Esports w/ Prof. Andy Miah

Mar 1

EPISODE #38

Professor Andy Miah shares his insights into why competitive video gaming has experienced a rapid growth in popularity, how digital technology is changing the way traditional sports are played, and how gamification looks set to transform the world of health and fitness.

Professor Andy Miah, PhD is Chair of Science Communication & Future Media, at the University of Salford, where he also leads The #SciComm Space and Co-Chairs the University’s Esports Strategy. He was previously Chair of Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, USA, Advisory Board Member for the Science and Industry Museum, Manchester, Advisory Board Member for the British Esports Association, and Commission Member of the Global Esports Federation. Professor Miah’s research examines the intersections of art, ethics, technology and culture and he has published broadly on areas of emerging technologies, particularly related to digital and biotechnological innovations. Current research themes include the use of virtual reality in science, health, and art, the ethics of artificial intelligence, and the rise of transhumanism.

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Transcript

Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the FUTURES Podcast with me, Luke Robert Mason.

On this episode I speak to Professor of Science Communication and Future Media, Andy Miah.

"I'm convinced that there's a lot of creativity that goes alongside being a gamer and occupying those sorts of creative, open-ended worlds." - Andy Miah, excerpt from interview.

Andy shared his insights into why competitive video gaming has experienced a rapid growth in popularity, how digital technology is changing the way traditional sports are played, and how gamification looks set to transform the world of health and fitness.

You can view a full video version of this conversation and FUTURES Podcast dot net.

Over the last decade, digital technology has had a massive impact on the world of sports. Athletes are able to collect more data than ever on their performance, while spectators are able to use a myriad of tools to engage with live sports in new and exciting ways. But nowhere has technology shown its dominance more than in aiding in the rise of the popularity of competitive video game playing otherwise known as esports. Today, esports has fast become a multi-million dollar industry, driving new innovations that are redefining how we think about the social function of sports, and the kind of individuals who participate. At the forefront of understanding this new world is Andy Miah, an academic who has dedicated his career to exploring the convergence of sports and digital culture.

Andy recently made the bold claim that the future of all sports is esports. Now this might seem odd, but already we're starting to see sports become mixed reality experiences, where the line between the physical and virtual is becoming increasingly blurred. So, Andy, why do you feel that esports is such an important cultural phenomena and one that deserves such close study?

Andy Miah: Well, I think it's actually all encompassing. It's a new generation of content, consumers and creators that are transforming how we engage with each other. What we've seen over the last five years is the rise of streaming content - so people watching other gamers stream their content - and alongside that, we've seen the growth of the professionalisation of esports.

Now we even have TV series on major broadcasting channels about the subject of esports. All those things together, coupled with the fact that the economic foundation of the world of elite sports is predicated on television - this medium that is quickly dying, or at least transforming into something completely different. All of those things combined, I think along with our desire to live digital lives, has really sowed the seeds for a world where the future of sports is esports, for sure. I think that actually what's happened at the highest level of league sports is to bring those two worlds closer together.

Mason: So, how do we define esports? I mean, are esports even real sports?

Miah: Ah, it's such a controversial question, Luke. It's funny because I often have debates with people where the world of esports are so fed up with the question that they reject it outright. But I think it's relevant to ask, still, because we're in the business of defining what we do, because it helps us demarcate what we're not doing. Of course the world of esports is not dissimilar. There are people in online poker that want it to become esports and many people in the esports world aren't too keen on that. It is a hotly contested field and subject, but I think that a reasonable definition is simply 'competitive computer game playing', and especially where the emphasis on how we reward people is their skill rather than chance. Those are some key factors in it. That definition, for me, is absolutely dynamic. It's evolving around the technologies.

I guess for me, what drew me into the subject is the fact that our interface to engage with each other and to engage with the things we like doing is changing. My son, who's 10 years old, is still learning on computers at school where they have a mouse to navigate the computer and the keyboard. Of course we know these things won't be around in 20 years time. You just won't engage with things in that way. So I've been very excited by seeing what's happening in this sort of immersive technology sphere, where we're seeing a new generation of esports in the making, I think, at the moment.

Mason: I mean, you've controversially said the future of all sports is esports. What did you mean by this, when you said that?

Miah: Well, do you know what? Last year in January, 2020, the international Olympic committee - this major guardian of elite sports - had its annual meeting. One of its senior leaders said that if the Olympic movement doesn't figure out its esports strategy, they'll be taken to the cleaners.

I think that what he meant by that is that the economic base that underpins elite sports - which is mostly the sale of television rights - is changing dramatically. We know now that the majority of young people are actually watching streaming content rather than watching TV. So if you want to make sure that you safeguard your future as a sport, you have to look at what's happening in that world.

Alongside that, I think we also see incredible amounts of innovation that are happening in the world of esports. I think back to the League of Legends World Finals in China last November, where we saw this remarkable production combining augmented reality with performance and projection mapping to stage. It was, I think, one of the most groundbreaking opening ceremonies of any event, nevermind just an esports event.

Mason: I mean, this is the crazy thing. Digital technology is changing sports in so many ways. It's changing the way in which they're played, they're watched, and they're understood. So what sort of impact is it having on the spectator, on the athlete and the broadcaster?

Miah: Well, I think that's also in flux. When I think back to the origins of sport, we go back perhaps to Ancient Greece and the ancient Olympic Games. The design of a kind of amphitheater or an Olympic stadium is a proposition of an interaction between a performer and a spectator. That is one of the things that's fundamentally changed over the last 20 years, for sure. We've seen the growing use of social media to engage audiences, the desire to find new sorts of experiences through different screen experiences, and that's the sort of thing that the elite brands are working with. They're exploring how you can create content in virtual reality, or use a whole range of immersive wearable technologies to bring people into the heart of the action. I think we've seen the growth of elite sport alongside the growth of the media. They're intertwined and have been for the last century.

Part of that - in fact, the heart of it - is the desire of the journalist to lead people into the experience. What is it like to break a world record? How does the narrative - the storyteller of the journalist - bring people into that world? I think immersive technologies are making that happen and pushing the frontiers of that relationship.

There's a great example from Formula E racing, which is the electric car version of Formula 1. Since its inception, really, they've been experimenting really creatively with digital. They've had things like fan boosts where the spectators can cheer for their favourite driver, and that driver receives a performance boost in their car during the race. Last season, the Formula E race introduced a Mario Kart line. If the driver took a particular route and followed it - a bit like the arrows on Mario Kart that get a performance boost in the car. These principles are coming out of the computer gaming world, and I think are having a big impact on both what we think of as sport, but also how we engage with it as spectators.

