TechList: The World of eSports

You can go to the tech Stuff podcast page and subscribe to listen to all sorts of episodes about tech from all realms, and hopefully this will provide a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of education, and probably more than a few puns, because that's kind of how I roll. Enjoy this playlist. Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to

tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and a love of all things tech, and we are now going to view the history of e sports in this classic episode. I hope you guys enjoy it. E sports is something that has definitely gained a lot of popularity and a small amount of respect

among uh outer circles. I think we're still got a long way to go before people accept e sports as being as valid as any other sport, but certainly the fans treat it like, you know, like it's it's it's a big, big deal. So let's take a listen. Today we're gonna talk specifically about the realm of professional gaming and professional gaming leagues, as well as how I tracking technology is integrated into that world these days. So think of this as the conclusion of that that loosely serialized

series of episodes. And then after this one, our next episode will probably be about something completely unrelated. So if you are uh satisfied, satiated, let us say, with video game content, fear not, we will cover something different in our next episode. If you love video game content, fear not. Eventually I'll get back to it. It'll happen because it plays a big role in tech. Now let's talk about

e sports. I've covered related topics, including some way back in the old days of tech stuff, when Chris Palette and I used to shout our podcast from the top of a building in Buckhead in Atlanta, and the only way you could hear it was if you were in the general neighborhood. There is a classic episode titled Can You Make a Living Playing Games? And that original episode came out on July two thousand eleven. Holy cow, guys,

I've been doing this show a long time. The answer, by the way, is yes, you can make money playing video games if you're good enough. We're gonna talk a bit today about the industry around competitive professional video game players, better known as e sports. I'll have a chance to chat with Robert o'caleny, VP of E sports products over at Turner Sports, and later on I'll also chat with Brian Desaias and David Chen of alien Ware to talk about the use of eye tracking tech and E sports

and how it can enhance the experience. We've got a lot of wonderful folks who gave over their time and their expertise to help make this episode happen. So big. Thanks to all of them, and I can't wait for you guys to hear what they have to say, because they're really fascinating people. But before we dive into that, it's always fun, at least for me anyway, to talk about the history of whatever the subject is at hand. So how old do you think E sports to be.

Do you think it rose up in the nineties, like maybe the late nineties over in South Korea, or maybe you would go back to like the nineteen eighties, when people like Billy Mitchell established world up record high scores and arcade games like pac Man. Well, depending upon your definition of e sports, the real birth of the industry dates back to nineteen seventy two. That's when students at Stanford University pitted their lead gaming skills and a tournament

of Space War. Now Steve Russell had led a small group of designers way back in nineteen sixty two to create Space War, which was one of the first examples of a computer game to use a dynamic display. Now, ever since we've had computers, people have been trying to figure out ways to make those computers do stuff that they weren't intended to do, like play games. The original

computers weren't meant to do that. But you get enough people who are mathematically gifted together and they start thinking about the potential for math to do practically anything. Eventually they're gonna start creating programs that play games, including things like Tic Tac Toe. But it wasn't until the nineteen sixties that people were looking at the potential of creating

displays for computers. Otherwise you were getting readouts that were either on paper or sometimes just a bank of lights would light up a specific way, and that's how you knew what the output was of whatever your input was. So Space War was one of these early, early, early examples of a game that uses such a dynamic display.

Players would control one of two spaceships. There was one called the needle and one called the wedge, and they were called that because obviously of their their shapes, and these spaceships could fly around in a two dimensional plane, so you can fly along that x, y axis, but not the z There was no third dimension to this, and it looked like a little space field and you were technically you are flying around the gravity well of a star so there was this gravitational effect that came

into play with the game, and your whole goal was to destroy the other starship. So it was a player versus player game that came out in nineteen sixty two, and by came out, I mean it was developed for a what at that time amounted to a supercomputer, and if you also happen to have a supercomputer and you could get a copy of the code, you could install and play that game yourself, not even installed, run the game, it's not really even installation because we're not talking about

a hard disk at this point. By nineteen seventy two, several engineering and computer science schools had a version of this game, and then the tournament was born. The grand prize for this tournament back in nineteen seventy two was a whole year's subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. The tournament itself took place in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, so one of the most important events to ever take place in that ail in the history of mankind as far

as I'm concerned. Stewart Brand, who at the time was a writer and editor for Rolling Stone, was the organizer for this event. His peace and Rolling Stone equated the players with athletes in traditional sports, so from the very beginning there were parallels. Though at the time the treatment might have been a touch tongue in cheek, maybe a little playful satirical, but the version that the students were playing of Space War was slightly altered from the one

that debuted back in nineteen sixty two. There was a programmer named Ralph Goren who added in a couple of elements to the game to make it more competitive and interesting. He added in the capacity for ships to suffer partial damage before being destroyed, so you can take more than one hit. And he also threw in some space minds, so some obstacles that you could deploy within the game field and maybe your opponent would fly into them and destroy himself, and that would just make the game more

interesting to play and watch. By the way, Ralph Gordon would later go on to create the world's first spell checker. So when you hear about some of these people who were involved in this tournament, a lot of them went on to do some very important things in the realm

of technology and computer science. Now, the winner of that first tournament was a guy named Bruce baum Guard, and baum Guard would go on to work at the Internet Archive, and later on he would become the head of operations at Cool c U I L. And you may owe my drugs not remember what Cool is? Things changing so scory nowadays and people quick to forget it. Cool was one of those companies that when it launched, got a lot of people poking fun at it for its name,

that c U I L being spelled cool. It was a short lived search engine. It did not last very long. It had really long entries, so when you did a search, you would get the results with very long descriptors of what those search results were, plus a thumbnail that would appear next to every search result. But it just didn't

catch on. It ended up shutting down in September. But while cool would come and go, video game tournaments were really here to stay, and whether they were informal or they were big twodus, they continued largely beneath the notice of the general public. The introduction of the personal computer and various gaming systems in the nineteen eighties helped a little bits, as as did the rise of the arcade, but by and large video game competitions remain confined to

a niche audience. In the late ninet nineties, gaming had reached a new level, largely because personal computers were much more common, and this would be the early days of the high powered graphics processing units or GPUs, those dedicated graphics cards, which were the devices that were actually giving computers the horsepower needed to run games that had three dimensional graphics, so stuff like Quake, and in fact, one of the earliest tournaments of this time was a Quake competition.

