In 2014, Ivan Curtiss began his professional esports career when he and his friends started an amateur pro-am league called My Player Basketball Association (MPBA).

Curtiss first met LT Fairly and Lawrence West, also known as ‘BiggWest’ in the 2K community, while playing in various gaming leagues. Through playing together in various leagues, LT had the idea to start his own league. He brought in Curtiss first, then BiggWest came in later down the line. BiggWest marketed the league, assisting LT in anything he knew about day-to-day operations.

Slowly but surely, the league started picking up a lot of traction. Many of the top players, who played the Jordan Rec Center mode at a time when everybody played with their My Players, formed teams to participate in structured and organized leagues.

Later, in 2016, NBA 2K came out with a pro-am mode. This allowed players to come together and form teams in their own arenas and gymnasiums so they could play against other teams like their own. But it wasn’t until a year later that the MPBA was looked at as the premier pro-am league to play in. At that time, they had received a lot of acclaim and success through the league.

In 2017, the NBA 2K League was announced to the 2K community. It was going to be a professional esport league. In the first draft held, over 80% of the drafted players, especially in the first round, participated in the MPBA. And that is where their notoriety began. Curtiss describes it as their wake-up call that this professional esports event was something that they themselves had created. They got to see the success of players who participated in their league develop from amateurs to professionals.

During that season, they were also awarded the opportunity to work with BucksGG, which is the Milwaukee Bucks affiliate team of the NBA 2K league. Curtiss and LT worked as draft analysts. They helped put together their team and roster in the first season. Afterward, LT assisted them in small roles daily, and Curtiss stayed on as a community manager.

“What is a game?” This is the first question Jessica Hammer asks in her game design class.

Pure definitional questions are not actually that interesting for either game research or game design. “The way I try to help my students think about what games are is that there are different lenses or different frames for defining what is or isn’t a game, and you can pick one or a subset of lenses to talk about games with when you are either designing or studying games,” says Hammer.

Typically, Hammer will start by teaching her students about three different frames of how you can look at what a game is. One of these frames is formal. What are some of the characteristics of an artifact that make it a game, whether or not it’s being played, totally in the abstract?

The second is thinking about it aesthetically. Do people feel playful when they’re playing? What is the experience of play? People will play things that are not games, and people will play games in ways that are not playful.

If you think about professional baseball players, are they feeling super playful when they’re playing the seventh game of the World Series? Probably not.

But we still recognize baseball as a game. So these are two different lenses that can get us to different answers about whether something is a game even when we’re looking at the same experience and trying to analyze it.

The third is thinking about what we culturally understand as a game. There are some agreements as a culture about what a game is.

“When I talk about games, I always say, OK, tell me some games you play. People almost never talk about sports because the word ‘game’,“ says Hammer.

If you asked someone “Is sports a game?”, the answer would be “Yes, of course sports are games.”

However, if you asked someone if they played games, they don’t always think of sports or gambling or other kinds of activities that by both formal and aesthetic experiences would certainly fall into the category of games.

Looking at these cultural understandings explicitly is a third way to ask the question of “what is a game” and come up with an answer that is interesting.

As a game designer, someone can’t tell you what the right frame is for your work. But as current-and-future game designers, you are going to have to come up with a frame for your work that you find productive for making incredible experiences for players.

Think about what something being a game means to you, and worry less about some kind of categorical definition that you might spit back on an exam. Because in the real world of games, nobody cares.

There has been a lot of interest coming from schools. The innovative schools in the early days recognized that if they offered esports programs, they’d be wilfully attracting some of the brightest STEM students on the planet.

STEM is a big part of gaming. Engineering is a big part of gaming. And computer science is definitely a big part of gaming. Some of the brightest kids on the planet are coming into STEM programs because of gaming, and the wise schools recognized early on that they could use esports for recruiting.

In that regard, Wim Stocks helps schools that may not have seen that very early tide coming in. They’ve aided them in building their curriculum. They’ve helped schools create the notion of a career by offering a curriculum, training, and learning opportunities for careers in esports and venue design.

Wim Stocks also had a hand in helping a college cultivate local sponsorships to help support the building and funding for an esports program on that particular campus. But they are not just the intercollegiate competitor, enabler, and league. They are also helping schools build far bigger footprints in esports than they might have been able to do independently. So much of esports is focused on competition.

Let’s use an analogy. First, think about the business of traditional sports. Then, think about all the jobs surrounding traditional sports: production, broadcasting, stadium design, agents, analysis, marketing, advertising, and sponsorship. Those same dynamics exist in esports.

One of the schools that Wim Stocks have a close association with has identified that there are 87 different skill sets that they can base their curriculum around to help students who want to be involved in esports build their knowledge, education, and experience. By no means is this a small opportunity. They also work very closely with production companies. There are very specific things to esports that don’t come into play from any other sports or any other experiences. And so that’s a powerful dynamic for esports, the marketing of esports.

