Life After Esports: A Grand Field Challenge

Abstract

Esports has experienced unprecedented growth recently and with it, the proposition for aspiring gamers to pursue a professional esport career has become increasingly attractive. “Esports” are video-games played competitively (and often professionally) through the means of cyberspace (Campbell et al., 2018) and are an important fixture in the overall gaming industry, which is estimated to be worth more than 120 billion US$ (Takahashi, 2020). The exponential rise in popularity has led to the inclusion of two esports (Rocket League and Street Fighter V) in an International Olympics Council sanctioned tournament before the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games (Martinello, 2019). Despite the appeal of esports as a profession, aspiring esport athletes face many obstacles that can threaten their prospective career timespan, and present post-career difficulties. To date, very limited formal exploration exists into this challenge; thus, this grand field challenge aims to explore the difficulties faced by esport athletes. It also highlights the unique skillsets and experience acquired during a professional esports career, and the value these could offer to alternate high performance professions. Like all occupations, an esports career depends on financial and job security. Although some professional athletes in tier-1 (the highest level of competition) leagues within popular esports enjoy financial stability from yearly contracts (Esports Mention, 2019), athletes in less popular esports and aspiring gamers not yet competing in tier-1 leagues are not afforded this luxury. Additionally, outside tier-1 tournaments, prize money distribution is such that winners are more greatly rewarded at the expense of other participants (Coates and Parshakov, 2016). Moreover, protections are limited for esport athletes as they have not yet been able to unionize. This makes job security remarkably fragile, particularly given the high athlete replaceability, with extreme cases of top esport athletes being dropped from teams at post-victory celebrations (Van Allen, 2018). To further compound these challenges, the average career of typical esports athletes' is remarkably short; with about one-in-five professional esport athletes' careers lasting 2 years or longer (Ward and Harmon, 2019). This short career length is largely due to the difficulty of becoming and remaining a top esport athlete, particularly given the volatility of team rosters. Esports performance is reliant on the ability to rapidly and accurately respond to complex visual stimuli, which begins to decline past 24 years of age (Thompson et al., 2014). As such, one's timeframe for peak esports performance is limited. The time commitment and rigor required for elite esports performance has resulted in many cases of burnout and injury, causing early retirement (Salo, 2017). Additionally, adolescent esport athletes often sacrifice educational opportunities to pursue their careers (Hollist, 2015), hampering their ability to pursue alternate careers post-retirement. In summary, there appears to be a narrow timeframe for financial success for esports athletes, who may jeopardize their post-retirement opportunities to take that window. Despite the current pitfalls of an esports profession, esports athletes possess a unique range of specialized skills and experiences that we argue are highly sought after in many contemporary professions. Such attributes include digital intelligence, experience and expertise in prolonged human computer interaction performed in a seated posture, skillful and efficient communication, and perhaps most notably, enhanced cognitive abilities. In this section, we outline some of these traits that this population possess. Fundamentally, esports involve human-computer interactions with an adapting computer program to produce outcome-defining events within a virtual gameplay environment (Hamari and Sjöblom, 2017). Higher-level esport athletes perform faster and with more complexity than their less-skilled counterparts (Avontuur et al., 2013; Buckley et al., 2017). Esports are a type of high-performance computing that requires “digital intelligence” to provide a competitive advantage, such as knowledge of, and proficiency with, hardware components (Claypool and Claypool, 2007). Additionally, esports athletes undertake long continuous bouts (often >3 h) fixating on computer monitors in a seated posture during training and competition (DiFrancisco-Donoghue et al., 2019). It is well-established that this prolonged sitting can result in lower back discomfort and impaired vascular function (Dunk and Callaghan, 2010; Credeur et al., 2019). Moreover, frequent computer monitor use can lead to “computer vision syndrome,” associated with temporary eye discomfort (Blehm et al., 2005). Although little work has investigated these physiological effects in esports athletes, it may be that esports athletes have developed strategies to maintain performance despite these issues. Esport teams are a unique hybrid of a high-performance action team engaging in computed supported cooperative work (CSCW), a combination not regularly seen in more traditional team environments (Freeman and Wohn, 2019). Given that most esports are team-based, effective team cohesion and communication are essential for success. Communication within elite esports is overwhelmingly verbal (Lipovaya et al., 2018). To maximize efficiency and effectiveness of this communication, athletes must be proficient in utilizing rigid phraseologies (Lipovaya et al., 2018; Freeman and Wohn, 2019). Team strategies and individual roles must be effectively communicated prior-to and during competition to ensure successful performance (Lipovaya et al., 2018; Freeman and Wohn, 2019). First Person Shooter (FPS) and Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games, which collectively comprise the majority of major esports and are known as action video-games (AVGs), are...