A Korean book by Mr. Cho Hyeong Geun on esports brought up some interesting point. What if professional esports players, who basically spend most of their time (24/7) in the so-called training houses operated by the team that they belong too (just like a Sumo wrestler would do) without much private life aside from the daily training routine, would be able to train in a rather “normal” workplace environment, i.e., just like a regular employee at a company would work 9-5, 5 days a week, with the freedom of time after work and weekends all given to the hands of the employee. Why not applying the same social system for esports athletes so that they will have the notion of work-life balance and a little privacy outside of the training?
I found this idea interesting and reminded me of an interview that I saw sometime ago by a Korean professional basketball player who used to play for the Korean Basketball League (KBL), then moved on to the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the US. The punchline of his interview was that he was shocked when he first joined the team training in NBA because the environment and the perception were so different from the one he had experienced in the KBL. If KBL was close to a Sumo wrestler environment, NBA was like a commute: Nobody lives in the training camp; the players gather up at an arranged training time all from, god know where, their private lives; after the training they disappear, back to their private world. I guess the point is, as an NBA athlete you have some time committed to the team in order to maintain or improve the performance that the team expects you from, but outside of that committed time, the rest is your own, as long as it doesn’t interfere with your own performance and the team policy.
Now that some countries have more than a decade of esports team operation experience, and some team has the big fat cash support by a solid sponsor, why can’t we do something similar? If this is too unrealistic for some reason, at least try something comparable to what the pro sports athlete world is doing.
Just eSports 