A Critique of Esports: How an Industry Lost the Question
Esports is just Carmack's porn.
Not an insult. A diagnosis — of how creative energy gets systematically absorbed into something that hollows it out.
The problem isn't that esports exists. Quake, CS, StarCraft were competition-first from the beginning — symmetric opposition was their design core, and esports grew naturally from that material. The problem is what happened next: esports' commercial success ran in reverse, infecting games that were never meant to be competitive. Ranked systems entered RPGs. Battle Passes entered single-player games. Design space that once belonged to narrative, exploration, and imagination began to be consumed. The industry followed the money, and the money pointed one direction.
This is an essay about that direction, and what it cost.
I. The Ninth Art
Film is the seventh art. Comics are the ninth. Games, if you take them seriously, are more dangerous than either — because they are the only art form that turns the audience into the author.
In every other form, you watch. In a game, you are part of the causal chain. The story turns because of you. The world exists because you're in it. This isn't metaphor. In a session of D&D, the world doesn't exist before you open your mouth — it grows in the space between your imagination and the randomness of the dice. You're not consuming a story. You're co-authoring one — your choices have consequences inside the fiction, and you know it while you're making them. That double awareness, that you are both the player and the agent, is something no other medium produces.
I'm saving D&D for a longer piece. What matters here is this: it's the extreme case — the medium stripped to its purest state — and what you find at that state is that the essence of games is imagination. Not graphics. Not mechanics. Not competition.
Once you understand that, you can talk about RDR2 and GTA4. You can talk about Carmack. You can talk about why esports is a kind of degradation.
II. The Olympic Spirit, or: Why Sport Has a Soul
Being against esports is not being against competition. Competition itself is fine.
Maybe the only difference between esports and the Olympics is time. Maybe in fifty years, people will watch League of Legends Worlds with the same complicated awe they bring to the hundred-metre final. I don't think so.
The Olympic movement was never purely about winning. Faster, higher, stronger, together — those words carry a philosophical posture: humanity using its body to interrogate the limits of nature. That inquiry has no endpoint and shouldn't. Every world record is a provisional answer and the beginning of the next question.
I mean the Olympics of the early twentieth century. The 1996 Atlanta Games were called the "Coca-Cola Olympics" — not as metaphor, but because the funding structure was almost entirely corporate. More than seventy percent of IOC revenue today comes from broadcast rights and sponsors. The awe you feel watching a hundred-metre final exists at the same time as whatever Nike paid to put its logo there.
This isn't to say the Olympics has no soul — or that esports has none. It's to say their relationship to commercial logic is structurally different. The Olympics accumulated its soul first, over a century of genuine athletic achievement, and the commercial machinery grew around something that was already there. The ritual came before the sponsorship. Esports had the sponsorship before it had time to develop anything worth sponsoring. That's not a moral difference. It's a sequencing problem with real consequences: when the commercial logic arrives before the meaning, it shapes what meaning is allowed to form.
But the standard is real. The inquiry into human potential, competition as means rather than end — that standard existed. We know what it looks like. An athlete in competition is performing a kind of ceremony: the continuous measurement of what this species can do. You can feel something close to awe watching a great sprint final, not because of who you're rooting for, but because you're watching humanity take its own measure. Whatever Nike paid doesn't change that.
The person I most admire in F1 history is Jim Clark, not Schumacher. Clark and Colin Chapman behind him represented something: use every gram of engineering intelligence to touch the edge of speed, not for trophies, not for the Marlboro logo, but because the thing itself was fascinating. Chapman's Lotus was often ten years ahead of the rest of the grid — and often fell apart mid-race, because the edge was right there and not going to the edge wasn't Chapman.
Clark himself was a different kind of gravity. Modest, quiet, almost shy — a Scottish farmer's son who kept going back to the farm to check on his sheep between seasons. The fastest man of his era on the track; just a man who wanted to go home and look at his sheep off it. That quality wasn't performed. It was a state of complete alignment between himself and what he did.
That's what sport's soul looks like. The competition serves something larger. It's the means, not the point.
Esports doesn't have this.
Esports competition serves spectacle. Spectacle serves advertising. The end of that chain isn't any inquiry into human potential — it's brand exposure and sponsor ROI. Someone watching the League of Legends World Championship might feel something in the neighbourhood of awe — the precision, the coordination, the years of practice distilled into a single play. That's real. But what it points toward is mastery of a system, not the interrogation of any limit that matters outside the system. The awe has no outside.
