Thanks to the mainstream media’s breathless fascination with esports, not to mention the all-encompassing subject of COVID-19, we’ve taken to designing some futuristic research that will project where pro sports is headed. One area that has really caught our attention is the collision of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, data networks and four-dimensional experiences.
If you are big on acronyms, that would be AI, AR, 6G and 4D. One of us even used those designations in that sequence on a recent test. If you might’ve failed that exam, it’s not too late to learn what they mean.
Interestingly, practitioner discussion of these concepts is hit or miss. But this discussion coalesces with projections we’re making about the future of esports.
As a primer, if you have time, a great summary is easily found on YouTube by entering the name of video game designer Jane McGonigal, a Berkeley Ph.D. Although McGonigal is a strong proponent of gaming (watch her TED Talk), her work is based on facts and peer-reviewed research. As academics, we like her credibility. As practitioners, we are provoked.
In one of McGonigal’s videos, she references data from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the International Monetary Fund showing many young American and Chinese men are working fewer hours because they want more time to play video games. To many, that will sound decadent. But wait.
One amazing stat she provides is that more than one in five (22%) American men in their 20s without a college degree did not work a single day of paid employment. Further, for the 78% in the sample who were working, they were only working about four days a week (on average). These numbers are huge shifts from the turn of the millennium when this demographic worked much more.
Now, here’s the kicker: Of the free time these young men created by not working, researchers found they were using about 75% of that time to play video games. More importantly, those choices were presented by experts as rational decisions.
These men saw the benefits of gaming (social connectivity, mood enhancement, energy expenditure, happiness, skill acquisition, game success, etc.) far outweighing the income they would’ve earned from minimum wage jobs.
As Burma Jones, a key character in John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 Pulitzer-prize-winning book “A Confederacy of Dunces” would say: “Whoa. That crazy.”
Seriously? Non-college educated men would rather stay home and play video games than work? And someone thinks that’s “a rational economic choice?” Whoa!
But think about this: Kennedy’s book title is drawn from the Jonathan Swift line, “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know [them] by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against [them].” It means our problem is thinking that this cohort of young American and Chinese men are making flawed decisions. It begs this question: Who is the genius in this allegory?
McGonigal backs this factoid up by suggesting that in the next 10 years, we may see the idea of “wage-play” (a concept originally put forward by Indiana professor Edward Castronova), where large proportions of young men in the U.S. and China will be paid to play video games in order to maintain the appeal of esports franchises. They will do so, in part, because many of the jobs young men without college degrees would have traditionally filled in that future era will have been filled by robots or drones.
This is unsettling because it’s possible North American sport practitioners are not looking at 10-year-olds to understand how they connect socially. Nor are they attempting to understand why pre-teens bond tightly during video game play and how that bonding may soon provide entry into a virtual world.
We’ve mentioned the book “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline before but never asked SBJ readers to consider why Cline’s novel was set in 2044, a mere 24 years from now. Cline’s futuristic technology was designed to show a world that had quickly moved past AI, AR, 6G and 4D as scientific or commercial breakthroughs.
So why are two SBJ columnists crying lupine? Is it because McGonigal’s statistics about men without college degrees choosing video games over jobs represents an irrational decision? Or is it the leading edge of a big wave?
We’re not suggesting esports are the wolf in sheep’s clothing but if we extrapolate “glocalized” connectivity (our topic last month) with rational economic choices, North American sports leagues/teams may find they failed to see the real threat to their businesses.
It isn’t that esports is stealing market share. It’s failing to understand how sports organizations should market to the emerging fan bases of 2032, 2044 and 2056.
Said another way, is it possible pro sports are still catering to baby boomers and unwilling to make the draconian switch to actively courting someone born in 2010? Is it possible pre-teens will have even less interest in baseball or football than our current college students? It’s not just possible, it’s likely.
The skeptics may presume we’ll always have the status quo but market conditions are changing rapidly, and technology — whether we cite Moore’s Law or the Law of Amazon — is one mean reality.
If you agree, don’t miss out on finding out how existing 10-year-olds think. It may help you hire some 20-year-olds. Without college educations.
Rick Burton is the David B. Falk Professor of Sport Management at Syracuse University and former commissioner of Australia’s National Basketball League. Norm O’Reilly is director of the International Institute for Sport Business & Leadership at the University of Guelph and partner consultant at T1.
Questions about OPED guidelines or letters to the editor? Email editor Jake Kyler at jkyler@sportsbusinessjournal.com
