“The Sporting Image” is the summer 2024 edition of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture.
Cutscenes explores—and blurs—the intersection of cinema and video games.
Illustration by Ivy Johnson.
Best of all things is water; but gold, like a gleaming fire by night, outshines all pride of wealth beside. But, my heart, would you chant the glory of games, look never beyond the sun by day for any star shining brighter through the deserted air, nor any contest than Olympia greater to sing.
—Pindar, “Olympian 1,” translated by William Lattimore
In Wembley Arena, among a crowd of 8,000, I watch a gunman pinging off shots at an assailant. The game is Counter-Strike 2 (2023), a five-versus-five shooter in which one team, playing terrorists, try to plant a bomb, while the other, playing counter-terrorists, have to defuse it. Adjacent to the live gameplay on the enormous screen, a gallery of webcam feeds displays the face of the real individual controlling the virtual avatar, Justinas “jL” Lekavičius, alongside those of his teammates and rivals. Below the screen, all ten competitors sit at their computers, arranged in a straight line on the front edge of the venue’s stage. The round will conclude when all players from either team are eliminated, or when the bomb goes off.
jL is on his own against three competitors: the bomb has been planted, triggering red lasers that pulsate throughout the arena in time with a countdown to the moment of detonation. jL needs to both kill his remaining opponents and reach the bomb site in time to prevent the explosion, and he’s critically low on health. His crosshairs twitch as he tries to chase a fast-moving combatant, who is ducking behind cover to avoid being hit. In a display of balletic movement and razor-sharp accuracy, jL pops his crosshairs up and over a ledge, taking out his opponent with a flawlessly timed headshot. By strafing around a crate to land another shot to the head, he gets the second. But the last remaining opponent, Danil “donk” Kryshkovets, pops him at point-blank range, draining his final health points and bringing the round to an end. The bomb goes off, the arena flashes cherry red, and ten palpably hot jets of flame erupt from the stage’s perimeter, alarmingly close to both the competitors and their industrially liquid-cooled computer stacks.
The crowd screams. It is not clear which they appreciate more: the valiance of the players’ heroics or the spectacle of the staging. After a round rife with tension, donk grins and high-fives the team coach standing behind him, shuffling in his seat in a manner that suggests less elation than relief. While the players prepare to face each other again, a camera on a crane scans the arena for crowd shots, zeroing in on someone waving a sign that reads: “MET ON CS:GO, MARRIED IN REAL LIFE.” The crowd cheers. The screen cuts to a dancing adult man dressed as Squidward from SpongeBob SquarePants. The applause grows louder. I just watched ten young men shoot at each other’s avatars in an incredibly violent video game, five of them roleplaying as terrorists, but the event itself feels inexplicably wholesome. Swept up in the excitement of the crowd and the pyrotechnics, I attend a similar event one week later in a different venue, where I watch groups of young men play cage soccer by piloting flying cars.
Counter-Strike 2 2024 Spring Final. Photograph by the author.
Competitive game-playing has been around for almost as long as video games themselves, even if the term “esports”—video games played competitively, in organized events, for spectators—is considerably newer. In October 1972, six weeks before the installation of the first Pong (1972) machine in a bar in California, journalist and entrepreneur Stewart Brand organized the first video-game tournament, gathering 24 competitors at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to play Spacewar! (1962), a formative two-dimensional space-combat game developed at MIT. The tournament was organized alongside a feature Brand was writing for Rolling Stone about computing’s potential to “unleash creativity and change society,” as Chris Baker describes it in his 2016 article on the event. In the feature, which included photography by Annie Liebowitz, Brand was positioned as a “sports reporter,” describing ”magnificent men with their flying machines” who are “locked in life-or-death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens.” While much of what Brand describes (“four intense hours, much frenzy and skilled concerted action, a 15-ring circus in ten different directions”) is comparable to contemporary esports events, the scale has changed. The current record prize pool for an esports tournament is $40 million; the winner of Brand’s competition received a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.