That gap isn't accidental. It's structural.
III. Carmack: Prometheus and His Fire
John Carmack is the most complicated figure in this story, because he's innocent — and guilty.
He made Doom because Doom was fascinating. In 1993, first-person 3D rendering was a pure engineering problem, and the intellectual pleasure of solving it was the same as solving a hard proof. Carmack in that basement wasn't trying to create esports, wasn't designing FPS as a competitive genre — he was wrestling with a problem that had him. In this, he and Chapman were the same kind of person.
Doom shipped. Quake shipped. Then someone organised a tournament. Carmack didn't just not object — he actively supported it. QuakeCon was his event from the beginning. The rise of competitive play looked to him like player enthusiasm for his work, confirmation of technical achievement. He never asked the deeper question: where is this enthusiasm taking games?
That's the line between innocent and guilty. Innocent: he didn't design FPS for esports. Guilty: he made people forget that games could be art — and not through silence. He said it out loud.
He later walked parts of this back on Twitter, acknowledging "undeniably lots of games where the story is the entire point." But his follow-up was: "the most important games have been all about the play, not the story." This makes him more dimensional — not a simple villain. But in that room, at that moment, the words had already been spoken.
During Doom's development, Tom Hall was responsible for narrative. He wrote a document called the Doom Bible — a full story structure with character motivations and world-building. Carmack's response became one of the most quoted lines in game development history: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."¹ Hall left id Software shortly after.
This isn't a modest engineer acknowledging the limits of his expertise. It's the person with the most influence in the most critical formation period of the industry giving everyone a convenient authorisation — not making people forget that games could be art, but giving the whole industry a credible excuse to stop thinking about it. That's harder to defend against than forgetting. Forgetting is passive. An excuse is something you reach for.
Half-Life wasn't his. BioShock wasn't his. Those works appeared after him, swimming upstream against a current he'd established and then blessed.
The engineer's mind asks: can this be done? How?
The philosopher's mind asks: should this be done? What will the world look like after?
Carmack only ever had the first kind of question. He built the technical foundations of modern VR, then went to Oculus — which became Meta's VR infrastructure — and used those foundations to build immersive advertising for Zuckerberg's metaverse. Nobody was surprised. Because he never asked the question he should have asked.
That's why he's a compelling villain rather than a simple bad guy. Chapman's spirit survived in him at half strength — the drive to touch the edge stayed; why touch it, what the world becomes when you do, never made it into the frame.
He's not a bad person. But the cost of that sentence, in that room, was real.
IV. RDR2 and GTA4: What Games Can Do
The degradation is easier to see once you know what games look like at their best — in this timeline without a philosopher-Carmack.
RDR2 and GTA4 are two examples of the same thing: games using social problems, social geography, social groups to capture a moment in history and transmit a set of values. Film can't do this the same way. Literature can't do this the same way. Because in a game, you're not watching. You're playing a role.
RDR2: Villains at the Empire's Dusk
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an elegy for a world in the act of disappearing.
- The last moment of the American West. The railroad has crossed the wilderness. Industrialisation is moving in from the east. The net of civilised order is tightening. Arthur Morgan's Van der Linde gang are not righteous resisters — they're outlaws, they've done real harm to real people. But they're outlaws with principles and limits, and the game takes that distinction seriously.
The distinction matters. Dutch van der Linde isn't fighting villains — he's fighting an irreversible historical process, and his gang is itself part of that process, because their way of surviving accelerated the very order that's crushing them. The tragedy isn't that they lost. It's that their logic never contained the possibility of winning. This makes RDR2 more honest than most political narratives.
Every design decision serves the theme. Horses need feeding, grooming, trust-building. Every NPC in camp has routines, anxieties, their own read on the gang's situation. Arthur spends the back half of the game reckoning with what he's done. These aren't decorations — they're the breathing rhythm of a dying world.
RDR2 is a good game, but it's first a parable about historical cost. The medium gives it something film and literature can't: you're not watching Arthur Morgan struggle. You're in his skin, making his choices, carrying his weight.
GTA4: Autopsy of the American Dream
GTA4 is angrier than RDR2. Colder.
Niko Bellic arrives in Liberty City from Eastern Europe carrying the last remnant of a war survivor's belief in the American Dream — not because he believes it, but because he came here to finish something else, and the dream is the backdrop he needs. Roman gave up long ago. He's been in Liberty City for years; he knows what the dream is and found his accommodation with it. Niko never stopped, not from faith but from obsession.
