By Kotie Geldenhuys; Photos courtesy of Pexels and Flickr
The sports landscape has been transformed by the rise of e-Sports, with the Internet enabling global online competition between video game players. Video game tournaments, or e-Sports, have seen rapid growth in recent years, attracting millions of viewers and large financial investments. However, like traditional sports, the surge in popularity and money has opened the door to potential corruption and integrity issues.
Despite various definitions from casual observers, industry professionals and scholars about what e-Sports is, most agree that e-Sports are organised and competitive and involve video gaming. These three elements are key to understanding e-Sports (Windholz, 2020). E-sports originated in the 1970s and 1980s with informal video game competitions in arcades and public spaces. The first prominent event took place in 1972 at Stanford University, where students played Spacewar! for a subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. By the 1990s, organised leagues and online tournaments emerged as video games grew in popularity. The expansion of high-speed internet has since driven e-Sports’s rapid growth, turning it into a multi-billion dollar industry with a global fanbase and participants (Vanas, nd).
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[This is only an extract of an article that is published in Servamus: November 2024. This article is available for purchase.]