Esports has always lived in three worlds at once, especially in education. It is a field of research that has produced its own handbooks, journals, and degree programs in little more than a decade; it is a competitive practice that spans from the scholastic leagues to world championships; and it is a community of players, fans, organizers, clubs, universities, and cities. These three worlds, however, meet less often than they should. Research tends to study competition from the outside, organizers rarely draw on what research already knows, and communities appear as the object of a study more often than as its partner. Still, there are places where the three converge, and NC State is one of them: a university with an esports program, an esports arena, esports academic coursework, and an esports research community, in a city that treats esports as part of its event economy.
NC State’s motto, Think & Do, describes the task ERNC27 sets itself. We invite contributions that think about esports, contributions that do something with it, and, above all, those that do both. Three questions run through the conference:
- What can research learn from esports competition and community, and what does it owe them in return?
- How do esports competitive structures, from collegiate programs to professional circuits, shape the communities around them?
- When esports research, competition, and community converge, what makes that convergence last?