Mason: I mean, it's so controversial - what is sport and what isn't sport? Recently we've heard the idea that they may allow skateboarding in the Olympics. Andy, do you think we'll ever see a Super Mario Bros in the Olympics?

Miah: I do. And actually, skateboarding is in the Olympics. In Tokyo this year, we've got Sky Brown from the UK, who's hopefully - if everything goes to plan - one of our great gold prospects there, and a remarkable young athlete.

But it's true that certainly with the Olympic program itself, there's this kind of frontier of what counts as being a sport which has always been in flux, actually. It has never been fixed. Back when the modern Olympic Games began, one of the earliest forms of competition was in artistic practices: sculpture; painting. How we reward excellence is really what this is all about. I think that's where the arguments that underpinned the desire to bring esports into that elite sports world are pretty similar. The virtues of being an elite sports player are similar to being an elite esports player, and those worlds are slowly getting closer together, I think.

But certainly, I think that as you can imagine, many people in that world are trying to really hold the line on where they draw esports into that world. Partly because we know historically that gaming has really been seen as oppositional to physical activity. There's been a lot of moral panic about gaming culture, a lot of anxiety about the way in which it may lead people - especially young people - into sedentary lifestyles. Historically, gaming has really been a challenge for anyone working in physical activity or sports, but that's what's changing. I think esports is helping usher in that new area.

Mason: Popular media is fascinated by gamers, but not all the press is positive. As you just said there, that there's things like burnout, depression, anxiety; all of these things are associated with esports. Whereas in traditional sports, these effects are often mitigated by having an active and healthy lifestyle. But how are the esports community actually addressing some of those issues?

Miah: I mean, that's a really great point, Luke, but I would say also that the sports world has created this myth that somehow being an elite athlete is just this virtuous healthy pursuit. There's a wonderful documentary from a couple of years ago called 'The Weight of Gold' that talked about how many elite athletes - often those that are the gold medal winners - suffer greatly from mental health issues. It covers the story of many of those athletes. So I think that elite sports are also going through a sort of revolution of realising that actually, these virtues that are presumed to be there as a result of what we see as being ultra healthy and ultra capable are in fact much more complex things. They're far more multifaceted than that. Let's remember, as well, that 99% of the elite athletes that are out there aren't making a lot of money, aren't winning any medals and are still on that struggle and that journey.

I think elite sports and elite esports have a lot in common in that respect, but what we've seen over the last, probably, just five years now is the first wave of role models in elite esports. It's the first time we see this sort of professionalisation of this practice, and it's really profound.

One of the great examples, I think, comes from 2019 when in the latest iteration of the Turing test, we saw Google's AlphaStar computer play the world's best StarCraft esports player. Of course, as with AlphaGo and as with Deep Blue back in 1997, the computer won. Esports are pushing the boundaries, technologically, that I think the waves of which are sort of perforating across societies in remarkable ways.

Mason: So in your mind, Andy, do you believe that serious gamers should also be considered elite athletes?

Miah: I do. It's a very careful argument to make because in fact, many people in the East, in the esports world, are not entirely comfortable with being categorised as sports. I think there's some really good arguments for that. I know that certainly in the UK, we have the British Esports Association.

One of the anxieties about badging esports as sports is the possibility that young people may say, "Well, I'm being an athlete by just doing esports.", and may leave behind these other sports. So I sort of advocate a kind of mixed reality experience where you combine these two things together. Actually what we're seeing with many of the esports players that are out there is that to be good at a sport, much like to be good at Formula 1 racing or anything that seems, on the surface, to be a quite sedentary practice, in fact requires an incredible amount of physical and mental preparation to be good at. So, although we're seeing young people often just moving mice and keyboards or controllers on these big events, in order to get to that point and in order to make the number of decisions they need to make every minute, they have to do a lot of physical preparation. That, for me, is in fact a healthier lifestyle.

I think the problem we have a little bit, historically, is that esports - not just esports, but sports - are seen as the kind of pinnacle of a healthy lifestyle. In actual fact, they're often not. Many athletes cease to compete or seize to engage with physical activity later in their life because it's been so all consuming in that early part. Potentially, the esports athlete, or player, or whatever you want to call it, will end up being a healthier role model than the sports elite athlete at the moment.

Mason: Well, there we have it. I'm going to be interested to follow that and see if that comes to pass. In researching this, I was surprised to hear that there's people who do things like posture and finger training. There's this whole field of folks who train people to be elite gamers. How can some of that knowledge of how to hold yourself in front of a machine, and how to use computers in the most effective way be applied to all of us - especially during this time of COVID where it feels like we're constantly tied to our shiny glowing rectangles?

Miah: It's a great question. I think it partly speaks to the broader environment in which we find ourselves, where everything is sort of screen-based. One of the things I've found, even from the advocates and companies that are underpinning this world of esports - companies like Twitch - trying to advocate healthier ways of gaming...in fact, I think a lot of the esports world are very anxious to encourage their players or their community to not play more hours, but to play better hours. That means combining it with a whole range of other activities. I think finding that balance between the two and making sure that you can optimise your performance is crucial.

One of the things that's really interesting which we're exploring at the moment is trying to see if we can bring esports into leisure centers. We know we've got a problem with getting young people into sports centers and being physically active. Maybe if we bring a partnership between these two worlds where you can perhaps trade physical activity in the gym with credits in the esports facility, that might be a way of getting those two worlds together.

But - and this is a really big but, I think - the future of the gym has to be the integration of esports technologies. It's clear with environments like Les Mills and the growing gamification of exercise that this is what we're looking at. I could quite imagine that a big part of our future of physical activity is where these two worlds collide.

Mason: I mean, that sounds very much like that episode of Black Mirror. It feels like gamification really is the thing that's at the core of all of this; the transformation of watching into playing. So how has gamification bled into all forms of sport health and fitness?

Miah: I think it really is, Luke. I think that's also very central to the economic proposition. The realisation in the sports world that even though they've got these remarkable products with elite athletes breaking world records and pushing the boundaries of human capabilities through what they do, even if they're right in front of the spectator, in a live stadium situation - that spectator is still looking at their phone for half of the time that they're there. Certainly with television, even more so.

I think that the sports world - in its pursuit of increased audience engagement, motivated by the proliferation of social media platforms, where they want to drive their content - have realised that if they want to recapture the eyeballs of these spectators, whether live or remote, they have to make it a kind of immersive experience. I think that gaming is the way to do that.

I play a lot of chess in my house. My son's a great chess player and really loves it, so we play a lot of chess. If you're playing chess, you can't do anything else. It's true of many games, I think. It keeps your focus and attention on that product or that experience, and it's fun. It transforms something that's often quite a sedentary or passive experience into something that's far more enriching.

