Esports and Virtual Environments: the realm of data?

Nicolas Besombes is an Associate Professor at the Sports Faculty of the University of Paris. His research focused on sports’ digital practices and more specifically on competitive gaming and esports. Through a transdisciplinary approach at the crossroads of the sociology of sport and the game studies, his research topics are related to esports and physicality, esports and public policies, esports and health, and esports and diversity. He is the Vice President of the French National Esports Association (France Esports) and he is also advising the Olympic Movement about its esports strategy.

His conference will focus on esports and data. Esports refers to organized video game competitions. With the appearance of streaming platforms at the turn of the 2010s, esports has gone from a niche practice to a true generational mass spectacle. Mirror of our digitized societies and a product of the digital revolution, esports is intrinsically dematerialized and virtual, and a particularly fertile ground for data collection: optimizing the performance of high-level players, predicting match results, spectator experience or even artificial intelligence, are some of the applications already underway in the esports world. The use of data in this sector stands out clearly in two areas: firstly technologically, with the development of different applications and systems designed to enrich and improve the gaming experience (users and fans), and secondly economically, where what is sought is both the growth and development of this new market. The first area will be the focus of the presentation, while keeping in mind that the boom of Big Data is not without raising some practical and technological questions: what relevant data to collect? with what tools? How to process them? And finally, how to interpret and analyze them?

The Conference is moderated by Ivan Urendez, former professional eSporter & RTS eSport consultant.

Inscription: www.unil.ch/centre-sport/esport