Short for electronic sports, esports is competitive video gaming at the professional level. In the same way that conventional sports like tennis and golf hold tournaments for the top players in the world to compete in for cash prizes and notoriety, esports do the same, bringing individual players or teams of players together to do battle in competitive video games like League of Legends and Overwatch. These competitions are exciting spectator sports whose popularity is sweeping the nation.

Where I can watch Esports?

The most common place to watch esports is online. Computers, tablets, mobile devices and smart TVs are all perfect for streaming live events for free online. The most popular streaming services for egaming are currently Twitch.com and YouTube.com. These two streaming networks offer lots of official esports tournaments, archives, and other content about the game and players.

Esports are also making their way onto mainstream television as well. Networks like ESPN and TBS have broadcasted esports coverage and as the popularity of the sport continues to grow, look for televised coverage of it to do the same.

Is Esports really Sports?

Last summer over 12,000 fans were at Wembley Arena in London, shouting and cheering. Thousands more were watching online. But this wasn’t a football, basketball or tennis match. It was esports, or competitive computer gaming. The prize money for the winners: £3 million. Millions of people in the UK play games for fun. Some of them have become professional gamers, playing games as their full-time job. Did you know that football teams such as West Ham and Manchester City employ esports players? They send them around the world to compete in football video game competitions. It’s not easy being a professional gamer, though. They practise for ten or more hours a day, five or six days a week. They do exercises like typing something and trying to type it faster and faster. They also study videos of other players and plan ways to beat them. As well as playing games, many people like watching them too. You can watch games on video sites like Twitch and YouTube and in the UK there’s a TV channel showing esports 24 hours a day. They can be exciting to watch: just like other sports, there are close games, last-minute victories and amazing performances. Sometimes online viewers can interact with the game. For example, some games rename characters in the game with the names of online viewers! But are esports really sports? Are players athletes? Some say no. Esports players don’t need to run, jump, throw or do big physical actions. At the moment, the UK government classifies esports as kinds of games, not as sports. But others say yes: esports are sports. Players do need some physical skills, especially hand–eye coordination, reflexes, accuracy and timing. If darts, snooker and shooting are classified as sports, then perhaps esports should be too. In fact, the governments of China and South Korea do classify esports as sports, and they will be an official medal sport in the Asian Games starting from 2022. Next step: the Olympics? For many esports fans and players, though, the most important thing is that esports are growing in popularity and importance. If esports are not as important as sports at the moment, they definitely will be in the near future.

Kinds of Esports

ESports consist of a variety of video games, for which you need nimble fingers and a fast brain to succeed. Just as with traditional sports, fans follow teams, watch matches and even attend cup finals, cheering on their favourite stars from around the world. Mathews founded Fnatic 13 years ago, with financial support from his mother, and has built it into one of the world’s most successful teams, competing in more than 600 tournaments globally, in games such as Counter-Strike, Dota2, Call Of Duty, Overwatch and League of Legends. Fnatic’s League of Legends team won the first world championship in 2011 and its Counter-Strike team are considered one of the best of all time, though few of the players are British. In truth, British players are not yet good enough to compete at the top level. “eSport is the first world sport outside of football that is truly global,” Mathews says.
Already, football clubs such as Manchester City have started signing Fifa stars who are players of the virtual game, rather than the real thing. The most ambitious clubs, such as Paris Saint-Germain, have signed up a whole squad of players in a number of different eSports, including League of Legends. The thinking is simple: digital gaming is where the next generation of fans will come from (often, a young person’s first interaction with a professional football club is through the Fifa game), and so eSports are a vast reservoir of future income.
The revenue from eSports is expected to rise from $130m (£100m) in 2012 to $465m (£365m) this year, according to Newzoo, the eSports data expert. The global audience will reach 385 million this year , made up of 191 million regular viewers and a further 194 million occasional viewers. ESports stars such as the South Korean player Faker, who has just turned 21, are already paid up to £2m a year, and that’s not including bonuses and sponsorship. But will they ever compete with, say, Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo? And should we be worried if they do?
Poland’s eSports ‘Olympics’The vast Spodec stadium in Katowice, south west Poland, is humming with activity. It is February, and this saucer-shaped building is host to the world’s biggest eSports event. Thousands of boys and young men (nearly everyone is male) gather to watch the Intel Extreme Masters finals, a kind of annual Olympics.
It is much more than a tournament. The halls are crammed with companies showing off their latest wares; visitors can try out new games on elevated seats that revolve 360 degrees. The noise is deafening – constant explosions and the rat-at-at-at of guns – while the screens light up with every new kill. You wouldn’t come here to find peace.
The professional eSports companies and players come here to make big bucks, while sponsors attend in the hope of tapping into tomorrow’s market. (Britain hosts its equivalent at Wembley Arena, but it is small fry by comparison.) The Fnatic team is competing against the top Korean, American and European teams. Fnatic might be British-based, but it is regarded as a global company; few British players are good enough to compete at the top level.
This is the fifth year the Intel finals have been held in Katowice. Once a weekend-long event, it now takes place over two weekends. This year’s figures are record-breaking: 173,500 attending, more than 46 million viewers watching online (up 35% from last year).
The event is the most widely broadcasted in the history of ESL, the eSports company that organises competitions worldwide. In 2015, Swedish media company Modern Times Group acquired a majority stake in ESL for $87m. That figure already looks like a bargain. ESL broadcasts its competitions on Twitch, the leading eSports streaming service. In 2014, only three years after it was founded, Twitch was bought by Amazon for $970m. Another bargain: this is a huge business.
What has astonished people – even those who dreamed it up in the first place – is the extent to which gaming has become a spectator sport. ESL founder Ralph Reichart blinks in disbelief at the thousands of young men staring at screens inside the Spodec. “We thought, let’s just build this stage and it’s going to be great.” He smiles. He didn’t expect it to be this great. “Most people thought we were crazy, including my father and my peers.”
The Intel Masters was founded in 2006, and Reichart puts its growth down to four factors: social media, live streaming, a faster internet, and the longevity of more established games. There is something fantastical about the way Katowice, this redundant mining town barely 30 miles from Auschwitz, has become an emblem of tomorrow’s world. Reichart explains how it happened. “Five years ago, the mayor contacted us. He said, ‘We have a fantastic stadium called Spodec, and our city is changing. It used to be all mining, and now we want it to become an entertainment city – video games can help’.” Nowadays, Katowice is largely known for the Intel masters, which Reichart calls the Woodstock of eSports. “Some music festivals are more special and longer-lasting than others, and Katowice is like that. It’s more than a festival – it’s a movement.”