The pathway into professional gaming is an important bridge in creating more opportunities for players. Unfortunately, when it comes to esports, that pathway isn’t as well defined as it is in more established sports industries.
Wim Stocks better outlines the disparity using the talent pipeline in baseball:
“If you want to play baseball, you want to be a professional baseball player in Major League Baseball, you know what to do. You start at T-ball when you’re six years old. You go to little league. You play for your high school. You play for your college. You play Minor League ball.”
According to Stocks, this pipeline isn’t nearly as defined in esports. Luckily, the work he’s doing with World Gaming and Collegiate Star League (CSL) is aiming to turn that around.
“You could say we act like the NCAA of esports,” Stocks explains. “We organize leagues. Every game is a league, no different than there is an NCAA football league. In our case, there’s a CSL League of Legends league. There’s a CSL Counterstrike league. There’s a CSL Dota 2 league. There’s a CSL Madden league.”
These leagues aren’t just to host competitive matches – they’re designed to help aspiring players get better while creating a global gaming society. The collegiate leagues are open to college students. Like other major collegiate sports, the aim is to build an infrastructure around creating enthusiasm for esports, developing talents, and presenting clear opportunities for those who want to take their gaming to another level.
As for what adopting this model means, Stocks is clear about what the future of the esports talent pipeline could look like:
“The more this starts to look like traditional sports that have a template – that have a built-in infrastructure and tremendous understanding – the more we can model that for esports.”

Which platform makes the most sense to operate tournaments on, and how do we decide which platform and which system we should be running these tournaments on? Ari Brummer has some interesting opinions on the topic. According to Brummer, it varies from game to game. Some games provide a simple answer. For example, League of Legends is played on a PC. And that’s the only way you play the game. Likewise, Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers are played on the Nintendo Switch exclusively. But some games, like Call of Duty, or sports titles, like Madden or NBA 2K, can be played easily across various platforms, so it’s up to you to decide.

Not all games are cross-platform, but recently, games like Call of Duty have adopted this approach. So, for example, you can run a tournament where gamers are playing on Xbox, PC, or PlayStation – both of which are cross-generational. But for a game like NBA 2K, you have to pick one specific platform to enter tournaments on.

Brummer is running a draft-eligible tournament for people to have the opportunity to join the NBA 2K league if they win. It will take place on the Xbox. Before choosing Xbox as the platform for the tournament, their research had shown that there was recently a high uptick in sales for Xbox. They also discovered that there are a lot of competitive players in NBA 2K that play on Xbox. This research drove them to shift their focus from Playstation to Xbox to make sure that top-level talent could compete in the tournament itself.

They aim to have a wide variety of tournaments to cater to players at all levels and make them more accessible to different platforms. This means, if they are running a Madden tournament on Xbox, they might run a FIFA tournament on Playstation. So, using research to make a decision beforehand, they ensure that there’s a clear marketing strategy in place so that gamers know exactly which platform is needed during the sign-up process.

One of the questions Jessica Hammer is often asked is how games have changed with the advent of digital technologies. According to Hammer, games have been shaped by the technologies people had on hand for as long as people have played them.
“For example, if you look at the manufacturing of game pieces, of dice, of cards, of Meeples, of the things that we can make and that have a cultural understanding of how they work – these shape the kinds of play we can do with them.”
Hammer often connects games across the digital and non-digital divide. To her, there is no divide.
“The way I analyze games is looking at the sort of verbs or actions that they encourage players to take. So you’ve got matching games that are happening in the physical world. For example, if you think about Set, it’s a game of visual perception. You’re looking at a set of cards. You’re looking for matches.
“But that connects to games like match-three games, like Bejeweled or Candy Crush, where you’re looking for matches in a digital environment. Those underlying principles of what the player is doing and the kind of perceptual tasks that are being asked of them are the same.”
However, technologies still have new angles to offer. They provide new human-computer interactions, affordances, or new capabilities for interaction. One way they do this is by automating the complex equations that can make physical games difficult to play at an enjoyable pace.
“Most people who play board games have had the experience of sitting around and waiting while someone else is counting up points,” explains Hammer. “A computer can do that for you, what we call, automagically.”
Computers are also great at hiding key information in games that call for it like Hanabi, one of Hammer’s favorite games.
“These are new capacities that computer games give us,” says Hammer. “We can use them to enhance the kinds of core human interactions that games are.”

Games are nothing without players, a sentiment that rings particularly true regarding Roblox. As an interactive experience based on community development, the company knew from the very beginning that it wanted players to be able to express themselves through shared collaborative experiences.

But to foster real collaboration, Roblox knew that respect among community members was crucial. Within the company, there’s a constant conversation taking place to ensure that everyone is given the opportunity to build something special. With this goal in mind, Roblox Studio was designed to use LUA, one of the most user-friendly coding languages available. Roblox seeks to give kids the tools to create; to see players become developers.

