It’s a Saturday morning. Or maybe afternoon depending on last night. Gameday. You’re groggy. It’s hot outside. The tailgate’s already in full swing, but you’re still in bed. Gotta get changed. Find that one piece of USC gear you own. Hell, you might not even go at all. It’s like, 90 degrees. The stadium will be even hotter. Sweaty, smelly drunken college kids all waiting for the blimp to go by for that brief moment of c o o l.

Life could be better.

So what else can you do?

Esports.

School spirit, thrilling matches, flying robot monkeys, all in the air conditioned comfort of your bed.

Unfortunately, the USC esports seasons don’t officially kick off until the spring semester, but there are still a few tournaments and showcases this fall that will give you a taste for the matches to come. You can also peruse some highlights and gameplay from last season’s games on the Esports Twitch Page.

Esports:

If you watched your brother or sister play video games as a kid, you already have the experience necessary to navigate the ever-expanding world of esports. The entire concept of Twitch – a streaming platform for video game related content – revolves around this relationship. The only difference is the scale. Now you watch people play video games with potentially thousands of fellow viewers.

Esports add the competitive twist to this casual scenario. No longer are people just playing the equivalent to backyard soccer games – they’re competing for much higher stakes.

Like that one 16-year-old kid who just won $3 million in a Fortnite tournament.

If you understand the basic concepts behind traditional sports, you can quickly figure out esports, and there’s no better way than learning about the competitive teams we have at our own school.

The Teams:

USC’s Esports Union, the major esports group on campus, hosts four varsity teams spanning the games of League of Legends, Overwatch, Hearthstone and Super Smash Bros. Players compete against rival teams from other schools around California for a chance at the highest levels of digital glory.

The national stage has a broader assortment of games, however. Counter Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Fortnite and many others are played at a high level with massive viewer counts and significant prize pools. Many smaller games – those with a smaller viewership and competitive player base – don’t have the same resources as some of these corporate behemoths, but maintain vibrant scenes with passionate playerbases. It’s sometimes fun to scroll down the ‘Browse’ tab on Twitch to see what kind of stuff people are playing towards the bottom of the list.

Finding a game you’re interested in makes esports much more exciting to follow, even if the game doesn’t have the media presence of some of the more mainstream titles, but it’s nice to have an understanding of those that everyone already knows.

League of Legends:

It’s probably the most popular competitive game right now barring Fortnite, but that’s still too new to tell. League of Legends (often referred to as League, or sometimes LoL (lol)) has been around since 2009, with the competitive scene really starting to take off in 2012.

League falls under the category of a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), the term for a real time, 3rd person strategy game where you see the whole battlefield from a bird’s eye view. You join your team of fellow players as a “champion” trying to work your way across a map fortified by lines of defensive structures called turrets, or towers to destroy the enemy’s “nexus”; essentially their home base. At the same time, your team works to defend your own nexus against enemy hoards of “minions” (non player characters) and rival player controlled champions. There are 144 different champions to play with, which is kind of a lot, but once you’ve played for 1000 hours or so everything kind of clicks.

It’s like a game of football where you have the running back, quarterback, linemen, etc, and the coach uses them in different combinations according to their roles to run specific plays. You can see similarities between the two games in the playmaking aspects, but with the added element of – you know – fireballs and such.

In the picture above, you’ll see three main arteries connecting the two bases. Teams split up their players to cover those three lanes, with various combinations taking on the different fronts. Pathways litter the middle areas as well, so teams send a player to terrorize those regions for added unpredictability. Here’s a more comprehensive rundown on the various roles in the game.

League tends to be one of the highest streamed games on Twitch, with the finals of major tournaments reaching the millions of viewers. The competitive scene hosts a variety of regional leagues, like the League Championship Series (LCS) here in the U.S. Regional competitions exist around the world in China (LPL), South Korea (LCK), Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau (LMS), and various other regions.

Each season culminates in a World Championship, where the best teams from each regional league compete in a massive tournament, which in 2018 amassed 100 million viewers and boasted a $6.5 million prize pool. And the coolest part: it’s held at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, just minutes away from USC.

The stakes are high, and the tension is real. League is a great game to be familiar with to better acquaint yourself with the esports world.

Overwatch:

I have a personal stake in this one, mainly because I’m still upset over Overwatch’s relationship with Team Fortress 2 (the best game in the history of video games). See, the games are very similar. Overwatch took lots of “inspiration” from Team Fortress 2’s class based, first person shooter system, and when Overwatch came out, many competitive “Team Fortress 2” players migrated to hop on the more lucrative, ESPN covered opportunity. So I’m still mad about that.

But you probably have no idea what that means without any context.