Negative Effects of Video Games

Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same criticisms in their time. Purported negative effects such as addiction, increased aggression, and various health consequences such as obesity and repetitive strain injuries tend to get far more media coverage than the positives. I know from my own research examining both sides that my papers on video game addiction receive far more publicity than my research into the social benefits of, for example, playing online role-playing games. However there is now a wealth of research which shows that video games can be put to educational and therapeutic uses, as well as many studies which reveal how playing video games can improve reaction times and hand-eye co-ordination. For example, research has shown that spatial visualisation ability, such as mentally rotating and manipulating two- and three-dimensional objects, improves with video game playing. To add to this long line of studies demonstrating the more positive effects of video games is a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Vikranth Bejjanki and colleagues. Their newly published paper demonstrates that the playing of action video games – the sort of fast-paced, 3D shoot-em-up beloved of doomsayers in the media – confirms what other studies have revealed, that players show improved performance in perception, attention, and cognition. In a series of experiments on small numbers of gamers (10 to 14 people in each study), the researchers reported that gamers with previous experience of playing such action video games were better at perceptual tasks such as pattern discrimination than gamers with less experience. In another experiment, they trained gamers that had little previous experience of playing action games, giving them 50 hours practice. It was showed that these gamers performed much better on perceptual tasks than they had prior to their training.

How to Create Esports Article?

Beginner’s guide to writing sports articles Sports is a very wide and broad topic, as there are a lot of sports that one can write about. All over the world, sports is something that a lot of people follow. Whether you are a sports fan or not, at one time or another you have read sports articles to know the latest news about different kinds of sports, the teams as well as famous athletes. Here are some kinds of sports and how to write about them: Team sports Team sports are probably one of the most popular kinds of sports all over the world, and the most famous and highest-paid athletes usually come from sports teams. Team sports include basketball, football, soccer, hockey, and volleyball. Among these, basketball, football and soccer account for the largest teams in the world. Famous leagues include the NBA for basketball, the NFL for football, and the Premiere League and UEFA Champion’s League for soccer. These fans are some of the most dedicated fans in the world, so when writing about team sports, make sure to highlight the most memorable moments during a match. Sports fans can be very invested in their teams and players, so even if you have favorite teams and personalities, make sure to balance your sports news articles with an unbiased write-up about the game. Individual sports These are sports such as tennis, archery, gymnastics and running that are usually played by a single individual. Although there are teams depending on the tournament, which usually happens during the Olympics, for the most part, these kinds of sports are played by an individual against another person, sometimes even belonging from the same team as they are. Out of all the individual sports, tennis is probably the most popular, as tennis opens happen throughout the year. The most popular one would have to be the Wimbledon, as the audience and prestige of winning this cup are sought after by every tennis player. Water sports Water sports include swimming, surfing, wakeboarding, and diving. Though water sports are not as accessible to people compared to ball sports that can be played almost anywhere, doing water sports is also rewarding. The inherent nature of water sports is more about leisure than a competition, as in the case of the surfing culture, but this does not discount the fact that water sports are also very competitive. Extreme sports The rise in popularity of the skate culture and other extreme sports has led to their competition for fans of extreme sports. The most popular one is probably the X-Games which had bred its superstars who are known not just to skaters and extreme sports enthusiasts, but also even to casual fans. Extreme sports articles are now just as anticipated as any write-up on sports that are out there. No matter what your interests, there will be a sport to suit you whether you’re just a casual fan or a player of the sports itself and want to write a sports article about it. Writing articles about video games and fitness articles Another emerging field of sports writing is writing articles about video games. Although some might argue that video games are not treated as a kind of sports in the traditional sense of the word, the level of competition in the gaming world has gotten bigger throughout the past few years that their gaming leagues are now comparable to any big sporting event. Video game tournaments now command a huge following all over the world, with enthusiastic fans cheering for their favorite teams. Gaming has now become so popular that the best and most popular gaming teams are racking up millions of dollars from tournament winnings, on top of endorsements, similar to celebrity athletes. Video game articles require a bit more technical knowledge compared to other kinds of sports, as the lingo used by gamers can be different and may not be familiar to a casual audience. The difference also regarding video game tournaments is that the games can last for hours longer than your normal kind of sporting event. Gaming articles are now one of the most discussed content when it comes to video games, and these can range from news on new video game releases, tournament news, and game reviews. Another industry that is seeing an increase in engagement and fans these days is the health and wellness industry. Although fitness buffs have always been around, the advent of social media has made it easier for people to share their fitness journey with other people. From fitness articles, people are posting pictures and status updates about their progress. A lot of people share and look for articles about fitness online because they want to read more on how they can improve and reach their fitness goals. It should be noted that fitness is not limited to just exercising, but it is a whole lifestyle. This includes eating right and incorporating everyday health and fitness choices to your daily life.