Less Pizza, More Yoga: E-Sports Embraces Traditional Training Methods | Hacker News Reader

Less Pizza, More Yoga: E-Sports Embraces Traditional Training Methods

nytimes.com

222 pointsbookofjoe159 comments

I had the opportunity to be around high-competitive esports in years 2005 - 2010 and I'm very glad this topic is coming up now. Back in the day, my observation was that only the best American and European players (Fatal1ty, Grubby, NIP team, to name few) understood how important it is to be also fit mentally and physically when competing in esports and they were the only once doing “something” for that. Back in the day, the Korean teams were mostly locked-down in their “Clan houses” and they had a defined time schedule which mostly consist of practicing the game.

Today, this is completely different story. When I’m talking with people who are still in esports and read news articles about current teams, they mention to have personal fitness couches and mental couches and I think it’s necessary for success as you can see application of these practices being successful in other sports - Tennis, Golf, etc. It’s even more crucial for team-based games (LoL, CS, etc.) where team chemistry, health of team members and ability to time your focus on the particular events are all important aspects for the overall success. I even heard that there is a professional LoL team which has a “synergy” coach who is dealing with day-to-day problems of team members and help them to resolve conflicts between each other.

It is incredibly hard to have consistent results on e-sports tournaments.

Edit: Grammar + Wording

The training schedule, despite the focus on overall health is absolutely /grueling/ though. 10 hours a day to develop muscle memory and decision making on a newly-meta champion, gun, or map. 6 days a week usually.

If you're at that high a level, you got there because you loved the game. So it's not really gruelling, it's what you would do anyhow if you weren't being paid for it.

I think this takes away from the professionalism of these individuals. At a certain level, we are all doing things we want to be doing, otherwise we would be looking for ways to do other things. If you follow a lot of top eSports players in LoL challenger, for example, they all love the game, but you can tell the difference in professionalism even in their online personas towards the game. There's no doubt QTPie loves the game, but it's also no secret that the reason he isn't a top tier ADC anymore is because he doesn't want to deal with the grind and just wants to enjoy himself (and more power to him for it -- this isn't a character judgement, just pointing out the difference)

Most probably love the game, but having been a semi-professional CS player myself in the past, it very much feels like "work" sometimes.

> it's what you would do anyhow if you weren't being paid for it.

Much different scrimming for fun or playing matches with your buddies/team mates/pub stomping versus practicing very detailed specifics or scenarios, or testing different team compositions and strategies over and over and over again.

My understanding is that pro counter-strike players also have to memorize and practice an obscene amount of nade throws these days just to be competitive since the physics are so predictable and things like flashbangs are so strong.

Eh, I'd say that's pretty insignificant to a CS pro, in the same way learning what every hero/champ does in DotA/LoL seems daunting at first but is pretty trivial once you have 1,000+ hours in the game. You're just incrementally building on knowledge that you've accrued while playing normally. It's not like a pro has to sit down and do some huge exercise in rote memorisation for smokes and flashes every week. Maybe rarely when a new map gets added to the active pool.

Thats not true at all in my experience - programmers who love their work burn out all the time. I had a dream job in the gaming industry but after months of 65 hour weeks decided the tradeoffs aren't worth it. I loved that job, but the sacrifices necessary to do it were too much of a cost. There are a lot of people who would love to play a game for 10 hours a day. Playing and training are different things though.

I'm not seeing the connection between being a top tier professional in a sport and working as a programmer 65hrs at a gaming company? One involves a necessary dedication and persistence for high reward, while the other is a useless exercise in exploitation (as no programmer is productive 65hrs/week and would only be rewarded sufficiently high in a few situations, such as having stock/ownership).

Try being a top tier professional in an obscure sport: racquetball for example. You need a large amount of dedication and effort and you will not get high rewards no matter how good you are.

I wasn't a programmer at the gaming company - more of a producer type. I went into programming after for less hours and more work/life flexibility. I'd never program for 65hrs/week, but it was very possible to do my production job that much - the problem is I didn't go on a date for half a year, and my work became the entire bit of my life.

I disagree. I wrestled at a DI level in college, it was grueling, it was incredibly hard, some days I hated it. But it wasn't the same kind of burn out that I feel from software development. I don't wake up excited for work the way I would wake up excited to train. It's just different. The harder you work the better you get in sport. You may work harder at software development and become a better developer but the gains you may get aren't so concrete, you don't win, you likely won't even get a raise.

At a professional level, people plateau all the time. They're beaten by people who train less hard but have more talent or ability.

You can work harder and harder at a game but not end up better than someone with superhuman reaction times despite a lot of hard work. Also, the game changes due to patches and content updates - all that work you put in for a year understanding a mechanic might be for nothing at the drop of an update.

Trust me, no programmer loves their work in the same way a gamer loves gaming.

Even implying they do is blasphemous.

I don't know. Followed Carmack since I was a kid. Guy's an inspiration.

I’m all for gaming and you can see my posts defending it but I don’t know who you can say this with confidence.

People love different things. It’s how you get masters at different crafts. Some people love solving things and some love creating... programming is both of those.

Blasphemous is an interesting choice of words - I wouldn't be so certain or dogmatic.

> Trust me, no programmer loves their work in the same way a gamer loves gaming.

I can't, sorry. I'm pretty into playing games (though by no means a "gamer" in the sense that it controls my life, etc.) but I will often choose to program rather than play games in my free time.

Competitive endeavours will dominate your life if you have the personality for it, and those people competing on that level do.

You are a casual gamer, but in this context you are as much of a gamer as a random board game player is one compared to Magnus Carlsen.

When I was younger, I'd agree. Was for sure a vidiot but now I don't play much. But programming is more compelling now than playing in someone else's skinner box.

