E-sports

Situation:

As you are interested in e-sports you volunteer to give a presentation on e-sports. To get prepared you have to view suitable material to present it to your class.

For an overview, watch the following video. Do not forget to take notes.

Materials:

Video: E-sports – the digital revolution has arrived

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/video/2017/jun/16/e-sports-the-digital-revolution-has-arrived-video

Text: Extreme eSports: the very male, billion-dollar gaming industry at a stadium near you

A crowd of 18,000 filled a Sydney arena at the weekend to watch groups of young men play video games for huge cash prizes

Read the text carefully before you answer the questions.

A Whenever an artist scheduled to play Qudos Bank Arena at Sydney Olympic Park doesn’t sell enough tickets, the venue tactfully drapes black cloth over the empty seats in the theatre’s uppermost section. Filling more than 18,000 seats is quite an ask, which is why only top-flight acts like Pink, Katy Perry, Shania Twain and Kendrick Lamar are attempting it in coming months.The black cloth is not needed today. Sydney gaming enthusiasts have filled the venue almost to capacity for the Intel Extreme Masters (IEM), a three-day professional video game tournament that rivals anything Qudos has hosted in terms of scale and spectacle.

B Two groups of five men are onstage, seated at computer monitors. Headphones on, hunched forward, they sit almost completely immobile save for their flickering hands and darting eyes. Their coaches pace grimly behind them, watching the screens and muttering directives into their microphones.
Behind them, two enormous television monitors broadcast their onscreen actions. On the dusty streets of a Moroccan village, a band of balaclava-clad separatists is shot to pieces by a matching squad of Special Forces soldiers. Thirty seconds later, the soldiers are the ones cut down, caught in the crosshairs of a sniper as they stumble through a veil of smoke. A bomb planted on a cache of chemical weapons ignites, presumably killing thousands.

C From the VIP seats to the nosebleed section, the enraptured crowd watches on, occasionally roaring its collective approval or disappointment. It is overwhelmingly male, although not noticeably more so than your average rugby league match. The main difference to any other sporting audience is that of age: the vast majority of attendees are in their 20s and 30s.

D While large-scale eSports events like IEM are relatively new in Australia, tournaments overseas routinely attract tens of thousands of attendees and millions of livestream views.
During lulls in play, they amuse themselves in the time-honoured way of bored Australian sports fans everywhere: by batting around a few beach balls and taunting security’s efforts to stop them. Chants of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” are just as regular and inane as they are at the cricket. When events onscreen reach a climax, the huge amphitheatre thunders with the crowd’s euphoria.

E If this scene sounds made-up, you have officially missed the boat on the eSports phenomenon. Competitive gaming is a billion-dollar industry, and Sydney has become the field’s domestic epicentre.
IEM is dedicated to Counterstrike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), a multiplayer first-person shoot-’em-up where teams of five compete against each other in simple, objective-based rounds. Teams either assume the role of “terrorists” trying to plant a bomb, or Special Forces-style “counter-terrorists” trying to stop them, with much carnage resulting.

F Sixteen professional CS:GO teams from as far afield as the European Union, Brazil, the United States and China are competing at IEM for a share in the $310,000 prize pool. Individual games take less than two minutes, with tournament rounds decided via a best-of-30 format. Whichever team wins 16 games takes the round, like a set in a game of tennis, and the team that wins two of three rounds wins the contest and advances to the next stage.
For competitors, this is not an amateur pursuit – it is a livelihood, and a possible ticket to sponsorship and stardom.

G As the scene has become increasingly professionalised, competitive eSports has begun to resemble traditional sport far more than the old cliche of nerdy kids playing in a basement. Like any other sport, it has its own doping scandals, injuries and pay and contract disputes. As the 16 male teams battle it out, the CS:GO Women’s Sydney Open, a domestic tournament, plays in a side room. Around 100 people sit in the audience, making it the only space at IEM with more than a handful of women at any given time.
It’s a sober reminder of the gender disparity that permeates both sports and gaming culture. Like almost any other sport, women eSports tournaments are woefully underpaid compared to the main international tournament, which is dominated by men. The two women’s teams in the grand final – Sydney Saints and Control ESports – are only competing for the lion’s share of $10,000 in prize money.

H The main tournament is not formally gender segregated, but while women are eligible to compete, there were no female players in the 16 teams over the weekend. It’s a circumstance that points more to the sexism present in the wider gaming scene than any disparity in ability. The 2014 Gamergate scandal, which saw female gaming journalists and critics of gaming culture’s more boorish aspects targeted by waves of online abuse, was the first rumbling of what would become the weaponised misogyny of the Trump campaign and the violent “incel” movement. Female eSports players have often spoken out about cyberbullying, verbal abuse and online harassment, which turn an ostensible meritocracy into one dominated by male players as women vacate the scene.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/may/08/extreme-esports-the-very-male-billion-dollar-gaming-industry-at-a-stadium-near-you

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