Calling for information systems research on esports: An overview study

Online gaming has become a pervasive entertainment activity, and its professionalization has resulted in esports (i.e., electronic sports)—a new blend of sport and business. Esports has a promising future given its widespread acceptance and significant business value. Its innovative nature necessitates more research to help understand and shape its future. We hold that scholars, especially information systems (IS) researchers, should pay more attention to this phenomenon since the IS discipline has a key interest in examining esports’ constituents (i.e., people, organizations, and technologies). To increase research attention and help readers understand esports, we compiled this research overview. In it, we first comprehensively define esports. Then, we summarize the esports development. We outline the current state of research in general and systematically review the IS perspective. Based on these efforts, we propose an esports research framework with four promising IS research avenues. We end by discussing “IS contributions” to esports and this overview’s implications. This study serves as a foundation for comprehensively mapping the esports practice and research landscape. We hope our findings can help others, especially IS researchers, more clearly understand esports and guide them towards creating increasingly impactful works. Copyright © 2022 by the Association for Information Systems.