When arcade games and the first home consoles appeared in the late 1970s and early ’80s, players competed locally, watching each other set and break records in arcades like Chinatown Fair in New York or Twin Galaxies in Ottumwa, Iowa. In 1978, Taito introduced Space Invaders, one of the first games to be able to permanently record players’ high scores, and in 1980, 10,000 players competed in the title’s first championship. Other publishers, like Sega and Nintendo, began to hold their own contests, attracting ever-growing numbers of entrants. A 1984 Track & Field (1983) tournament organized by Konami and Centuri drew more than a million players. Described as “the coin-op event of the year” in a contemporaneous Play Meter article, the tournament was dispersed across numerous convenience stores and arcades, “providing the broad-based exposure and accessibility of the event on a scale never before achieved in the industry.” These early tournaments displayed the popularity of the format among hardcore players while some pioneering broadcasters saw the potential to attract non-playing spectators: Starcade, a television game show focused on high-score chasing, had a 100-plus-episode-run on WTBS between 1981 and 1984.
In the 1990s, competitive arcade play focused more on fighting games like Street Fighter II (1991), Mortal Kombat (1992), and Tekken (1994), fostering committed communities of players. One of the most prominent fighting competitions, the Evolution Championship Series (EVO), began in 1996 as a humble 40-entrant Street Fighter tournament held in Sunnyvale, California. The arrival of affordable home computers in the same period, offering internet access and local area network (LAN) connections, transformed the state of competitive video-game play. To face off in fast-moving first-person shooters like Quake (1996), Unreal Tournament (1999), or Counter-Strike (1999), or to join forces for cerebral real-time strategy games like Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994) or StarCraft (1998), players towed keyboards, mice, and CRT monitors to link their PCs for regional LAN tournaments, or battled online via campus internet servers with faster connections. In Meritt K’s LAN Party, a photographic survey of pre-internet multiplayer gaming, a text by Gregory Charvat describes a ’90s home LAN experience, explaining some of the challenges of turning gaming into a spectator sport. “The network was rigged up with WW2 surplus coax cable.” Charvat writes. “We needed long lengths of coax to cover the entire house, which was filled with desktop PCs and CRT monitors, 486 and Pentium computers of different types. We spent quite literally half to three-quarters of the time just setting up and keeping the network alive.”
A spread from LAN Party (Merritt K, 2024).
The best players in such competitions often joined self-organized amateur teams, known as “clans,” the first step on a path toward professionalization. In Germany, in 2000, Ralf Reichert founded the online Electronic Sports League (ESL), a rebranding of the more informal and localized German Clan League (DeCL) that signaled a desire to commercialize (and globalize) the competition structure. In the United States, Angel Munoz founded the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL). Their first event, held in Dallas, Texas, in 1997, attracted 300 attendees and awarded a $3,500 first prize, and by 2005, the tournament was being held at ten locations around the world, offering a total prize pot of $1 million. The tournament’s biggest taker, Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel, made $150,000 alone for winning the Painkiller (2004) competition, and in him, esports found its first certified superstar, a player who was not only incredibly skillful but also media- and business-savvy. He sold his own line of mousepads, secured brand deals to supplement his tournament takings, and even landed a feature on CBC’s 60 Minutes, a level of exposure no pro gamer had previously achieved.
At the same time, consumer internet connections sped up, increasing the possibilities for competition. In Raising the Stakes, an academic study of professional gameplay, T. L. Taylor notes that “while local area network games” are “a powerful tool in building an esports community,” it is the internet that “makes scaling niche activities possible.” She explains that “even though you may be one of only a handful of players in your town who [are] interested in competitive gaming, by being able to go online and connect—and compete—against others, a nascent esports community is able to form.” Clans then became “franchises,” professional organizations that gave players salaries, covered tournament entry fees and travel, and provided coaches, training, and living arrangements in return for cuts of players’ winnings. Computing hardware brands and accessory-makers started sponsoring franchises and tournaments, and teams turned logo-clad players into personalities. Where competitions used to be amateur and localized, now there was a professional, commercially viable spectator circuit spanning North America, Europe, and beyond.
Counter-Strike 2 2024 Spring Final. Photograph by the author.