So many things are happening in that ecosystem of the audience experience that that's what's really motivating the content creators and indeed the brands that underpin these experiences. One of the great things that happened over the COVID period was a huge amount of experimentation with computer gaming and virtual environments. One of the first was the Australian Grand Prix that moved into an entirely online proposition. I watched this on YouTube. We know that Formula One racing in computer games is already heavily modeled on the physical reality of the cities, so when you watch it, the graphics are so good and the modelling is so good that it feels like you're watching a TV broadcast; a televisual broadcast. What was also nice about it was they also brought together the gamers and the drivers in a race competing alongside each other. It went really well. I think these are still early days for those sorts of products, but I think we'll see a lot more of those.

Mason: Now, when we look at gamers, there's an obvious concern, which is one of antisocial behavior, violence and mental health. Because if you're an elite gamer, of course you have all this training. As you just argued there, you might be physically fitter in the longer term. But for folks who look up to these gamers and who might be amateur gamers, there's still the issue that they have when there might be gaming disorders, for example. I know the World Health Organisation described the characteristics of gaming disorder as the significant impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational, or other areas of functioning that would normally have been evident for at least 12 months or more.

The WHO is really concerned about the risk to amateur gamers, who look up to these pro gamers, want to become them, but just don't have that skill to get into that pro level. What do we do for those folks?

Miah: You're absolutely right, Luke, it's a huge issue. I think what we're seeing from the world of esports is a real distancing from that sort of problem. I think it makes sense on one level, in that if you are playing computer games competitively in a social setting, the risks of those sorts of habits emerging is significantly less. But, we have to take seriously that relationship between the esports professionals and players and the amateur watches or gamers, because - and I think it's not dissimilar from sports world - we have to think about how active spectators are, how much physical activity spectators get out of their enjoyment of elite sports, and look at those sorts of figures.

I suppose what we do know is that if you can make the transition from being a casual gamer into being, even, an amateur esports player where you're in this social setting and where you are working with others to produce events and take part in competitions, then that can reduce the risks that the WHO is concerned about with gaming disorder. It's partly because, again, we know that the routes into addictive habits and things that are destructive for life often happen as a result of isolation. If you're working within a social setting where people are able to support you and check how you're doing, then we do diminish that considerably.

I would say that a key strategy to reduce the prospects of gaming disorder is in fact to move gaming habits into social settings. I'm blown away by just how much online gaming there is and how big some of these communities are, but I know that certainly speaking to my university students - we have an esports society at the university - they're all incredibly creative and innovative. They're doers. They get productions done really well. I think that by being part of that community, it just allows them to lead a healthier approach to their own gaming habits.

Mason: I mean, you've gone one step further, Andy, and actually suggested putting the NHS into these virtual worlds. Basically, giving users access to mental health support from professionals whilst they're online, whilst they're gaming or even whilst they're scrolling social media. So how do you imagine that might look?

Miah: Well, I think we're in a really challenging situation with regards to not just social media, but those immersive platforms where we're either watching streams or gaming ourselves. The problem is that they're entirely divorced from those unhealthy habits and the treatment of them by the healthcare professionals. It's a peculiar thing to me that we don't have any sort of presence of healthcare professionals within those spaces.

It's interesting - if you look at what's happened with social media over the last, maybe five to 10 years, there is a growing expectation to think about the risks that exist to vulnerable people. We see platforms like TikTok where that's becoming incredibly prominent as a concern. What they've done, really, is create their own digital wellbeing aspects to their platforms. Let's be frank, they don't work terribly well. I would rather that we had an NHS presence in the UK, or health professionals there that are able to support people. The consequences of not doing that means that there's no support whatsoever.

I know that in the UK we've set up a sort of gaming addiction sort of clinic in the UK, in London. That's trying to address some of these things, but you have to address the problem in the environment where it's taking place. That's where the support is needed, where you can manage and observe those risks and work with people on developing them.

It's interesting. You might've seen last July, the WHO released their first version of their digital health care worker which is an AI avatar. You log onto the website and have a conversation with this entity that will hopefully help you to step away from your addictive habits and lead a healthier lifestyle. The proposition is quite interesting, I think, because it's essentially predicated on the idea that when you have an addiction to smoking or whatever it might be, when you go to see your GP or your healthcare professional, you may not be entirely honest about how well you're doing with your habit. But with a computer, you can tell it what you like and you could be completely upfront with it. So I think we're beginning to see increasingly within the healthcare sector, the integration of these sorts of things that perhaps the gaming world isn't quite there yet with.

For me, the major gain of it is in fact the broader conversation that would occur between esports game developer publishers and the healthcare professionals. There's something really, I think, disingenuous about that world. Of course they want more people to spend more hours in the game. Of course there are aspects of the game design that lead people into that transaction and to do so in a way that's often completely unlimited. Unless we are really honest about how those game design features affect the behaviours and inclinations of its users, then I think we're not really attending to the problem, or in fact being honest about how we deal with it.

Mason: It feels like we're at such early days with esports. But despite that, it's a huge industry. It's a huge ecosystem. Andy, can you give us an idea of what the actual scale of this thing looks like?

Miah: Oh my goodness, Luke. It's so hard to draw parameters around this and it's partly because the industry's continually expanding. Take, for example, last June or July when Travis Scott created a performance within Fortnite. Now, how do you categorise the economic parameters around that as an esports event? I think the reason why people talk about esports and gaming more widely as being bigger than film and music is because it's integrating these other sectors. That is the one thing that I think people need to realise: as we do more and more within gaming environments, more and more of the creative sector wants to come into that world. So yes, of course last year was an exceptional situation where there were no Travis Scott concerts elsewhere that were happening. But when you drive people into that world, through their interest in the music - when you can create the 21st century version of the music video into this live experience where the users can find themselves as characters within the video - I mean, it's just mind blowing really, I think. That's why it's a really hotly debated subject as to how big this is economically, but there's no controversy over whether it's absolutely enormous. I think that expansion is really what's fascinating people.

On 23rd February, we saw the announcement from Toronto of a new, big esports stadium that's being designed by the architecture firm Populous, which also designed many of the hallmark arenas around the world over the last 20 years. So architects are turning their attention to esports, to design new theatrical staging of events. I think that is the broad picture around esports that is really transformative.

Mason: I mean, that's the fascinating thing. Esports seems to be that weird space where cultures collide. Traditional sports stars, actors, DJs, musicians - they're all investing heavily in Egaming sports teams. What do you think that really means for the future of this area?

Miah: Yeah, that's a great question. I remember Keanu Reeves talk about his latest gaming experience.

Mason: And Steve Aioki, and all of those guys.

