E-Sports - from the scientific perspective (Chapter 1: Introduction & the big recognition / perception gap)

So let me start fully motivated with the first "real" posting, talking about one of the subjects I do research and lecture.

I decided to start with "e-Sports" that is something that fits perfectly on a blockchain powered social media plattform. 

I guess the next days I will start different subjects (like gamification, nudging, gamecrime/cybercrime, iGaming, games and blockchain, serious games, board games, VR, AR; Holografie etc.) and devide them into small "bits" and mix them. And at the end we might have some drafts for future papers, some good discussions and maybe a new game studies network here on steemit.  But now to e-Sports, the first topic I like to talk about. 

Introduction:

I started to do research about E-Sports together with my friend Andreas Wochenalt back in 2007. In 2011 we released our first book about this topic, called eSport - eine Analyse von kompetitiven digitalen Spielen".  However 6 yrs later I would rewrite half of it. (the link is just a reference, not an advert). 

So back in 2007-2011 people in Austria had no clue what exactly E-Sports means. And most of them would still not give a clear definition of it in the year 2017.

Most people say that e-Sports means playing digital sport games on a computer, followed by playing games you have to be "active" like on the wii or the kinect. And for the Austrian Government it is kind of an equivalent to iGaming, which is very bad for the Austrian E-Sports szene regarding taxes and regulations for promoters to organize events.

And like until 2016 I had the feeling that noone really cared about e-Sports and wanted to hear about it from the social  science perspective (in Austria). In 2007-2008 we had several talks at conferences and there was kind of a first boom. But things like the financial crisis hit e-Sports like a comet. So it was for me something I always had in mind, but I had to turn to a lot of other topics. 

So why is there (again) a big boom about e-Sports since the beginning of last year?

Or: Why is there such a big recognition / perception gap. Maybe simular to people that know about the blockchain / heard about it / and so many that have no clue at all! But replace for this article blockchain with E-Sports. 

To analyse this we have to find some variables. Like the affinity to gaming itself, if the person plays competitive games that are used in e-Sports already, gender, age and media behaviour/usage in general. 

The result in short is that if you are under 30, playing competitive games like LoL, Fifa, Dota2 etc... 

and watch the gaming channel of youtube and of course twitch ...

you fully understand the pheneomon of e-Sports. 

but if you are "just" a normal social media user, playing some non-competitive mobile games or stand alone games and if you mainly use youtube with cat-content ;) you can not give a decent defintion or understand e-Sport as the big (huuuuuuge) thing it already has become. 

So people of the 2nd group absolutely don`t understand the first group - altough they are in the millions. 

That is not just a fun fact, it is a social dilemma. 

I just like to give you one example out of many: 

Peter is a 17 yrs old semi-professional FIFA player who has been invited to a tournament in Gelsenkirchen from Schalke04. He lives in Vienna and goes to school. He has a big chance to be signed by this famous German soccer club as E-Sports professional. However he has to fly from Austria to Germany, has to book a hotel there, has to spent 3-4 days away from school. He will not have the chance to go there, as the principal of the school does not know what this all means and will not give the school-boy some extra days off. 

Klaus, a 17yrs old semi-professional downhill-skier gets any extra time free he needs for the races (and gets the possiblity of course to keep up with the classroom as a lot of extra-programms have been established to push alpine-sportsmen and women.)

So that is - in my opinon - the bigest issue of the perception gap and of the fact that there are us who know and the others ;). 

So this is the first of hopefully many small parts. in the next chapter I will talk about if E-Sports itself can be seen as sport (or not). 

Pls comment and tell me your opionion about this topic. Especially the part about the perception and the generation gap.