At the turn of the millennium, Korea invested heavily in video games, promoting gaming both as a sport and pastime. Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism Park Jie-won coined the term “esports” at the inaugural meeting of the Korea e-Sports Association (KeSPA). The organization was founded to make Korea a world leader in the realm of “electronic sports” by organizing national competitions and fostering talented players, but also “advocating for the recognition of e-sports as a legitimate sport.” Accordingly, the World Cyber Games (WCG) was inaugurated in Seoul in 2001, a large-scale, government-sponsored event fashioned as “the Olympics of gaming,” in which 30,000 spectators gathered to watch 400 players from 24 countries compete. In 2003, the first Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC) was held in Poitiers, France. China launched its ProGamer League (PGL) in 2007.
That same year, the short-lived Championship Gaming Series (CGS) was established and broadcast by the US cable television provider DirecTV; the first season reportedly drew in 50 million viewers.1 This was the first notable instance of esports as a televised spectator sport and an indicator, as commentator Paul Chaloner puts it in his memoir, This Is Esports (And How to Spell It), that esports had “hit prime time.” Judging from some archived clips, the format doesn’t seem remarkably different from what I witnessed live; the crowds watch the gameplay projected on large displays, accompanied by grandstanding commentary, confetti, and ostentatious light shows. But the CGS broadcasts lacked an insider's understanding of esports, and coverage was designed to appeal to wider audiences. The organizers picked the games with the best graphics rather than those necessarily favored by competitors, and, due to the long, unpredictable duration of some matches, would sometimes truncate their coverage before the match’s end. Chaloner, who worked for the CGS, remembers the event as “a little cheesy,” citing an instance in which “players are made to pose in two lines backstage while a presenter shouts that they’ve made it out of ‘Larry’s basement’ and into the spotlight.” Although it was canceled in 2008, the CGS demonstrated that there was a significant audience awaiting an effective business model.
In 2000, there were ten tournaments operating globally, with a collective prize pot of around $300,000. By 2012, there were almost 700, handing out over $10 million.2 And Chaloner estimates that by 2018, the number of paying tournaments operating was almost 3,500, bolstered by increasing sponsorship possibilities and by newfound support from game publishers who were finally starting to see the value of esports. While competitive shooters, strategy games, trading-card games, and sports titles boomed, the fighting-game community has stayed comparatively small-scale, perhaps due to its roots in local offline meetups and the late introduction of online gameplay modes, plus the insular, boisterous, sometimes toxic, player base. Esports audiences exploded with the 2005 arrival of YouTube, where “Let’s Plays” made a market out of watching others play games, and the 2011 founding of Twitch, which popularized live-streamed tournaments, gave players platforms to promote themselves, and fostered chatbox conversation and other community interaction. In 2013, Twitch viewers reportedly watched twelve billion minutes of video on the service, with multiplayer online battle games like League of Legends (2009) and Defense of the Ancients (2003) being the most popular broadcast subjects. Based on the global popularity of both these games and, a few years later, the boom in youth-targeting “battle royale” games like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Fortnite (both 2017), esports could no longer be deemed a niche proposition.
In 2020, global esports revenues were estimated to be $1 billion, with global audiences of around 500 million, though current reports suggest that, after accelerated expansion driven primarily by sponsorships, the industry may now be starting to decline. As Kellen Brown wrote last year in the New York Times, “partnerships to broadcast esports tournaments on sites like YouTube and Twitch have dissipated, sponsors are slashing their advertising budgets, and owners are operating teams at a loss while paying huge salaries to e-sports players.” In the face of disappearing revenue sources and declining market confidence, the esports industry has taken investment from Saudi Arabia to drive current growth; a Grant Liberty analysis defines the nation’s lavish spending on athletics as “sportswashing,” a means to distract from wrongdoing or unethical conduct. As Alexander Lee writes in Digiday, for “beleaguered esports companies, the choice is not whether or not to take Saudi Arabian money, but increasingly whether to take Saudi Arabian money or stop existing entirely.” Ralf Reichert, who founded the ESL in Germany two decades ago, is now in charge of the Esports World Cup, a new Saudi government–funded tournament that took place this summer in Riyadh. And as I write, it was announced that the first Olympic Esports Games will be held in Saudi Arabia next year.
Rocket League 2024 Championship Series - Major 2. Photography by the author.