Miah: Yeah. For me, it comes down to the kind of creatives behind it. The people that I know and work with who are excited about this world are all creators. They're fascinated by the realisation of alternate worlds and that's what really drives the involvement. It's quite different from what drives the players to be competitors. I think for me personally, it's the first part that's really fascinating. People trying to imagine new ways of interacting, new ways of existing within our world. The gaming is allowing that.

There's some great examples we see on the horizon where companies like Sony and others are trying to create and have patent applications already awarded to create immersive virtual reality experiences of esports. So rather than just watch them on a flat screen, as we still do with most of our content, you can put the headset on and find yourself within the playing field, effectively, being able to take part in some way within that space. That, for me, is a big part of that journey. It's one of the reasons why I think we've seen over the last few years pop up VR shops in the high street where people can try out different experiences.

I think it's because the technology is always changing. If you bought an Oculus headset three years ago, you're really not using it anymore. I think the turnover of this technology means that the best way for people to experience it is by going to the kind of technology temples to engage with these experiences. It might be a gym, it might be a theater - but certainly that immersive interaction is, I think, at the heart of this.

Mason: I mean, that seems to be a really interesting tension, because do esports really need to be hosted in stadiums? Surely they could just be hosted in virtual worlds? It feels like there's about to be a fight between whether the future of this space is going to be physical or whether it's going to be virtual.

Miah: Well, a lot of people do feel strongly that the physical aspect of esports is huge. We know already that esports events are able to fill out venues like Madison Square Gardens. All around the world, these are big ticket experiences. I think it's partly because spectators still want to see and be within that sort of proximity of their idol, if you like. Then that aspiration, for the fan, will always be there.

There are some practical reasons why the physical space is also important. Trying to make sure that everyone is competing by the same terms, and has the same equipment, and everyone's got the same bandwidth and ping rates, and so on. Those are some important reasons to bring people together.

But there's also, I think, some anxiety about how this may go in the future. One of the great examples of this is the platform Zwift, which is this cycling platform. If you go onto YouTube and Google 'Zwift live competitions', you'll see a whole range of staged events where you have competitors come from around the world that are on their own bicycles, in their own bedrooms or garages or wherever it might be - but all located within this computer generated version of the Tour de France leg, or something like that. I know that people who see these online competitions are very anxious about their legitimacy and authenticity, and of making sure that there's no sort of digital doping taking place. But I think there's also a recognition that many of the sports that we produce are incredibly expensive to stage in the physical world.

Think about the Tour de France. You've got to close off roads, you've got to stage the thing across miles, and it takes a lot of investment. But if you can bring all those cyclists into one arena where they can all compete, and you've got this multi-screen experience which is realising their performances in real time, it's an incredibly different proposition. It's exciting. I think that is, for me, what is also so fascinating about it is that we're beginning to see - and I think esports isn't the start of this, but it's where it's really innovating at the moment - we're seeing how the stadium experience is being transformed by technology as well. That's been a slow burn.

I remember back in London at the 2012 Olympic Games, they had these interactive things where the audience could do stuff and it affected what happened visually on the TV. I think that's where we're seeing a restaging of the theatricality of sports, which is why I think that those boundaries are far greater than just competition. They have to do with the creation of new kinds of worlds.

Mason: Well, you've so wonderfully described esports as a theater of possibility. So how do you feel esports is really going to inform the design of arenas and spaces in the future, and how have we already seen some new designs of these spaces influenced by the needs of esports games?

Miah: Well, I think at the moment we're seeing that revolution beginning right now, and certainly purpose-built esports arenas are now becoming a thing. We're seeing how designers and content space creators are reorganizing the dimensions and parameters.

If you think about a current football event where you might go to the stadium, it's pretty standard. It's not changed very much for certainly decades, if not centuries. The arena's quite similar, but now we're seeing the integration of screen-based technology as a kind of intermediary of that experience.

The great example was from the esports opening ceremony of League of Legends in 2017, where we had this augmented reality dragon flying around the stadium. Of course, the way to watch that was through your mobile phone, using an augmented reality application. I think that aspect of visualizing things that aren't there has really engaged people.

We've seen a lot of AR applications take off in the last five years, perhaps. There's no real limits to it. I think that's partly what's interesting about it. It's putting things into physical spaces digitally, that transform that relationship. The great example from last year with the League of Legends final was that you had augmented reality dancers performing alongside physical dancers in the stadium. That's just a perfect sort of symbol of where we are as a society, where we're wrestling with that dichotomy of the physical experience and the increasing encroachment of the digital.

Mason: I mean, it's really hard in this day and age to talk about going back to the stadium and physical experiences, because of COVID 19. Do you think COVID has impacted the growth of esports, or in actual fact, do you think it's actually helped?

Miah: I think it's helped in many ways to push the world of elite sports into the digital era. I think it's taken quite a long time for sports federations to figure out how to relate their physical activity to the increasingly digital world of the consumer. We've seen so many great examples. I mentioned the Australian Grand Prix. We also saw an elite tennis tournament take place - The Mutua Madrid virtual tennis event, last July - where Andy Murray and many other people were competing. Andy Murray one it, which I think is a bit fishy, but nevertheless he was playing a computer game and it's given rise to a range of other tennis events setting up their own computer game version of it. We've seen basketball also emerge. These are quite niche games in the world of esports. They're not really hugely credible as titles, but they're doing something to bring those two worlds together.

I remember back in 2013, you remember when Google Glass was around as this kind of device that would allow you to mediate the digital and the physical. I think we're seeing a lot more sports brands try to experiment with these technologies and perhaps bring themselves a bit closer to that world, because they also realise that they are losing their spectators. You have to find new ways of innovating, because there's so much competition now. It's so much harder to keep people's attention. So you have to find new routes to do so.

Mason: It feels every four years, we have a sudden impetus to innovate. That's because of the Olympic Games. You've written a lot about how the Olympic Games have continued to drive innovation in the digital space. So what do you think's next for a gathering like that?

Miah: I think there is a huge and probably inherent relationship between the modern Olympic Games and the development of technology. If you look at the major worldwide partners of the Olympic movement, we see huge companies like Intel, Samsung, and many others that are really pushing the boundaries of what's possible technologically. A lot of this isn't always seen by the audiences and lays below the surface. I know that one of the things we're likely to see in Tokyo and in future games is real time AI backed performance analysis, to the point where if you think about a long-jumper from the second they take off from the ramp, we'll know whether they've broken a world record or not just by the data that we're seeing.

I think those aspects of what's taking place in the elite sports world are just hugely profound. It's also having an impact on how we monitor and manage health more widely. So the integration of AI is certainly no stranger to the world of elite sports. We've already seen press organizations experiment with artificially intelligent journalist bots that are pushing out content during the games.