It was held in nineteen and the organization holding It was read Annihilation. It drew two thousand participants, and the prize was a doozy. If you won, you got to go home with a Ferrari that once belonged to John Carmack. He was one of the lead developers of Quake. On June seven, Angel Manuals founded the cyber Athlete Professional League or the CPL. This was a group that organized various tournaments and pioneered the field of e sports professional tournaments.

It operated out of the United States until two thousand eight, when the company nearly dissolved due to an overcrowded scene, got acquired and then sort of relaunched in China. But in just a decade we saw that the environment had changed from a curiosity into a pretty big industry. This cyber Athlete Professional League went from being the only game in town pun intended to being a a fish in a very large pond that was growing completely beyond what

it originally was. Now. Early on, the emphasis in these tournaments was on first person shooter games games like Quake. Then sports titles also became popular in tournament play. Then you might get things like fighting games. They've popped up a little bit later and then real time strategy genre games joined the ranks, and that's when the game StarCraft

brood War rose to prominence in the tournament scene. While tournaments were still largely a niche interest in the United States and other parts of the world, they had become incredibly popular, and one of those regions was South Korea. South Korea has two big game channels, on game Net and NBC Game, both of which created leagues of professional StarCraft players who would compete against each other for prizes.

The kind tree takes professional gaming extremely seriously. In fact, when a scandal broke out in that some StarCraft players were purposefully throwing games as part of a gambling scheme, the government levied harsh punishments against the accused players, all of whom were banned for life from professional StarCraft competition. In two thousand, the World Cyber Games and Electronics Sports World Cup both launched, and they gave professional gaming a

bigger spotlight. Two years later, the Major League Gaming Professional Game League launched, and since then professional video game leagues have been picking up speed. We've also seen other types of games into this realm, including MOBA's things like Dota Too and Smite, and League of Legends. Those have become enormously popular in the professional gaming league scene. In recent years, we've also seen a big push coming from major broadcasters

to elevate professional video game tournaments. I had a chance to speak with Robert Ocellini, who overseas e League at Turner to talk about it now. Robert, thank you so much for joining us on text stuff. I want to kind of get an idea about how eligue came about and uh, and and sort of get an idea of how it's evolved and and what you have seen so

far in that space. Because while the sports I think, uh, it's something that more and more people are are aware of, it's still sort of an emerging kind of form of entertainment for a large part of the mainstream audience. I think that's changing, especially among younger demographics. I think they're far more aware, especially now that we're seeing video games being used as a form just the playing of video games being used as a form of entertainment throughout lots

of different platforms. But tell me specifically about eligue, sure, so, Uh. Eleague was first announced about two years ago. Um, it actually wasn't called elague at the time. We didn't have a name it UM, but we were working on it, I would say for probably six months or so before that September two thousand fifteen announcement UM. And really it came from the sort of interest came from the very

senior levels of Turner. So Kevin Reiley, who is the head of TBS and tn T, came to the company with a lot of contacts and gaming UM and you know he's in l A and E sports has really taken off in Los Angeles, and so he came in with a lot of interest in the sports. And then from the Turner Sports side, you know, Lenny Daniels and David Levy UM had had a lot of interest in the space. They saw, you know, they kept hearing that this space was developing. They kind of saw what was happening.

And actually at first UM at of time, I was working on the NBA's digital products here. I did seven seasons working on the NBA mobile apps and over the top apps and NBA League pass UM and for a little while as a part time job, I was actually going to meetings and working on this, and you know, sort of my background is more in digital product, but I'm a lifelong gamer and very interested in competitive gaming and was actually the GM of competitive World of Warcraft guild.

Um So I kind of had my own long history with with gaming and e sports on the fan side and on the playing side. UM so I kind of was able to bring that to the table. UM as we looked into this, and then I think probably around uh beginning of July July, we sort of decided what direction we're going to go in, and at that time they decided that if I wanted to work on this full time, they give me that opportunity. And I really haven't looked back, um, nor have nor has the company.

Um uh. So, you know, we we did this deal with i MG Iligue as a joint venture with w M E i MG, and we started meeting with teams. We actually had a big team summit in September because we were really the first big media brand to enter into this e sports space and we wanted to make sure that we were entering it with reverence, um with you know, an eye towards authenticity. And then of course, you know, we'd already decided at that point that we're going to work with counter Strike um that we were

talking to and getting feedback from the counter Strike community. UM. About two months later we came up with a name and logo and all of that stuff and launched our website. And then in January of two thousand sixteen, we did our very first tournament UM the Road to Vegas, and that was essentially sort of an open qualifier for one of the scots in our inaugural season. Later in UM, we really started the league and league play in earnest in May of sixteen UM with our first counter Strike season.

We followed that up later in sixteen we had the opportunity to do the Overwatch Open. We were like the first big Overwatch tournament UM, and then we did a second season of counter Strike. Around that time frame, we were also awarded the first counter Strike Major of SEEN UM and we did that in January. And then in in SEEN we've we've branched out a little bit and have done some stuff with street Fighter. We did a series a docuseries around UH the International, which is the

big DODA World Championship. And then finally right now we're running are what is essentially our third Counterstrike season of the Premier UM and you know that's where Group D starts tonight, uh, and then the finals the week of October ten. So you know, it's been, uh, it's been kind of a wild ride. We went from from you know nothing and no organization to a thriving business with a lot of employees and uh, you know, have done

a lot of tournaments at this point. Um, I think you know, the only other thing I'll add that I shouldn't have bloss over is the amazing studio that we built downstairs that's built for sports, whether that game is one v one or six P six. We have built the studio in a way that, um, it can it can easily support any game that we want to do.

