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.”

Competition has always been at the core of gaming, and esports is a great example of the evolution of gaming over the last 50 years. Esports really began in the 1980s with Walter Day who, via his organization Twin Galaxies, hosted competitions to determine the best players for arcade games like Donkey Kong and Tetris based on high scores that spectators could watch. Today, esports are more in line with traditional sports, with leagues in such varied communities as NBA 2K, Call of Duty, and Overwatch.

The next esports milestone looks to be in game development itself for both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X, but particularly PS5 due to its storage architecture. Because of the way the hardware is built now with the SSD structure, as well as the elimination of hard drives, the jump in game development is akin to comparing an old record player to an iPhone.

These developments seem to signal a major milestone in overall entertainment in the gaming space, helping the form continue its transition from being an activity that only a few players can enjoy at a given time to something more like sports that thousands, even millions, can enjoy worldwide, whether you’re a gamer or not. NBA 2K League has even been featured on ESPN alongside “real” sports.

In the future, the acceptance of esports by major outlets will continue to make such an event the norm rather than the exception, especially as more games are created to work in this kind of sports format.

From its humble beginnings in the arcade, esports have become one of the greatest examples of how gaming has evolved to become the juggernaut of entertainment it is today.

This last year for Christmas, we helped raise $1,200 for the VFW to give 20 families a Christmas. We even got everything on their list. One of those things that I was passionate about — I threw my funds in on top of it to make sure I got it done — was the PS4 for a young kid from a veteran family with a missing father.

People come to me sometimes and they’re like, “I got a cause” — like the VFW. One of them messaged me privately, and I vetted him. I got his information; I got his 401C, and I got his bank account information so that I knew they were legitimate.

That is the primary goal: If you are going to do any kind of fundraising, you don’t deal with the cash yourself. Also, make sure you vet the people you’re giving the money to.

Besides that, we also do things like suicide-prevention strain streams. The last one we did was 35 minutes in from my end. I put seven streamers together — two of which were veterans because that’s our most at-risk community for suicide prevention.

Right behind them were us — gamers and streamers because a lot of us are alone or introverts and we struggle to communicate outside of ourselves. However, gaming allows us to open up.

So, when doing suicide prevention awareness, we’re not asking for donations; we’re just asking people to be aware, to reach out to people, and to let them know they’re not alone.

There are many opportunities to do things without money or without asking for money, since, sometimes, that’s a turnoff.

In summary, vet who you’re going to work with. Then, make sure that you’re going to represent them while you’re doing what you’re doing. That way you don’t reflect poorly on their cause because you’re their face at the moment.

A few things have changed.
One is that esports has become more accessible to a wider range of people. So, the affordability of gaming consoles, gaming moving towards mobile, and free gaming, have all grown exponentially over the past few years. Consequently, it’s been easier to get gaming in front of more people.
The second thing that has changed is what I call the mainstreaming of esports, where you see esports information on sports networks such as ESPN and others. You turn on your TV, in some instances, and watch esports competitions live.
That is only going to increase because esports is ultimately a global sport. We believe that there are three global sports at the end of the day: soccer, basketball, and esports. Those are the three sports that anyone can, theoretically, play at any moment of the day.
So, that’s why you see the growth of esports all around the world; because it is a universal language in that regard. It’ll only grow as technology, communication, and connectivity keep growing.
In terms of breaking into the industry — for anyone who’s interested in pursuing a career within the esports landscape, I would make a few recommendations.
One would be to familiarize yourself, as intimately as possible, with the landscape. What are the top games right now? What are the next games coming out? When and where are the big tournaments? Actually, you should attend a big tournament.
Besides, are you reading the trades of esports? Are you following esports journalists on social media? Are you watching the events online? You need to immerse yourself in the space if you’re not from it. If you’re not a native, you can’t be an outsider looking to just break in; there are so many on the inside that already want these positions. So, you have to learn as much as you can in the gaming space.