I think what happened around 2000 is that many of those brands that were working with the world of sports began to see an opportunity to align their showcasing of next generation technology alongside the showcasing of these athletic performances. I remember back in Pyeongchang in 2018 at the Winter Olympic Games in South Korea, Samsung had its foldable mobile phone there. It's a moment where they treat it as a bit like an international expo. It's an environment where I think many brands are now aligning their own trajectories alongside the Olympic Games, as well. It's partly because a lot of elite athletes rely on experimental, innovative technology to actually be better than others. That aspect of it, I think, is crucial.

Mason: Well, you mentioned that briefly: the idea of digital doping. As we start to datify athletes, could having access to certain AI technologies or certain wearable devices actually help some athletes and hinder others? Where is the tricky line here with regards to access to these sorts of innovations?

Miah: I think certainly it could. I think that it's probably been that way for quite a long time. When you think about the rise of sports science and technology in the 1970s and eighties, and how a lot of the concern, certainly, was around medical doping - which is the sort of thing that's firmly banned by the world of sports. But for as long as I can remember, there have been many other examples of technology that have allowed athletes to push the boundaries.

Some controversial examples include things like hyperbaric chambers that simulate different levels of altitude within an environment. These are on the borderline. But I think with new digital technologies, we're seeing a proliferation of these sorts of things. For me, if you're working in elite sports, finding a way into relationships with technology companies is a way of you safeguarding your future. If you don't find some partnerships, it's really difficult to make sure that you can engage with your audiences, but also allow them to innovate.

The great thing about Zwift as an immersive gaming environment for cyclists is that you can do it yourself. You can buy these platforms. You can even compete alongside the elite athletes. I know that one of the companies that's been doing great work in this area is a company called Virtually Live, which is a virtual reality experience in real time of Formula One racing. It's providing ghost racing experiences where you can enter your console, set it up and off you go at the same time as the drivers. You have that spectator experience whilst competing alongside the drivers. That, I think, is a big part of this future.

Mason: I mean, all of this feels like...why will we need sports people in the future? And by sports people, I mean human sports people. If you can, datify all of their ability to perform in these sports and if you can understand through metrics how they may or may not perform, surely you can just remove the sports people and simulate the entire game? Why isn't that trajectory one that we're pursuing?

Miah: I think it's a great and really deep philosophical question that you just asked because it gets to the heart of what it is that we're fascinated with when we watch people play games. I remember there's lots of controversial debates about chess. If the game is played perfectly, then whoever is white will win, because algorithmically you have that advantage.

It reminds me of when Gary Kasparov made his documentary, 'Game Over', which is where he reflects back on that experience of playing IBM's Deep Blue, where he feels that there was a kind of ghost in the machine. We know that IBM was working with some grandmasters to influence the program after each game. But I think there's that feeling of there being something quintessentially human about gaming, that we still want to see and that we haven't yet found replicated by a computer simulation.

Now, whether it's possible to get to that point is a really open question, but I think what's likely well before we get there is that we'll see many of these activities being transformed by technology, to make them into something completely different. If you think about the current number of elite sports that are part of the Olympic program, I think that many of those won't stay in their present form for the next 50 years. They'll be modified by technology. They'll be transformed.

Even things like fencing. I know that one of the aspirations for Tokyo for this year's Olympic Games was to bring data visualisation into the broadcasting environment. If you watch fencing and you're not a fencer, it's quite hard to know what's going on. It's quite hard to see what's going on. By using quite creative visualisations, like rendering insights into the heart rate of the performers to get a sense of how they're feeling, all these are ways of remaking the sport. More aspects of the humanity of the player are being more articulated by the technology.

I think there's a lot of scope to develop more in that direction before we turn to technology. I guess we've seen things like Robot Wars, where there's only so much we're interested in with regards to the kind of battle between the machines. We want to make sure there's some human contest going one step behind it.

Mason: You want to see the guy who's spent six months in his basement designing a thing cry as he watches it fly across the stadium and explode into pieces. That's really what we're watching that for. But Andy, do you think we'll see AI designed sports or the sorts of competitions where we pit AI against AI in these kind of perverse Turin experiments meets competitive gaming environments, and we'll watch AIs do weird versions of cockfighting almost? We'll just see AIs compete and we'll find that oddly interesting.

Miah: Well, I think we will, Luke. I think we both feel that way about this. I've seen some great examples of AI backed literary works - poetry that has been created by machines. There's your first sign that in fact, the machine can do a good enough job to actually compel us to want to engage with the content.

In some respects, the critique of the late 20th century is that so much of our cultural and creative sector has become this sort of manufactured world. Where in fact, a lot of what we see come off the production line and then to the music charts is perhaps a bit too mechanical and a bit too samey. It goes back to this idea that all pop songs could be reduced to four chords. In that respect, I think AI and the possibility of designing innovative creative machines is, in fact, a richer way of thinking about creativity.

I know that within artistic practice and indeed music composition, the integration of experimentation of artificial intelligence is pushing the boundaries of what we think of as being musically possible. It goes back to what I was saying earlier about how what surrounds that esports world is a whole range of people that want to create new things. They want to push the boundaries of innovation and see what's possible. It's that experimentation that I think really underpins everything.

Mason: I mean, we've seen virtual pop stars and we've seen virtual influencers. Are we on the precipice of seeing a virtual gaming rockstar?

Miah: Well we've already seen in the last 12 months already, the creation of the world's first AI news anchor, coming out of Korea. What's really interesting about that is that I saw the launch of this and it's not just a sort of random avatar. It is actually an AI version of an existing news presenter. How do you feel about that? Who's getting the paycheque now? That has been the question.

I think we're already there in many respects where we can almost find it impossible to distinguish between the computer generated version of a person and the actual biological version. I think we're moving into a realm where it's becoming increasingly imperceptible. For those that own the content, the platforms and the products at this point in time, there's so much more money they can make by exploiting this.

I think it does push us to think, what is it that we want out of our lives that keeps us kind of connected through these experiences? There's a sea change in evaluating performance, creativity, intellectual prowess and achievements that we're seeing off the back of AI, certainly, but a whole range of technological transformations too.

A great example for me was just in 2019, I think it was. The Drone Racing League worked with a computer game developer to create a drone experience. It was a computer game where you could use your drone controller to operate the drone within the computer game. Of course, you see a transfer of those skills that are developed in the gaming experience into the real world of piloting drones. It's getting towards the 'Ender's Game' scenario where the gaming interactions are training us for a whole range of things, both good and bad.