And then of course we've got all of the you know other stuff you would want, practice space for the players, a player lounge, first class green room for our talent um, and then all the tech that you would need to to support doing something like a counter strike tournament, which is a pretty big undertaking right where every tiny little technical detail can end up uh having an influence on

actual gameplay. It is really important as well pointing out to my listeners here that by going this route, by having the tournament where you've got the system set up where you know, you're going to have a really good approach to running these games. It also means everyone's on equal footing. It doesn't mean that, you know, you're not worried about one who's souped up their game engine so or their game system so much that they're going to

have an unfair advantage over anyone else. It really does bring it down to skill and in the case of games like Counterstrike, really good team communication and team uh cooperation.

I'm really fascinated by this, And since you've had experience working in a realm that was UH that was focused on traditional sports, something that I think a lot of people can can kind of get their mind around for For people who haven't made that that step from the idea of well, a professional sport where you're playing physically in a on a cord or on a field or whatever it may be. That's one thing. But professional video game playing, how is that something that you How can

you consider that person an athlete? Well, you've seen both worlds. What's your kind of response to that sort of uh, like think we wants asking questions or if they're just expressing skepticism that someone could be an athlete playing video games by the way, I'm totally on the board of professional video games players are on a level that is far, far,

far beyond the capabilities of the average person. Sure, I mean, listen, I think that that skepticism is a natural a natural thing, right, Like I think with with physical sports, it's very easy to tell that I cannot jump as high off the ground as Lebron James, right. Um, But me sitting in front of a computer, it doesn't look optically any different than ol of Meister or Faker or any of these

sort of top tier esports players. But I will tell you that, Um, from a talent perspective, from a commitment perspective, these gentlemen are no and women are no different than professional athletes and traditional stick and ball sports. They are a cut above and you know, you if you were to put an average or even above average sort of casual video game athlete up against these guys, they would

just get completely and utterly wrecked. You know. I think that one of the interesting things that we've done here at Turner this year is we had an employee tournament for street Fighters. So we did we did this uh six week street Fighter season where we had the best street fighter players in the world come to our campus and play, and then UM, a couple of weeks after that tournament was over, we had an internal tournament that culminated with the finals that was played in the very

same studio where our street Fighter tournament was hosted. UM. And you know, shirt Off Turners a pretty big company. They're some really good street Fighter players here. But talking to the sort of experts that we have on staff, the guy who won the tournament would be like the tenth best player at a local Atlanta semi professional tournament. And the guy who would win that tournament wouldn't even

be in the top hundred in the world. You know, there's there's a there's a big difference between the two d and fifty guys who play counterstrike sort of at the top level professionally and the seven or eight million people who play it on a daily basis. UM. So you know, I'm in definitely you can tell I'm in the camp of this is no different than the other sports.

There's a scarcity of of talent and then the ability to sort of focus that The commitment that it requires to play these games at a top level UM is ridiculous. I guess the last point i'd make on that is, Um, it's also really hard to stay on top. And you know there's one team currently that you know, last year one i think five tournaments uh during the regular tournament season, and this year made it to the finals of the Major. But we've seen them slowly declined. The name of the

team as Burtis Pro and we love them. They won our first season, UM, but we've seen them slowly decline and they actually didn't make it to the playoffs of our current tournament. And I think that that shows like just how tight it is at the very top, right, Like even just kind of in six months, a team can go from being virtually unbeatable over a three or four month time period to not even making it to the late stages of any tournaments. There's that very top level.

Is it is the top of the pyramid in every way, shape or form. Now in your experience of overseeing these things being part of the the E League, UH, does it feel like when there's a tournament going, when you have these people at this these very elite levels of performance competing against each other. Isn't a similar kind of of atmosphere of excitement to watch people at that level play similar to what you might see in a traditional

sporting arena. I think, you know, I think, for so there are differences there that I would call out right so um for some tournaments and and I'm not alluding to ours, almost all of the competition except for the finals, is played over the internet, right, and so you know the spectator experience there is on Twitch and on YouTube, and you know that the chat experience is like a proxy for the arena, if that makes sense, almost like a virtual proxy, I would say, though, at the very

top level, if you were to were to attend like our finals at the Fox Theater in Atlanta for the Major, or an e s L one in New York, or the finals of a dream Hack, they have all of the same trappings and crowd engagement that you know a professional Atlanta sports team has. And you know, I go, I'm a season ticket holder for our our new MLS team, which probably has about as good fan engagement as you could possibly have, and it feels the same to me as the really Rabbit fans for the finals of our

Major or the finals the Dota to International. I went to that this summer too, at Key Arena, which is where the Sonics used to play in Seattle, so even the same buildings in some case, although I will also say those buildings can sometimes not be the best venues for watching the sports because you're trying to watch on the screen and watch kind of what's going on stage.

But what's going on on stage a lot of the time is some guys in headsets yelling to each other, right, Like, the more interesting thing is the combination of what they're doing with what's happening on the screen. Right. Similar to what we've seen with various platforms where people are setting up webcams to capture their their footage of how they react while they're playing games, I imagine something similar is

useful in this kind of realm. When we come back, we'll talk more about the advances and technology that are making it easier and more enjoyable to watch gaming as a professional sport. But first let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. In a previous episode, I spoke with Oscar Warner over at Toby Tech about eye tracking technology, and we talked a bit about how it could be used in professional gaming, but to get a more thorough perspective on it, I had a conversation with Brian Dazais and David Chen of alien Ware about how it's transforming e sports. Yeah. So, um, one of the things that aileen Ware is always doing right, We're always trying to

look for the next innovative thing. What's going to help gamers, whether they're professional or just you know, folks that just want to have fun playing games. How can they have more fun and how can they get better at their games? In I just make it as in most of it as possible. UM. So you know, as as we launch and look at new technologies, UM, one of the things that was coming down the pike several years ago, UM

is eye tracking. Now, historically you've thought of eye tracking or you know, eye tracking mainly for some cool stuff like trying to maybe log into a computer or something like that, kind of like facial recognition. UM. But as the technologies evolved, as it's gotten smaller, been able to put into laptops and things like that. UM. It really there's a lot of innovative ways to the things we

