According to people who keep track of video-game history, games such as checkers and chess were played on research computers in the late 1950s.
At Sydney University in the ’60s, we could play chess on Siliac, the science faculty computer, which I knew intimately because it filled a room and I once walked around inside it.
It seems like only yesterday when, in 1978, my computer-game choices were limited to either Space Invaders or Pong on the Atari or, for real excitement, Asteroids on the B.C. Ferries’ full-size game consoles.
Then, like most adults, I drifted away from video games because the annoyingly serious business of getting on with life took precedence.
But video gaming evolved while I was away. Like me, you also might have been otherwise preoccupied during the intervening 40 or so years during which video gaming became mainstream entertainment and, at the same time, big business.
Video gaming now has its own serious culture, vocabulary and a fan base that blankets the planet.
As a parent, you might wish that your offspring would spend more time “AFK” (away from the keyboard). As a simple-minded adult you don’t realize that he or she is firing every cortical synapse available chasing a Buff, an in-game event that increases a player’s utility.
And so on.
Now, in 2019 and in countries we have only vaguely heard about, League of Legends (abbreviated LoL) which hit the market in 2009, is the multiplayer online battle-arena video game developed by an American developer and E-sports tournament organizer, Riot Games, Inc.
LoL quickly dominated the market and by July 2012 was the most played PC game in North America, Europe, Asia and parts of the subcontinent in terms of the number of hours played. By January 2014, more than 67 million people played League of Legends per month and 27 million per day, according to Forbes magazine in 2014.
But wait a minute. “E-sports”?
Yep, the League of Legends World Championship Finals in 2018, the eighth such world finals, featured Team Fnatic facing off against Team Invictus with a prize pool of more than $6 million. The year 2018 had the largest “sports” prize pool of any League of Legends tournament.
Not just some kids playing Minecraft in somebody’s basement.
Not quite. Fnatics professional team gamers, average age 24, have won thousands of tournaments and inspired a community of tens of millions of fans — all while the rest of us were not paying attention.
The LoL finals had 99.6 million on-the-edge-of-the-seat viewers, an impressive increase of almost 20 million viewers with peak-time viewing of 44 million — more than the Super Bowl.
The global E-sports market generated $325 million US in revenue in 2015 and was expected to make $493 million in 2016.
By this year, it is estimated that 427 million people worldwide will be watching some form of E-sports.
Many competitions, such as the League of Legends World Championship, are played by sponsored teams and are structured similarly to American professional sports events, with salaried players and regular-season and playoff series.
The athletic legitimacy of E-sports remains in question, but E-sports have been featured alongside traditional sports in multinational events, and even the International Olympic Committee has explored incorporating them into future Olympic events.
In a study of 7,000 video gamers, about 12 per cent were classified as being addicted to video games, but the likelihood of developing video-game addiction, the experts tell us, depends on the curiosity of the player, the inclusion of a role-playing element, feeling obligated to the team members, a sense of belonging to an online gaming community and rewards for playing.
Overall, the mainstream understanding of gaming has become less curmudgeonly in recent years, although many parents still see games as a negative influence on their children and think they need to be limited.
Not necessarily so, according to an article published in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which suggests that we might be fundamentally mistaken in our thinking about how video games affect behaviour.
Game-based learning, we are told, nurtures meta-cognitive skills (the ability to think about your own thinking) and in an exponentially technological job market, meta-cognitive skills are becoming more desirable — and lucrative.
It’s all a big step up from mind-numbing Space Invaders and Pong, but who knows, can 99.6 million avid League of Legends fans be wrong?
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