Unlike League where you play in a sort of god mode – controlling your champion from the sky – Overwatch unites you with your character in a first-person perspective, creating the effect of a limiting but personal relationship with the game’s environment. Teams consist of six players using various characters who provide different skill sets to the field of play.

A gorilla with a jetpack for example.

Overwatch rewards technical skill, giving advantage to players who excel at clicking on the enemy’s pixeled body. Aim and movement are crucial to the decisive moments of the game where the outcome often depends on clutch individual plays.

Teams must either capture and hold objectives, or push a payload – a cart full of valuable cargo – across a map to the enemy team’s home. It all goes pretty fast, and it’s easy to get lost in the chaos of big fights, but once you’ve seen a few games it’s, well, still kind of a mess.

But that mess makes a lot of money. The Overwatch league (OWL) started off strong with heavy backing from industry giants like Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, and Fred Wilpon, owner of the New York Mets. It’s covered all over the place in every big esports news outlet, especially ESPN who took to the game very quickly.

It’s the first game really designed specially for esports, with large deposits of cash forcing it into the mainstream. Other games had to naturally grow into the esport status, but Overwatch came out of the gates with competition in mind.

The economic push brought about concepts foreign to the typical esports environment, most notably the link of teams to physical locations. Esports teams generally formulate around a digital banner with no real geographical anchor to their name, while in Overwatch cities around the world host their own teams, and play in a system similar to many traditional sports with a regular season followed by playoffs and finals. Again, lots of money goes into these tournaments, with the 2018 playoffs boasting a prize pool of $1.7 million.

The future of this game is in flux, as people have been complaining about stale gameplay after only 2 years of competitive play, but the player-base is still quite massive so we’ll have to see what Blizzard (the company behind Overwatch, Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, to name a few) has in store.

Hearthstone:

World of Warcraft’s iconic characters put into a card game.

Blizzard’s Hearthstone takes everyone’s favorite characters from the soul draining classic and places them into a turn based card game, not unlike “Yu-Gi-Oh!”. All the fun of collecting cards in the comfort of your digital box with the added benefits of some sweet, sweet effects whenever your card does something cool.

This one doesn’t involve teams. Just a one-vs-one against an enemy player using cards from your deck of 30, supplemented by your hero’s innate abilities. Your goal is to take down the enemy player with various combinations of your cards, which you can win or buy in packs from the store.

Though not as popular as games like League of Legends or Fortnite, it still has a pretty huge player base with Blizzard sponsored leagues culminating in a big tournament at the company’s annual Blizzcon, an event where Blizzard fans partake in cosplay and various competitions – Overwatch being one of the bigger ones.

Super Smash Bros:

You all probably know Super Smash Bros. It’s a certified classic in the video game community. Even if you didn’t play, you probably heard Nick in fifth grade bragging at school that he could beat anyone, and then you went over to his house and he beat you five times in a row right in front of Jennifer.

Well jokes on him – this fictional character of course… There are people who’ve dedicated decades to this game, which was originally released in 1999, but was popularized further by the release of Super Smash Bros: Melee on the GameCube, which people still play to this day.

Lots of people, in fact. Melee tournaments are everywhere, and all of them looking like they never left the mid 2000s. People gather around old, massive TVs and watch insanely talented players duke it out over a game that’s been studied to the point where everyone knows all the gimmicks and glitches on a pixel level.

The game itself is pretty simple. It’s a fighting game, where players face off against each other in an arena, and use various button combinations to send the other player flying off the map. Lots of characters from the greater Nintendo universe, like the beloved Mario, Kirby and Pikachu, are available to choose, with each possessing different moves and combinations to knock their enemies around.

As the years went on, Smash was updated to fit the new systems and incorporate new characters, thought they mainly stayed true to their core. The latest iteration, Smash Bros Ultimate, is on the Nintendo Switch, one of the more popular devices of the late ‘10s.

Smash has an interesting competitive history in context with the other games on this list. While League of Legends, Hearthstone and Overwatch all have company sponsored competitive leagues and events, Smash grew primarily through grassroots organization. Most of its player base participates in local or independently run scenes. Bigger avenues do exist, however, with organizations like Major League Gaming (MLG) – an esports organization with various tournaments and ladders – hosting the game in its Pro Circuit. USC has its own community, the USC Smash Club, which has tournaments on Fridays every other week.

Smash can be a very social game – especially with a group of people who have no idea what they’re doing. On the flip side, getting smacked around by someone who actually knows the game is an infuriating experience everyone should have as an emerging gamer.

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There are many, many more games that have massive competitive scenes out there, but if you know these four, you’ll be well on your way to understanding the world of esports.

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