The NCAA and esports: a Potentially Unstable Alliance (Scroggins, Koba, & Nagel)
The eSports industry has experienced tremendous participation, viewership and revenue growth over the past few years, particularly among adolescents and young adults. This growth has attracted investors interested in creating professional eSports leagues, many of whom are owners of traditional professional sports franchises (Novy-Williams & Palmeri, 2017). In addition, several colleges and universities have formalized their on-campus eSports activities, with some even placing eSports teams in their athletic department and offering scholarships to attract top players (Powell, 2017). This intercollegiate eSports environment has attracted the attention of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), which recently hired a consulting firm to ascertain the feasibility of developing a collegiate eSports athletic league (Anastasopoulos, 2017). The potential NCAA benefits are lucrative as top-quality eSports events have attracted large on-site and on-line audiences complete with sponsorships and other rapidly growing ancillary revenues. Despite this rapidly developing eSports environment, the potential mechanism by which the NCAA would enter the industry is unclear given its adherence to the collegiate model, whereby the member schools are encouraged to develop nearly all possible revenue streams while simultaneously mandating that participating athletes do not financially benefit for their participation beyond their awarded scholarship (Brand, 2006).
This presentation details the current organizational, managerial, financial, marketing and legal environment in which the top eSports athletes and various leagues compete, while providing potential outcomes for NCAA involvement. In particular, NCAA rules that specifically limit athlete compensation for their name, image and likeness are discussed (Bernfeld, 2014) and prior NCAA litigation (Bloom v NCAA, 2004; O’Bannon v NCAA, 2014) in this area that may have relevance for attracting top eSports athletes for intercollegiate teams is described. In addition, it offers comparisons between traditional college sports and eSports regarding player participation, season structure and length, “employment” relationships, and compensation models that comprise the organizational elements under consideration. The authors conclude that the current iteration of professionalized eSports would not likely be adaptable to a traditional NCAA model, but that modifications could potentially occur that would enable the NCAA to maintain their existing standards of player eligibility. The ramifications of such changes will be discussed.
Esports Institutionalization: The Case of France (Besombes, Vansyngel, & Velpry)
Esports commonly refers to a competitive approach (professional and amateur) to video gaming that is organized in leagues, tournaments and championships (Hamari & Sjoblöm, 2017). Growing in popularity since the late 2010s due to the apparition of the streaming platforms (Rosell, 2017), esports is professionalizing and experiencing a structuration and institutionalization process at a national level in numerous country around the world including France.
Many academic works have analyzed e-sports in comparison with sports, whether in the field of sports sciences (Mora & Héas, 2003; Reeves et al., 2009; Heere, 2014; Jenny et al., 2016; Holt, 2016; Van Hilvoorde & Pot, 2016; Heere, 2017; Holt, 2017; Holden et al., 2017; Karluhahti, 2017; Llorens, 2017; Besombes, 2017) or media and games studies (Wagner, 2006; Witkowski, 2012; Taylor, 2012; Hewitt, 2014). Yet these previous academic articles have mainly focused their analysis on the “physicality” of esports and few have focused on the role of institutionalization in this debate, except for Thiborg (2009), Jonasson & Thiborg (2010), Abanazir (2018).
To understand this process, our fieldwork is based on a qualitative methodology. We have conducted semi-directive interviews with tournaments organizers and members of the recently created French regulatory body, France Esports. We also went to 10 French competitive events between 2015 and 2016 to observe the organization of the national esports competitions.
Our results show that esports in France has historically been dispersed between players (communities and teams), promoters (associative and private leagues organizers) and games publishers who hold the intellectual property of the games. But since 2016, these three stakeholders have joined together to form the national association France Esports with a common goal: to structure and regulate the French esports ecosystem under the benevolence of the Ministry of Economy, of Labor and of Internal Affairs. The specificity of France is therefore both in the esports recognition by other public authorities than the sports one (Ministry or French National Olympic Committee), and the presence of the game publishers beside the players in the decision process of public policies for esports ecosystem. Since its creation, France Esports has been at the initiative of (i) the “digital republic law” which has brought competitive video gaming out of illegality and (ii) two decrees on the conditions of competitive events organization and the status of professional player.
The Development of Sports: A Comparative Analysis of the Institutionalisation of Traditional Sports c. 1845- 2018 and Esports c. 1991- 2018 (Summerley)
This paper takes the definition of a sport as ‘an institutionalised game’ under which both ‘traditional sports’ and ‘esports’ fall. It takes a comparative analytical approach that examines the historical documentation and cultural output of these two major categories of sports to see what the core differences and similarities are and how these might inform the present day and future development of sports. The wisdom of the ages has provided these case studies for us to examine and these are of great use to understanding the present and future development of sports.
The major case studies of this paper fall into two distinct timeframes that concern traditional sports and esports respectively. The 19th Century saw the development and institutionalisation of Association Football (1863a), Baseball (1845), Basketball (1891), American Football (1880), Rugby (1863b) as well as the institutionalisation of the International Olympic Committee in 1894. These all became sports that remain some of the most popular in societies and countries around the world today. A similar process of development is happening for games whose lineage can be traced to games and mods primarily developed in the 1990s and early 2000s such as Defense of the Ancients (2003), Super Smash Bros. (1999), Counterstrike (1999), Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior (1991), Starcraft (1998), Quake 3 Arena (1999) and Magic: The Gathering (1993). The ludic descendants of these games are in the early stages of institutionalisation as they make the transformation into esports with major tournaments, companies and sponsors populating each of their scenes.
Given the increasing interest in, engagement with and spectator numbers of esports it is worth considering how we might learn from the development of traditional sports to identify what makes for a successful or societally important sport. This is especially important given that esports have begun to receive consideration for inclusion amongst institutions such as ESPN and the International Olympic Committee. This paper intends to examine the development of sports through two related questions. Firstly, how are sports institutionalised over time (what were the factors that led to institutionalisation and what organisations or peoples were involved)? And Secondly, how are these sports supported and affected by grassroots amateur communities or professional corporate sponsorship that participate in sports? Traditional sports did not benefit from corporate sponsorship until much later in their lifespan when compared to esports and thi