could do. As you're just tracing with the ice looking and so what we started working with Toby on is how can we adopt that and tie that into something meaningful for gamers. And at the same time, you know, we've we've seen and known that gamers are always looking for an advantage. So I'll give you an example. You know, and most most gamers will at some point, if they're really into a game, right, they're gonna go to YouTube or they're gonna go onto Twitch, and they're gonna try

and get better at their game. They're gonna look at tips and tricks. And you know, I'm maybe doing it today. Um, I'm heavily invested in pub g and um it seems like every other day, every day, I'm trying to see, you know, we're going to get some tips and tricks and get better at it because I'm not very good, Jonathan, But you know I dive in there anyway. I completely completely,

but it's too much fun to avoid. So but but kind of that that nature and just wanting to get better, UM, and I tracking prove as we're thinking about how leverage this provided a real, a real way to track how the best players in the world as a specific game or any game that they're playing. Where are they looking? You know, gaming is so much about where you're looking,

where you're paying attention where your focus is. And I tracking really enabled really the world and we'll talk some definitely about this, but enabled gamers to see where the best players in the world are looking at any point in time. So are they looking at the mini map, are they looking down the corridor, They're looking down the hallway? Um, right before you know, they fragged somebody or they get tragged or whatever it might be happening in the match.

So we saw this real opportunity, this real thing that gamers are looking to do, and that's get better and this technology that really allows a new level of data capture and you turn that into some analytics and you

can actually put out, um, some pretty interesting information. So that's kind of at the very beginning conceptually, when we're just you know, sitting around with you know, our internal product group teams, are internal marketing teams talking to e sports organizations, um, and you know, our third party partners like Toby talking about whether the priorities that we have coming up. You know, this isn't just a something we

spoke about six months ago. This is year in the making of understanding what gamers are looking for and working with these technology partners. So that's kind of out it all started and UM and and and David if you have UM you obviously played an Intel part for us here and getting this technology rolled out with UH, with with Turner and the league. So, UM, there's anything you

want to add on on where this started? Police feel free? Yeah, I would you say, And it's your point earlier A lot of this technology and research into this technology as part of gaming even beyond gaming has been around for a couple of years now, and it hasn't really been until now, until the technology has become uh, you know, smaller and more nimble, that it's you know, hitting this

more consumer level focus. But I'm sure in the past they've been using eye tracking to look at how people respond to add online, you know, when they do keep

mapping on websites and where people respond UM. And it wasn't until I think a couple of years ago, probably two or two years ago, that one of our partners, t liquid UM they had done some research of their own with I believe it was the Mayo Research Clinic over in California, UM and they had work with a UH I believe the professor there who was researching kind

of eye tracking as part of video gaming. The level of cognition and just the uh, you know, research level analytics between some of the oldest veteran players versus you know, young hot starts who are coming out, you know, sixteen

seventeen and dominating the scene. UM. And the research that he saw and some of these teams are really startling as far as you know, veterans being able to still keep the edge ahead through their experience and just how quick their eyes are and being able to you know, cycle between icons from you know, a hundred different characters and they have a lot more in their memory banks to pull from and react from than a lot of

younger players. UM. And again at that time, you know that research is probably being done on a ten to twelve thousand dollar piece of equipment that was tracking your eyes and it was cumbersome, and now we're seeing it to the point where again it's able to be up into a laptop and it's something that you know, pretty much a lot of consumers and teams UM have at

their immediate disposal. UM. And what I'm bringing the back home between liquid you know, as more and more teams are growing in the space, and as more and more traditional sports teams are also getting involved in the sports, there's this growing desire to understand again the dynamics of the athleticism or the cognition and skill of the traditional athlete versus an e sports athletes. And I think we're

barely scratching the surface of what that means today. UM And as more and more other technology catches up, I think we all dream of finding other big in cycul ways that the sports can provide a level of biometric data, um to allow us to appreciate, you know, what's the best you well uh and also how you know, average Joe's like you and I can strive to uh chase after some of that greatness in certain categories. It's definitely

very very exciting. That's so cool and and and you know, I, I too am chasing after that elusive chicken dinner over at pub g and it it remains just outside my grasp. So being able to see how not just not just how well someone plays, but how they go about playing that way, there is something really enticing about that, the not just you know, when we watch professional sports, typically we can see great, great displays of athleticism, but you know,

people are not machines. We can break things down and use slow motion and various camera angles to kind of analyze the basics. But to me, the fact that we're talking about a digital realm and then being able to track our physical motions and map that to the actions of a digital realm, it does seem like this is uh much more conducive to breaking things down into quantifiable aspects to really talk about, Well, you know, this person is checking their mini map more frequently than someone who

is not a professional gamer. That's a really interesting stat and could really inform people how to play the game at a slightly higher level than what they were doing before. Knowing of course that it's not a magic substitute for the hours of practice, as you know, countless hours of practice for some of these professional gamers who will sit down for eight or ten hours and play a game and that's largely how they got as good as they are, but then also a tool for them to look at afterward.

Maybe they've played in a tournament, maybe they played really well and they want to see what what they were doing and remember to really hone in on those particular types of of of strategies and future tournaments, or they didn't do so well and maybe they want to see what the differences between their performance and someone else's. I also like the idea of this from if we're looking beyond the sports, which we'll get back to in a second.