Watching something compile, link and pass all your test cases after you add a new feature is a pretty big dopamine rush in of itself.

> If you're at that high a level, you got there because you loved the game. So it's not really gruelling, it's what you would do anyhow if you weren't being paid for it.

I don't think this is true. To reach the highest level you need more than passion: you need dedication and discipline.

If you only practice when you feel like it then you're not going to practice as much as someone who has a set schedule they stick to no matter whether they're enjoying it or not.

Not only that but practice or training is much different from playing and often not at all enjoyable.

I would hope that all musicians love music, but practicing is usually very tiring and not fun. My current teacher always says that if you're practice feels completely painful and hopeless, you're probably doing it right.

One of my friends trained with one of the top players in the world in her sport. When she wanted to take it easy because she was on her period, the coach, also female, said she should keep going. That dedication could be the difference between being #1 and #2.

A professional gamer has to deal with so many more things as a result of their daily interaction with the game than someone who just loves the game. If a big weekend tournament is coming up, you can't just "take sick leave" because you're running a 102 fever. If you are in a slump or having a rough time personally for a few weeks, you bleed fans and have shoutcasters questioning whether you have fallen from grace or are no longer the best of the best. If you are just not in the mood to practice because it's a nice day out, but if you have a tournament net week, you can't skip your session. It becomes so very different when it changes from something you love doing purely because it was fun, to becoming a job you get paid for, to becoming something where it's your job to be the best in the world at scoring points in.

This is no different from being any other professional athlete.

E-sports should drop the 'E' moniker, because the 'E' part is less significant than the 'sports' part. People think playing games is less taxing and less skillful than a 'real' athlete's work, but it's not. The same level applies, upto and including the revenue model.

eSports at this level reminds me of the old circus/carnival freak shows, except the circus put naturally occuring freaks on display, whereas eSports participants transform themselves into freaks -- 60 hours a week of playing a videogame into its extreme corner cases, developing hyperspecific skills to an extreme level that have zero transferability or relevance outside the game.

You just described all pro sports

This sounds very narrow minded.

What you are saying is no different than any other traditional sport. Take ice hockey goalies. In recent years they've become more athletic to the point that their bodies do things that non-goalies can't. How is that skill relevant or transferable outside of the game? Name a position in any sport and there will be close to zero relevance to the real world.

Even chess, what I consider to be very early precursor of eSports, depends on a narrow set of skills that you can't easily abstract into real life situations.

With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable, as a good hockey player will be in demand for as long as hockey is around. There's a built in longevity to the game that there isn't in e-gaming.

If you dedicate years to honing your Starcraft 2 skills, but consumer interest shifts to Overwatch or Destiny, can you retrain fast enough to compete at a similarly high level?

In IRL sports, the rules of a specific game don't change. Neither does the size of the field, the goalposts, the ball itself. So as long as you're able to improve your physical/mental focus, you can improve your performance. That's not the case when multiple variables around the game itself are changing.

When a new game comes out everyone else is also starting at zero. As long as there's churn and new games are able to gain popularity, this isn't a huge issue.

Also, the skills are more transferable than they'd first appear - for example, several players have been competitive in more than one FPS game. Plus, streaming, analysis, coaching, and commentary are becoming quite lucrative.

Based on my observations, the skills are solely transferable in same genre of games. I've seen great FPS players switching to different titles. I have never seen a great FPS player doing well in RTS and opposite.

So how often do you see Baseball players end up pivoting to the NFL? RTS and FPS are essentially different sports.

I believe the initial argument is that "pivoting" of the players is inevitable, due to the relatively short shelf-life of a video game's popularity. Whereas a professional athlete in traditional sports can typically play one sport from childhood till retirement (be it 20, 30, 40, or 50), an e-sport professional may have to switch games after 3 years, and every 3 years, to remain relevant.

Tell that to the 1.6 pros still winning today. (Ok, before Astralis dominated everything).

There’s a streamer, Fitzyhere, who has gone from playing SC2 (RTS) at a competitive level, to becoming one of the best players in Overwatch (FPS).

So, it does happen, but you’re right in that the skills are not easily transferable. The only thing that is, is your dexterity.

There are many professional poker players who started as competitive Starcraft players, and even more who started at Magic: The Gathering

I don't know about "many"? The only famously successful one I can think of off the top of my head is Bertrand Grospellier. And I guess Benger got some publicity when he made the WSOP main event.

Is there a whole host of ex e-sports players making a professional living off poker? Or are these guys outliers?

But even if that's true, who cares? Overwatch is not going to be a popular ESports title forever, but the FPS genre overall is probably going to be a component of ESports for an extremely long time. If your skills are transferable within an entire genre, that's good enough.

The odds of someone waking up some day in a world where competitive FPS ESports have vanished is probably roughly comparable to the odds that someone wakes up in a world where competitive hockey has vanished -- that is to say, unlikely enough that's it doesn't seem to be worth worrying about.

I disagree. While the games might not change, the interface might.

The future might be AR/VR games. If you spent your whole life using keyboard and a mouse, you're gonna have to get used to the new interface.

I mostly agree with that, but there are a handful of Dota 2 pros that used to play Starcraft 1/2 or Warcraft 3 at high levels. Like someone else mentioned I believe there are a few pros that moved to Overwatch from another type of game.

I think the teamplay and drive many of those players have is transferable. You have to let the video game run your life, like any other sporting professional. The mouse movement, keyboard habits and reaction speed are also all mostly transferable. At the end of the day I think its mostly determination to switch and time.

>With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable,

Well, if you're making the argument that these pro gamers are worse off because they spent a large portion of their lives for skills that aren't transferable and won't result in a long term career, then if you accept that sports skills aren't transferable as well, same argument would apply to athletes given average NFL career is like 3 years. You could say they are better off because they make a lot more money for that short period of time, but you would also have to consider the odds and expected value of "trying to go pro" given average genetics.

edit: meant to reply to parent

There's also the mental tax of transferring.

