Topic Presentation Idea

     The topic I thought of for the end of the quarter presentations is e-sports or if that is to specific maybe video games in general. I like the idea of researching e-sports because well I play a lot of video games so competitive gaming interests me more than most things. However, another reason is that e-sports is growing at a ridiculously rapid rate. Just in my lifetime I have seen e-sports for certain games go from enthusiasts meet ups to actual organized events.

     One of my favorite games and the one I think I have put the most time into is league of legends and it has one of the biggest multiplayer tournaments in the world. Right now the League of Legends World Championship is going on and I quickly looked up some stats that say at peak viewership there were 149,058,415 viewers. A large portion of that viewership seems to come from China and not the USA though.

     Besides being interested because I play games, I'm more interested because it is a new form of competition bringing in a lot of money and also creating brand new things like professional gamers. There have been people playing games professionally for awhile but now the popular players are on a whole new level with new games, new sponsorship's, and easy ways to watch.

     I watched one professional player streaming and on stream his dad came in and poured champagne on his son cheering for him the whole time; he did that because he was proud of him for winning like 4 tournaments in a game called Fortnite. I just thought that was really cool that parents now days can be proud of their gamer children and that kids have a whole new route to take their lives.

     Another thing that could be researched under this topic is how technology developing further allowed for e-sports to even exist. For example, how crazy it is that for free I can watch a live stream of the League of Legends World Championships in Korea and read live comments people are posting. Thats not even to mention how awesome the technology that supports multiplayer games has become, for example the new craze in multiplayer is battle royale style games. I don't want to describe the whole game type here but game developers were able to create a game where 100 different players are matched up in an online game and they kill each other until one player remains and the maps are huge.