Esports
When Watching Becomes a Sport: The Spectator Logic Behind Competitive Gaming
The most-watched sporting event of 2019 wasn't the Super Bowl or the Champions League final — it was two teams playing a video game in front of 44 million people.
The Idea
There's a persistent assumption that esports are popular despite being games — that the audience is there in spite of the medium, not because of it. This gets things exactly backwards. What makes competitive gaming genuinely fascinating as a cultural form is how deliberately it has been designed to be watched, not just played. Traditional sports evolved organically over centuries, with spectatorship grafted on later. Esports, by contrast, were shaped from early on by the logic of the audience. Game designers make choices — camera angles, colour-coded teams, visible cooldowns, health bars — that function more like broadcast decisions than game mechanics. The result is a kind of sport that is also, intrinsically, a piece of media. Consider what this means for skill legibility. One of the oldest problems in watching any competition is making expertise visible to non-experts. Football solved this with goals; tennis with the scoreline. Esports designers iterate constantly on this problem. When Valve redesigned Dota 2's spectator mode, they were essentially doing what a television director does — deciding what matters, what the audience needs to see, and how to make a complex system readable in real time. What's underappreciated here is that this makes esports a genuinely new kind of cultural object: not just a game that people watch, but a designed experience in which playing and watching are built in parallel, each informing the other.
In the World
In 2012, League of Legends held its World Championship at the USC Galen Center in Los Angeles. Around 8,000 people attended in person. The organisers — Riot Games — had spent months not just preparing the teams but redesigning the broadcast experience: custom overlays, statistical readouts, observer tools that let cameras glide through the virtual arena like a film crew on a dolly. They hired colour commentators and analysts, borrowed the language of traditional sports broadcasting, and then pushed beyond it, because the game itself offered information no physical sport could — every player's position, every resource, every decision, all visible simultaneously. The final drew over 8 million online viewers. Within three years, the same event filled the Seoul World Cup Stadium and was watched by 36 million people. What Riot understood early was that the game and the broadcast were one product, not two. Their in-house team of what they called "sherpas" — analysts who could explain a single moment of high-level play to a casual viewer — became as central to the experience as the players themselves. This is the moment esports stopped being a subculture and started being a medium: when the people making the game and the people staging its spectacle became, essentially, the same team.
Why It Matters
The esports question — what makes expertise visible, and to whom — is not confined to gaming. It runs through every field where complex skill gets performed in public: surgery, architecture, jazz improvisation, scientific research. Most human excellence happens in forms that are nearly invisible to everyone except other practitioners. What esports designers have done, under commercial pressure and with remarkable speed, is treat that problem as a design problem — something to be solved iteratively, with feedback and data. There's something worth borrowing in that approach. When you watch or participate in any complex activity, it's worth asking: what would it look like if someone had deliberately designed this to be understood? What information is available but not surfaced? What expertise is being performed but not narrated? The best coaches, teachers, and communicators already think this way — they don't just do the thing, they build the conditions under which the thing can be seen. Esports, unexpectedly, offers a surprisingly rigorous model for that.
A Question to Ponder
In your own area of expertise, what would it take to make your skill genuinely legible to an intelligent outsider — and what would you lose in the translation?
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