I don't want to leave that behind, but I like this idea also from a game designer standpoint, the idea of getting more information about what your players see as important in your game means that game designers can actually use that information to make more effective games down the

line um and beyond that. If you if you think about this technology reaching a point where it becomes more of a kind of a a standard piece of tech that gets rolled out into laptops in the future or computers in general in the future, you could see this being incorporated into games themselves, where it's not just analysis,

but it becomes an element of gameplay. Like I think of a game, perhaps like l A Noir, where part of that game involves the player watching a virtual characters action as you're interrogating the character, and that in turn informs you as to whether or not that character is telling the truth they're telling a lie. Will imagine eye tracking technology where the character appears to be aware of where you are looking, and then that adds a whole

new game element. So to me, the eye tracking technology in the gaming world, I mean, as you say, we're at the very beginning of it. Even if you just and I don't mean to to to uh make this sound less than what it is, but even if you are restricting that attention to eat sports, there are so many incredible potential applications for this technology. And it's really exciting to be in these fairly early days talking about where we're going right now. Um so getting back to

eat sports and getting back into that realm. Can you talk a little bit about the relationships that have formed now that uh, you guys are really kind of uh getting more involved with incorporating eye tracking tech analogy and the pro gaming realm. I want to hear more about this, uh, this this relationship and how that has developed over time. Yeah. Absolutely,

you make some some great points, Jonathan. I think you know, as we as we think about where we are, we are very much um just that at the beginning point of showcasing this kind of technology and I attracting technology um to the world, right And I'll definitely jump into the partners and talk about the partners and what we've done um, but you you have made some really interesting comments about where is you know, who can get the most benefit out of UH technologies like this, like eye

tracking and and that kind of thing. And there's obviously some very clear benefits for professional players and for amateurs that are trying to become professional, right, just this no of getting better learning from the pros that are out there, just like traditional sports. But one of the other parts that really intrigued us here as we're trying to trying to roll out this kind of technology is for the for just the viewer, um, for the fan. One of the things that has not kind of cut up with

traditional sports is the viewing experience and the commentating. A lot of the commentating in the past for the sports has been around, you know, the commentator explaining what's going on, but verbally there really wasn't a visual visual cues or visual explanations of what's happening in the match. You know. Obviously with NFL or NBA there's a lot of analytic things and things that happened through the broadcast, I think of teleprompters and and things like that. Well, it really

wasn't that for e sports. And so as we were introducing the technology and figuring out how can we bring this and how what should we be doing, and we really wanted to make that viewing experience better for you know, the hundreds of millions of gaming fans that are watching these sports globally. And then we have to decide, you know, okay, how who can who shares our values, who can who will work with us to to bring this technology to

the forefront. And you know, earlier this year in January, UM we announced the partnership and we've been working very closely with UM, with Turner and with Elige around all the all the tournaments that they're running. And UM actually just here in September for the first time UM partnership

between US, Toby and an Eleague. UM we rolled out the the getting Technical segment on the Eligue broadcast and really being able to to showcase the fans and to the viewers this ideas technology that's being captured to the

tracking software at Tracking Software. So UM from a partnership side, it has been it was it was very important to us to select partners and work with partners that shared quite honestly our vision of making this better for for the viewer because we know professionals are going to continue to innovate and get better where at the forefront working with them on separate uh, separate programs. Amateurs are always going to look to get better because they want they

they want so badly to become a professional. But there's a ton of people I just enjoy the sports because of what it is, and how can we make it better for them? So, um, David all hands over to you because you again, I would love for you to chime in and talk to uh just a relationship we have with Turner and E League and how all that

came together. Yes, absolutely, and I feel like get bowed back down to a point of trying to be a good steward as far as a leader in the industry on behalf of the sports and really just making it a bit easier for viewers overall to get more out of the viewing experience, whether their season veterans who have been watching the games for a long time, or something maybe new to the game as well. We've seen the studies who knew you that say a lot of sports

viewers don't even play the games that they watch. So if we're trying to help the sports grow in the Western world. That's likely going to be introducing the sports to people who are very new to the game, maybe your family, maybe your friends who put that um So, when it came to working with Eligue, I think it was no brainer for us to start off with counter Strikes.

When you look at the landscape of the sports titles out there, you can look at your League of Legends, your Dodas and your mobios out there, it does have a rather high learning curve for people who may not be yet familiar with the title. UM So, definitely we look at a game like counter Strike, there's really nothing to us understand about, you know, don't be on the

wrong point and end of the gun. Um and so I think being able to find a game that immediately resonates it and can be digested by a larger audience helps us. Uh. Not only again brings to a wider audience, but then when you factor in the first person perspective and what eye tracking can really bring in from a synergy perspective there, it really made a lot of sense to find the white partner like easy to have a right tournament, where again counter Strikes with their bread and

butter for the better part of two years now. Um. They housted the Major in January to overwhelming success. UM, and they're willing to continue to try and see how they can push the limits of counter Strike even further and further as you look towards the future. But it really boils down to what ways can we have this experience be more digestible to a huge gaming audience out there.

So for eye tracking and counter strike, where was the player looking, what were the context of you know, how they made the decision that they did, um, And we've seen a lot of assignment from it. We've seen a tremendous amount of assignment from the fans. They've been really uh receptive of the I cracking uh clips. They've been telling us how they want to see you know, other players,

specific players get put under the microscope. UM. You know, they would love to be able to get a better clear breakdown of exactly how they pulled off the ace that they did. We're seeing a lot of really good

reception from the commentators as well. So when we look at the league, uh, the you know enders U and a lot of the guys who are providing kind of the color uh you know playing by play commentary have been excited to be able to talk, you know, a little bit more about the nuances of for example, how an in game leader on the team may index more between the mini map and looking at the economy of the team and the other four players who are more of the you know, damage doers and the um you know,

the meet and guns of the team are just more focused on playing UM and so I think it really opens up a way to present the game again, to know why a variety of people, and it helps us as a brand find meaningful ways to continue the game back to the community rather than you know, just business as usual logo branding and culsorship rights and things like that. Fascinating, I think. I also find it really interesting that that counter Strike is the sort of the go to game.

