Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of Esports

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)