On TBS’s ELeague, airing for three hours each Friday night, skilled players of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive sprint around drab maps, gunning each other down with assault rifles and spinning digital knives in virtual hands. They lurk behind doors and shipping containers, only to launch themselves out of hiding at the sound of approaching footsteps, guns blazing. Occasionally, grenades fly into view and smoke or fire fills the screen.
For the uninitiated, this televised video game competition will likely feel vertiginous, perhaps even queasifying. Though the camera typically remains locked into the individual players’ first-person perspectives, it constantly shifts from one vantage to the next, the choppy editing offering little sense of narrative continuity. Players die abruptly and without clear explanation, gunned down by head shots that neither they nor the audience see coming. And then, equally unexpectedly, the matches end and the feed cuts away, revealing an elaborately designed studio located within Turner Sports’ Atlanta campus. A team of anchors perches behind a curved desk while players stand to congratulate one another or commiserate with their fellows.
This is what’s so fascinating about Turner’s new gaming venture: While the mechanics of Counter-Strike are very hard to follow, the production still looks and feels like that of a conventional sporting event. And though this isn’t the first video-game competition to air on television, it is one of the most substantial, partly because TBS has worked so hard to signify that substance. At least for now, Turner seemingly isn’t trying to attract football or basketball fans to video-game broadcasts, despite the existence of the occasional Inside the NBA–ELeague crossover video. Rather, it wants to appeal to gaming fans by cultivating the same aura of normalcy that surrounds established sports.
Though competitive gaming, which typically goes by the term e-sports, is still alien to many, its built-in fan base is substantial. Live streams of ELeague’s preliminary rounds on Twitch.tv have attracted tens of thousands of viewers—not Monday Night Football numbers, but more than enough to fill many stadiums. (Disclosure: Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch.tv, is a friend. We have discussed e-sports in the past, but I did not consult him for this article.) The series’ first two prime-time broadcasts drew far more eyeballs than those online streams, averaging more than half a million viewers, according to Turner representatives. That’s about five times the roughly 100,000 viewers that ESPN2 managed when it broadcast Heroes of the Storm matches in 2015 and 2016, suggesting that televised e-sports are very much on their way, even if they haven’t yet arrived.
Whether or not ELeague—and e-sports in general—will break through into popular consciousness remains to be seen, but many are betting it will: In addition to Turner’s venture, both ESPN and Yahoo recently launched e-sports verticals. These media companies are entering into a conversation that has been building for decades, one that can feel alien to outsiders. E-sports journalists frequently refer to popular players by their in-game handles, and unusual acronyms and erratic capitalization schemes proliferate in their articles. One recent ESPN piece, for instance, ran under the headline: “Naded Leaves OpTiC Gaming Days Before HCS Pro League Kicks Off.”
That sort of language matches the general tenor of e-sports coverage. “Sometimes we fall into that pattern where we assume people understand what we’re talking about when we describe a play,” ELeague announcer Auguste Massonnat told ESPN in a recent profile, a piece that compared him and colleague Anders Blume to Al Michaels and Bob Costas. They may not be wrong to talk to an audience of fellow fans. Craig Barry, executive vice president and chief content officer for Turner Sports, told me the “hardcore” demographic—mostly 18-to-34-year-old men—remains ELeague’s primary constituency, especially for the broadcasts that air online.
Nevertheless, Turner’s top e-sports announcers are striving to adapt to a broader audience. “We have some important tools that will help you spectate the game,” Blume claimed near the start of the first TBS broadcast. In the segment that followed, though, he rushed all too quickly through the many visual details that clutter the screen: a mini-map of the game arena revealing player positions, team rosters, and more. If you’re used to Counter-Strike, there’ll be nothing new here. If it’s unfamiliar, you’ll need a much more elaborate primer before you dive in.
A more elaborate primer is not what you’re going to get. Nongamer fans likely won’t understand much of of the announcers’ vocabulary, and may struggle to learn it, even if they seek out the handful of terminology videos scattered throughout the ELeague website. But, as John Herrman and Nick Wingfield observe in the New York Times, the announcers deliver that commentary while sitting behind a desk that doesn’t look so different from the one that Shaq, Chuck, Kenny, and Ernie use on Turner’s Inside the NBA. That resemblance was “absolutely by design,” Barry says, adding that Turner relied on its “experience in more traditional stick and ball sports.” Secure in this familiar fortress, the anchors insult one another’s opinions almost as frequently as they express ideas of their own. They also spend a great deal of time talking about the personalities and skills of individual players, reminding us that we’re watching an established sport, one with customs and characters. Barry suggests that too is deliberate, telling me, “We thought there was an opportunity to create an emotional connection with the players. Who’s the one you love? Who’s the one you love to hate? Who’s the LeBron James of e-sports?”
Ultimately, that’s what TBS wants out of its ELeague broadcasts: to convey a sense of legitimacy. To do so, it doesn’t just need to appeal to viewers. It also needs to sell itself to advertisers. As Sarah E. Needleman reports in the Wall Street Journal, Turner was “still talking to companies to fill five remaining sponsorships” as of late May. But some corporations have already bought in. During the initial TBS broadcast, the commentators explained that a flyover of the game arena was presented by Arby’s. “This is where the future is,” an Arby’s representative told the Journal.
ELeague’s beautifully constructed stadium and the roar of its studio audience, then, aren’t just supposed to prove that skilled Counter-Strike players are worth watching. They’re also designed to demonstrate that this is already a serious operation. Turner surely wants to attract new fans to competitive gaming. But for now, it’s more important to make money off of all of the viewers who are already showing up.