I was a pretty active competitive player in Street Fighter 4 in my local scene. I spent a lot of time learning intricate things about the game. I knew so many different situations that could happen in the game, and due to my experience I was able to come up with appropriate responses. Those are the things that can't be learned from a video tutorial or a written guide, because they are simply too minute. As an example, some of the longer combos can have their later hits miss if you start out too far from the opponent. But the fine line between close enough and too far is very hard to gauge.

Then Street Fighter 5 came out, and all that accumulated knowledge had to be thrown away. That was one of the reasons I gave up on competitive playing, couldn't really deal with going at it again only for all my knowledge to get invalidated later on once more.

I experienced the exact same thing, except I was competitive in Tekken.

I am not sure your argument holds.

Many "good" hockey players never make it to a pro league and end up sitting behind a computer somewhere. Even if they do make it pro most sports performers have a prime age where they start to lose their edge. I am not sure that when one thinks of something that is in high demand hockey goalies comes to mind.

It sounds like you know nothing about esports to be honest. Players change games pretty frequently. Seagull was TF2, now overwatch. Same with Harbleu.

Imaqtpie was dota, now league.

So yeah, they do adapt, and quickly.

The rules may not change frequently for IRL sports but style of play definitely changes and can have the same result.

Chris Carter was tied for the 6th most home runs in baseball from 2013-2016. If he was born 10 years earlier he would have been one of the highest paid players in the sport. Instead he was cut after the 2016 season, was only a part time player in 2017, and hasn't played in the majors since. He wasn't any worse as a baseball player, just the idea of what defined a "good baseball player" changed.

Similar things have also happened in other sports recently. Basketball has shifted to be faster paced and more about spreading to floor to shoot 3-pointers reducing the importance of traditional centers. Football has become more of a passing game reducing the importance of running backs and all but eliminating the position of fullback. I don't follow hockey, but I have heard that the enforcer role is on its way to disappearing from the game.

>There's a built in longevity to the game that there isn't in e-gaming.

Tetris came out 35 years ago and they're still holding world tournaments for it. Not to say that modern modern e-sports are the same as Tetris, but there doesn't seem to me any reason why LoL would be less likely to be around in 20 years than boxing.

Starcraft Broodwars is 20 years old and there are still professional tournaments being played in front of large live audiences (a large tournament recently ended and a new one is starting in about two weeks), and players are making a living out of streaming and playing these tournaments.

> With hockey, or any other professional sport, it doesn't matter if the skills aren't transferable, as a good hockey player will be in demand for as long as hockey is around.

This isnt even close to true. A, "good" hockey player is useless. The top 200 goalies in the world will have jobs. The top 25-50 will have well-paying jobs. The other hundreds or thousands of good goalies will never be paid to by a hockey player.

> In IRL sports, the rules of a specific game don't change. Neither does the size of the field, the goalposts, the ball itself. So as long as you're able to improve your physical/mental focus, you can improve your performance.

Also untrue. Many sports change over the years as one progresses. They are regular rule changes in many sports. There are specific rules based on location. I think you should learn more about IRL sports if you are going to draw comparisons to e-sports.

There is a bit of transferability though.

ElkY is a former Starcraft pro who turned to poker with great success. He now plays Hearthstone. He used his skills as a Starcraft player to play online poker on many tables at once. Reaching the highest levels on PokerStar and joining the resident team.

And while there are hyperspecific skills, like any activity at such a high level of play, what differentiate e-sports from traditional sports is that things change fast, really fast. A video game lifespan is relatively short and between that are new content, patches, and new techniques. Adapting quickly is very important. And indeed, pro players are often young and don't stay on top for very long.

There was a pro Counter Strike player Griffin Benger ("What up now Swedes" guy) who became a professional poker player and was once the highest winning online player and has a total earnings of over $10m now.

I think there are a number of pro esports players who have become full time poker players. Interesting how that drive and dedication transfers to other things.

There's plenty of transferability; watch any of the top FPS streamers (like Shroud) and they're amazingly competitive at just about any shooter they pick up. Fundamentals like quick camera movement, communication, corner-taking, etc transfer across many games.

>eSports at this level reminds me of the old circus/carnival freak shows,

I don't think that's really a fair comparison. Most of the appeal of esports is just admiration for someone who's really good at something you enjoy doing.

If you played football or hockey competitively growing up, you have more appreciation of the sport than someone who never did and conversely, it's probably harder for someone who never played to really grasp the nuances or even understand the appeal beyond regional tribalism.

I think you have a good point, but today you have to add hours of analysis to that schedule as well. Back in my days, it was all about putting the hours into game. Today, the time is more diversified between analytics, exercise and of course majority still goes to training. I don’t think that people realize how much time is going into these games – professional today spends easily 14 hours a day on duties related to their esports careers (training, analysis, exercise, streaming, sponsorship duties).

>It is incredibly hard to have consistent results on e-sports tournaments.

The NYXL are a great example of this. Often undefeated in normal season stages but then choke when it actually matters.

It doesn't help that their strategies and skillsets become very rigid, and any changes in opponent strategy or game rebalances can completely throw them off. https://www.theringer.com/2018/7/24/17606796/overwatch-leagu...

There was a 60 Minutes episode with Fatal1ty that I saw when I was in high school and it showed him playing sports and exercising to make sure his reactions were sharp. I was competing in Counter Strike when I saw this and started regularly running and doing my best to eat healthy based off that episode. It definitely helped I think, we got pretty far along the CAL ladder during those days. It's cool to see these teams taking physical fitness even more seriously, I think it will have positive reflections on E-Sports in the long run.

