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Rencontre avec l’Innovation Spotter Docteur Brett Abarbanel

The SPOT : faites connaissance avec nos intervenants !
Brett Abarbanel, Directeur de la recherche à l’International Gaming Institute de l’Université du Nevada (Las Vegas), a accordé un entretien à iSportconnect, dans lequel il partage sa vision des différents types d’eSport et de la place du sport traditionnel dans cet univers. Il donne aussi son avis sur la grande question : comment définir le sport ?

Jay Stuart
In Conversation:

Traditional Sports and eSports Have Business in Common

The opportunities for traditional sports to plug into the explosive growth of eSports are plentiful and the connections might not be through eSports extensions of their own sports.

Sports games based on traditional sports, such as FIFA or Madden NFL or NBA 2K, are already hugely successful. In 2018, the NBA is launching the NBA 2K League in a joint venture with Take Two Interactive, the publisher of the basketball-based game. It will be a professional eSports league featuring the best 2K players in the world.

However, the idea that traditional sports might need to get in on the eSports boom via games based on their own sports like the NBA venture is not necessarily the way the convergence is going to happen, according to Doctor Brett Abarbanel. The Director of Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas International Gaming Institute will be a featured speaker at The SPOT in Lausanne from 15 to 16 May.

“There is definitely space for traditional sports to crossover with eSports,” she said. “It won’t necessarily be with games about traditional sports. People in the sports business will want to diversify into a new area, just as in any other business when an exciting new area opens up. There are lots of ways to do so.”

To help set the stage for the discussion at The SPOT, she defines several different genres within the broad category of eSports, a bit like different sports in themselves.

Other than sports-based games like the ones mentioned above, there are:

  • MOBA (Multi-Player Online Battle Arenas) – These are games like Riot Games’ League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2, in which teams of players match strategies with the aim of destroying or capturing a goal such as the opposing team’s citadel.
  • FPS (First-Person Shooter) – Games such as Valve’s Counter Strike: Global Offensive are the classic contests in which teams of players do battle by shooting each other in classic video game fashion.
  • Real-Time Strategy – Blizzard’s Starcraft is an example of this sort of game, which is like a MOBA game only for singles players facing off one versus one.
  • Fighter – Single-person combat games such as Streetfighter from Capcom or Smash, usually for consoles like Xbox or PlayStation.

Doctor Abarbanel pointed out that we are already seeing investment in teams in League of Legends by professional athletes like NBA players past and present, and Robert Kraft, the owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots, is partnering the COO of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, Jeff Wilpon, in a team in Blizzard Entertainment’s Overwatch League.

She said one of the big question marks over the whole eSports area is whether the activity can or should be defined as sports. There are lots of issues around that. How about this one? eSports players would then be defined as athletes and to compete in the United States, for example, they would need to qualify for athlete visas.

Doctor Abarbanel, who has been researching the convergence of gaming and gambling or the past 10 years and is also Head of Social and Recreational Gambling at the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, will be taking part in the panel on What’s Next in eSports? at The SPOT. 

 

www.thespot2018.org

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