“If you liked what you heard at NSL, then follow these accounts to get involved.” Prof @andymiah
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Esports
Global Sports Week took place last week, led out of Paris, France. I gave a Masterclass on Esports and, while so much was online, a huge amount of activity tool place. Here’s a bit about how it felt.
I was really honoured to take part in the inaugural esports education programme hosted by LDNUTD, a fantastic esports team in London. Reaching out to young esports players in London, the sessions covered all aspects of becoming an esports professional. I was really pleased to speak to school kids and beyond about how to think through developing a public speaking presence in the esports world. Here’s a bit of what we covered.
Earlier this month, the British Esports Association produced the Esports Education Summit, in partnership with Pearson Education. I was delighted to speak in a session with Dr Maria Stukoff, as host.
We covered career paths in esports, from how STEM subjects are really benefitting from the esports pathway to the creative work involved in designing increasingly immersive experiences in esports.
Great to see this write up from our AI for Good event last week. An excellent summary of what we covered.
It was an absolute pleasure to be involved with an event this week run by the Tokyo 2020 Director of International Communications Tatsuo Ogura, who took time out of his role to produce an independent, charity liveathon about all things digital and sport. For 24hours speakers from all over the world covered a range of topics in an event he wants to become the SXSW of Japan.
My session takes you through the last 20 years of digital innovation, which leads up to how esports are changing the conversation about creativity, culture, and content. You can watch it back here
This week, I took part in an event led by the United Nations agency ITU and the Global Esports Federation, examining points of intersection between artificial intelligence and esports. Other panelists included Ursula Romero, Chris Overholt, Chong Geng Ng, Bryn Balcombe, and our host was the amazing LJ Rich. We covered a wide range of subjects from how esports integration with AI is driving ground breaking research and the possibility that AI may just save the world from a range of catastrophic risks.
Currently working on a full article to examine these areas, so stay tuned! Meanwhile, here’s the recording from yesterday.
Another really fun event this week was led by Tonic Digital and I covered the last three months and what’s happened to the sports world in coming to terms with lockdown. So many traditional sports have found a digital alternative that it’s made some major steps into imagining a new future for them. Whether this will lead to long term planning for alternative experiences, or whether the end of lockdown will see things snap back into business as usual is anybody’s guess, but there is a new conversation taking place between sports and esports right now that’s really exciting.
I was really pleased to take part in an event produced by The Landing in Manchester this week. Focused on the gaming industries, I had a conversation with the amazing Julia Cwierz on where esports is going and what we need to think about to take it somewhere that is safe, exciting, and innovative.
The Landing is a remarkable community based in Media City and I’m really pleased that the University of Salford works with them on so many areas.
We talked about some really crucial issues in the world of esports, but the key one for me is the relationship between the wider culture of gaming and how it relates to competition. If we don’t conceptualise that well, we can easily lose sight of what’s at stake and what’s important when thinking about the direction of travel for esports.
Very excited to publish this article for the Design Exchange, bringing together some of my thoughts about esports and architecture. Some wider work developing around this theme. Check out the article here
On 28th Feb, my colleagues and I at the University of Salford produced an event called ‘Esports for All’, which brought together colleagues from all over the university to examine how esports can expand into a space where everyone feels welcome.
It was a really fantastic afternoon, with friends from the British Esports Association, British Cycling, and NUEL. We covered so much ground, but most interesting for me was how we brought together people from very different perspectives to talk about the continual expansion of this remarkable world of esports.
It was really great to speak at Pro Manchester’s Future of Sport event, alongside my colleague Dr Maria Stukoff. We got into a lot of stuff, but most fun was talking about virtual reality and sports.
I think a lot of people wonder whether VR will go the same way as 3D, but it’s worth remembering that VR is still a developmental technology. Design glitches are getting fixed, new platforms are emerging to make a more comfortable experience and a lot of the people working within this space are really excited by the capacity to make the world more accessible by creating VR experiences of it. I know people who are creating VR interactives of the natural world, which are amazing. There’s a great everest video which gets into the waste left by climbers and how it gets cleaned up.
There’s so much around using VR for good and the health benefits of its integration with sports are vast. So, it may be a bumpy ride, but I think it’s likely that VR - or XR experiences - has reached a critical point in its history where it’s going to become a bigger part of everything we do.
Just back from the Lausanne YOG and what a whirlwind it has been. Most noticeable was the presence of esports, which included a dedicated zone in a building, as part of the cultural programme, along with some tournaments, conferences, a retro-gaming exhibition, and big stage demos.
What was particularly compelling about the presence of esports was the promotion of Swiss Made Games - nurturing the game developer community and putting them in closer contact with players. I had the chance to speak to a young player, Neo, who was a fantastic ambassador for the Swiss Esports Federation.
Very grateful to those walked me through the content.
Just before the summer, I was in Monaco giving a talk about how esports can contribute to peace processes. The event brought together many world leading athletes who have broken records for many years and it was great to have a chance to talk about the potential of esports for social good.
This will be worked up into a longer paper, but I’m passionate about the idea that esports can be a pipeline for all kinds of valuable social functions, from building greater innovation, to developing infrastructure, creativity, and community. These elements draw on the idea that digital rights are becoming a more crucial part of our world.
I recently interview for Ubeat, a Spanish esports OTT platform, which featured a film on the relationship between sports and esports. I spoke about the growing range of immersive experiences that are developing around the esports world and how these are beginning to approximate the kinds of things we do in sports.
We can draw a long line of interest in such forms of gaming from Dance Revolution to Nintendo Wii and to Pokemon Go. Bringing physical activity closer to the gaming space is one of my key areas of focus for the next couple of years and it’s such a compelling proposition, as we move into a world that is increasingly anxious about sedentary lifestyles and excessive mobile phone usage,
Here’s the video! And thanks to Emma, who set up the opportunity and produced the content, and to David and the team at Salford University for shooting the film for me during our Virtual Reality Fitness Marathon.
Check out our wider esports work over at Esports Science Insights.
Last week, we ran a Virtual Reality Fitness Marathon as part of our Creative Entrepreneurs day at the University of Salford, which focused on esports. It was a day for bringing people together across a range of disciplines within the university, from health, business, art, science, and digital, to explore the synergy between gaming and physical activity.
Here’s a wider piece on the topic I wrote recently.
I am very proud to be joining the board of the British Esports Association this year, along with my colleague at Salford, Dr Maria Stukoff..
I’ve been in dialogue with BEA since 2016, when I met Chester King during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. He was there producing what must surely be the first esports event to take place during the Olympic Games, and was suitably embedded within British House.
Since then, we’ve met all over the world to talk about the development of esports and BEA is really leading the world in terms of its values, concern about the importance of esports for social and personal development and I’m really looking forward to working more closely with them
Delighted to have another article published in The Conversation, focused on esports and the prospects of virtual reality. Take a peek here
I am very excited to share our new Esports research platform, which takes research findings from the academic literature and digests them into accessible insights for the industry. We’re now making informal inquiries to colleagues around the world to work as sub-editors for disciplines, so if this is something you’d like to do, then please drop me a line.
In Barcelona, I gave an opening keynote on Emerging Realities in Esports, for the Esports Regulatory Congress. Within the talk, I spoke about how new kinds of immersive realities are emerging that are changing how we define and play esports. Here’s a nice example…
The programme of work in esports that we are growing at Salford University is really exciting and the students are so switched on to what’s changing around our media culture. It’s a really exciting time to be working within this space, especially given the wide ranging of policy issues it engages where I think we can make a contribution.