Mason: Has anybody got it right in terms of science fiction? We look at 'Ready Player One', and you've just mentioned 'Ender's Game' there. Are any of those visions of what the future of gaming may look like as presented on the big screen or in science fiction books appealing to you?

Miah: I think both of those that you've just mentioned are absolutely appealing. When I was starting off as a PhD student, I was writing about genetics. Someone told me that I must read Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World'. I was anxious about doing so, because I felt that once I've read it, I can't unread it anymore. You worry that your vision of the future is entirely framed by those ideas. I think in some respects, those augmented reality or virtual reality sports that we're seeing emerge are informed by those visions of virtual reality that we see writers having created over the last century.

I also go back to this sort of fundamental principle that we have always lived within a sort of virtual reality. Our consciousness and the ability to think visually and imaginatively is an entry into that world. Of course, that's partly why it's so compelling. It's partly why people talk about their dreams when they wake up, because there's something about the experience of this other world that we find fascinating. Maybe it's because we're so constrained by being us. We can't step out of ourselves and be other people, so in fact we desire to perform other sorts of roles and occupy different spaces. That unreality of sport is a great example of that, because if you are a boxer, you can go out and punch people in the head, which you can't really do in the real world.

Mason: That's an interesting point actually, because what compels people to want to be a gamer and want to watch gaming. It always fascinates me that these Twitch folks manage to gather these massive audiences of people who are watching them play games over their shoulder. So, what is the psychology of all of this? Why is this so popular?

Miah: I think it's different for the players versus the spectators. Obviously, anyone that's ever been a spectator has always thought about being a participant and really good at what they're interested in, whether it's sports or music or whatever it might be. We all aspire to have those kinds of creative capabilities or maybe just the desire to sort of explore more aspects of ourselves. I'd love to be a singer, Luke. I'm never going to be.

Mason: Well, now's your chance.

Miah: That's where our consumption of music allows us to occupy those worlds, in some respects. I think certainly with platforms like Twitch, they're doing so well because of that social experience. With the integration of a social, communal experience to games, participation is central to it. It's not so different from what happens with other events. You go to a sports event or to a gig, and you socialise and talk about it with people. It's that communal resharing of the experience that gives the historic, memorable aspect to it.

What's interesting actually, is that when you think about it, most of what's happening in the esports and gaming world is still quite outside of the mainstream mechanisms by which that's orchestrated. We don't see any news on the evening news about esports. We don't see it in the newspapers; it's not covered. I think that's also indicative of just what's being transformed at the moment.

These are actually quite worrying things because at the moment, we see a huge number of journalists who are being excluded from reporting these worlds because the brand is all controlled by media managers and people that want to make sure that their product is framed in the right way. But actually these are historic, newsworthy, culture defining experiences, and we need to make sure that they are treated as historical work.

I often think about the state of esports as being comparable to the film industry a hundred years ago. We're still at that embryonic stage and so much more is possible, which is why I think it's also incumbent upon us who are working in the world of esports to keep opening the boundaries around this. There's a lot of people that want to say, 'This is esports. This isn't esports' - but you have to keep quite open-minded about this because it's still being redefined.

It's being redefined around the populations of players as well. One of the big problems in these sports is inclusivity and diversity. That's partly because a lot of attention is often focused on a small number of titles. There are so many other competitive gaming experiences that are out there. If you go to Asia, the mobile esports world is really booming. It's much more diverse than what we see over in the West, often. I think being open-minded as to what this world might look like is really crucial, not least because so many people, Luke, just think esports is absolutely boring. They don't want to get anywhere near it. Through films like 'Ready Player One', you can see that these immersive technologies are redefining humanity, and that for me is the big sell on why this is so interesting.

Mason: What was fascinating to me was that esports does have such a rich history. I hadn't realised it went all the way back to the 1980s. Could you reveal a little bit about that history?

Miah: It is. Actually, one of the things that's really interesting is if you look back, I think the first official computer game to be associated with the Olympics goes back to LA 1984. It's a really simple sort of athletics game, but these worlds are intertwined. Actually that's one of the things that I think is really useful to draw upon, because there is often some sort of antagonism between elite sports and their competition formats, and the gaming world and their desire to pursue their own roots. But actually there is so much common ground between these two worlds.

Competitive fighting, I think, still draws on some of those principles that we see flourish and define the sports world. I've noticed that in the UK we've had this BBC TV series about esports. It's the first TV series that we've seen in the UK on esports. When you watch it, you see quite clearly that the culture of competition and the ethos - the way of talking, even, to each other, as competitors and broadcasting events - is so similar to sports. There's a huge amount of common ground with the staging of it.

Along with that goes a massive responsibility to the young people that are pursuing these careers, not least because if you are an esports player, you're burnt out by 22. It's a hugely intense experience at the best of times. I think that there's a lot more work to be done there to make sure that we safeguard young players, but also help them transition from competition into a career. That's a massive responsibility that I feel, certainly.

Mason: How do you feel this whole space is going to change? You mentioned representation there, very briefly. It does feel that egaming is very male oriented, but do you think the gender representation inside of esports is, about to change?

Miah: Well, I would hope so. As you mentioned earlier, I worked a lot with the Olympic movement. It's taken a hundred years to get to a point where it's really addressed a lot of it's gender inequalities. Not just around participation at the competitor level, but also at the leadership level, too. I think that's where we need to see a lot more take place. It is a long game, Luke.

Mason: Pun intended.

Miah: Yeah. It's not an overnight thing. It has to do with who's working on game development; who's entering into game design courses; who's operating around that ideation space that leads them to be the figureheads of the industry. I think that there is some evidence within esports that it's doing a bit better than the gaming industry more widely, in terms of representation - but it's not often at the competitor level.

I think there's a huge need to understand what's going on, and to understand why people feel excluded. There's lots of discussions about things like hypermasculinity or toxicity within esports; things that are very similar to the world of sports, incidentally.

That is, again, where I think a lot can be learned to understand how to address these things. We can't wait a hundred years before we get the sort of equality we see in the world of sports. We have to act now and really make this a concerted effort to both understand, but also to correct.

Mason: Do you think that the culture of gaming and the dynamics of gaming are bleeding out into the real world? Some people have looked at what's happening on social media and the rise of conspiracy theory and QAnon, and the folks who were going and storming the Capitol in the US. They look at that as a form of LARPing, almost like gaming dynamics of suddenly being co-opted and brought into the real world. Are you beginning to see that in the work that you're looking at?

Miah: I think we are certainly at a point in history where the expansion of mistrust into our everyday lives has become all encompassing. I think it's been quite present in the whole of human history to have to deal with misrepresentation, misdirection, and certainly misinformation.