Liberty City is New York's mirror, but more honest — it doesn't have to answer for itself. The wealth gap is visible on the map. The power structure is uncomfortably legible. Violence is the city's atmosphere, not a narrative device — it's just there, the way this place operates, not requiring explanation, only navigation. Roman keeps calling, not because he cares what Niko's doing, but because he needs to confirm someone's still on the line. That detail tells you more about the situation than any cutscene.
GTA gets called a violent game. GTA4 is — violence is its air. But the violence in GTA5 and its DLC is something else: spectacle, consumer product, a different species from GTA4. Niko's violence is a man with a past surviving in a brutal place. GTA5's violence is an entertainment park for the player. That difference isn't a detail. It's a nature difference.
GTA5 Online took this logic to its endpoint. Flying motorcycles, nuclear weapons, supercars — each new content drop is a Take-Two quarterly report. A series that once depicted the American Dream's collapse survived by becoming the American Dream: infinite consumption, infinite upgrades, infinite paid content. This isn't just betrayal. GTA Online took everything GTA4 was criticising — identity-as-purchase, status-as-commodity, the endless hunger of consumer culture — and turned it into the gameplay itself. The critique became the product. Rockstar didn't abandon their argument. They monetised it.
RDR2 and GTA4 together make the same argument: games at their best can do what literature does, can do what film does — but only games let you live inside that world rather than watch it. That difference is fundamental.
V. EA and Ubisoft: The Industrial Grinder
Two different diseases, one diagnosis. EA kills by doing nothing. Ubisoft kills by doing too much of the same thing.
EA and Wasteland: Burying an IP
In 1988, Interplay Productions made Wasteland. EA was the publisher. The rights stayed with EA — standard contract terms for the eighties, nobody thought much about it.
Then EA decided to do nothing with those rights.
Fargo wanted to make a sequel. EA wasn't interested and wouldn't allow it. Interplay, with the full original team, wanted to make a "spiritual successor" — but had to, in Fargo's own later words, "do everything they could not to get sued by EA." They changed the name. Changed the setting details. Carefully walked around every element that could be read as a Wasteland sequel. That spiritual successor was called Fallout.
Fallout shipped in 1997. One of the most important games ever made. The Wasteland IP sat in EA's archive being nothing. For fifteen years.
In 2003, Fargo left Interplay. He started his own studio and eventually bought the rights back from EA. Nine years after that, he went to Kickstarter and made Wasteland 2.
EA never "destroyed" Wasteland. It didn't even try. It just held a key, sat at the door, and let whatever was behind it slowly die. This is the most common thing capital does to creative work — and the hardest to prosecute: not destruction, suffocation. You cannot sue someone for doing nothing.
Ubisoft and Star Wars Outlaws
Star Wars Outlaws did something genuinely impressive: it built a Star Wars universe that is technically and artistically close to perfect. A Kotaku reviewer described standing in an Imperial base staring at a wall — the wall perfectly captured seventies science fiction aesthetics, drilled plate, matte-grey control panels, worn signage, every detail the product of real attention. Then an AI bug triggered and he respawned three times, standing in front of the same wall three times.
That's Ubisoft's problem. The capability was there. The priority wasn't. Thousands of talented people spent years building a world that takes your breath away, then loaded it into a game design framework they'd been using since 2012. Question marks across the map. Synchronisation points. Clear-camp-to-unlock-area. Skill trees. And Nix — Kay's adorable animal companion, cute enough to anchor its own mobile game.
Nix is the most honest part of Outlaws. It exists to soften everything: when the narrative loses weight, when the design loses edge, when the moral grey zone becomes a Disney-approved grey zone, there's always a small animal making an endearing face at the right moment. A pet isn't game design. It's risk mitigation — it tells everyone the game is safe, it won't make anyone genuinely uncomfortable.
The Star Wars IP should have been liberation: a universe large enough to tell anything. Andor proved this — same IP, Disney licence, but a creator with a point of view made a political drama about imperialism and resistance, no pets, no question marks, no synchronisation points. Ubisoft turned the same IP into a constraint, because in their hands the licence means risk management, means not offending any age group, means a Han Solo-style moral ambiguity that must ultimately remain PG-13.