When looking at the top games on Roblox, you’re likely to see concepts that, if they were to be pitched in a traditional green light fashion, they would probably never happen. But thanks to the supportive community the company’s built, gamers don’t have to worry about that green light process. Any kid can come on to the platform and, thanks to its ease of use, they can create a game. It really allows them to express themselves without adults getting in the way with rules and regulations. Kids know what kids like.

Whether it’s a seasoned player who’s been active in the world for years or a brand-new developer coming to the community for the first time, Roblox provides everyone with amazing opportunities to be creative in a way that encourages others to add to the story…making the world of the game so much cooler in the process.

How do problematic social issues manifest within the gaming community? According to Maria Hwang, some game characters play off of racist and sexist stereotypes. She also points out issues in the way gamers and fans interact with each other. “There’s a cyberbullying aspect in online communities, and that includes game communities,” she notes.

Hwang highlights the novelty of humanity’s relationship with immersive digital technology as a possible contributing factor. “We’re still in a transition period where we don’t truly understand the distinction between our online and offline lives,” she continues. “As we define what that means and whether our online alter egos are distinct or just continuations of who we are, things will change. For now, though, the idea of embodying new characters and exploring virtual worlds is still a relatively new concept. Cyberbullying may be prevalent because people think that these experiences aren’t real, even though virtual reality is as close to real as entertainment media can get.”

These misconceptions find parallels in the disconnect between people’s actions and their outcomes – Some gamers conclude they can do whatever they want without ramifications. “There are consequences,” cautions Hwang, “but they’re often harder to observe or less tangible than what one might experience in real life.”

Hwang also says that profit motives play a role. “Some people want to capitalize on troublesome things, such as heavily accentuated, hypersexualized portrayals of female characters similar to those found in lingerie commercials and modeling.”

Despite such negatives, Hwang points to a hopeful future. “As we move forward, we constantly reconsider the fluidity between our online and real-life identities. This makes us better equipped to address cyberbullying, stereotyping, and other problems. I believe the gaming and online communities will follow suit, but things are definitely not ideal at the moment.”

Game developers are more frequently using stress testing on their games prior to finalization to ensure their game and servers will handle the demand of their player community.
The video game industry is moving to more digital copies of games. When a game launches, everyone downloads it and jumps online at the same time. Without stress testing, it can be hard for game developers to predict if their servers are going to hold up when everybody hops on the game at the same time. This is especially true for more popular titles that have a lot of player demand.
Think of when a new show comes out on Netflix and everybody jumps on to watch it at the same time. Netflix doesn’t run as smooth because of the service demand. The same thing applies to video games.
Companies in the video game industry will hold a public beta. They’ll give access to the game before the final version is officially released so players can play it and test the game out. As a player, you get to demo the game and decide if you’d like to buy the final game or not.
For the developer, these public betas give them a stress test of your game. They get to test out their servers and say “Ok this many people are on. Our servers can handle this many people. Let’s take this information and project how many people are going to buy our game. And multiply this many people so when it does come out and everybody jumps on at the same time, we’re not having server issues.”
Stress testing is an effective method that game developers use to make sure their game is running on day one. Use stress tests to your advantage to determine your community’s anticipation for the game so you can deliver a better launch day experience for them.

 “So much of marketing around esports is done very differently than it is around traditional consumer experiences or traditional consumer products,” Explains Wim Stocks. “Using influencers and building influencer involvement with a particular campaign is a special set of understandings. That’s a really important role.”

“For us, it’s analytics. A huge part of our business from how we improve our events to how we improve our player experiences are all derived from the analytics around an event, a player’s participation in the event, what our stream looked like, how we’ve engaged an audience for our streams. Those are all very analytics driven, and those are huge opportunities in the esports space.”

“How does one incorporate data and what is the importance of data and knowing it and knowing the importance of it, etc. within our business landscape?” Jonathan Sumers asks. “It’s extremely important because in the digital world one of the benefits of digital and social media in general when we speak to partners and potential partners is the measurability the fact that you can track it. You can target it. You can measure it.”

“It provides all that information. I tell people all the time that the analytics debate in traditional sports is funny. It’s been happening over the most recent years, where people feel as if you either are an analytics person 100% or you’re an old-school iTest person.”

“Obviously, the answer is somewhere in between, right? Numbers and data are information. Information is power. The more information you have, the more leverage you have, the better position you’re going to be in in any circumstance, personal or professional,” Says Sumers.

“If we can gather as much data, whether it be performance of our social post for our partners or nonbranded posts or how many viewers we have per stream or how long they watch per stream or how many unique viewers, etc. that’s all crucial to the story we’re telling as we go into these partnership meetings and other meetings because they tell the story of our brand.”

“If you’re going to hold a traditional sporting event, and your venue holds 20,000 people, you can’t hold the game and not tell people afterwards how many fans showed up. You scroll to the bottom of that box where it tells you the attendance of every game. Numbers, data, and information are crucial across the board and even more so in esports because it is a digital-first property.”