Both competitions I attended to try to understand the ascent of esports—the Counter-Strike 2 2024 Spring Final, and the Rocket League 2024 Championship Series - Major 2—were organized by BLAST, a Danish tournament organizer that is frequently contracted by publishers to produce tournaments for games. In 2020, after facing criticism, BLAST ended a planned partnership with Saudi city development Neom, and in 2024, Epic Games renewed their existing contract with BLAST for Rocket League tournaments, though they had been expected to cede it to Reichert’s much larger Saudi-owned ESL/FACEIT Group.
The setup of both events resembled a traditional stadium sports experience, with some differences. Both competitions were staged live in arenas, streamed online, and licensed to select broadcasters. Fans sit in seats angled toward a stage where players are huddled behind computer setups, the teams pointed away from view of each other’s monitors. Above them, the game action is projected onto large screen displays—just one for Counter-Strike, but six, arranged in an hexagon around the venue, for Rocket League. Players compete via locally connected computers, and spectators observe an authored presentation of the in-game action on the large screen. Backstage, technical experts ensure everything works correctly, and producers switch between different angles and perspectives from within the game. Commentators, known as “casters,” stand at podiums, describing and analyzing the gameplay for both the live and stream audiences. Strobing lights, pyrotechnic displays, and eruptions of confetti accompany key match moments, enlivening the action.
One key difference from regular stadium sports is that game spectatorship is directed toward two distinct but connected worlds: the physical presence of the players and the in-game virtual action resulting from their mouse clicks and button presses. Writing about the “kinetic beauty” of tennis, David Foster Wallace posited that the beauty of sports has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” There isn’t much of this reconciliation to see in esports. Excluding wrist and finger twitches, darting eye movements, and fist pumps and bumps upon round conclusions, the players remain mostly still, laser-focused, locked into the world inside the screen. A Washington Post piece by Coleman Hamstead claims that large numbers of players use Vyvanse, Adderall, or Ritalin as a “performance enhancer to sharpen their response times and reflexes during game play,” and one ex-player is quoted as saying that “nobody talks about it because everyone is on it.” Some leagues drug test, but of course it can be hard to distinguish between legitimate prescription usage and the abuse of stimulants to improve focus, concentration, and reflexes during high-pressure competitive events.
Instead of watching the players onstage in front of you, you largely watch the match screen. In Raising the Stakes, Taylor describes esports as “a complex matrix that involves not only the corporeal body, but the technology, specific contexts, and the games themselves.” The experience of witnessing it is one of simultaneous proximity and distance. We watch human bodies negotiate with machines to produce something both virtual and not, mediated but live. At the Counter-Strike event, before the match starts, a group of teenage boys behind me are vibrating with excitement. When a player steps onto the stage, one teen tells his mate: “I’ve been watching this guy online for four years; it’s so crazy to see him in the flesh.” During the game, close-ups showing the players’ faces frame the game action, emphasizing this personality-led element, a reminder that the athletes are in the room with us, driving the action we see onscreen.
Counter-Strike 2 2024 Spring Final. Photograph by the author.
As well as wrangling players, presenters, and the fans in attendance, tournament organizers guarantee that the game and servers are running with pinpoint precision, and prepare a real-time presentation that services both an in-person audience and the live stream, cutting between the various views to make the action exciting and intelligible for all. The question is how to turn gaming into a compelling spectacle. Taylor writes that “the power of computer games is...located in the way they ask us to interact with them.” Games, she maintains, “presume, at their very core, direct action, and as such rarely conceptualize a spectator role.” It is for this reason that, unlike most other broadcast sports, esports action is usually depicted from a player's own perspective, and also benefits from a player’s understanding of the game. Of course, there is no shortage of players of any given game who could be converted into live esports attendees: Counter-Strike 2, a relatively niche title, has around 700,000 to 1 million players online at any given moment. In March 2024, League of Legends registered 35 million daily players. At the Rocket League event, I overheard people in the crowd comparing their own in-game competitive rank, a medal system that acted as a shorthand to convey the level of their commitment to the game, and by extension, the degree of their comprehension of the intricacies of the high-level play on show in the stadium. Casual players watch pros inhabit the same perspective as they do when they play the game themselves, which forges a connection between spectator and player. Per Taylor, a player watching a game feels “excitement, tension,” and “remembrances” of their own “similar play moments.” The viewer observes the player’s actions, vicariously experiencing the game at hand.