It makes perfect sense. But I recently did a multi part series on the history of Valve, and so my listeners now know that counter Strike that's a game that originally was you know, a modification. Uh, it was a mod of Half Life that came out thousand that It's gone through a couple of different variations, the source version of it coming out a few years ago, I believe it was And to see that that game is still so so such a big part of E sports. It is,

which makes sense. It requires people to have very strong skill sets as well as be very good team players if you want to have a strong counter strike team, and I can definitely see where that value comes in. I remember distinctly when I attended a C E S many years ago. UH. One of the the companies there,

one of the the computer companies. We're hosting Ubisoft's team at the time, the frag Dolls, who were professional gamers, and the frag Dolls were taking on all comers, and so people would step up, they'd form a team of four, and then three of the frag Dolls would just decimate them. And it happened over and over and over again, and

it was exciting to watch. But it would have been so much more interesting to actually see how they played together as a team, beyond just knowing that they're coordinating much better, that they have a good knowledge of the maps, being able to see where they're looking, and how frequently they're looking around. Do they stare at one place for any given time, where are they just constantly scanning? Uh, that sort of stuff would have been really interesting to see.

So I find this really exciting. And as you point out, it also by giving more information. By informing the audience, you spend less time, uh, trying to familiarize yourself with the way the game is working. It becomes much more apparent early on if you're able to see what other people are looking at, and I think it removes that barrier. Uh. I think it also really illustrates how professional gamers are.

Are you know, just incredibly good at what they do beyond raking up high scores, because I think still among certain populations at least, the idea of professional gaming is somewhat scoffed at. Whereas you know, we accept professional sports pretty easily. That's been part of our culture for for decades and that is pretty easy for folks to go along with. I think before anyone gets a chance to really see what pro e sports is all about, they have an initial reaction of like, well, that's a game

that's not a sport. And it's not until you're able to really kind of break it down in this way and say, no, take a look at this. These these are men and women who are doing things at a level far beyond what the average person is capable of doing. It is similar, if not, if not identical to what you see in the actual physical sports realm. So I

like that aspect of it as well. It gives you that extra I guess ammunition is the right way to put it when you are talking about the sports and trying to explain to someone how it really is a level of performance beyond what the average person tends to be able to do. Uh. Through this partnership, I'm sure you've you've seen some really interesting stuff. Are there any particular uh stories or particular revelations that you have encountered as a result of this eye tracking technology being part

of this experience. Yeah, I mean I would definitely say the just the little of nuanced gameplay between these counterslike players is insane. I mean we talk about, you know, these guys being able to be at the top of their games. I mean, these are the guys who absolutely can tell the difference between you know, two hundred and sixty hurt versus a hundred and forty two hurts. There's jokes out there about how these human I feel and see you know thirty fps. That is completely not true

at all. Um. You know the counter start guys who within the league and a lot of these guys here are just very um uh, their their senses are extreme. You know, when you also could have some of these guys play. There's a player like j d M on Team Liquid who means back, you know, three or four ft behind it here, the distance between his eyes to the screen is wildly different from you know, another player

who may be near seven inches away. Um. We found that can be interesting in the studio setting when it comes to calibrating the eye tracking units for the various players and making sure that the way that they compete

is how they're being calibrated at the time. But I think just at a very high level, um, people, once we slow down the game and once we get to replays and all the technologies finally as caught up to be able to subtily break down the nuances of how quick they are in terms of milliseconds and hundreds of milliseconds, we're gonna quickly see just you know, the difference between the top one percent of players and invest of us

out there. And uh, that'shing to be very exciting to see. Yeah, and and you know something else that stood out to me here with with the initial raud and it's kind of the first the first time the getting technical SIGMENTA

started to run on the league coverage has been the reaction. So, you know, I mentioned part of the reason that we're doing this is we want to improve the viewership experience, you know, selfishly for us as gamers and fans, because we're watching these things ourselves and we want to be

able to us better viewing experience. Like if you look at the feedback you know, just on on Facebook, comments on what you see happening on Twitch on the Elite broadcast, like the comments from fans is it's really encouraging around this. They appreciate this technology, They appreciate being able to get a better glint at how these professionals are performing real

time something we've never seen before. So you know, as we as we roll on new new innovations and technologies, we do obviously a ton of work, and we're working with and talking with our fans and our customers and just gamers overall too um to make sure we're delivering what they want. Ultimately alien where is trying to over

that ultimate gaming experience. We feel this place right into that, but it's always and it's always reassuring one when we go down a path and we work with partners UM and roll out new technologies and new features and so on to see that. See the fan reaction is UM is a positive, is coming back positive and that to me has definitely said out of have and seen anything negative around the technology, just a lot of appreciation from

from the game of community. Well, I love that. There is what we do want to add in the fan feedback. People have been clamoring about what a anti cheating tool that may wind up being. UM. It's curious to see because what if one day they you know, we all had monitors that always tracked our eyes and you can never disable that UM that that would be a very

interesting future. When we come back, we'll chat a bit more with Robert from Turner about how they took a challenge of taking the tech created by Toby and alien Ware and they found a way to incorporate it into e sports broadcasts. But first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So that kind of leads us naturally into a discussion about the challenges of presenting e sports to an audience in a way where they can really appreciate what's going on, and that that ties into

this topic of the eye tracking technology. We know that Toby Tech was the company to start working on the actual hardware and the basic software, and we had Dell and alien Ware that we're working on the various uh

consumer products that incorporate that technology. But when it comes to actually implementing it in a way that makes sense both from an administrative perspective, where you guys are trying to find ways of adding value to the presentation, and from a consumer perspective or from an audience perspective where they can appreciate even more the capabilities of these elite players because they're getting kind of insight into what's happening.

Can you talk a little bit about that implementation and what that experience was, Like, sure, yeah, and UM, you know what I would say is it was birthed out of actually a very casual conversation between David Chen and I David Chen from Dell and I um at our

major actually and that was in January. Um, you know, I had seen a demo of some behind the scenes software that a League of Legends team was using to improve their performance with eye tracking and thought, wow, this is a really interesting, Um, how do we democratize that like, how do we bring that to the audience watching the game instead of making it like a back off its tool that a team is using to try and optimize its performance. And you know there are challenges for sure, right.

