Social Bookmarking Post

For this blog post, I will be primarily focusing on the social bookmarking experiment that I recently discovered. Since this blog is focused on video games in popular culture,I wanted to advance the research beyond just what I found through a simple Google search. By using Diigo, a website that acts as a way to share your documents with other people and edit them, I've discovered new articles that pertain to my interest. Using the keyword "eSports", I am able to see what documents other people with video game interest are reading. This method is useful to see what important eSports information other people are using and use some of it to create my own view.

When using Diigo and browsing the eSports related articles that other users have tagged (shared), one particular article grabbed my attention. This article called "The Rise of the Professional Cyber Athlete" featured a wealth of information in regards to the esports community. We all know that the growth of esports is in its infancy and the available information regarding the topic is quite scarce. I feel as though the growth of video games hasn't received the amount of attention it deserves from the media. It is commonly overcast by other media juggernauts such as movies, reality television, concerts etc. To get back to the article though, Ben McGrath, an author for TheNewYorker magazine writes about the professional gamers. What stands out to me in particular is the fact that he analyzes a female professional gamer in the beginning of the article. His description of the crowd being surprised that she was "neither South Korean nor a young man in a game called Starcraft 2 was nice to point out because many people associate video games with males.

(Note: Scarlett identifies herself as female. While looking up information about the person there is some confusion as to whether Scarlett is male or female. For all intensive purpose I will identify Scarlett as a female.)

(Note: tarcraft 2 is a popular rts (real time strategy) game where your objective is use resources scattered on a map to try and amass an army to eliminate your opponent).

The article then dives into what eSports really means and if it is a sport or not, using the quote from ESPN president John Skipper "It's not a sport. It's a competition." I cane see why this article is popular among the users on Diigo because of the amount of information that is relevant for people learning more about the eSports community. I will continue to use Diigo as a source of knowledge for my research of eSports and video games in general.

Also I will looking at the blog of Nathan Grayson from Kotaku. This person is interesting to follow because he presents information in regards to video game growth that might be interesting in the future. The article i found on the website that he wrote about RiotGames (the creator of League of Legends) being pissed at a certain streamer for streaming matches of a professional gamer was very interesting and something that I want to look more into. This story is interesting due to the factors that both the streamer and the creator of the game RiotGames have presented in arguments for why the stream should be shut down vs why it should not. Though some of the posts that i have discovered so aren't quite what I am looking for in terms of eSports, the overall content is very relevant to what this blog pertains to. As video games become more prominent in popular culture (some might argue they are right now), i am interested in seeing what Grayson has to say on this. I may also check out Reddit to see what people have to say on Video games in general. I believe that the more information I can gather, the better the blog will be content wise due to the fact that I will have opinions from multiple sources.