Electronic sports, or eSports, is the activity of playing videogames competitively. Strategic videogames such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, Fortnite, Starcraft, Defence of the Ancients, Arena of Valor, are played globally by millions of players. Even if the sports genre has historically been one of the most present in the world of videogames, since early experiments such as "Tennis for two", most videogames played on eSports tournaments create entirely new environments and set of rules that require prolonged sessions of play to be mastered. Players who attempt a career in eSports typically gather in teams, occasionally supported by external sponsorship, and engage in intensive and prolonged training sessions (Brock 2017; Kari and Karhulahti 2016). Professionally competing in eSports should be treated as a form of precarious labour, and investigated through the social and economic barriers that shape its communities and material conditions of possibility (Taylor 2012). At the same time, eSports generate large investments and new technical solutions.
For example, platforms such as Twitch have largely invested in the online streaming of eSports (Taylor 2018; Gandolfi 2016; Woodcock and Johnson 2019). Gambling in eSports is a rapidly growing business, projected to generate revenues of $1.5 billion by 2020, with obvious implications on the professionalisation of play in digital environments (Sweeney, Tuttle and Berg 2019). The League of Legends finals in 2019, had over 300,000 spectators connected live, and generated over $2.2 million in cash prize for the winners. eSports finals have been played in live stadia and arenas where traditional sports are usually played, but are also broadcasted on streaming platforms, thus blurring the boundaries between physical and digital environments (Miah 2020). eSports players engage with complex interfaces and in entirely unmapped territory of professionalism while doing real work in virtual environments (Scholz 2020).