You hilariously misspelled coaches as couches. As in personal fitness couches. It would be great if that were a thing!

The trick is to think of every couch as a personal fitness couch.

Particularly beneficial for console gaming.

A few years back I bought the domain for 5ktocouch.com, now I wish I had done something with it.

I'd love to find out what it is that the truly consistent teams are doing that other teams aren't. For example Astralis (currently) or SK Telecom (LoL) or Fnatic (CS) a few years ago. Every now and then a team comes along that just seems to dominate consistently. I wonder if it comes down mostly to the skill of the individual players, or if the team culture/infrastructure plays a big part in it.

This reminded me of the reasons that NASCAR drivers exercise. Any activity that you do for medium-to-long periods of time will inherently have a physical component. Increasing your physical stamina and strength could be the difference between a win and a loss.

I thought this quote was telling: "It [physical conditioning] doesn’t make you drive the car faster...it allows you to drive the car faster for a longer period of time."

https://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/04/nascar-jimmie-johnson-ryan-...

Why wouldn't racing drivers exercise?

Incidentally, obsessive fitness was one of the things that Michael Schumacher brought to F1.

Everyone should exercise. And I agree that racing is highly physical, so it's even more important.

Just making the point that 50 years ago people might have said "You just need to move your hands to turn the wheel, why would exercise be important?" When in reality physical fitness might be some of the lowest-hanging fruit to improve performance. I thought that e-sports are in a similar place today.

Because the value isn't as obvious as it is for a more athletic sport.

Michael Schumacher (Formula 1 driver) was at the forefront of this. His training regimen in the late 90s was known to be very rigorous, and not typical of his competitors. Now, though, they all train their bodies accordingly.

The stresses put on the body in an F1 car are unreal: you spend between 75 and 90 minutes subjecting your body to brief, repeated periods of 5-8Gs of longitudinal and lateral acceleration, where the difference between braking 1-5 meters earlier or later when traveling at 350kph can mean the difference between you hitting the perfect apex or shunting yourself into a gravel trap (or worse, a wall in the case of most street courses).

Not to mention that some of the courses are just completely brutal. Internal cockpit temperatures can hit 50C at the race in Signapore, and the drivers will lose 5-7kg of water weight over the course of a race.

Anyone who says professional race drivers are not physically fit has no idea what they're talking about.

Check out the neck muscles on Fernando Alonso and Daniel Ricciardo:

https://cdn.24.co.za/files/Cms/General/d/4389/3e9ecba0eb614c...

https://e1.365dm.com/18/04/768x432/skysports-f-f1-daniel-ric...

Many F1 teams have built special training rigs to allow drivers to lift weights with their neck.

https://youtu.be/g-KYASQKdSU?t=148

> brief, repeated periods of 5-8Gs of longitudinal and lateral acceleration

Where does this acceleration come from? I'm sure the acceleration due to speeding up/slowing down is much less than this, as is that produced by turning?

Turning. I also imagine down hill, since they are built like upside down airplanes, you could experience faster than falling forces :)

The largest forces are under braking. For example at Monza, a famous racetrack in Italy, the average peak deceleration force per lap is around 5.6Gs. The braking zone before the Parabolica corner has a peak deceleration force of 6.7Gs. And they do this for over 50 laps.

Hell, the deceleration that an F1 car experiences simply due to engine braking is already more than what you would feel if you slammed on the brakes in your sedan going 100kph.

For turns, the forces are less, but they're still incredible. At Suzuka there's a very famous corner that is known as 130R (it has a 130m radius) and taken at about 305kph (190mph), and produces sustained 3.5Gs of lateral force.

Sources:

* https://www.brembo.com/en/company/news/formula-1-monza-2018-... * https://www.redbull.com/ca-en/f1-toughest-track-ever

I've joked that a lot of the nerdy sports like League, Smash, speedcubing, etc. need some crazy Russian coaches. Someone who forces them to train like hell, complete like hell and win. This isn't exactly the same, but it's still cool seeing them adopt mainstream sports training techniques.

But for real, it's funny seeing competitors in these nascent sports not doing the basic min-max tricks that established sports take for granted. Stuff like consistent sleep, good diet, conditioning, etc. isn't just for show. It's about maximizing your mind. Fencers, for instance, have long known about the effect of meditation and physical endurance on their mental game.

Now we need the gamers to learn to scream like a proper athlete.

> I've joked that a lot of the nerdy sports like League, Smash, speedcubing, etc. need some crazy Russian coaches.

From everything I've read about South Korean Brood War and League of Legends organizations, this thing already exists in the form of team houses where players practice for 8/10/12 hour days, and the result is that SK is head and shoulders above their competition in both games.

Of course, those games were the most popular of their respective eras in a country that values esports more than any other, and in the case of League of Legends, had massive financial support from the game developers.

You won't see something similar in Smash, where the developer isn't providing that same support and the competitive scene is dominated by grassroots communities in countries that are less gaming-centric than SK.

Yes, you're right about StarCraft and as a former competitive speedcuber I can tell you they practice like hell too.

This was true back in the kespa days, but not anymore. There are no longer teamhouses and all the professional players are streamers which is where the majority of their income comes from (boxer just started on twitch this week).

I first got into weight lifting while watching a Star Craft 2 match, one of the teams was shown in a pre-roll going to the gym and lifting weights together.

I realized that instead of spending 3 hours a night watching SC2 matches, I could go to the gym for an hour, and then spend 2 hours a night watching SC2 matches, and end up looking good while doing it!

That path lead me to a job with Microsoft Health, to years of learning martial arts, and to learning all about health and dieting.

Healthy body healthy mind, exercise doesn't take much time, and you'll feel great doing it. It grows neurons (or at very least slows down their decay), and helps prevent life long issues that can come with the weakening of muscles that happens when sitting all day.

