Going for gold
As the Commonwealth Games trials a videogame competition, does it feel like a torchbearer for esports?
Was Birmingham’s inaugural Commonwealth Esports Championships a success?
Bella ‘Crimson’ Selwood is – along with the other two members of Team England – the first woman ever to win a Commonwealth gold for Rocket League. Aged 21, Selwood has been competing in various tournaments for the game since her teens, but the Commonwealth Esports Championships finals are the first time she’s played in front of a live audience. It’s enough to put her and her teammates, the clear favourites, off their game.
“The nerves were definitely there,” she admits – resulting in an early stumble that allows underdog Scotland to snatch a couple of early goals. “Game one, the nerves were definitely there. I wasn’t able to do, mechanically, what I would have liked because you’re like, ‘Wow, this is huge, I am playing for a Commonwealth gold medal’. It’s very much there in your mind.” After narrowly taking the win in the first game, those nerves visibly disappear, and the team’s victory in the next two is decisive. At which point, their composure melts away, these young women collapsing into teary hugs and running out into the crowd, into the arms of proud family and friends.
This is exactly the kind of moment and story that the CEC’s organisers are hoping will spread beyond the walls of Birmingham’s International Convention Centre, to help secure a future for the event. Because this inaugural championship, which covers three titles – Rocket League, Dota 2 and Konami’s eFootball, each split into ‘open’ and ‘women’s’ competitions – is very much a pilot. Commonwealth Games Federation CEO Katie Sadleir calls it “an exciting opportunity to test people’s thinking about what should and shouldn’t be in the Commonwealth Games”.
This pilot status brings with it a few important caveats. “We’ve invited this pilot programme of the Commonwealth Esports Championship to run inside the Games period, in the same venue, but it’s not a Commonwealth medal sport,” Sadleir explains. “The countries that are competing here, they don’t get points towards their wider Commonwealth totals.” The medals that Selwood and her team hold high are of their own, separate design – but that doesn’t undermine how they feel about winning. “I never thought when I started playing Rocket League on my PS4 in 2016, or whatever it was, that I would be playing for a Commonwealth medal. It’s just absurd.”
Selwood is well acquainted with the Commonwealth Games – “it’s something I would watch with my parents or my grandparents,” she says – but among people of her age, she’s very much in the minority. We ask Team England manager Mark Weller if the competition’s legacy meant anything to the young people on his teams. “Initially, honestly, I don’t think so,” he says. “A lot of these players had never heard of the Commonwealth before. Like, ever.”
Given that 60 percent of the 2.5 billion people who live in Commonwealth nations are under the age of 30, that’s a problem. And so the Games – eternally lacking the profile of the Olympics, and seeking to convince a generation that is less likely to celebrate its roots in British colonialism – is attempting to reinvent itself. To that end, it laid out a 2026/2030 ‘roadmap’ to ensure, as CGF president Dame Louise Martin put it in her 2022 New Year’s statement, “that our Games adapt, evolve and modernise, to maintain their relevance and prestige across the Commonwealth”.
That same statement alluded to a partnership with the Global Esports Federation, to help it “engage with young people”. This deal was signed in May 2020, not long after the GEF – which CEO Paul Foster describes as “the convening body for esports [focused on] credibility, legitimacy, prestige” – was founded in December 2019. If this seems improbably quick, then it’s probably worth noting that GEF president Chris Chan already served as the CGF’s vice president for Asia.
This background in traditional sports – which Foster shares, having previously worked for the International Olympic Committee – might have been a boon when it came to winning over the Commonwealth Games Federation, but it means that the GEF is something of an outsider to the esports community, among whom the organisation remains largely unknown. You might assume that the greatest obstacle to the CEC’s future would be those familiar questions about whether games without an obvious physical element can ever constitute a sport. In truth, though, its greatest challenge may be winning over an audience already convinced that they do.
“There’s been some scepticism in the esports industry about, well, why does esports need the Commonwealth Games?” admits Dave Martin, COO of British Esports, a not-for-profit national body established in 2016 to promote esports in the UK. It’s a good question, and one we put to Selwood. “It is very niche, obviously,” she says, “and a lot of
“You’re like, ‘Wow, this is huge, I am playing for a Commonwealth gold medal’. It’s there in your mind”