The conference volume of the Competence Center eSport of Leibniz Universität Hannover contains, in addition to the introductory preface and annual report, a total of thirteen contributions on the ...legal and sociological implementation of eSports. The legal focus of the first conference volume reflects the character of eSports law as a cross-sectional subject. In addition to contributions on the (legal) political classification, data protection and labor law in eSports, a classification of eSports betting and lootboxes in terms of gambling law is also provided. In addition, the phenomenon of NFTs as well as blockchain technology is extensively addressed. Finally, further practical legal research is followed by an analysis of the platformization of the eSports ecosystem as well as eSports at national universities. With contributions byLuis Blödorn | Carl Cevin-Key Coste, LL.B. | Jasmin Dolling, LL.B. | Adrian Fischer, LL.M. | RA Kai Korte | RAin Marisa Machacek LL.M. (UCL) | Lina Marquard, LL.B. | RAin Ann-Marie Sahm, Mag. iur. | Dr. Tobias M. Scholz | Prof. Dr. Margrit Seckelmann, M.A. | Patrick Semrau | Nicolas Thöne, LL.M. | Fabian Will, Mag. iur. | RA Dr. Andreas H. Woerlein, LL.M. | Dr. Anton Zimmermann
This study followed a longitudinal design to objectively monitor practice behaviors of professional and semi-professional esports players over a year. Publicly available data were collected from 30 ...male Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players (age: 23.76 ± 2.88y). Players were classified into two groups: professional (n = 18) or semi-professional (n = 12). The total hours of practice (all game-specific practice) and the competitive hours of practice (time spent in competitive modes only) were collected weekly. Generalised Estimating Equations were used to compare the practice behaviors of the two groups. Professional and semi-professional esports players completed an average of 30.9 ± 8.2 h and 24.7 ± 3.6 h per week of total game-specific practice, respectively, and 19.6 ± 6.9 and 15.0 ± 2.7 h of competitive practice, respectively. A significant week∗group interaction was observed for total practice time (Wald χ2 = 9.48, p = 0.002) and total competition practice time (Wald χ2 = 7.54, p = 0.006). Specifically, professional esports players completed 6.6 (SE = 2.2) hr per week more of total practice hours than semi-professional players, of which 4.8 (SE = 1.8) hr were competitive practice. This sample of expert esports performers complete high volumes of practice which can be monitored via publicly accessible repositories.
•Public data repositories can be used to objectively and longitudinally monitor practice behaviors of esports players.•Practice behaviors of professional and semi-professional esports players can involve >30 h/week of practice.•Professional players accumulate more hours of practice per week than semi-professional players.•A high volume of expert esports practice is performed in competitive, game-specific activities.
Electronic sports, cybersports, gaming, competitive computer gaming, and virtual sports are all synonyms for the term eSports. Regardless of the term used, eSports is now becoming more accepted as a ...sport and gamers are being identified as athletes within society today. eSports has even infiltrated higher education in the form of an intercollegiate athletic sport, as two university athletic departments have made eSports an official varsity sport where scholarships are provided to collegiate eSports athletes. Thus, the intertwining of eSports and university athletics brings into question whether eSports should be considered sport by broader society. This article provides a brief history of eSports, a further developed definition of eSports, and a comparison of eSports to traditional philosophical and sociological definitions of sport. The purpose of this article is to provoke thought on the academically accepted definitions of sport and debate whether eSports should be considered a sport. Attention will be given to the following components of sport: play, organization, competition, skill, physicality, broad following, and institutionalization.
This study explores sentiments towards the World ESports Association (WESA) within a Counter-Strike Reddit community. Esports communities have not embraced the various self-proclaimed domestic and ...international esports governing organisations and are notoriously hostile to any organisation perceived as exploiting them. Our sentiment analysis was based on a review of 5359 comments (distributed across 29 threads and five subreddits) made by Counter-Strike Redditors. We retained 861 of these comments in our final data set. Provisional themes were revised until the main categories were finalised. The key finding was that negative sentiments outweigh positive sentiments. Counter-Strike Redditors criticised WESA for subsequent monopolisation and unnecessary interference in an otherwise functional system, corruption, a lack of transparency and power, and its opportunistic financial behaviour. More positively, WESA is credited with standardising rules and setting standards, enhancing player welfare and protection, growing esports, and offsetting publisher power and incompetence. Despite these sentiments, we propose that esports communities' influence on institutional considerations is likely to be limited. There is an ongoing tension between the initial understanding of gaming and its institutionalisation process. Acquiring player/fan acceptance is an ongoing challenge for these organisations.
Esports: The Chess of the 21st Century Pluss, Matthew A; Bennett, Kyle J M; Novak, Andrew R ...