Or you can do both! The gym is a great time for passive content consumption.

My new "only YouTube while on the treadmill or exercise bike" rule has been a life changer

The money is getting serious.[1]

Epic Games ... plans on doling out $100,000,000 in prize money across 2019.

The Fortnite World Cup will pit players against each other for a $1 million prize pool each week. Then, from June 26-28, the top 100 solo players and top 50 duo teams will duke it out in New York. Every player will leave the finals with at least $50,000 of the $30 million prize pool, while the solo champion will net themselves $3 million.

[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/fortnite-will-give-out-dollar100-mil...

For a single event, The International 2018 for Dota 2 had a prize pool of $25,532,177 USD [1] and "set the record for largest single tournament prize pool in esports history for the fifth consecutive year" [2].

[1] https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International/2018#Prize_Po...

[2] http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/24429755/the-internat...

E-sports is this funny thing where everyone on the internet seems to talk about but I have yet to find one person IRL who actually gives a shit about it. Like seriously, where is the interest??

Pretty poor sample size; I've never met anyone interested in baseball.

Do you know anyone interested in field sports?

Me: pole vault

Some of the streams of the tournaments I've encountered have millions of people watching them. The younger generation seems to like it.

That's just your personal experience. It's reflective of your personal surroundings.

Nobody I know is into baseball. Either I assume there is no real interest, or I assume it might be a reflection of my surroundings.

(I live in London, where nobody cares for baseball)

I'm in the segment of people who think baseball is extremely slow-paced and impossible to watch on TV, and yet I go to the occasional game. It's a social event more than anything else, and a way to be outdoors with friends and have a shared experience with (sometimes) thousands of other people.

I know some esport tournaments take place in sports arenas, but everything else has always been on niche TV channels and online, so the social factor is very much absent.

Well it's also a sport in it's infancy, not a more-than-a-century-old sport that's literally called "America's Pastime". Maybe when it's older than a couple of decades, the social factor of the sport will be more present. I was into eSports as a teenager, but it was very, very niche at the time, as you say. Nowadays, gaming is so commonplace with teens that a streamer like Ninja is able to reach a level of pop stardom.

I have friends who travel to the e-sports events in Sydney when it comes to town, or get together to watch DoTA TI (online, why would you rely on TV channels for this?) with their gamer friends. It's very much online, and very much a social event.

I'm not into e-sports enough to travel for it, I've considered it purely for the social aspect, but they do and have a blast.

I think Baseball is excellent to watch while in the background, e.g. in a restaurant. There is a lot of build-up when you can continue eating and during the few seconds of action you can watch the TV. And if you missed, there is enough time to show replays.

Sumo is similar to this.

since you don't know anyone into esports, it must not be popular

Online e-Sports are talked about on the internet because...wait for it... they are nearly entirely based on the Internet. I've been watching pro Starcraft matches for 10 years from Korea - it's an online game, the games are streamed online. Some things like fighting games or console games, yes you do hang in person at an arcade or a tournament.

You're looking in all the wrong places. Maybe start by comparing yourself to average esports fans/players. What's your age, who are your friends, what are their hobbies?

I used to be very into professional SC2. Stopped watching after realizing Protoss was always going to be a gimmicky race.

But yeah, I very rarely ever ran into others who watched professional SC2.

It's an interesting phenomenon with Protoss, certain players are highly strategic like sOs, herO, and Classic. Part of that is the tri-partite tech structure, you go from cyber core to 3 different techs, and scouting which 1 or 2 it is is HUGE for opponents, thus the hiding/masking. Compare that to Terran, who will not have a Starport without a Factory, or Zerg, who is by its nature the least gimmicky race IMO.

You might want to check out some Brood War, it has its gimmicky strats but IMO it's less strategic than SC2...there is more "counter-play" with a "countered" unit composition/strat, especially if your early-game micro with workers and low unit counts is top notch. I'll link a great match from recently, hope you enjoy :)

https://youtu.be/oPLSoFyVjes?t=5776

It is pretty big online, but I still think it didn't take off as people expected it to. I think that is probably a thing in general that it is hard to get critical mass for new big things. The Internet hasn't really come to that yet, maybe it never will. Its hard to have ownership of something when FAANG owns everything.

Most gamers don't use the term "esports" in the same way the press does. You likely know many people IRL that play or watch esports, but they just consider themselves "gamers".

A person that watches Ninja play Fortnite every once in a while while eating is participating in what the media considers "esports", but they're not going to go say it like that.

What's your age range? I've met a number of people interested in them in university and I haven't been going out of my way to do so.

I'm assuming your username indicates your age, 34. The average age of someone who watches e-sports in my experience is sub-25, i.e. generation Z.

There are a few coworkers at work that I talk to about e-sports, they're around 24-26 years old and grew up playing video games and not playing traditional sports.

This is just an inflammatory post. eSports is already here, twitch got bought for 1b, but it's no big deal/ not real since "tomac1985" doesn't know about it.

Sampling bias is an even funnier thing

I'm a mid-20s male e-sports fan and I promise you there are tons of us. Perhaps a big thing is lack of visibility - you might see traditional sports on TV in passing at bars, restaurants, etc, but that isn't the case for e-sports. It's a community that organizes by event and livestream schedules shared online with up to hundreds of thousands of people tuning in on twitch.

Having been through the recent birth e-sports and its growth since, to me it's remarkable the social aspect of regular sports. Especially here in Boston, big game days are a major IRL event for half the city. Jerseys walking around on the sidewalks, everyone talking about it, etc. The biggest e-sports events in contrast are in convention centers, hotel ballrooms, theaters, etc, where only if their lucky will there be any noticeable external sign.

I've met at least one person IRL who is way more into it than I am.