Rarely do we get to embody a single athlete’s perspective when watching them, and this point-of-view is a key consideration for esports broadcasts. When watching traditional sports, a spectator usually sees a large part of the field of play simultaneously: a tennis match is shot mostly from behind the server or receiver, a soccer match from the upper decks (or increasingly by use of suspended skycams). When watching a fighting game, the same is possible due to the in-game camera showing both combatants simultaneously, side-on. But with a first-person shooter game or a real-time strategy game, this is neither possible nor desirable. Multiple crucial moments of in-game action can occur simultaneously on opposite ends of the map, and there is no perfect “God’s-eye-view” perspective from which to observe them.
This is where “observers” come in: active players turned esports broadcast professionals. Observers are both the cinematographers and the editors of the live stream, switching between the game’s individual cameras and advising when to cut and what angle to display. They scrutinize matches as they unfold, using their knowledge of the game to anticipate the next incident. Mark “Frosty” Mortensen, a BLAST Counter-Strike observer, explained via email that “as an observer, you are the connection between the audience and the game. Unlike a soccer match, where the audience can follow the action on their own, in esports, the audience relies entirely on the observer to experience the game.” It is their job, Mortensen continues, to “ensure that the most exciting and relevant action is being shown.” For Rocket League, this means showing where the player receiving the crucial pass is located, rather than just following the ball. In the case of Counter-Strike, the spectators need to be shown “the lead-up to the kills, not just the kills themselves.” In other cases, the observer predicts who is going to shoot whom next, guiding spectators to view a kill from the perspective of the winning player, rather than leaving them to watch the losing player be defeated. Traditional sports coverage tends to feature long takes and wide fields of view, with close-ups and more complex shot sequences relegated to replays. In esports, the broadcaster is frantically moving around massive maps or fields of competition, trying to capture multiple critical moments occurring simultaneously, and also constructing visual sub-narratives that Mortensen says “show key moments and strategies that make the game exciting and understandable.”
Most traditional broadcast sports also have a fixed, or at least predictable, duration, with planned stoppages as well as ad hoc breaks. In the case of esports, particularly with strategy games, this is not so. As journalist Roland Li explains in Good Luck Have Fun, a history of the rise of esports, “a game can be a twenty-minute stomp or occasionally an eighty-minute marathon,” which means that there is “no good way to cut to commercials,” nor a clear running time around which to structure a show. On top of this unpredictability, there is legibility to think about too: while something like FIFA or Madden might be easy to follow for a newcomer given their connection to existing sports, most games are far more complicated, fast-paced, and subject to a range of highly specific systems and rules. While “intricate plays based on intimate knowledge of advanced mechanics and split-second execution make hardcore fans scream in awe,” for “neophytes,” Li argues, esports can “read as unintelligible flashing lights and visual noise” to the uninitiated. Casters strive to make the action comprehensible, but even following the commentary requires some knowledge of game-specific jargon and rules.
Rocket League 2024 Championship Series - Major 2. Photograph by the author.
The two games I watched—both of which I’ve played (badly)—were very comprehensible. Rocket League is based on real-world soccer, albeit with the players operating flying cars, and Counter-Strike 2 has a simple format and benefits from the visual immediacy of headshots and well-timed frag grenades. There is a difference, however, between basic comprehension and aesthetic appreciation: these are difficult games to master. But appreciating the strategic intricacies of a specific game demands a competitive, if not professional, perspective. Taylor writes that “the perceptual acuity of first-person shooter players—where their knowledge of game maps and weapons meets interpretative work in elaborate eye-to-hand coordination—can leave the average player’s head spinning if they face them in battle.” This was clear during all the Counter-Strike matches, particularly when watching players on the Dust map, which players have now been battling on for fifteen years and know inside-out. Casters also carefully unpacked which moves were the most impressive and why, and what the stakes were at all times.
