Why eSports sector is more than a game

Do the words ganking, head glitch and kappa mean anything to you? If not, it’s likely they soon will as the eSports industry continues to cast its net ever wider in the global entertainment world.The words are a small selection of slang used in popular online games such as Call of Duty, Overwatch, and League of Legends — a vocabularyin constant parlance amongst an entertainment demographic that is well on the way to eclipsing football in global numbers. The Insomnia Gaming Festival comes to the RDS Dublin next month, an event billed as “celebrating the culture of gaming”, complete with the latest merchandise, technology, and stage shows, plus the presence of gaming influencers and content creators. Running in the UK for over 20 years, organisers say Insomnia has grown to become the biggest event of its kind, regularly attracting audiences of 70,000 people. The first International Insomnia took place in Cairo in October last year, in addition to a recent event in Dubai. In its avowedly commercial pitch, Insomnia bills itself as the source that “taps into the unreachable, we are the modern-day brand for Generation Z. If you want to reach the people that don’t own a TV and who are typically ABC1, we are that audience by definition”.