Esports - child’s play during COVID-19
Artist: Janusz Jurek
Esports - child’s play during COVID-19
Verdoodt, V, Fordyce, R, Archbold, L, Gordon, F & Clifford, D 2021, ‘Esports - child’s play during COVID-19’, Special issues in the International Journal of Children’s Rights (Forthcoming).
In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the popularity of ‘Esports’ or competitive video game contests (Gibbs et al., 2018). This phenomenon presents significant public health concerns linked to the associated excessive gaming consumption as well as potentially exposing children to harms similar to those in traditional sporting contexts, due to team environments and professional coaching (ESIC, 2019). Moreover, the blurring lines between esports gaming and esports gambling (Zendle, 2020) and the manipulative effect of personalised commercial content embedded as part of the gaming content (Verdoodt et al., 2016) are also of key concern. This commercialisation of play leads to some fundamental questions. For instance, could the playing or watching of esports fall under the concept of ‘play’ as conceptualised by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (“CRC”) and, hence, contribute to the realisation of the right to play and enable other rights such as the rights to development, assembly, and freedom of expression during COVID-19? The platforming of child’s play therefore, raises important questions from a children’s rights perspective.When responding to such questions and the concerns raised by developments such as esports, it is important however, to not ‘disproportionately restrict children’s rights to participation and play’ (UNICEF, 2019), in particular in times of COVID-19. This paper will therefore focus on the digitalisation and platforming of child’s play during the pandemic and will address the issues through the lens of children’s rights, in particular the right to play and the right to protection from exploitation. The analysis proceeds in three parts. The first introduces children’s rights and esports, the second narrows down on how playing esports can contribute to the realisation of the rights enshrined in Article 31 CRC in times of COVID-19, and the final section explores exploitative play and the need for a balanced regulatory response to the challenges posed by the esports phenomenon.