That's why Star Wars Outlaws is disappointing not because it's bad, but because it's good enough — good enough for you to see clearly what it could have been.
Ubisoft didn't catch the contagion from esports directly. But the underlying logic is the same: find the most commercially legible version of the thing, remove whatever resists scaling, repeat. EA does it to IP. Ubisoft does it to design. Esports did it to games' soul. Three different vectors, one direction.
VI. The Contagion
Esports didn't just become porn. It taught the rest of the industry to treat narrative as porn. Expected to be there. Not that important. Something you include for appearance, not for weight.
A fair objection: doesn't competitive play have its own narrative? StarCraft matches have drama, reversals, personal styles that become legendary. Faker is a story. The question is who that story belongs to. When you watch Faker, you're watching — the narrative's subject is the spectator, not the player. The player is executing. The story is happening to the audience. This is the structure of sport, and there's nothing wrong with it. But it's not the structure of a game that turns the audience into the author. Esports is the most perfectly realised version of sport that games have produced. That's exactly the problem.
Esports didn't extract competition from games — Quake, CS, StarCraft were competition-first from the design core. Symmetric opposition was their essence; they weren't stripped of narrative, they never had it. Esports grew from this naturally, following the grain of the material, not against it.
The real problem is the direction of contagion: esports' commercial success infected games that were never meant to be competitive. Ranked systems entered RPGs. Battle Passes entered single-player games. Seasonal updates turned what were meant to be complete experiences into permanently unfinished services. Design space that once belonged to narrative, exploration, and imagination began to be consumed by competitive commercial logic.
This wasn't something esports actively did. It's what happens when an industry follows the money. The pattern was set early: Carmack built the engine, the engine made FPS possible, FPS competitive potential was discovered, the esports business model matured. That particular chain runs through id Software. But the logic it established — find the most commercially legible part of any game, extract it, scale it — ran well beyond FPS. MOBA, battle royale, live service: each a different technical lineage, the same commercial logic. EA and Ubisoft are two variations on the outcome: one turns games into a function of market data, the other turns games into IP-licence delivery vehicles. Different directions, similar result — the possibility of games as art shrinks.
This isn't Carmack's fault. It's the legacy of a genius who never asked "what are games?" operating in an industry that never asked the same question.
VII. Does Gaming Have a Future?
Yes. Not in esports. Not in EA and Ubisoft.
It's in Larian Studios spending six years on Baldur's Gate 3 — which is also D&D, the thing that strips the medium to its purest state haunting AAA game development. It's in FromSoftware building narrative through silence, forcing players to actively participate in constructing meaning. It's in independent developers, driven by personal obsession, making games that only a thousand people will love — but those thousand will never forget them.
D&D has existed for fifty years and is still growing. That says something.
In 2023, Hasbro tried to revise the OGL, turn D&D Beyond into a subscription service, bring third-party publisher content under licence control. This was capital's attempt to put advertising into a D&D session. The community backlash was strong enough that they retreated. But the logic is still there, waiting.
"You can't put advertising into a D&D session" — in 2024, that's a proposition that's been tested, and it held, barely. D&D didn't die, but its resistance came from community and twenty years of accumulated cultural capital, not from any structural commercial invulnerability. When a medium returns to its purest state, commercial logic does find it harder to get in — but harder isn't impossible. Hasbro already showed us that.
Esports and EA will keep existing, because the money is there. Carmack will keep being cited, because his technical achievements are real. But the possibility of games as art will also keep existing, because human beings won't stop needing a medium that makes them authors rather than audience.
Jim Clark died at Hockenheim. The suspension on his Lotus failed. Chapman said through tears that it was the fastest car he'd ever built.
The car was fast because Chapman refused to compromise on the thing that mattered. That refusal is what made it fragile. These two facts are not in tension — they're the same fact.
I'm not saying great games must be dangerous. I'm saying: that state of complete alignment between a person and what they're doing — Clark on the track, Arthur Morgan at the empire's dusk, Tom Hall writing the Doom Bible — is fragile by nature, because it serves no external logic. Commercial logic can protect a product. It cannot protect that state. The fastest car and the safest car are different cars.
That's where the best of games lives.
If this piece made you think — or made you argue — I'd like to hear it: f227f0227@zohomail.eu
¹ Quoted in David Kushner, Masters of Doom (2003). The dialogue is reconstructed from interviews; the quote has been widely circulated and not disputed by the parties involved.