Meeting the Stars of Competitive Call of Duty

Callum Swan has looked happier. Head down, eyes fixed on his feet, every inch of his body language screams: Get me off this fucking stage, immediately. Tournament anchor Olivier Morin has a microphone thrust beneath the Millenium player's nose. "So, what happened, what went wrong?" he asks, as the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" plays over the PA. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of his questioning. A mumble, a shrug, a swift exit: Swan, or the freshly Twitter-verified Swanny to millions of viewers who regularly tune into competitive Call of Duty tournaments, is caught between feeling livid and fractured. He's all torn up inside, and wearing it all over his face.

Anyone thinking that eSports is just a bunch of silly boys playing around with silly toys would immediately be set right with a split-second look at Swan, right now. This isn't just a game—this is a sport, with all the passion and fire and broken hopes of any "traditional" precedents. It doesn't matter that this is played with a controller, that the action takes place in a virtual environment, generated by a game console. The emotions, the highs, and the lows are just as real as those seen and felt in any other competitive discipline.

Swan slinks away to go over what went down wrongly in his mind, before reengaging with Black Ops III in what's effectively both a backstage area and second, smaller competitive zone, where less-glamorous matches have been played this weekend. A third-place playoff match now has to happen. He doesn't give all that much of a shit about it, now that a crack at the top prize, $20,000 and an admirably proportioned trophy, has slipped through his team's fingers and thumbs. But he'll play anyway, alongside his fellow British teammates, ultimately losing a 2-1 lead across a best-of-five setup against the American team Rise Nation. It's all a bit England at Italia 90: Once Chris Waddle's penalty screams over the bar, all anyone watching at home wants to do is bring our boys home. The third-place match is a cruel prank. No tournament needs it.

Millenium in action (Swan is the third player back, leaning forward)

At the Le Zénith venue in central Paris, usually home to rock concerts, some 5,000 Call of Duty fans have gathered to watch the final day's play of an intense ESWC weekend, just another in the on-going Call of Duty World League series. Saturday saw a starting total of 16 teams reduced to just four: the French-owned Millenium, featuring all British players; their semi-final conquerors and ultimate competition winners OpTic Gaming, from the US; another British outfit, Splyce, who reach the final despite visibly shitting it in every interview; and Rise Nation, who place third. The crowd is wild for it. The hosts hype them up from time to time, but honestly, it's not needed.

Drinks flow, voices rise as one, and the celebrations that erupt among the onlookers when a match-turning play comes off is a marvelous thing to witness. If you turned your eyes from the stage and focused solely on the attendees, leaping from their seats, waving flags of their chosen crews, you'd automatically assume you were at an indoor tennis match or basketball game, or anywhere else where a little booze and a lot of excitement combine to turn the air electric. It's completely compelling, and after arriving on the Saturday somewhat naïve as to how this kind of competition will play out, I leave wholly won over. I dare not dive into the technicalities of each match, the various modes and what each one means; this isn't that piece. But the competitive format allows for a variety of modes in each encounter, and the way the scoring can swing from one side to the other is indicative of certain teams having very particular strengths and weaknesses.

Twenty-four hours before Millenium goes down to OpTic, Swan and I share lunch on the edge of La Vilette, the park that Le Zénith sits within, just beside the impressively curvaceous Philharmonie de Paris. On our way to a bowl of particularly salty skinny chips, a salad, and a couple of drinks—lager for me, something non-alcoholic for the yet-to-play-that-day professional—we pass another competitor, from the FaZe Clan team. The two exchange friendly words and look forward to seeing each other later. "There's no trash-talking between players, off the stage," Swan tells me. "We all get along, really." I ask about psyching each other out on stage, when the teams are sat facing away from each other. "We can take comfort breaks, like, toilet breaks," he says. "If you're doing well and the other team is all fired up and ready to strike back, you really wind them up by slowing things down, and having a break."

In the heat of the mid-May sun, Swan remains cool: "I don't really get mentally affected by anything. And I'm not superstitious, or anything like that." There's an almost unsettling steeliness to the man, still just 23 years old with a got-his-shit-together calmness that other players I see in action across the weekend don't share. He's fairly private when he's not putting on a show—"I don't share my personal stuff on Twitter. I mean, social media is instrumental in the growth of eSports, and Call of Duty in particular, but I only use it for the playing side. The rise of eSports has coincided with the digital age, and the foundations of our community are built on social media. That is the primary method of communication here, and you'll see Premier League footballers with fewer Twitter followers than people who play this game."