So in March, UM I went to Austin and we we had a meeting, and in that meeting Toby actually brought their ideas on how it could work. UM. But you know, to be candid, UH, they hadn't ever run a competitive gaming event, and as you alluded to earlier, you know, competitive integrity is extremely important to us, extremely important to the players, and so we have to be very careful about what we do in the studio and

how we produce things. And as a result, UM, it is certainly not as simple to do something like this eye tracking as one would think it would be. UM. So to kind of walk through the components of how it works, UM, you need a computer with an eye tracker connected to it, UM that is capturing gays in real time. Then you also need a video feed of

the point of view of the player in real time. UM. And the two things like the the eye tracker needs to be synchronized for the resolution and aspect ratio that the player is running the game at and of course then the p o V feed of the gameplay also needs to be exactly what the player is looking at, so it can't be at a different aspect ratio or

resolution and have it make perfect sense, right. And then you need to take those two things, that the video feed of the gays and the actual p o V and then use podcast production equipment to merge those two things in real time so you're getting an accurate UM feed of the two things. Well, in order to do all of what I just mentioned, it actually requires two

computers that the players not even playing on. UM. We have one machine that is the dedicated gaze tracker that's actually outputting a green screen with the gaze on it. So that computer is the tracker itself, is mounted underneath the monitor that the player is sitting in front of

on stage. And then we're using UM this might be a little too in the weeds, but we're using uh USB Cat six extenders, so we're able to run the USB three feet to a server room UM, and then the actual computer that the gaze tracking software is running on is in this server room hundreds of hundreds of feet away from the actual stage. So we can't run the games tracking software on the computer that the player is playing on because we can't do anything that would

that could impact competitive integrity. Then for the p o V UM, in order to get that p o V we cannot take it from the player's computer. So we don't ever take a video output from a player's computer and feed that into our broadcast infrastructure. Because the output from the video card on a player's computer needs to go directly to the monitor, there cannot be anything in

that loop that introduces any latency. So uh and again, in order to to maintain competitive integrity, we cannot use the computer that the player is playing on to produce the p o B foot that we're using to produce this content. So instead, I have yet another computer in the same server room that is connected to a relay game server and is mimicking that player's point of view experience.

So what we've done is we very carefully keep track of what aspect ratio the players running the game at on stage, We mimic those settings and all of the other settings that that players traditionally use on this secondary computer, and then we're um linking it to that player so that it shows their p o V the entire game and then feeding that into our broadcast infrastructure, and then upstream from all of that, there is a broadcast switcher that is merging the gays out put with the green

removed obviously, and that POV footage and feeding that to the control room where a producer can watch it in real time and decide is this something I want our talent to talk about or not talk about? And so we're we've now done this for three weeks of this tournament, and we're you know, to be honest with you, if you had talked to me before the tournament, UM, I I was very careful to say, I don't know what we're going to get. I don't know what kind of

insights we're going to get. I don't know if this is really going to be like super interesting content or just interesting content. Is it going to reveal things or not reveal things? Um? All I knew was that we had a proof of concept that we could capture this, and then we were going to see what we could do with it. But I think we're really really pleased with how the content has come come together, and the

fans are just blown away. UM. I think you know, it's it's a statement about what Turner Sports brings to the e sports space where we're trying to you know, constantly be additive and constantly be innovative, but not doing innovation and additive things for the sake of doing them, doing them to enhance the fan engagement and the fan viewing experience. Um And with this, you know what I would say is there is no nothing analogous to this

In traditional sports. You can see where a player runs, you can see them kick the ball, but you have no idea about like what they're looking at in real time, or what their intents are, or what they even consider. Right. You don't really have any raw data about their thoughts in traditional sports except what they tell you, right. But with this, this data, that this content, it reveals thought process in a way that nothing else in sports or e sports does. At this point, you see them look,

you know, do their mental check what's my health? How much ammo? Do I have? You know where where the rest of my team on the map? Like you see that in real time in the content. We're not we haven't gotten to the point where we can really do this real time in a play areat Although I want

to do that at some point. Um, and I'm so excited because it's it is really like this super interesting combination of biometric technology that is not very invasive and um, this sport that is like sort of made out of data, and it would be almost impossible to do this for

tragal sports. Like you know, I I am, I'm very fortunate in that I'm I'm a part of the team that also does the production for our NBA games, also does the production for our MLB games, and so I get to hear some of the behind the scenes stuff that is considered and talked about. And we certainly don't treat E sports any differently than we do those other

things from a thought process perspective. But you know, as I'm sitting in the meetings in the last couple of weeks and we're talking about MLB, like I'm actually thinking, Wow, wouldn't it be cool to see like gaze trace as a batter's in the batter's box and the pitches come again. But like, there is no way to do that but be super cool. So so this is like that though,

this is a step in that direction, right, Um. So I mean for me, like I think it's super exciting, and I would love to see this sort of like intent based data capture. Um, you know, what did he really look at? What did he consider? I would love to see that in baseball or football or basketball. How cool would it be to see the quarterbacks checkdowns in real time in football? You know, Um, what did he consider before he threw the ball over there? And what

did he see before he threw that ball? Like, there's there's just not anything like this. So so to tack back the esports though, um, and the content that we've captured so far, you know, I think it's some of it is has revealed, Oh that guy does exactly what we expected. And then in other cases it's like, wow, he spends a lot more time checking the more basic

things than you would expect. And I think you know, with players, other players, like you know, regular stream of consciousness like everyday counterstrike players, Um, this is an opportunity for them to kind of learn, oh wow, when I go around that corner, I don't look at that box. I start over there and sort of optimize their game too. Yeah.

I also I also like how you know, you you had this incredible challenge of being able to like all the pieces were there, but in order for them to actually work, you had to go to these enormous considerations so that you did not affect the performance of any player's machine, because clearly, uh, it would be the same as if you were to uh to mess with uh, you know, a professional athlete in a traditional sport, if they were to mess with their equipment, it would be

almost like sabotage. So you're you know, you're talking about like the not wanting to put any kind of load on a graphics processing unit that is meant to run

the game on the player's machine. I would say that that's sort of analogous to what you were saying with professional sports in the in the physical realm, the idea that we can't really do that eye tracking technique with traditional sports largely because it would require us to outfit professional players with additional equipment that would then in turn affect their performance. Thus you end up you end up with the classic quantum physics issue of anything you observe,

you are affecting, right. So, so it's it's interesting that you know, you had to find that work around and the professional sports arena for for pro video gamers, and I think once you do consider that in the realm of the physical sports as well. Even if you're not familiar with professional video game sports or e leagues or anything of those that nature, you start to say, oh, well, now I'm getting it. Now I'm getting it. I see.