My circle of friends are all into e-sports in one way or another; or rather high level gaming to the point they follow pros to keep up

-One has competed in multiple State-level Smash Bros Tournaments -Another has competed in some of the big SF4-SF5 and DBZ Fighterz Tournaments (Going to CEO in Orlando) -I have several friends who have achieved Master and Grandmaster in Overwatch (top 1%/ Top 500) and have played public matches with pros

I personally have gone to TI8 (Dota 2 international tournament with $25 million prizepool, the largest of any esports tournament ever) and it was the most fun I had in any live event, including traditional sports.

I don't know what to say, the interest is there, you just have to go find it.

Unless you mean "Where are the competitors" and to that I say the pool is very small since you need a combination of the following:

-A lot of free time to play

-Access to tournaments / Local community of players

-Ability to sustain your hobby / lifestyle

The third point is what kills most up and comers. Most tournaments are top heavy and you end up losing cash for participating and not getting out of pools / qualifiers and some winners only get a few thousand dollars at most for winning. Most companies have different approaches to solving this issue with League offering some form of Base salary to players, Overwatch having a Franchise system similar to Traditional sports, while Fighting Games and Dota are very much grassroots with some official tournaments sponsored by the developers.

It doesn't matter if your friends are part of the audience or not.

The numbers are big enough:

https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/twitch-stats/

174,000 people attended the most recent Intel Extreme Masters tournament in Katowice over the entire 10 day event. Nearly 1.2 million people watched the CS:GO final on live streams. Esports are legit.

https://iem.imgix.net/season-13/katowice/wp-content/uploads/...

https://news.unikrn.com/article/esl-iem-katowice-most-attend...

https://escharts.com/tournaments/csgo/iem-katowice-2019

Here's what I think -- if you work in tech you probably know multiple people who enjoy watching video-games (i.e. twitch) and at least one who has watched at least on esport-level thing (be it speedrunning, a tournament, whatever). I think those people haven't brought it up to you because they are afraid of being judged.

I think it's just not quite over the hump where it's "cool" yet. Give it 5 years, and talking about videogames at work will be as normal as talking about basketball, at least in tech sectors.

I haven't met anyone who cares about watching sport. The only times I hear about sport are when the person is actually playing it.

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Philadelphia-Prof...

I've never met a person IRL that gives a shit about Nascar, Tennis, or Golf, and I'm 39. Doesn't mean there isn't serious interest. This isn't new. It also doesn't mean I haven't met someone who doesn't give a shit about those sports. Just that it never came up.

http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/page/instantawesome-leagueo...

There is massive interest world wide, and it's growing in the US. I've been several esports events, and they were filled with people, and it was a blast.

I'm not particularly into e-sports, with the exception of the man-vs-machine matches in Chess, Go, and now StarCraft II. Yet I did go to a few in-person livestreaming e-sport events at bars, mainly for big SC2 matches, and there were lots of people there. You just haven't seen it because you haven't sought it out, but there are e-sports Meetup groups for major cities that have thousands of members.

I was in the UK recently and my Youtube recommendations showed me a live FIFA 19 tournament hosted by Sky TV. 75% of the screen showed the gameplay, while the other 25% showed PIP camera angles focused on the players.

I checked it out for a few minutes; it wasn't as boring as I thought it'd be, but after ~10 mins there really was no need to watch further. The appeal of real sports isn't just the action on the field, it's also the noise of the crowd, the in-game drama (fouls, occasional fights, bad ref decisions) and the personalities of the players.

In e-sports, the last factor is completely non-existent. Each time I looked at the PIP screens, I saw two barely moving figures with hoods over their heads blankly staring at a screen. I know, they're playing video games, what did I expect?

Went ahead and closed the tab.

Strongly disagree, but depends on the game I guess. Dota 2 players' popularity is often heavily influenced by their personality, even if that personality is largely on display between matches, and even outside of tournaments if they stream. The tournaments (the big ones at least) have a live audience (which is sometimes piped in to the stream via a mic) and commentators who help contextualize the energy of the situation. When they cut to the players in the booths, they can often be seen celebrating and full of energy.

I think the real issue is you watched competitive FIFA, which (to my knowledge) doesn't have a very big community who cares about it deeply.

"E-sports is this funny thing where everyone outside of my bubble seems to talk about but I have yet to find one person in my bubble who actually gives a shit about it. Like seriously, where is the interest??"

The answer is "outside your bubble".

Go to twitch.tv and look for a game you like to play.

Bobby Fischer had a strict diet/exercise regimen. His goal was to be able to outlast other opponents in long (hours and hours) games, as they would tire and be the first o make a mistake

The elephant in the room is the huge amount of mental health issues encountered by competitive gamers (kind of like programmers). The lifestyle and pressures are not conducive to most people's idea of happiness and there is a huge rate of burnout. It's really sad when these young players start to see their first glimpse of success but drop out one or two months into their first professional engagement...

If it was easy, everyone would do it. Same goes for the top 0.1% of any profession: athletics, sales, management... Is there any profession where performing at the very top does not = high pressure not conducive to most people's idea of happiness? With high burnout?

The difference is that when you are a top 0.1% programmer, you can drop to top 20% and still have a solid career. When you drop to top 5% as an e-sports pro, you're suddenly just a kid playing games.

(if you are lucky to still be a kid when that happens)

I see your point, though I'd suggest to you that for those who make it to the 0.1%, dropping down to top 20% does not feel like a "solid career" anymore. It feels the same as a 20%er dropping down to 80%. Success is very relative in that way.

I don't know of any objective measurement to say if someone is a 80% vs 20%. In sports and games there is a score which is objective and teams use statistics to see how much someone contributes compared to peers in similar positions on other teams.