While watching both games played by professionals immediately convinced me of the value of esports as entertainment—impressive for its intricacy, technicality, and kineticism—what impressed me most about live esports was not the quality of the gameplay, but the polish and impact of the productions. The scale and absurdity of the spectacle are far beyond anything found in traditional sports, even something like Twenty20 cricket, which actively targets a younger crowd by blasting Rihanna whenever a batsman hits a six. The Counter-Strike 2 final started with both teams taking the stage, rising up, like Roman gladiators, on electric elevators, alongside pyrotechnics, strobes, fervorous cheering, and the casters’ introductory hype-up-spiel that described players as “tacticians looking to make legend reality.” Each Rocket League match started out with a garish CG montage featuring cars, national flags, bombastic babble from the casters, and a drum-and-bass theme tune. The stadium atmosphere was also fantastic, with fans chanting team names at the Counter-Strike event, and singing reworked versions of football songs. At the Rocket League tournament, traveling fans of the French team Gentle Mates Alpine rhythmically beat thunder sticks, chanting team anthems in unison, resembling ultras in their camaraderie, albeit without any of the violent tendencies that are sometimes part of this kind of fanaticism. A younger brother of a friend told me that esports is “darts for young people,” and, with all the raucousness, noise, and light-hearted hooliganism you also see with live darts in the UK, it's a comparison that fits.
Applying a methodology used for studying regular sports, a 2017 study by researchers Juho Hamari and Max Sjöblom found “the enjoyment derived from witnessing the aggressive behavior, macho attitudes and hostility exhibited by players” to be one of the most appealing parts of esports spectatorship, which is odd considering the players never come into physical contact, and can only exhibit aggression verbally or with rude hand gestures—both of which are admittedly fun to observe. Other factors included the “attractiveness of the athletes, enjoyment of uncertainty and dramatic turns of events, escapism from everyday life, acquisition of knowledge about players and the game, appreciation of player skills” and “social interaction around the sport.” Interestingly, few of these have to do with the in-game action; most are about the intangible elements that surround it. Bjoern Franzen, an esports consultant interviewed in Li’s book, says that the industry is “not selling products” to the esports community. “What you do sell,” he argues, “is emotions.” When crowds at the Rocket League final went crazy for some of the technical plays from the winning team G2 Stride’s Landon “BeastMode” Konerman, it was partly about embodying the perspective of someone playing the game expertly. But it was also about how his narrative arc toward dominance was presented, made emotionally legible by the casters in a way that any viewer could understand. The caster spoke of “stakes that haunt you” and “goals that put you in the history books forever,” indicative of the sort of commendable self-seriousness that was a fixture of both events. Writing about esports for the London Review of Books, John Lancaster proposes that the experience of watching sports “adds up to a story, or a connected series of stories,” and that “if you follow a sport it becomes a thread which runs through your life and provides memories and narrative and meaning and context.” The presentation of these esports events invites a viewer to feel instantly part of a longstanding narrative.
At the Counter-Strike final, many of the factors outlined in Hamari and Sjöblom’s study coalesced in the game’s current figurehead, the aforementioned donk, a scrawny Russian seventeen-year-old who was a true performer both on- and offscreen, evincing the arrogance that fans desire as well as the skill needed to justify it. At one point during a showdown on the “Ancient” map, donk took out three opponents in a row with his red M4A4 rifle, shooting one foe to his left, before cursor-jerking rightward to take out a second through a smoke-grenade haze, and then headshotting the round’s last player above him. The crowd witnessed this superiority from his perspective, before the camera then cut to a shot of him behind his computer. He stands to taunt the crowd that had been booing him, asking why they were now silent. His coach laughs and squeezes him affectionately on the shoulder. The reluctant crowd can’t help but respect both his play and his bravado. This moment contains everything that live sports have to offer: narrative, skill, and interpersonal drama, plus the excitement of the unexpected. It matters to no one here that this victory took place on a computer screen, because we are here, witnessing it in real time.
- Roland Li, Good Luck Have Fun (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017), 30. ↩
- Ben Popper, “Field of Streams: How Twitch Made Video Games a Spectator Sport,” The Verge, September 30, 2013. ↩