New Scientist Live - October

Since my early undergrad days, I have studied the history of human evolution, fixated on how the new genetics would transform who we are and how we see ourselves.

Alongside vast amounts of technological entanglement, games and game playing remain a consistent feature of the human condition.

In recent years, my focus has turned to esports, as the most advanced example of this characteristic and the pursuit of game playing is one of those features of being human that we would not wish to turn over to artificial intelligence.

By working with the British Esports Federation and the Global Esports Federation, while maintaining a close involvement with the International Olympic Committee – IOC and the many organizations who work hard to ensure that the youth of the world remains served by these mega-events, I've seen just how much there is to gain by ensuring that we continue to be a species who plays games.

Join me on the Futures Stage at New Scientist Events this year to discover 'How gaming changed the world"

https://live.newscientist.com/nsl-london-2025-talks-programme/how-gaming-changed-the-world?&sortby=customfield_2734%20asc%2Ccustomfield_2730%20asc&filters.stream=engage-stage-1%2Cfuture-8%2Cmind-and-body-1%2Cour-planet-1%2Cuniverse-9&searchgroup=libraryentry-nsl-london-2025-talks-programme

Global Esports Summit (London)

I was delighted to be the host of the Global Esports Summit, which took place again this year in London.

You can take a look at all the exciting sessions that took place.

Discover more on esports here.

Host City 2022 Glasgow

Some thoughts ahead of #HostCity2022 next week.

"COVID has brought about a step change in audience expectations, which must be seen in the context of a longer history of making our live and remote experiences increasingly immersive, flexible, and technologically enabled. The Web2 era nurtured this desire and COVID embedded the expectation, readying us for web3.

For sure, the error we make is concluding that this is a move away from the importance of physical space as a crucial component of a compelling experience, but what's changing is the capacity to level up the physical world with immersive integrations which have been prototyped during COVID. Audiences expect to be more active and the data driven event economy finds a crucial extension through volumetric and locative audience data.

The future of the elite event experience is phygital - e.g watching digital content layered over a physical swimming pool and seeing the projection of Olympic swimmers live into the space, as it happens, or the transition of triathlons into arena based virtual worlds, or running in your gym alongside athletes as they compete. These are our clues which shed light onto the future and it's as big a shift as was the design of the amphitheatre in ancient Greece.

In this context, rights holders need to massively rethink what they do and what they are in relation to their audience. Simply staging something isn't enough anymore. The Olympic Channel is a great example of how institutions are experimenting to find their feet in a world where the media proposition around events is vastly different. The MVP in this future is to wrangle the innovation community that can remake events for a vastly different set of audience expectations."

Join us for Host City in Glasgow next week!

The ethics of virtual sports

I've really fallen behind on updating my website, so I'm going to blitz through the last 3 months!

Way back in March, I gave a talk for the doctoral school of the University of Lausanne about ethics and xr sports. It was a great way to think through some new ideas and you can find the entire session here.

Will Artificial Intelligence Kill the Drama in Sports?

A talk for the Global Alliance for Responsible AI

Taiwan Olympic Academy Conference

I am really delighted to be virtually in Taiwan this week, speaking at their National Olympic Academy about the relationship between ‘Sport, Health and the Environment. I get into everything from nanotechnology to virtual reality to discuss how an appreciation for planetary health must guide everything we do and the sense we make of human actions in a fragile and vulnerable world. I’m really pleased to make this available more widely on YouTube.

Understanding Sport Organizations

When I first started out as a PhD student, a new Professor came into my school and secured me a bursary and was my second supervisor. His name was Professor Trevor Slack and he was a real legend in sports management. He didn’t really get philosophy, but he did understand the value and currency of research and his approach stuck with me throughout my career.

This month, I am really pleased to take part in the publication of the third edition of his significant textbook called ‘Understanding Sport Organizations: Applications for Sport Managers’, published by Human Kinetics.

My chapter focuses on “Technology” and covers a raft of issues, from the innovation chain to esports.

Sadly, Trevor never lived to see this publication, but he certainly had a huge influence on my career and I’m delighted to be a part of this book. It’s used on sport management courses all over the world and certainly takes me back to the early days of my career.

Esports Business Mixer

On 10th March, my colleague Dr Maria Stukoff pulled together an amazing esports business mixer event in Manchester, amidst all kinds of cancellations due to coronavirus. It was fantastic to see players, managers, owners, and producers come together to talk about where esports is going and to think about how universities can contribute.

Our Esports Science Insights platform seeks to bring knowledge from academic research to industry pros to help figure out what we know and what we still don’t know about this rapidly expanding world.

Virtual Reality and Esports

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.