Does there need to be an objective measurement? Even in sports there is wide disagreement about which athletes are better than others, score and stats only gets you so far. The point is that if you are doing very well -- at anything -- your perspective on what is acceptable changes. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

That there are many different ways to measure something objectively doesn't destroy my point. While they might differ on the exact position, they tend to put the same people near the top, and the same middle tier people in the middle. Any that don't come at least somewhat close to each other will be wiped out as those who use the better measure destroy those who use the worse to select their players.

Actually, most programmers would still comfortably think they are the brightest guy in the world even if they fell right through to the bottom of the bucket. There are no formal competitions ruthlessly declaring winners and losers to put us into our place. If everybody around me is shipping faster, better and more reliable they are probably just "doing it wrong". Cutting corners, not respecting the art or something like that, any excuse will do.

We aren't discussing whether a given engineer would still view themselves as being smart. We're discussing how it feels to be at the very top of your field and then falling behind. Even if you are higher after the fall than you were before your rise, it will be very painful. I know more than one person who met with tragedy as a result of this. By their own standards of just a few years prior, they were doing amazingly well still. But by their new standards, inflated due to rapid success, they were doing terribly. One person took his life as a result.

In fairness, if you are a worldwide #1 player and drop to, let's just say, some ranking that is so irrelevant that you can't be placed on a new professional team then there are avenues for you that are outside of actual playing at a high level. Analyst, caster, commentator, streamer, coach, manager... etc. Same goes for programming. When you aren't a good programmer anymore, then it becomes time to turn into a manager. :)

I have to imagine amphetamine use/abuse is also super common in e-sports, which among other things, can have a severe impact on mental state. As far as I'm aware there's no anti-doping body for e-sports at this time.

Well caffeine for sure, and they don't even attempt to hide that. But I'm sure many take Adderall

It is indeed. There was a big incident recently when a player mentioned in an interview that he and all his teammates were using Adderall during the tournament.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gvy7b3/counter-st...

I watched a short documentary on the player "device" from the CS:GO team Astralis[0]. It's interesting even if you aren't into esports or Counter-Strike in general, I'd say. One of the relevant aspects of the story is that he was seriously affected by anxiety, and the team itself developed a reputation for crumbling in high-pressure situations. They made the pioneering decision (in esports) to hire a sports psychologist. They took on a physical training regiment that highlights healthy eating, working out, etc. just like any other athlete and since then they have become perhaps the most dominant team in Counter-Strike history, with 3 of their core members becoming the game's first millionaires (based on prize money)[1].

Esports have been building up to this inflection point, where now players are expected to care for themselves physically and mentally and act more professionally. Production value is high, Twitch is bigger than ever, and these tournaments sell out large stadiums. It's a super exciting time to get into watching esports if you haven't been into it yet.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goaP8yjeFzs 1. https://news.unikrn.com/article/astralis-dupreeh-xyp9x-csgo-...

Yoga specifically makes a lot of sense to me. Recently I've been getting back into playing CS:GO and it's shocking how much your physical state affects your gameplay. Tense up and you become much more erratic with your aim and movement. In games where the margins are so thin and twitchy reactions are required, anything that can calm you down and set your mind right are vital.

Not so sure about doing squats though..

>In games where the margins are so thin and twitchy reactions are required, anything that can calm you down and set your mind right are vital.

<music>Jose Cuervo you are a friend of mine...</music>

Drunk CS is the best

> Not so sure about doing squats though..

Sitting all day (and night) long wreaks havok in your body, especially hip area joints/ligaments. Squatting might not increase your perf but it sure will improve your health.

> Not so sure about doing squats though..

Why's that? Squats are one of the single most effective exercises you can do.

Right, for getting in good physical shape. It can't hurt - but in terms of direct impact to your gameplay, I think the meditation/calming exercises of yoga would be more beneficial

Squats are about as close to a single exercise working out the whole body as you can get, and massively helped me with muscular imbalances caused by sitting too much. Those tight muscles in your quads, back, chest, shoulders throw everything else out of whack.

It's no secret that exercise helps with mental focus and mental stamina. Top chess players, who you could call the original pro gamers, maintain fairly strict exercise regimes:

https://www.inc.com/betsy-mikel/1-thing-the-worlds-best-ches...

This got me thinking about whether people take this approach in analagous non-eSports. A quick google of Ronnie O'Sullivan shows he thinks healthy eating is more important then exercise to snooker, though he was possibly already the greatest player of all time before taking up a healthy lifestyle, so it's hard to judge.

I was thinking about this the other day after the Overwatch League Stage 1 final. That game went to 7, and I watched San Francisco fall apart right at the very end. At that point, they'd been playing for most of the day. I have to imagine stamina played a huge part in that match.

I am very very pleased to see gaming moving in this direction, albeit slowly. The amount of ads for say, Totinos or Mountain Dew / Red Bull that I see while watching Twitch or viewing gaming-related content is staggering.

Kind of like how there's tons of beer and hot wings commercials surrounding traditional sports? They're selling what the audience wants, not what the athletes eat.

I always found the grueling training regimes a race to the bottom.

Yes, the first one that introduces it has an edge and crushes everything for 3-4 years but then everyone else starts doing the same training so back to square one...with the difference that now you cannot head down to the bar every now and then as everyone and their grandmothers are working out and going to sleep at 10PM to have a chance winning a game.

I believe that the sportspeople should have gentlemen's agreements on the amount of training to put themselves through.

The NFL player's association negotiates such agreements [1, 2] unilaterally across all teams. Perhaps e-sports athletes should have a union that negotiates likewise.

[1] https://www.nflpa.com/active-players/off-season-rules

[2] https://www.ajc.com/sports/football/look-nfl-new-practice-ru...

Optic and Redbull partnered on personal training and nutrition way back in the days [0]. Glad to see it being more and more common, eSports orgs definitely have a responsibility with this, just like pro sports teams do.

