ESports’ time may well have arrived
WHEN you hear the word eSports what springs to mind? For a lot of us nothing at all. It’s an alien concept. Sport is about the physical world, about tangible things; balls and running tracks, goal-posts and grass, not bytes and sprites, polygons and upload speeds.
The idea of eSports itself isn’t altogether that new though. Maybe the presentation of it as eSports is, but competitive video game playing has been going on for at least twenty-five years if not a little bit more. Competitive Street Fighter II was a thing – hell it still might be for all we know – going back to the nineties. In recent years though eSports have gained in salience as the technology has improved and the gap between what can be simulated and the thing it’s trying to simulate has shrunk. Nowhere has this been more obvious than in motorsports.
You can get the most elaborate set ups in your house if you so wish. Steering wheels with paddle gear switches, pedals with clutches and even gear boxes and force feedback. That coupled with brilliant graphics and sophisticated handling algorithms means it’s pretty danged close to the real thing.
Professional motorsport teams have been using simulators for about ten years now – at the very least – for their drivers and set-up work and, while these devices are a lot more sophisticated than a PC or PS4 game, what’s available to the average punter isn’t that far off it either.
The really exciting thing about eSports – and eMotorsports in particular – is that it allows regular people the chance to compete for real with the people they watch on weekends. Assuming that something can be real, of course, in the cyber realm – and we’re not going to get into the philosophical repercussions of that now.
Look at what happened last weekend after the Australian Grand Prix was cancelled. The Race – a new motorsport news and views site – organised a cyber Aussie GP, which included some of the top eSports racers in the world and some real life Grand Prix superstars (Max Verstappen, Lando Norris and Juan Pablo Montoya). The interesting thing about it is the audience it drew. As of the time of writing, well over half a million people have view the cyber event on YouTube, which doesn’t include those who watched it on other platforms like Twitch. It might seem strange to a lot of us, but eSports and eRacing is a thing now and – with the global shut-down of sport – its time may have come.