Previous research on e-sports

As mentioned previously, the amount of research related to the topic of e-sports was just a few years ago relatively limited, though the amount is definitely on an upward trend, as the global e-sports community grows. And many field of research take an interest in e-sports (Reitman et al. 2019). Previous research on e-sports has approached the topic from a multitude of viewpoints. Out of the previously mentioned research, the article by Hamari and Sjöblom (2017) seems the most relevant in terms of this study.

In their article Hamari and Sjöblom (2017) discuss the phenomenon of e-sports and why people watch it via measures used more commonly in traditional sports research on sports consumption. The most interesting part of the discussion is the conclusion by Hamari and Sjöblom (2017: 213) that the defining factor of e-sports in comparison to regular sports is that in e-sports the main aspects of the sport are experienced through human-computer interfaces by both players and spectators. They note that even spectators attending a live e-sports event see the sport happening on screen that projects gameplay that is happening on a computer screen.

Hamari and Sjöblom (2017: 214) look into the motivations of consuming e-sports. Based on previous research that found that e-sports consumption motivations were highly similar to those of regular sports consumption, they chose to use the motivation scale for sports consumption, or MSSC, for the purposes of their research. The results of their research showed that the main motivators for e-sports consumption were escapism, knowledge acquisition, novelty and the enjoyment of aggression. A further look into the results also revealed that viewers who valued aesthetics in video games had a negative association with the e-sports viewing frequency. Hamari and Sjöblom believe this is due to many e-sports games being fairly complex to follow and the resulting requirement of concentration inhibits the enjoyment of the games’ aesthetic side. They also note that player skill did not seem to be a significant factor in motivating e-sports consumption but they surmise that viewers expect a certain level of player skill as a base and going above that is less significant of a factor.

Hamari and Sjöblom (2017: 223) end their discussion of the results with the notion that player aggressiveness was significant in motivating watching frequency. They predict that the viewers enjoy both the aggression stemming from team and player rivalries as well as the violence present in the games themselves. They use the game Counter Strike: Global offensive as an example, as the core gameplay of the game involves the players shooting each other in the game. One type of aggression that could also motivate consumption that Hamari and Sjöblom failed to mention is the aggression of players’ in-game actions. While the metric they used was developed for the purposes of researching traditional sports viewed player aggression through the action of the humans themselves, in e-sports player aggressiveness can manifest not only outside of the game but also inside the game, as the sport itself happens within a certain game. In almost every game that is played competitively it is possible for players to make flashy and aggressive actions that can result in gaining an advantage or even victory.

Another look at e-sports is offered by the previous study by the author (Majanen 2018). The study focuses on the language side of e-sports, namely the special language terms and terminology used in texts related to sports. In the study, online news articles detailing the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends were collected to form a corpus, which was then searched for special language terms used by the e-sports community. The study begins by detailing the relationship between terminology and e-sports. According to the study, terms are formed when a neologism or a new concept is formed and there is a need to describe it. In the case of e-sports new terms are formed when a game is played competitively, which creates a need for terms to describe the elements of that competitive gameplay. The study notes that as of yet there has not been a conscious effort of term formation in the field of e-sports so all of the terms used are ones that are formed naturally through interactions of people in the e-sports community. The study of terms in a special field is quite relevant to the current study as Dobnik (2019) points out, the most common translation issues made by translation students translating a special language text were related to special language terms.

The results of the author’s previous study (Majanen, 2018) showed that in a corpus of 20 articles detailing the happenings of the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends as many as 17 terms were found that occurred more than 4 times in the corpus. The study then looked

at how these terms were formed. The three most common term formation methods highlighted by the previous study were forming a new unit, initialism and narrowing. The study presented examples of these term formation methods using terms found regularly in the corpus. An example for forming a new unit was the term early game, which is formed by adding the words early and game together to form a term that refers to the beginning stage of a competitive League of Legends game. An example for the initialism formation method was the term CC, which is formed by combining the first letters of the words crowd and control.

The term refers to player-used abilities that inhibit the opposing player from controlling their in-game character for a certain period of time. The third most common formation method was narrowing, which refers to a commonly used word becoming a term when its meaning is narrowed in a special language setting. The term example used for narrowing was objective, which in the context of a competitive League of Legends game means certain structures and creatures on the in-game map that when killed provides an advantage to the team that scored the kill. These example terms and term formation methods highlight how in a certain context, in this case e-sports context, normal words can have vastly different meanings. This again highlights the point made by Dobnik (2019) who noted that, when translation students were tasked with translating a special language text from a certain field, the students who recognized the field-specific terms made considerably less translation errors than those students who failed to recognize the special language terms.

As mentioned previously, despite the rise of the phenomenon of e-sports there has been little coordinated research on the subject. This was also noticed by Steinkuehler (2019), who writes the opening article to a special e-sports issue. She begins with highlighting the popularity of e-sports through numbers in comparison to traditional sports. In accordance to her research, the global revenue of e-sports saw an almost 40% increase from 2017 to 2018 with an expected revenue of 908 million US dollars. Top e-sports players have begun to earn revenue equal to the stars of traditional sports. She uses Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok as an example stating that his annual salary is an estimated 2.5 million US dollars. While using Faker, who is the consensus greatest-of-all-time player of the game League of Legends highlights the salaries of top players, there has been a conscious effort to provide a competitive salary for all e-sports players competing in established leagues. Companies like Riot Games and Blizzard, who actively run their games’ e-sports leagues provide base salaries to their participating

players, a concept that was nonexistent just five years ago. Even Finnish players have started to gain notice via their e-sports salaries. Finnish players of the Dota2 e-sport Jesse “JerAx”

Vainikka and Miikka “Topson” Taavitsainen have appeared high on the list of highest-earning e-sports players owing to their back-to-back wins of the Dota2 world championship tournament called The International (Gough, 2020).

Steinkuehler (2019: 15) describes the similarities between e-sports and what she calls

“nondigital sports”. She lists the similarities as: competition, league organization and physicality, continuing that e-sports are defined by the competition and challenge of teams or individuals. She also notes that e-sports, like regular sports, hosts both amateur and professional leagues. The notion of similarity in competition and the aforementioned high salary of top players reflects the findings of Hamari and Sjöblom (2017), who found in their research that a significant motivation of watching e-sports was player aggressiveness which, in the case of e-sports, manifests as flashy and/or skilled actions performed by players. This can be seen in the failure of the Blizzard game Heroes of the Storm that dampened individual players’ ability to make game-winning plays by themselves, which is in contrast to competitors like League of Legends. Many experts noted this as a factor in the Heroes of the Storm’s low e-sports viewership, which in turn led to Blizzard discontinuing the funding of the game’s professional league.

Steinkuehler (2019) also discusses the physicality of e-sports stating that in e-sports dexterity, quick reflexes, mental focus, coordination and visual acuity are required much like in traditional sports like shooting or archery. Perhaps not a counter point to Steinkuehler’s notion but an important note nonetheless is the point made by Hamari and Sjöblom (2017) that the separating factor between traditional sports and e-sports is that in e-sports the actions of the sports happen through a human-computer interface and not directly. As this is the case the point can be made that the physicality of e-sports is directed at a computer or a console as opposed to the object or tool of play of a regular sport.