One such player is the same one we pass on the way to lunch. The fresh-faced "Clayster" is James Eubanks, a veteran player who celebrates his 24th birthday (he still looks about 16) on the Saturday of competition. His Twitter follower count is more than 570,000, and he spends what feels like forever signing autographs and having his photo taken with a seemingly endless line of admirers, in the Zénith concourse, not far from his girlfriend's view. Clayster doesn't look like a celebrity—if you saw him simply milling with the regular players, if they weren't constantly stopping their stride to do a double-take before politely asking for a selfie, you'd assume he was just another fan, albeit one in a garish, sponsor-plastered team jersey. (Seriously, someone needs to get these guys some properly tailored kits.)

The biggest receptions are reserved for whenever France's own Team Vitality is onstage. Millenium soundly beats the guys at the quarterfinal stage, but the team is far and away the crowd's choice, the peoples' champions if not genuine contenders this weekend. Two of their four, "BroKen" and "Gotaga," get special attention—the former is featured on an advert for customized controllers that runs between matches, and the latter is, says Swan, the star of the team.

"Gotaga, he's kind of the star, and he's got a YouTube channel and a lot of social media followers," Swan says. "He's had a lot of success there, so he's garnered an incredible following. And that's transferred from the casual to the competitive community, to the point where a lot of the people attending this event have come specifically to watch him, and Team Vitality. People actually follow the players more than they do the teams."

Team Vitality

Alan Brice is covering the weekend for English viewers. He's both a commentator—a shoutcaster—and a director, constantly moving the camera to find the best action for the watching-at-home audience. He wears a nice shirt, as befits anyone being broadcast live onto thousands of screens, but mercifully loose shorts, because this venue is quite the cauldron of stink, sweat, and oppressive heat. He might not be the one pressing the buttons to pull off the head shots, but he's well aware that his role in all of this, this rapidly growing industry, is just as vital as that of the players themselves.

"One of my colleagues a few years ago, he said to me that eSports is like a pizza," Brice says, in a break from coverage, "and all the 'casting, all the stuff around it, is the toppings. The games will happen regardless, but margarita is margarita. Take us away, and you take away the toppings."

It's an awkward analogy, but one that makes sense all the same: It's the 'casters, the analysts, and the experts who bring color to these occasions, who provide the context necessary to transform what would otherwise be a bundle of polygons and textures jogging aggressively around a screen into a tense drama, a soap opera, a true theatrical experience. Brice both drives the coverage, deciding what player's perspective to snap to in time to see a vital kill or play, and delivers motor-mouthed descriptions of what's going down, and why it's significant.

"You have to remember that these players are all people, and wherever you have people you have stories, and drama. It's every bit as real as traditional sports, but it's a lot more public, because this is a very social media–based form of entertainment," Brice says. "We've had corruption in the past, and that's been taken care of to make sure it doesn't happen again. But that's part of a bigger drama. You have teammates leave to start other teams. Stuff can get really personal in eSports. When a footballer leaves his team, his teammates don't hate him. But here there are some genuine grudges and grievances going on. So we have Splyce and Epsilon here this weekend—right now the new Epsilon is struggling while Splyce, which took on a lot of Epsilon players, is doing really well. And it would be fireworks if they came up against each other."

Team Splyce

They don't, mainly because Splyce is, as Brice observes, on fire (right up until they meet OpTic, anyway), while Epsilon fails to make it out of the group stage. But Brice has seen teams rise only to fall in the past and has used that to craft storylines based on who's going where, and why that may or may not cause repercussions elsewhere. "Even when I'm not 'casting, I'm watching everything," he says. "I'm always making notes when I'm off camera, to get those stories, and feed them into my next 'cast." He's also been working right through eSports's rise from a niche attraction on the fringes of the games market to its current status as a cultural phenomenon ready to happen—if you don't feel it's exploding already.

"I think it'll be baby steps for eSports, going forward—you can't just flick a switch and turn it on. The money is now flooding in though, so perhaps people expect it that way. But that's a worry for me, honestly—a lot of companies are just throwing money at eSports, because the numbers are great. But the numbers have been great for a long time, but we took ages convincing you that this wasn't stupid. Now a lot of people are land grabbing—I think Shaq's bought a team (he has), and we see a lot of that. And it's great, but we need to make sure the right steps are taken, because this level of boom is almost unprecedented, and it's a very dangerous area," Brice says.

Brice advises caution in escalating eSports's reach, then—the viewer numbers and prize pools are going up every year, but he feels that "competitive integrity" needs to improve, too, before the industry can really feel it's in a secure place, its future assured. "I'm actually a big advocate of an eSports union, and I think that it will come about. I was a union man for eight and a half years myself, and this whole legitimacy for eSports is coming, but it will be in baby steps. A union is almost untenable at the moment, because we don't have the infrastructure—but we'll get there."

