Calling for information systems research on esports : An overview study

Online gaming has become a pervasive entertainment activity. Meanwhile, professionalization of this entertainment has resulted in a new blend of sport and business, termed esports. Esports’ future is promising, with widespread acceptance and significant business value. The innovative nature of esports necessitates more research to help understand and shape its future. We hold that scholars, especially information systems (IS) researchers, should pay more attention to this phenomenon, as esports’ constituents (i.e., people, organizations, and technologies) are of key interest to IS field. To increase research attention and help readers understand esports, we compiled this research overview. In it, we first provide a comprehensive definition of esports. Then, we summarize the esports development. We outline the current state of research in general and systematically review the IS perspective. Based on these efforts, we propose an esports research framework with four promising IS research avenues. We end this study with a discussion of “IS contributions” to esports and the implications of this overview. This study is a foundation for comprehensively mapping the landscape of esports practice and research. We hope our findings can help others, especially IS researchers, gain a clearer understanding of esports and guide them towards creating increasingly impactful works.