Playing for Real: An Exploratory Analysis of Professional Esports Athletes' Work

摘要

In recent years competitive computer gaming-esports-is becoming increasingly mainstream as audiences, general interest and acceptance of its status as actual sports grows. Its representativeness is backed by numbers: more than 33 million unique viewers on average watched the 2017 World Championship (a League of Legends championship) and the prize pool for Dota 2, The International championship earlier this year topped the 20 million dollars mark. As eSports consolidate itself as a possible career path, it is a natural step to start investigating its particularities regarding athletes' work, from an ergonomics perspective. This exploratory study aims to achieve a better understanding of the constraints and issues faced by esports athletes in their work. To that extent, we analyze 36 interviews conducted with professional players of Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) in 2017 by the HLTV.org website, a news organization focused in covering CS:GO competitions. The interviews' analysis followed the general inductive approach for qualitative data analysis and focused on gaining insight on players' work, uncovering possible issues related to ergonomics and human factors aspects on the physical, cognitive or organizational domains. Although the interviews were not designed by the researchers and hadn't ergonomics as their main subject, they still provided useful information about players' work, the dynamics in their teams and their overall work strategies. This exploratory study can be seen as a first step for an ergonomics and human factors understanding of this emerging work situation. Further studies on this theme are necessary to understand the work of professional eSports' athletes and, possibly, improve its conditions.