Call of Duty is an eSports mainstay, with Black Ops III developers Treyarch committed to maintaining its high profile in the market alongside both publishers Activision and the makers of the forthcoming Infinite Warfare, Infinity Ward. For Swan, he first realized he had a future in it back in 2011, at the CoD XP event in Los Angeles, the game's first million-dollar tournament. "A few eighteen-year-old lads from the UK decided to get a team together. We were massive underdogs, but we qualified to play in LA, and took it all in our stride. There was no pressure on us. We ended up placing fourth, and we took away $100,000 between four of us. My parents got it, then. Their skepticism fell away, and they saw how it could be a legitimate occupation. Before that, I had no intention of pursuing this professionally. But now, I don't think I'll ever lose interest, and I'm not about to give this up for anything else, anytime soon. It's a privilege to be able to do this, and it's actually pretty humbling when you see how far people have come to support you."

Yet while CoD isn't going anywhere, it's going to come up against some fierce competition in 2016, from other shooters like LawBreakers and Overwatch. But if this is making Treyarch sweat a little, the company's director of brand development, Jay Puryear, isn't showing the signs of it. Backstage at Le Zénith, I talk to him about how easy it isn't to launch a new title aimed squarely at the eSports market.

"It's very difficult to start a game by saying: This is going to be an eSports title. How do you even do that?" Puryear's face scrunches into one of comedically perplexed exaggeration. "You can't just create a new sport without having a critical mass. Now, Call of Duty has such a history of players, maps and memories, and that gives us a great advantage. Obviously we have critical mass, but more pertinently, this is important to us. The Call of Duty World League is a franchise play, something we want to support across multiple titles. This isn't about capitalizing on a fad, or one particular title; it's about looking at pillars, at CoD titles from multiple studios. Call of Duty changes every year, but when it comes to eSports, there needs to be these same things you see every time, albeit always improved."

Treyarch listened closely to feedback from pro players when designing the multiplayer maps and competitive modes for Black Ops III. "Professionals look at the maps different to most players. They will find lines of sight that we never saw coming. So they're constantly pushing us to design better maps. But the other challenge is finding the balance between public matches and how professionals play the game. So it's a constant balancing act between the two, and neither side should be stronger than the other, but both need to be considered, equally," Puryear says.

And Black Ops III offers a portal into eSports, into the CoD World League, for casual players who'd never considered the game as a spectator attraction before. "If you turn the game on, and there's a tournament happening somewhere, you can see a widget in the upper left-hand corner, inviting you to watch it now. And that's introducing a lot of our players to eSports," he adds.

"It's our belief that eSports players are becoming stars in their own rights, and that's very aspirational. You watch them at home, and you might think, Hey, I'm as good as these guys. Or you see a new strategy, and then you give it a go yourself, then and there, inside the game. That's a very interesting connection that we have. That aspirational part is huge for us."

OpTic Gaming celebrate their win at Le Zénith

In a moment of quiet, before Millenium plays its final Saturday match, Swan slouches beside me. "This is its own medium of entertainment, on its own platform of competition," he says. "And when you're getting six figures and more in terms of concurrent viewers for an event like this, and you have thousands of people always tuning in, it does legitimize it. It proves that eSports has transcended its niche. It's not mainstream yet, obviously, in as much as it's not a 'conventional' sport, but it is a flourishing industry."

Brice, sitting nearby, is in agreement: "I remember doing ESWC four years ago, and I set up my own PC, we didn't have a mixing desk, I had two headsets, and we had a standard-def webcam. It was just me and one other guy, for thirteen hours a day. Now, we have a production crew, additional talent, and there's a five thousand–person crowd out there. And this is just going to get bigger as the years go by."

Current predictions set the global eSports revenue for 2017 at $465 million, up from $195 million in 2015. The trend is clear: The thin line on the not-so-little graph of income and exposure over time passed is on a strictly upward tangent and shows no sign of dipping. This year will see some new games hoping for a slice of the eSports action fall short of achieving anywhere close to the necessary critical mass—Evolve being one such title from 2015. That's inevitable—might be Paragon, might be Overwatch, might be Battleborn. You suspect, though, that Call of Duty will be around forever. And 20 years from now, when it'll still be around, will anyone be viewing eSports, the games and the competitors alike, with skepticism? I don't think so. The corner of acceptance is being turned, and before long only the utterly naïve will look upon events like this with any scorn, offering in a cackling, mocking tone: "It's not a real sport." I've been there, in the middle of it, between the cacophony of a packed-tight crowd and the ecstasy and anguish of the onstage winners and losers. It felt pretty real to me.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.