[0] https://dotesports.com/call-of-duty/news/optic-gaming-underg...

Great article. I did one of the first non-endemic brand deals with a major esports team (Team Liquid) in 2015, with the explicit goal of showing that gamers are athletes. We setup private chefs for them, helped with training, etc. It was a really fulfilling partnership that I was sad to see discontinued after I left.

I'm wonder if we the same sort of stuff might arrive in the corporate world. If exercise improves intellectual performance significantly, couldn't your employer ask you to exercise during work hours?

Isn’t that a fairly common practice in Japan?

Employers often subsidize or provide gym memberships. Of course, they know that not only do healthy people make better workers (more productive, focused, competitive maybe?) but also healthy people take less sick days.

That's not exactly new and it has been a thing for over a decade already in South Korea.

"The top professionals now make six-figure salaries and earn even more with endorsements and prize money."

Same in this case, six-figure salaries were already being paid a long time ago. [0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100202002307/http://www.mymym....

I believe ultimately analog and esports will merge. Where big, strong athletes who also happen to be very good at games are the new celebrities of sports.

You look at the complexity and strategy shifts necessary in a game like DOTA and the NBA rules are boring in comparison.

But if you look at the physical capability of the NBA and the training it requires it makes esports players look softer than soft.

What I’m curious about is how AR will bind these, and how it will be well-spectated.

> makes esports players look softer than soft.

I'm not sure why this is... an opinion at all? They do different things. Nobody compares an NBA player to (for example) Ronnie O'Sullivan and says he's softer than soft - even if the difference is similar. Why be judgemental like that about eSports?

I think esports are awesome. The players just aren’t physically strong. And I think mainstream spectators will not completely let go of wanting to see people demonstrating what they can do not just physically but in complex gameplay strategy and tactics.

To your example, I don’t see snooker becoming some major thing, but I do think some kind of hybrid virtual / physics MOBA could be a major sport for a long time.

One of the most poignant discussions of meditations I've ever watched was framed in the context of a video about Smash Ultimate: "Keeping a Good Mentality" by BananaBoySSB [1].

Playing video games with other people has actually taught me a lot about how I should approach life.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c1bZxD6QJE

Anecdotally, I've heard many eSports players and game streamers talk about how working out and staying healthy has become a hobby for them because when they play so much of a game as job, they don't want to spend their free time doing it too. Sitting for that long is also unhealthy so making a hobby of working out is quite natural for them.

Despite all the "type A" obsessions with it (I was an ultrarunner for example), physical fitness is such a "little goes a long way" activity.

A tiny sliver of overall time dedicated to a professional e-sports routine - possibly as low as 2 hours a week - in order to receive most of the benefits. It would certainly be worth it.

I thought chess players have been doing physical fitness training since the '70s.

If so, I suspect that a lot of eSports players have been doing the same for a long time without making the newspaper.

Bypass paywall:https://lm.facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.nytimes.com/2019...

This story is at least 10 years late. E-Sports has been like this for a very long time.

E-Sport athletes have been training physically for a while now. Not sure why the nytimes is trying to play it off like it is a recent phenomenon.

but what about pizza.gg? We need to save esports! /s

People imagine esports as like, a sedentary lifestyle thing. Seems pretty intuitive.

But if you’re in high school and you get bad grades, for some reason, you work out a lot, or you’re taller, and for some reason, you play sports. And now, for some reason, you play eSports.

eSports competitors are jocks, not nerds. It wasn’t ever about using yoga to improve performance.

The public just doesn’t get the dynamics of performance arts and how or why people get into them in 2019, and how that has changed since the 80s. But I think there’s a pretty good book about it and I’ll find it again soon.

I have no idea what you're trying to say.

My guess is he's trying to say plenty high skilled gamers are fit or even muscular. If you're in good physical shape that will show in your performance because especially first person shooters require a lot of twitch aim and good reactions as well as mental toughness, clarity, ability to handle pressure, etc.

That there isn’t any evidence that yoga or whatever improves your eSports performance. Evidence in the sense of randomized control trials. It would be really hard to design that experiment anyway, so pretty much expect that evidence to never really appear.

So just take the things that this article are saying about training and esports and fitness or whatever as though they are true, and now delete them. What is left?

The clickbait that (1) the public perceives being into eSports as also being into computers, so (2) isn’t it surprising that people into computers are also into fitness?

Why I’m saying is the public perception is wrong. ESports is not for people into computers. It’s for people who are into regular sports, which the public would not find surprising at all that people into regular sports are into fitness.

From a game design point of view I think it’s really fascinating. Starcraft 2, like one commenter said, is for “nerds” but that game is dead. eSports games, the really huge PvP games, they don’t look like SC2 at all anymore. So what’s really eSports? I’d argue not SC2. It was always about designing things that appeal to people who would be into regular sports.

My hypothesis WHY people into sports are also into eSports: because they’re both things that 13-18 year olds get into, oftentimes, when their nerdier endeavors (like getting good grades in school, which is pretty much impossible to do while being a competitive eSports athlete) don’t pan out or aren’t as attractive.

The public isn’t really aware of the similarities between sports and eSports in terms of what you need, going into them, to be competitive. The public sees that being into computers involves a lot of sitting, so people who do that must wind up fat. Even doctors think that! But we don’t observe many eSports athletes who are lardasses, so how to explain that? This is my explanation: eSports are actually a jock thing to do!

Competitiveness is the difference, not whether you're into the Philadelphia Eagles or the Periodic Table. Plenty of both, and it still skews towards the nerdier side of the spectrum (though its very game dependent - CoD players are mostly dudebros, Starcraft players are usually nerds).

For the professional level, performance matters, and good physical health gives better performance on measure (wide amount of exceptions of course). Thats the point about Yoga.

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