 1 2003 SK Gaming became one of the first clubs in FPS gaming to legally bind players to their clan. [1] The specifics of their contracts are not disclosed; however, it is known from interviews that the contracts include a salary, which according to interviews was not large by itself, but the players are also entitled to shares of prize money.

SK-Gaming also set another precedent regarding contracts. On May 19 2003 they were the one of the first FPS teams to receive a fee for a player transfer after rival team "NoA" bought Norwegian SK player Ola "elemeNt-" Moum out of his contract. [2]

After the introduction of contracts and transfers, a lot of clubs have also started to sell merchandise including gaming equipment and even clothing. This fast growing industry generates important income for the clubs, allowing them to send more teams and players to tournaments around the world.

Media coverage

The main medium for e-sports coverage is the World Wide Web. E-sports websites generally focus on professional tournaments and the top level amateur games, leaving the other games to be covered by the leagues themselves or smaller game-specific community websites if at all.

Mainstream coverage in North America and Europe has increased, and more mainstream news websites are starting to regularly provide some coverage of the major events with occasional television coverage. In South Korea, e-sports and events are regularly televised. The most frequent games in South Korean e-sports are the real-time strategy games StarCraft and Warcraft III. The South Korean scene is often cited as an example of popularised e-sports by those who would like to see a similar level of popularity in the west. In Germany, NBC Europe hosts an e-sports show named GIGA eSports, which is aired twice every week. Most Western televised e-sports coverage, however, takes place through webcasts by stations like the Team Sportscast Network and Radio iTG.

Websites such as GotFrag are among the largest gaming communities, news, and e-sports resource websites in North America. Such websites provide coverage for several games, which include Counter-Strike, Quake 4, Counter-Strike: Source, Call of Duty 2, Warcraft 3 and many more. These large websites often attend events worldwide in order to provide tournament and gaming coverage.

Although many of these e-sports coverage sites include community interaction, many of the large European sites such as SoGamed and ESReality have defined themselves with this approach, and these were among the first sites in the e-sports scene to utilise features such as community polls, submitted news, detailed profile pages for registered users. For one example, ESReality almost completely runs on community submitted content.

In many countries, localized sites also start to appear. For instance, in Germany, sites like readmore.de and rushed.de cover both local and global e-sports. In other countries, like the Netherlands, sites like Gamelux are setting the pace for local e-sports coverage.

External links

Media coverage: news articles and features

Media coverage: Internet radio and video

LAN leagues

Online leagues (North America)

Online leagues (Europe)

Online leagues (Australia)

Media Coverage: local news articles and features

Media coverage: local Internet radio and video

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