I think that what we've seen over the last certainly five years, but maybe a bit longer - maybe with the growth and the incursion of social media into our daily lives in such profound ways - we've seen alongside that a growing difficulty in trying to understand truth.

It's interesting because I think that gaming is a sort of a double-edged sword. We seek to experience the joyfulness of play that games provide, but also we know that we can't spend too long in that world because we neglect all the other stuff that needs our attention. I think we have to try to find a healthy balance between those sorts of lies.

One of the great examples for me, which I still love talking about, is from a few years ago now. You may remember the mobile running application, 'Zombies, Run!'. I've tried it a good number of times. This is an app where you download it to your mobile phone. You press play, and you find yourself as a character in a zombie apocalypse story. Essentially, you have to run away from zombies, and that's when you get your exercise. What was beautiful about it for me - and I know that Margaret Atwood was involved with some of the scripting for it - but you have the fusion of creativity, or narrative, of storytelling - into what otherwise may be for many people, quite a boring physical activity.

I do quite a bit of running, but I've never been a runner and I've always been someone that listens to podcasts whilst I run. I get my catch up whilst I run. So I think that what we're seeing is an expansion of that sort of gaming experience into other worlds. There's a lot to be said for that, but I think it's crucial that we think about these things as theaters and as storytelling experiences. Hopefully, that will allow people to find their way into physical activity and perhaps more effectively negotiate these difficult boundaries between reality and unreality.

Mason: I always love talking to you, Andy, cause you're such an enthusiastic techno-optimist. I have to ask you about the far future of this space. How do you think wearables, insidables, embeddables, ingestibles - all of those emerging technologies - will soon become part of the e-gaming ecosystem in the near future?

Miah: Well, let's be clear about one thing. A lot of that stuff's already happening. It's already apparent that the military have, for nearly a decade now, been using gaming as a tool for recruitment and indeed training. The sort of vision that we see in 'Ender's Game' is not fiction at all. It's incredibly close to reality.

The question is how we feel about the particular manifestation of that. You could perhaps argue that there's something a little bit worrisome about using people's passions to lure them into career paths, which of course every industry does. But there's something perhaps more fundamentally worrisome about the fact that in 2015, the Russians developed a tank where the interface was modeled on a PlayStation controller. Yet I think we have to also recognize that for many of these things, whether you're controlling a tank, a drone or a character or a computer game screen, we're talking about our vision for a seamless simulation of our world.

Now, I think what's interesting about gaming is that it's clear that gamers don't want a seamless simulation. You don't want to have to train for three years before you get to play the airline or spacecraft flying game, and have that experience. We don't want it to be a perfect model. We just want it modeled well enough.

I think that what's also apparent is that those skills that are being used to nurture the best gamers in the world are skills that have transferability into a whole range of other practices, both good and bad. I am an optimist, Luke. I think for me, the optimist needs to appreciate that these things are not one or the other. We will certainly see the exploitation of esports for a whole range of practices that we may well be very alarmed about, but also for lots of great things as well.

I think that what's really important is that we expose each of those things. If it turns out, Luke, that the best way to nurture the most effective drone pilot is to create computer games that develop those skills so that when the players become 17 or 18 years old, they are optimised for drone operation, then what do we do? I think what we can do is alert people to that. We can alert people to the fact that these games are not just games. There are, in fact, leading people into certain career paths. Then, we can allow them to make choices about whether they're comfortable with that or not. The first step for me is exposing those things that are happening.

Mason: One of the most fascinating presentations I saw on gaming was at the artist studio Blast Theory. An artist was talking about gaming and simulation and saying, "Look, these things aren't realistic simulations. They're nowhere close. If we had a realistic simulation of warfare in something like Call of Duty, then basically there would be no respawn." You know? As soon as you're shot, it's game over. You would have paid sixty dollars and you have one chance. It would fundamentally change the dynamics of the game. I think I saw this presentation in around 2011 or 2012, just when Call of Duty had launched multiplayer. He was talking about how those dynamics would change if you had a multiplayer game where you had one shot and that's it. No restart. No respawn. What you'd actually have is people camping out in trenches for the entirety of the game, scared to run through that game and shoot.

We've seen a multitude of artists use gaming as a space to explore some of these themes. Andy, my favourite book in the entire world is 'Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty'. It's my Bible, and it was my Bible during my undergraduate, for how artists are exploring the world of bio art. But how are artists exploring the world of gaming? What are some of the most exciting examples you've seen of this?

Miah: I think it is really interesting to look at that relationship. Of course, artists are central to game design and have been for many years. I think one of the most interesting examples is a bit like that digital healthcare worker that I mentioned earlier. I've seen a lot of people working in the gaming space that are trying to explore the creation of virtual people. In that respect, I think they are asking us to consider how we see ourselves and think about what's crucial about our humanity.

I remember a great example that was shown in FACT in Liverpool, which is the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology. I think this was about five years ago and I forget what the name was called, but essentially it was a VR experience that you had with somebody else. You each wore a headset and you then found yourself seeing the perspective from the other person's viewpoint. You would then coordinate your movements so that when you raised your hands, they would see your hands in front of them. It allowed you to see what we were talking about earlier, about this possibility of occupying the perspective of another person. I think that is often what sort of game design is really about. Artists have been, I think, at the heart of that. I'd say equally, at the heart of really pushing the boundaries of the ethics of that, too; how we can try to allow people to see the impacts of the simulation.

You mentioned Call of Duty, and the idea that if you're shot, that's it for you. Let's also look at it the other way. If you shoot somebody, you've got a good lifetime of trauma that you face as a result of having done that. I think that when you think about what game design entails now, how do you not engage people with the consequence of those virtual actions?

There's a great, great film that was made a few years ago, called '5000 Feet Is The Best', which you might've seen in art house cinemas. It's a film that speaks to the experience of a drone operator, who of course undertakes their combat from a distance. They're deploying weapons without having to be within the field of battle. It gets into the psychological challenge of the juxtaposition between pressing buttons that kill people and then going to a Starbucks and ordering a coffee 10 minutes later.

Trying to find ways of creating emotional gaming experiences is perhaps the pinnacle. I will say that, again, if you think about what sports journalists have tried to do for the last century, which is to allow us that emotional experience - to tell the story of what it means and what it feels like to be that person - that's where we can see the future of this.I think there's a great deal that we can do to explore that. Imagine you had the capability of increasing your heart rate at the same time as the heart rate increasing for the performer as they're doing it. There, you have a really different way of simulating the experience, but I would argue in a way that allows you to more fully appreciate what's going on. Just figuring out what's going on is so simple.

