Summary
Summary
Esports is one of the fastest growing--and most cutthroat--industries in the world. A confluence of technology, culture, and determination has made this possible. Players around the world compete for millions of dollars in prize money, and companies like Amazon, Coca Cola, and Intel have invested billions. Esports are now regularly played live on national TV. Hundreds of people have dedicated their lives to gaming, sacrificing their education, relationships, and even their bodies to compete, committing themselves with the same fervor of any professional athlete. In Good Luck Have Fun , author Roland Li talks to some of the biggest names in the business and explores the players, companies, and games that have made it to the new major leagues.
Follow Alex Garfield as he builds Evil Geniuses, a modest gaming group in his college dorm, into a global, multimillion-dollar eSports empire. Learn how Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill made League of Legends the world's most successful eSports league and most popular PC game, on track to make over $1 billion a year. See how Twitch.tv pivoted from a video streaming novelty into a $1 billion startup on the back of professional gamers. And dive into eSports' dark side: drug abuse, labor troubles, and for each success story, hundreds of people who failed to make it big. With updates on recent developments, Good Luck Have Fun is the essential guide to the rise of an industry and culture that challenge what we know about sports, games, and competition.
Author Notes
Roland Li is an Oakland-based journalist whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal , New York Times , New York Observer , and Interview magazine. He was born in Beijing in 1988. After briefly being a pre-med major, he studied journalism and history at NYU and spent eight years in New York before moving to the West Coast in 2015. He has been gaming since Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was released in 1994, and his favorite DOTA 2 hero is Visage.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
First-time author Li, an Oakland-based journalist who has studied video game culture for the past decade, has produced an in-depth look at electronic sports or e-sports, the video game competitions that "have become a global phenomenon." Unlike single-player video game arcades, e-sports feature multiplayer games in which teams of highly skilled players compete against each other in the same virtual world, and Li exactingly details how a variety of entrepreneurs, renegade game-players, and tech savants have struggled to translate this competition into a "formalized, regulated environment" similar to the NBA and NFL. One of the main threads in Li's book is the career of Alex Garfield, whose discovery of the first-person shooter game Counter-Strike in 2000 led him to join the gaming team Evil Geniuses, compete successfully in a range of international tournaments during the next 10 years, and then establish his own e-sports company, which he sold to Amazon in 2014 for a large profit. Following Garfield's career allows Li to successfully explore a number of gaming issues, such as the early dominance of South Korea in e-sports, the game industry's misogyny and "gender dysfunction," and the fact that despite millions in new investment money, e-sports remains "a digital Wild West." (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
What type of competitor practices for 10 hours a day, lives in a team house surrounded by other professional players, and is supported by coaches, managers, and corporate endorsements? Answer: professional video gamers. Debut author Li delves into the burgeoning industry of eSports, where individuals and teams compete in lucrative tournaments playing popular games, such as Defense of the Ancients 2, Street Fighter, and StarCraft II. Li follows the rise of Alex Garfield, founder of Evil Geniuses, from his humble beginnings scraping together funds to support gamers to a pioneering leader in managing and promoting professional players. He traces the ascent of Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, creators of the early streaming site, Justin.tv, which was the foundation for Twitch, the leading streaming platform for eSports. Li includes a fascinating chapter on gender and race that highlights the difficulty women have experienced entering a male-dominated sport. While the player profiles and game recaps will be of interest to ardent gamers, readers interested in the genesis of a new sport in our time also may find this title appealing.--Clark, Craig Copyright 2016 Booklist