3/7/19
A Specific Interest of Mine: eSports in a public forum
The specific interest of mine I chose is professional gaming, or as the industry refers to itself: eSports (Electronic Sports). I’ve been playing video games my whole life and most of which have competitive online ladders to rank all the players who play them. Around 2014 I was introduced to professional League of Legends and immediately I was hooked on the concept of top level players competing on huge stages for massive amounts of money. Since 2014 eSports itself has grown across the world with the release of many new popularized games and eSports has used those games to put together events and leagues that draw millions of online viewers and hundreds of thousands of people who will pay to see them in person. The best part about the emergence of eSports is the community and discourse that appears in online forums. For any professional video game, there are a multitude of subreddits and twitter pages that allow you to interact with players, casters, coaches, journalists, and mainly other fans of said game. The public forum for eSports is massive and very involved. I personally coached mid tier League of Legends teams in the past and some of the most valuable insight I got was though public discussion and forums.
The mainstream media is still adapting to the idea of professional video gaming, its disheartening that they haven’t been able to embrace it yet. While these industries thrive, the online community will only get bigger. With more and more money going into eSports daily, I genuinely think that we have something very special and eSports is something the media should embrace.
*insert creative name here* 