Mason: Hmm. That's that weird boundary between what is simulation and what is gaming. Listening to you there, I'm reminded of Blood Sport - if you ever saw this Kickstarter campaign. There were two Canadians who I want to believe were artists but they were completely serious. They were trying to redesign ways in which we could do blood donation. What they had was a device where every time you were shot in a computer game, it would basically take the blood from your body, up until about a pint. So, they could actually get a donation of a pint of blood.

Now, obviously it didn't get Kickstarted for some obvious reasons, but those are some interesting discussions that we need to have over what it is that we're trying to do here. Are we trying to simulate reality, or are we trying to allow gaming to be a true gaming experience?

I'm also reminded of the artist Joseph LaPage, who's done a wonderful art project whereby every time someone is shot in Call of Duty, he displays just above their head the name and the date of death of a real soldier in the Iraq war. There's ways to grok these environments to really make us think about the way in which we're navigating the real world.

Miah: That's absolutely fascinating. A good friend of mine is a multi gold medal Olympic champion in shooting. I think he's published it already, but he's written a book on meditation. He was explaining to me just a couple of weeks ago that shooting in the Olympic sport is really not about shooting at all. It's about understanding your body and your mind. For example, the moment when they pull the trigger in Olympic shooting, they time it with their heartbeat. He's listening to his heartbeat. As soon as it's beated, he pulls the trigger. So there's an incredible, profound sense and complete holistic appreciation of the physicality of themselves, when they're in the act of what externally just looks like somebody shooting a gun.

I think sports are often like that. I think competition's often like that. I think dance is like that. I think many pursuits that involve us stepping outside of the humdrum reality of the day-to-day are a bit like this. But maybe so, too, is reading and even just imagining. It's trying to think about ways of recreating ourselves. That is, I think, what all these practices are really about. Inviting us to explore aspects of ourselves that are maybe unfamiliar to us and that allow us to take risks about who we are and see where we want to go.

I think of how many artists and creators are remarkable on stage, but when you hear them talk about themselves, they're incredibly introverted and anxious about being around people. I think that even as a spectator or as a gamer, it is about the exploration of being somebody else and the emotional connection that we feel to occupying that space, which is, I think, why it's so compelling. It's not just about the competition in itself. It's about all of these other things.

Mason: I mean, the other thing I love about you, Andy, is that someone who features quite heavily in your work and your research is Ethan, your ten-year-old son. I'll always remember the presentation you gave when he must've been maybe just a year old. You were talking about longevity technology and you sat him on your knee and asked the audience whether Ethan was enhanced in any way, shape or form.

I do have to ask, is Ethan a gamer? Are you encouraging him to become an esports player? Are you seeing the millions of dollars that these kids are making and going, "You know what? Let's get Ethan in front of the PlayStation 5."

Miah: Not nearly as much as you might think. As you will know, he has quite a balanced lifestyle. He has real but not completely fixed limits on gaming activity. He does have a sort of trading system in the house where if he goes out for a run, he gets an equivalent amount of time for gaming. If he breaks a record with his run, he gets double that time. We've got some sort of nudging behaviour to see that relationship as quite integrated.

I suppose I grew up in that way too. I was big into sports as a kid and big into gaming as well. I felt that there was a good balance between those worlds, which is why I suppose I don't feel anxious about gaming. I think as long as you do manage that balanced lifestyle, that it's all good. I think I'm also of the view - and speaking to so many esports players around the world - that there's ways in which their training within the game environments has impacts on their own mental acuity for a whole range of things they do, whether it's training to be a doctor or a lawyer, or just being more creative.

I'm convinced that there's a lot of creativity that goes alongside being a gamer and occupying those creative, open-ended worlds. To be honest, the games that Ethan plays are absolutely boring. I want to get him onto some really good titles, but he's just not interested.

Mason: I wonder if that's a generational thing, though. I mean, what sort of games are the next generation playing? I know 'Among Us' became really popular and I don't understand it as a 30 year old. It doesn't make any sense to me. Yet it's massively popular amongst the next generation.

Miah: It is. I think that 'Among Us' did very well. It's still doing very well because it becomes a sort of communal experience. I played a lot with my family. We all played together. Ethan spends most of his time watching streamers stream their content. There's a great game called 'ARK: Survival Evolved', which is where you're chasing dinosaurs around the world, taming them, and harvesting resources and that sort of thing. He just loves watching a really good player play that game. In order for him to get to that level would take hours and days of his life, and a lot of my money to actually purchase these things. So actually, you can watch a gamer who's got a lot further and has achieved a lot more, and get a lot out of that experience.

I think that the worry I have, I suppose - and it's not a simple sort of one to resolve - is the tension between the consumption and the creation. I'd love him to be thinking about designing games, character development, those sorts of things - but a lot of what he's being driven towards certainly is the consumption side of it. I think finding that balance is really crucial.

Mason: So if anybody has been inspired by the conversation that we've just had and they want to learn more about esports, where can they go to discover more information on this new form of gaming?

Miah: There's two organisations that I work with that are doing fantastic work. One is the British Esports Association, which has a lot of resources for parents and for young players that are really trying to develop and innovate within this world. There are also career paths within it as well. I think that's one of the things to realise. If you are someone that's looking to enter the creative and cultural industries - whether it's media, sport, music - then if you keep an eye on what's happening in esports, you'll have a sense of where the technology trends are taking your industries. That's worth having a look at, especially.

I also work with the Global Esports Federation, which is trying to build a kind of esports agenda around a whole range of global priorities. They work closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to see how gaming can be a route into sustainable innovation cultures in places where there isn't even a lot of technological infrastructure. I'm very committed to the idea that gaming is a route into sustainable innovation as well. I think it's built on that passion for playing games that allows people an entry into a lot of skill development.

You can think about this in quite simple ways. If you are in a place where there's limited infrastructure for schools or hospitals and things like that and if you can create sort of gaming spaces through a range of sort of sponsorship opportunities, then you can create an infrastructure that then can be used for so many other things - whether it's training people, educating them, or deploying technological solutions into places with limited technological means.

I think we'll see a lot more space opening up in that direction. The Global Esports Federation has been working with the United Nations ITU over the last year to talk about gaming for good. I think we'll see a lot more in that direction. I think that's really a space to watch for the next two years.

Mason: Andy Miah, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I just want to thank you for being on the FUTURES Podcast.

Miah: Thanks so much, Luke. Great to be here and great to talk to you as well.

Mason: Thank you to Andy for showing us how the world of sports is set to be transformed by gaming technology.

You can find out more by purchasing his book, 'Sport 2.0: Transforming Sports for a Digital World', available now from The MIT Press.

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More episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found at FUTURES Podcast dot net.

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