The second thing I would suggest is to look for organizations that are interested in becoming part of the gaming space. As you see more non-esports traditional entities and sports organizations get involved, — whether through investment in esports organizations or owning and operating esports organizations (such as the Cleveland Cavaliers owning and operating a team in a professional esports league) — there are more and more non-esports endemics who are tasked with leading this shift.
Therefore, if you can get to people like me first before others (people who know the space and have the connections and the knowledge), you’re going to prove your worth and help yourself potentially solidify a position. Because people like me need people who know the space.
There are going to be more endemics and organizations getting involved in esports. So, knowledge of the esports landscape, performance, and connections is a gold rush.
We’re still so early in the gaming space. It feels like esports has gotten really big over the past few years. Think 10 years from now; we’ll be looking back at around this time and realize that only a handful of games were franchised and had leagues. Theoretically, a decade from now, that could be the norm. So much could change.
So, I would say this: Learn as much as you can and make contact with as many organizations and people looking to be in the gaming space.

Let’s take a closer look at medical gamification and how tools from the gaming industry can be used for gaming that is designed for our wellbeing and health.

“In medicine in general, I have not seen a lot of cases where gains have been fully integrated,” explains Maria Hwang. “It is more gamification, meaning there are game aspects that are added to whatever system they have, whether that’s an application or that’s a whole infrastructure and people go through certain steps to accomplish their goals.”

Maria goes on to explain, “It is a little bit unfortunate coming from a game designer perspective to see that it’s just using one element of games that are sometimes we like to say it’s tricking the patients.”

So you provide incentives. For example, for type 2 diabetics, we want them to log their meals. So every time you log something, you get a point for something. Every time you take a picture of your meal, you get a point. Every time you log your glucose measures, you get a badge.

Then you share that with your other friends, then you get a social media badge or not. Those are the superficial gamification aspects that we’re putting into these apps or infrastructures, says Maria. That will incentivize the patients to do something that they don’t want to do.

“From what I can tell, that’s the extent of how games are being used in medicine. We can go a little bit further and take advantage of all the affordances of games and make it more beautiful.”

Some efforts have been made in terms of mental health. There’s a lot of games that address mental health. It’s a full-blown game where people play it in and, some communities talk about the characters, the issues, the conflicts they resolved inside the game, and really from that, they’re healing and doing therapy. The goal is to keep relaxed. This is the neurofeedback headset that it comes with.

There’s one sensor right here at the front that is reading your brainwaves. The more relaxed you are, the bigger your midnight grows in the game. We have been trying to teach kids if you change the way they think, then the world out there looks different. It’s an incredibly powerful metaphor, says Maria. So, there are efforts in that area.

Maria explains that from a game designer perspective, the majority seen is only using superficial incentivized aspects of games, at least in medicine.

But it’s changing.

Twitch Plays Pokémon (TPP) was an exciting era in gaming, especially for game designers who were curious about how such a project could work. For those who are unfamiliar, Twitch Pays Pokémon is a social-experiment-slash-game played live on Twitch, where actions and decisions are crowdsourced via the chat function.
Dan Shefelman lived through that moment and remembers all the fascinating ways the game evolved around its clear obstacles.
“I thought we’d seen it all. We’ve seen multiplayer games, we did platform games, we had FPS, we’ve just seen every genre possible. And then, Twitch Plays Pokémon comes around.”
The most glaring obstacle was how thousands of commands given by the chat could be distilled into one cohesive decision so the game could progress.
“[I asked if] it needs to take one input and the character moves. And they said no, all these people are putting in that input and they’re – somehow – getting averaged. Well, you know, at one point, then a voting system came out.”
The technology also had to answer the question of lag. If a user gave an input from South Korea, and another user gave an input from Brazil, which would arrive first? Would the first one count before the second? These questions were slowly rising, and communities developed out of the solutions people found. Eventually, they developed a voting system, until another problem arose.
“The voting system went away and it was just this incredible phenomenon of how we deal with, basically, overpopulation . . . Maybe it’s almost like a democracy deciding on a policy. And they did.”
This happened outside of the game, and players returned ready to navigate it as a team, like a crowd-sourced game.
“We as a team, a world team, we can beat that by coming together as communities to plan and strategize, to play one game,” says Shefelman. “Like a million people played one game together with one character. And that was basically a new genre.”