I am the esports guy. Since making a comment in the first lectorial all the way in week one in the ‘hyper or deep attention’ discussion multiple students have recognised me (the purple hair helps I assume) and they have associated that whole sect of gaming with their mental image of me. To them, I am a fan – and I am. It is in part one of the labels that I wear, sometimes quite literally! (I own a hat and a jacket which features my team’s colours.)
Thinking about fandom is fascinating. There are so many links between all the media, hobbies, people et ceria in the world that the marketing, business, and information technology sectors are all committed to creating predictive algorithms. Which are now commonly and consistently crunching public (and sometimes not so public) data in order to figure out what you are likely to have the dispositions to like. Which at least circumvents elitist fan views of prerequisite uniform fanaticism, though we will never hear the end of that, I suspect.
Fans as a collective have had an astounding ability to do many things. Unsurprising to an extent, I mean that are a passionate group of people after all – by far the most likely to get up and do something with their interests.
As a case study, the esports title I follow is called League of Legends. You may have heard of it – it is the most played game in the world. Esports as a concept is simple, there are the best of the best players of a competitive (video) game and there are fans who will watch the matches between them similar to that of a traditional spectator sport. As time has passed the game and esport has changed, at the time of writing prize pools of major esports competitions are in the multi-millions – this did not use to be the case though, it used to be a passion project of fans of the game or the game developers themselves. The only thing at stake was really pride, the draw was seeing the best play a game you were keen on and probably a level of curiosity.
Esports has become the focus of podcasts, websites, fan art, cosplay, businesses, and careers – but esports is not the whole fandom of Leauge of Legends and vice versa, though the overlaps are obvious. In fact, esports in only a percentage of the game’s fan base. I know people who will still watch matches who no longer play the game. Things have evolved and changed has more people have gotten involved. Going back to the start, this all spawned from fans of the game. League of Legends developers got their start being inspired by other games. Fans can do amazing things.