It's like, you know, if if I walked up and I realized that the bat that I want to use is nowhere to be found, and I'm gonna have to use a different bat and it's one that's of a slightly different weight, and I'm not it's enough when you're talking about at that elite level of performance that it makes a measurable difference. So, Uh, I'm glad that we were able to have this conversation and and kind of get that perspective, because I think it does. It's very

enlightening to people who are unfamiliar with the subject. Uh. Is there anything that you have witnessed in your time with the league that stands out as one of those really special moments, whether it was in a tournament or maybe it was maybe it was when you were when you saw this this eye tracking technology all kind of come together. But anything that kind of is particularly special in your mind. I mean, from my personal experience to

kind of attack back to personal. There's kind of three moments for me, um to to take a question that asks for one and to answer with three. Um. You know, the first was the finals of our first tournament and we were we released game Command, which I have not mentioned, but it's a mosaic player, so like a user directed experience where uh end users can choose to watch any of the ten players who are playing in real time

or actually watch all ten. UM. Releasing that out into the wild and seeing the fan feedback on it, because there was literally nothing like it in the in the world at that point. UM, and there there actually still isn't like there's still nothing where you can watch all ten players at the same time, um in one UI.

But UM, that was the first, you know. The second was I've talked about the Major in January a few times already, but there was a moment during the finals where we crested a million concurrent viewers on Twitch, not just breaking the all time Twitch record, but shattering it by almost three hundred thousand viewers, and you know, setting the sort of bar for competitive e sports as far as viewership counts go. And then the third, honestly is

this eye tracker stuff. Um, it's always interesting to start with the theory in I mean, I guess in March. We started with a theory and go to proof of concept in June and then be sitting at a desk with white knuckles in September hoping that that vision and all of the workarounds and hard work come together. And then to see the fans react so positively. I mean, really,

that's what it's about, right. It's not about me or building a cool thing, as much as I love building cool things and that's kind of what I've made my living doing. Um, you know what's important is that other people are getting some value out of that, and no other people are more important than the like fans uh

in the scene. So um to see that and then to see what they do with it, right like they've they've taken it and turned it into memes and jokes and everything like to me, that means it's been accepted, right like at the highest level. When they start making Reddit threads about joking about past tournaments with eye tracking turned on, then to me, that means we've we've done

something new. Like those three moments for me are the are the three most special among many many special moments that the last three years, those are those are great stories. And I love that this trend has been picking up steam for the last not to use a valve joke, but it's been picking up steam for the past few years, and seeing not just the the professional video game sports industry really coming into its own in the United States. I mean, obviously it's been a big deal in other

places as well. It started really in the US, but I would say that it kind of blossomed in South Korea and then as now finding more acceptance in the United States, which which is great. But we're also seeing uh people turning into kind of an entertainment figure through their video game playing and reaching audiences that way. Clearly there is a a uh interested invested audience they get,

they get really attached to certain players and certain titles. Uh. It's exciting, and I'm glad that we're kind of like right at the point where I think it's going to explode, like it's already. I guess you could argue hitting a million concurrent twitch viewers all at once, that's kind of

an explosion all in of itself. But seeing this, this this cusp of acceptance is really exciting to me because I've been following professional game aiming for a while in its various formats, whether it was through UH league, you know, tournament league play, or whether it was a group of sponsored players who were there to help represent a particular

game developer, anything like that. I've been following that stuff for years and seeing it now get to a point where there's there's a real awareness and celebration of it is exciting to me. I love games. I love playing games. I am awful at them, but I still enjoy it. Uh. Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about the games that that we would stream, and I believe you mentioned a very popular M m O RPG that you occasionally would play. Yeah, I'm not afraid to break out World

of Warcraft on occasion. That's fair among other games. Yeah, I I my go to SO I I used to

UH so people can know interest a full disclosure. I the game I'm most known for streaming, because I don't do it very frequently is Minecraft, because I would hold a marathon session of Minecraft as part of a charity event every year, and I would play twenty four hours straight of Minecraft and then for whatever when people would make donations at whatever level they would donate, I would build a monument in Minecraft out of materials that were, uh,

comparatively difficult to find. So the more you donated, the more rare the material had to be in order for me to make a monument significant for that donation. And I it was not creative mode. It was you know, regular mode, turned on all the enemies everything, and um, let me tell you somewhere around our number sixteen, things get special. But uh, but yeah, I I have a love of this as well. So I cannot wait to check out the the E League play. I cannot wait.

I plan to actually be at the finals, so I cannot wait to see that in person. And uh, where can people go to experience this? I mean Elite dot com is is the one stop shop for everything you'd want when we're live. That will point you to all the different viewing experiences that we have and it'll give you schedule information anything else you would want. Excellent, Robert, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and I hope we get a chance to talk again

in the future. Awesome. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the conversation. Clearly there's a healthy audience out there for professional gaming, from entertainment personalities to tournament players, and it will be really interesting to see how the industry evolves from here. Could we one day see video games take a place with traditional sports and something as celebrated as the Olympics, or will there always be at least some level of stigma in place that will prevent

that from ever happening. And doesn't really matter as long as people are having a good time playing or watching games. I can say this. I am in my early forties and I watch a lot of let's play style videos and live streams. I enjoy watching people play games. I'm dazzled by the skills of pro level gamers, and I find myself thoroughly entertained by certain personalities when they interact with each other while playing together. Cough achievement Hunter cough.

I think there's plenty of room for growth in that realm of entertainment. I hope you guys enjoyed this episode about the history of the sports. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuffs, reach out to me on Twitter or on Facebook to handle I use it both as Text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to your favorite shows. Two