University of California Irvine held their inaugural e-sports conference on October 11 and 12. There, academics and e-sports professionals came together to discuss how the scene as a whole is evolving: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Chris Kluwe, former NFL kicker for the Minnesota Vikings, was invited to be one of the featured keynote speakers. His positions and social activism didn’t make him any friends within the NFL world, though. He was unable to find a contract after being released by the Vikings in 2012 and the Raiders in 2013.

He has since been an outspoken advocate in the e-sports industry, trying to bring his knowledge from traditional sports over to e-sports. After his keynote, I followed up with him to further discuss why e-sports players need a union and why transparency is something e-sports desperately needs if there is to be any balance of power.

GameCrate: I wanted to start off and ask why you’re so passionate about e-sports?

Chris Kluwe: I’m a huge nerd at heart. I was in a top-level World of Warcraft raiding guild, primarily through The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. I also feel like I’m in a unique situation where there really aren’t a lot of people who grew up as the internet was growing up and became professional athletes. It was generally one or the other. I want people to understand there really aren’t a lot of differences between e-sports and traditional sports.

No matter how you look at it, it’s still athletes trying to do something at a very high level. E-sports may be newer, but it has the potential to become something lots and lots of people watch and love. When you go to these events, it feels like a sporting event.

It’s a really cool experience, but having been on the players side, I also want to make sure players aren’t being taken advantage of. Most players just want to play and have fun. They aren’t thinking about the issues that may befall them later on. Someone has to let them know. Someone needs to tell them about the things that can happen, that they should unionize, that they should have financial representation.

GC: You say have a plan, but how do you educate these kids that are just out of high school or haven’t even finished high school?

CK: That’s where it’s incumbent on both the league and the teams to create those secondary structures. Yeah, it’s important that you practice for your game, but it’s also important that you study on the side. The money you make now has to last you. It’s something collegiate and professional sports do; every year we had seminars on why investing is a good idea or why you should have a plan for afterwards. Granted, they probably could have been doing it more, and you’re always going to have the problem of how do you educate teenagers on financial literacy and future life plans. But you have to at least make the effort.

GC: I totally agree with that, but what’s the incentive on the team’s side?

CK: The incentive is that you avoid future bad PR. The NFL has a huge issue right now with concussions and a lot of that was brought about because the older players don’t have any money because they were never educated and taken care of by the league.

When someone sees a hero from their childhood penniless on the street, they begin to ask how did that happen? Is this league a good thing? That’s really the incentive. It’s not a short-term incentive, but a long-term one. The positive viewing of that league is a net benefit to society.

GC: One of the big things you talked about was players having power. Recently in League of Legends, the Players Association was formed, but it’s pretty useless. How does that change for them when Riot Games has all the power?

CK: You have to be willing to strike and not play. You have to be very visible and very clear about the reasons you’re doing it, too. If you strike because players are bringing in X amount of money and only getting paid Y, and there’s a huge discrepancy between those numbers, that gives people something to rally behind. It allows for the conversation of what is fair compensation?

If players are bringing in $500 million and only getting paid $10 million, is that fair? Players need to talk and have the discussion about what they’re worth to these organizations, and that’s incredibly hard to do because the numbers just aren’t out there. I’ve looked and it’s nearly impossible to find the financial information. That needs to change. Sooner or later this stuff is going to come out, and when it does, that’s when a labor strike can happen.

GC: On the topic of a labor strike, North America could strike, but even if you exclude every other region, Riot still has revenue from people playing the game. Doesn’t that still give them a significant amount of power?

CK: Right, and that’s where players have to have those numbers in order to determine their own value. That’s one of the key differences between e-sports and traditional sports. In traditional sports, the value the players bring to the league is everything, there is no supplemental revenue stream that the NFL or MLB could pull from.

Riot still has X amount of people playing the game and spending the money. They’re bringing in money even if players strike. Players need to do research and find those numbers so they can say that we bring in X amount of value and we matter. If players don’t make the effort then companies like Riot can just keep squeezing them.

Joshua “Dardoch” Hartnett – Started playing professionally at 17-years-old

GC: Since we’re talking about pay, contracts are a big issue with young e-sports players. They’re teenagers looking at contracts from organizations with millions of dollars in backing and teams of lawyers. How is a teenager supposed to deal with that?

CK: That’s where forming a union and having a union lawyer look at these contracts would help. Making contracts public would also help. That’s a big thing with traditional sports contracts, you know your value in relation to the other people in the league.

Especially with how stats driven e-sports is becoming. They’re the exact same types of stats that traditional sports use. You can break these stats down and compare players easily. If player A is statistically the same as player B but is getting paid $50,000 less, why?

GC: It’s all about transparency.

CK: Right, and it will eventually come out one way or the other. It could even come from the players just talking to each other about their latest deals. If there’s a huge discrepancy then one player is going to ask why the other is getting paid more.

Riot Games’ Los Angeles Campus

GC: You also talked about toxicity, but the big issue I see with asking the community to be the better person is that you’ve got Riot with a toxicity problem worse than the community at times. How can you expect the players to be good if the company who makes the game can’t even do it?

CK: That’s why I said you have to demand it not only from the community, but the publisher. The community can do what it can on the community side within chatrooms and such, but you have to demand that the publisher puts tools in place to deal with this and implement a culture that values inclusivity and not being toxic.

As you’ve seen, if your corporate culture tends to be toxic then that tends to trickle down and is reflected in things that go on within that community. This isn’t something that you should do out of the good of your heart, this is something that’s good for business. The more people you appeal to, the more people that will consume your product. That’s basic business 101.

In order to do that, you need to have more leadership positions occupied by women, people of color, and people of more diverse backgrounds. Then they’ll bring their viewpoints to the table and let you know when you’re making a mistake. Let you know that you can make more money by doing things differently. Don’t look at it just as a social justice thing, look at it as a pure business thing. If you want to make more money appeal to more people.

GC: Finally, you mentioned e-sports as a whole needs to make a jump to a more professional level, but the big challenge I see is that we may not have the same e-sports around in a year or two. Wouldn’t that create its own problem with jumping to the processional level?

CK: And that’s why I talked about creating an organization of publishers similar to the Olympics. That way you have this broad umbrella of e-sports so e-sports isn’t just one individual game, but everything.

GC: You would want Riot, Valve, Blizzard, Capcom, or EA to come together as one to create an e-sports organization.

CK: Right, and ideally, they would all have a representative that works on a relatively neutral board that is more interested in the health of e-sports as a whole rather than an individual game within that e-sports community, because you’re right, e-sports games are going to pop up and disappear.

If you don’t create that longevity and sense of buy-in for the fan, they’re going to disappear with the games and you’re never going to hit that saturation point that football, baseball, and soccer have. Those fans know that no matter what their teams and that sport is going to be there next year. E-sports fans don’t know that. The quicker you can get to creating that stability the more incentive people have to buy-in and support it for the long run.

GC: That organizational framework is also something that a strong Players Union could participate in.

CK: Yeah! Ideally, you’d want to have three parts to it: players, owners, and publishers. All three have different things that they want, but all three can balance against each other. If one becomes too dominant then you can run into problems and things like labor strikes. Until e-sports figures out how to balance the wants from all three parts, that potential for a labor strike is going to be heightened.

It’s a growing industry. Kids are growing up watching streams. We have the roadmap, let’s make sure we don’t make the same mistakes all over again.