Continuing from my earlier lengthy article, I am going to talk about what I think will happen in the future. The trend has been somewhat established and the wheels are now turning. Needs a bit of grease but generally speaking, it sounds pretty good… well, not sounds pretty good since it needs grease but you should be able to come to the correct conclusion despite the bad metaphor. I must admit that I once again succumb to the temptation of bad research (as I have a few deadlines looming chillingly over the horizon) but I will aim to provides links to my sources whenever I feel inclined to do so.

E-sports is essentially the name of the game now (all puns intended). As the name suggests, it is considered a sports, with professional athletes competing for the top spot in global scale events. ESPN has covered the growth of e-sports as well as notable events across different games. With the massive reaction and cheering of TI5 still ringing in my ears (I need to get that checked out), the e-sports community is pushing ahead by organizing not just bigger events, but more events, allowing the general gaming community as a whole to enter. Amateur tournaments are event being hosted in backwater countries like Australia!

Lured by the scent of money, betting companies are now entering the fray. I am not talking about betting hats (please refer to my previous article for an explanation on hats), I am talking about real money. Sportsbet (a major player in Australia) is currently covering the Nanyang Dota2008 2 Championships, LoL World Championships, CS Go Dreamhack Open, and I’m sure there’s more but I got the idea after scrolling through 3 pages. As with fantasy baseball that has been popularized relatively recently (compared to the actual sport I guess), fantasy e-sports, along with gambling is clearly going to be a space worth watching.

Seeing as I live in Australia, I enjoy simple things such as using the metric system, riding in my kangaroo to work, avoiding dropbears while commuting, and using Aussie statistics. From the Australian Wagering Council website, I found some interesting facts and figures. Sports betting only contributes 1.2% of total betting revenue, around AUD$200 million. It has over 2 million Australians involved yearly, which doesn’t sound impressive until you realize that we have a total population of around 23 million. Now, I know that Australia is not something most people would consider as a standard, and that we do have a gambling problem like a middle aged alcoholic found in a casino… which is a fitting simile when you realize that most of our gambling laws are made under the same act as our alcohol laws.

While gambling doesn’t provide much investment opportunities, outside of the current rudimentary system of calculating odds which can be arbitraged by those who are keen enough to accumulate data for themselves, the e-sports community provides other interesting opportunities. One of the more prominent would be Virtual Reality (VR). I assume that it is already common knowledge that some of the larger tech companies are addressing VR as a serious investment opportunity. Looking at Oculus Rift, the version that I’m referring to is due to be released Q1 of 2016, it essentially brings portable entertainment into the real world. I believe I’ve made jokes about how the real world has awesome graphics with crappy gameplay. Well, that’s all about to change if I can be seeing the world through a VR augmented lens. Hot girls? Check. Zero need for human interaction? Check. ability to immerse myself fully and integrate my current technology into it (you can plug in your phone)? Check. Well, I guess this is where the human race goes extinct. Not by nuclear warfare, but by being too obsessed with virtual things such that all productivity drops to a level where only the maintenance of said virtual world is sustained. Kind of like Wall-E.

One step further is the world of augmented reality (AR). Looking at companies like this must truly make one reconsider the concept of reality. I just came back from Melbourne, where I played a VR/AR game. It was a Left 4 Dead styled shoot ’em up zombie first person shooter. Apart from the fact that you cannot adjust the field of view, so the focus makes people like me suffer from motion sickness around half an hour in, the game was pretty good. There are some other problems with the actual aiming and the fact that there were some other restraints, it was a pretty good experience. Nothing good enough for me to actually name them but enough to give them a mention so that if you’re interested, you can go google for it.

Major tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Amazon are all investing in some kind of ‘reality’ technology. Perhaps in the future, all our wants and needs can be fulfilled by virtual or augmented reality. To the point where we can simply sit back and consume virtual products that are delivered straight to our brains via the headsets. Where the world’s only professionals are pretty much those who live in the real world maintaining the servers and creating newer and better ways for the hardware to tickle our pleasure sensors in the brain. It seems that if there is artificial intelligence set out to destroy us, this would almost seem the most logical and fool proof. With everything we want at immediate disposal, the need to procreate etc. all disappear and the human race eventually dies out in this slippery slope scenario. On the other hand, I get to live in a world where I get to sleep all I want and eat everything I want and have fun with whomever I want. Sounds almost fair.

Hmm… the matrix almost sounds like a nice place to live. I’ll take that blue pill thank you very much.