Introduction

An angry grandmother.

That’s the reason why I am writing this book.

Here is the story of how one enraged elderly woman inspired me to set down a history of esports, with a view to bridging a gap between generations.

One day I bought two Nintendo Switches as birthday presents for my two sons, who recently turned eight and six, respectively. From the moment the consoles arrived in our house, their grandmother, who supervises their daily activities, entered a state of extreme vigilance.

I’ve known Yoko for more than a decade. In most circumstances, she is an extremely peaceful person. I’ve never known her to get mad for no reason. When she sees her grandchildren playing video games, however, a red mist descends over her eyes.

Despite occasional complaints, my older son, Mir, a law-abiding citizen who is more civilized than his brother, seemed to cope with his grandmother’s “homework first” doctrine. My younger son, Haru, however, is slightly rebellious and doesn’t yet attend primary school—meaning he doesn’t have any homework.

When Haru entered gaming mode, he was not at all interested in listening to his grandmother. When she tried to intervene in the middle of his intense engagement with the Switch, he ignored her completely. Sometimes he even retorted by saying something obnoxious (“a six-year-old just said what?!”) that he had learned from a YouTube video.

His otherwise peaceful grandmother, on the other hand, couldn’t stand the sight of her grandchild giving all his attention to the tiny screen of the Switch for hours at a time, and none to her.

Over the course of a few days, stress in the house gradually built up, until the clouds broke in dramatic fashion.

My sons’ granny had a bad day. When she saw the younger one in gaming mode, she flipped out.

With a speed that belied her age, she brought a pair of scissors from the kitchen and mercilessly cut the charging cable of the Switch. Without a cable to charge the machine, my younger son had no way to prolong his gaming when the battery was empty.

His grandmother was victorious yet slightly abashed. My younger son reacted with shock and horror.

How Many Adults Perceive Video Games

What does the story above tell us? I’d argue that it’s a fairly good illustration of how many people in our society perceive gaming. While many young people love to play video games, their older counterparts, especially those who haven’t had the chance to experience gaming for themselves, often respond with suspicion, or even outright hostility.

There is a stark gap between people in their thirties, forties, and younger, myself included, who have embraced video gaming as part of their culture, and older generations with little or no gaming experience, who may see video gaming as an alien phenomenon. For many of them, their interactions with video games consist solely of seeing their younger relatives apparently buried in another world, unable to socialize or pay attention to events off the screen. They naturally form a negative perception of gaming that can be hard to shake.

Esports is everywhere nowadays, so these same older people are sure to hear about it on the news. They don’t fully understand what esports is and—based on their limited interactions with video games—they think negatively about it.

It’s an entirely understandable situation, but I think it’s an extremely unfortunate one. This generation gap is felt by parents of children who love games and children whose parents don’t love games. Worse, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. I have seen many people facing the same issue in Japan—where I currently live—the United States, and Europe, where I have previously lived.

The good news is that there’s no need for esports to drive a wedge between generations when they could instead be a point of intergenerational connection.

That’s why I wrote this book. As a parent of two children who love video games, I can see the risks of excessive gaming. Yet as an esports enthusiast myself, I understand why my sons enjoy them so much. I hope I can be a bridge between the generation of digital natives who feel completely at home in the world of esports and an older generation of people who feel perplexed, even threatened, by the virtual worlds their relatives inhabit.

If you have limited experience playing games but your children or grandchildren are avid gamers, this book is for you. Perhaps you already feel negative toward video games in general and you want to understand why so many younger people love them. The gaming industry isn’t perfect. It has focused too much on creating entertainment, leading to a perception of video games as a guilty pleasure. But there are numerous positive elements of video gaming.

This book is about the history of competitive gaming, now called esports. In these pages, I describe how esports took off as a subculture, how it formed into an industry, and how it mushroomed into a global phenomenon. If you are curious to know more about the history, so you can understand younger members of your family who are heavily into competitive gaming, you’ll find ample insight in this book.

Alternatively, perhaps you’ve seen so much about esports in the media that you want to familiarize yourself with it. Even if you don’t have a personal connection with an esports fan, reading this book will provide you with a history of the esports industry and an understanding of the new career paths it has opened up to members of younger generations.

Let’s acknowledge another possibility. Perhaps you’re a young person who is serious about gaming. You aim to carve out a career for yourself in the esports industry, but you still haven’t figured out how to explain your ambition to your parents. If your parents are highly conservative, you may wonder how you could ever explain to them what esports mean to you.

Or maybe you simply want to understand the history and business of an industry that brings you a lot of pleasure. How did esports start and how do they differ from standard video gaming?

When communication breaks down, we all lose. If you’re a parent, you may resort to premature judgments about your child’s life and career choices, for example, believing that he is hopeless because he spends too many hours every day playing games, or that he is nuts for wanting to become a professional gamer. On the other side of the coin, if you’re a young person with an avid interest in esports, you may think your parents are clueless.

The only way to bridge this gap is by making a conscious effort to understand the perspectives of the important people in your life. I hope this book will represent the first step in that effort.

My Esports Story

You may be wondering what gives me the authority to write about esports. When it comes to gaming, I have roughly an average amount of experience for my generation. Although I spent a moderate amount of time gaming during my childhood and teenage years, I am no professional gamer. Nonetheless, like any other Korean male of my generation, I enjoy watching professional gamers play competitively.

My first game console was a Nintendo that my parents bought me when we lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was five or six years old. The next landmark I remember is moving to Seoul, South Korea, where I owned a series of video game consoles, such as a Super Nintendo and a Sony PlayStation.

Around the time I entered a local junior high school, PC games became more popular than console games in South Korea. Throughout my time living in Seoul, as a high schooler and as a college student, the heat never went out of gaming. Enthusiasm for competitive gaming only grew. Years later, the world would dub this phenomenon “esports.”

While I was training as an aerospace engineer, and during my career in the research and development department of a major Korean automaker, video games were an occasional hobby but nothing more.

Years later, I switched my career path to business management consulting and joined a Big Four consulting firm based in Tokyo, Japan, where I currently live. Growing up as a big fan of Japanese video games and watching the esports scene grow globally, I expected that Japan would have a decent-sized esports market, at least matching South Korea or the United States.

But to my great surprise, when I joined the firm in 2017, the term “esports” was still foreign to the majority of the Japanese people.

This observation soon evolved into a realization that the relative dearth of esports in Japan might be a good business opportunity. Japan has one of the largest video gaming industries in the world, surely ripe for esports development. I started to work on establishing an esports business practice at a consulting firm traditionally known for its auditing, accounting, and risk management service, not subject areas remotely related to esports.

At first, nobody in the firm understood what I was trying to do. But after about a year of internal seminars, pitches, and discussions, the...