Frontiers in psychology,
01/2019, Volume:
10
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
For many decades, researchers have explored the true potential of human achievement. The expertise field has come a long way since the early works of de Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973). Since ...then, this inquiry has expanded into the areas of music, science, technology, sport, academia, and art. Despite the vast amount of research to date, the capability of study methodologies to truly capture the nature of expertise remains questionable. Some considerations include (i) the individual bias in the retrospective recall of developmental activities, (ii) the ability to develop ecologically valid tasks, and (iii) difficulties capturing the influence of confounding factors on expertise. This article proposes that expertise research in electronic sports (esports) presents an opportunity to overcome some of these considerations. Esports involves individuals or teams of players that compete in video game competitions via human-computer interaction. Advantages of applying the expert performance approach in esports include (i) developmental activities are objectively tracked and automatically logged online, (ii) the constraints of representative tasks correspond with the real-world environment of esports performance, and (iii) expertise has emerged without the influence of guided systematic training environments. Therefore, this article argues that esports research provides an ideal opportunity to further advance research on the development and assessment of human expertise.
While the most popular forms of organized competitive digital gaming, also known as eSports, have begun finding their place within and in relation to both mainstream entertainment culture and the ...field of traditional sports, their history is one of struggling to be accepted as “true sports.” Partly because of this history, great effort has been put into the sportification of eSports by presenting competitions in familiar ways adapted from traditional sports. In this article, we examine the process of sportification of eSports in the context of tournament broadcasts. We analyze the Overwatch World Cup 2016 tournament, comparing its final broadcast to the 2014 FIFA World Cup’s final broadcast, looking for similarities and differences in the areas of broadcast structure, commentary and expertise, game presentation, game highlights and acknowledgments, teams and players, and audience.
Purpose To explore the effects of static stretching for 20 s on key hits and subjective fatigue in an eSports-like setting. Participants and Methods The participants comprised of 15 healthy males who ...were instructed to hit a particular key on a computer keyboard using the left ring finger to achieve the maximum number of hits possible over a period of 30 s. Subjective fatigue of the forearm was assessed using a visual analog scale (VAS) before the experiment and after each trial. Trials 1, 2, and 3 were conducted in succession, with an inter-trial interval of 60 s to ensure a loaded state. Static stretching for 20 s preceded Trial 4. Results Over the first three trials, the number of key hits in the first 10 s gradually decreased, while the feeling of subjective fatigue gradually increased. After stretching, the number of key hits in the first 10 s of Trial 4 was similar to that observed in Trial 1, and there was no increase in subjective fatigue. Conclusion Static stretching for 20 s restored the number of key hits for 10 s after stretching to that before the load application and suppressed the increase in subjective fatigue.
Team activities that were traditionally offline are increasingly incorporating mediated elements where there is a mix of physical and computer-assisted activities. In this study, we provide a ...preliminary insight into this understudied yet emerging genre of mixed-form CSCW. Specifically, we present a qualitative research of team formation and coordination mechanics in Electronic Sports (eSports), a unique combination of action and knowledge/decision teams. Our findings highlight online users’ particular needs to coordinate their team activities under pressure (e.g., a mix of online and offline team formation/coordination strategies; technology-enabled knowing and judging before the team is formed; and reinforcing personal relationships to enhance the professional performance) and higher requirements for sophisticated multimodal communication patterns to sustain such coordination. We contribute to both confirming and augmenting existing theories of team formation and team coordination. We also suggest further avenues of research in HCI and CSCW to design systems that support the formation of teams, to explicate the optimal modalities of communication for different teamwork situations, and to fully understand the delicacies of how personal and professional relationships could intertwine in virtual teams.
Esports are considered a form of electronic sports that have become an important element of popular culture. Its evolution and continuous development have led to consider esports as a profession, ...increasing the number of players, practice modalities and hours of play dedicated to this field. Therefore, scientific and economic contributions have increased in recent years, however, there is little research on body composition in this group of players. To describe the anthropometric characteristics and body composition in professional esports players according to the years of experience. The sample consisted of 53 esports players competing in the Spanish professional league, with a mean age of 21.01 ? 0.39 years, whose body composition was measured by electrical bioimpedance with the TANITA® BC-601F Segment device. No differences were found between groups nor significant associations according to linear regression (p<0.05) between body composition variables and years of experience as a professional player. The years of practice, as well as the esports practiced have no influence on the body composition of professional esports players.
Performance analysis is a well-established discipline in sports science, supported by decades of research. Comparatively, performance analysis in electronic sports (esports) is limited. Therefore, ...there is an opportunity to accelerate performance outcomes in esports by applying methods grounded in sports science. This study adopted a coach-centred approach to model performance at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship. Three expert coaches rated the proposed relationship between 43 variables and match outcomes in professional League of Legends competition using a Likert scale (1–10). The Likert scale was anchored with ‘no relationship’ at 1 and ‘very strong relationship’ at 10. The coaches’ median ratings were calculated for each variable. Variables with a median score ≥6 were retained for analyses. A total of 14 variables were collected from the 2018 League of Legends World Championship (n = 119) matches via video annotations and match histories. Generalized Linear Mixed Effects Models with binomial logit link function were implemented with respect to the Blue Side winning or losing the match, and individual teams were specified as random effects. Variables were screened for multicollinearity before using a step-up approach. The best model of performance included Tower Percentage (p = 0.006) and Number of Inhibitors (p = 0.029). This model achieved classification accuracy of 95.8%. While Tower Percentage and Number of Inhibitors contributed to winning or losing, further research is required to determine effective strategies to improve these variables, to understand the relevance of these variables across the complete time-series of the match, and to determine whether performance indicators remain stable across game updates.
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