Gaming Houses in Esports

August 18, 2022

Gaming Houses in Esports

Hey lovely readers, apologies for the lack of posts over the weekend and weird posting schedule XD – my brain required a quick break to proofread and come up with new blog ideas! But taadaa I am back with a new blog and this is one I'm particularly interested in and haven’t seen anyone discuss recently so here I am to discuss it! Having scrolled through my YouTube recommended and done a quick google search on what hasn’t been covered recently, I have settled on the topic of gaming houses! Okie so yes, perhaps not the most diverse topic but I watched a few videos that got me thinking about the implications of gaming houses so here I am ready to ramble on about it for a few thousand words. So, let’s get into it!

Firstly, let’s just make it clear that gaming houses aren’t always needed or viable – it should go without saying but I think it’s an important preface as so many teams that we see on the international stage do have a gaming house (though it’s worth pointing out Pentanet.GG 2021 MSI LCO representative didn’t) so there’s that. Secondly, I plan to cover quite a few questions I had when brainstorming this so I may miss some things and this blog purely covers the points I came up with and things that I thought were notable and weren’t always discussed in the wider discourse on gaming houses. A couple of points I want to cover are to do with if gaming houses are inherently positive and necessary, especially in the scenario where a pro is let go of from a team and was living in the gaming house (what this then means for their living situation), whether gaming houses can breed out of game toxicity (and how this could affect in game), as well as if there is a certain level of play where a gaming house isn’t necessarily required in order to keep good team synergy. Now that we have put in some context and a little preface, let’s get into this and discuss it further!

Quick definition – gaming houses are run by a team (typically the team manager or an in house person if a team manager is not in existence e.g. a coach) where players scrim, strategize, and review games, and usually live there too (though players are not necessarily obligated to live there). In my opinion, what makes gaming houses interesting are all the questions they create, they blur the line between work and down time and make me wonder whether they create bigger problems such as the aforementioned implication of a teammate being let go of/not playing for a period of time but still living in the house or if they could potentially be beneficial by not letting a situation escalate to that point – we will get into this shortly.

While researching this piece, I came across a Reddit thread discussing whether gaming houses were holding back esports (granted the thread is from 2014 when esports was still very much in its’ infancy but I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the points being made). The main arguments from the thread (I will link it with the rest of my sources for you to read if you wish to) was that gaming houses don’t promote professional culture, by no means am I intending to bash this person for their opinion or saying gaming houses are amazing wonderful things that are a necessity in every possible esports situation – I don’t agree with this point. Gaming houses do blur the lines between professional time and down time, but a team needs to spend time together to build a synergy with each other, or at least enough of a relationship to be able to take (constructive) criticism, and I think living together could quite easily speed this process along. Also, surely having a more personal approach via living with each other isn’t entirely a bad thing, you are aware of each member of the house’s boundaries and how they like to live, this to me doesn’t seem inherently bad because being purely professional in every situation could lead to detachment and make the environment more strained. Having done shared living, you are forced to get along quickly and learn how to work with each other which is obviously so important in a gaming house especially where the job is concerned. While I agree with a subsequent point under this argument – e.g. that a toxic environment can be created, we will come back to this – I don’t think it’s inherently fair to brand gaming houses as terrible for ‘not promoting professional culture’ when the whole point of the gaming house isn’t to be a standard office environment. Yes it’s about hard work but it’s also about being a team in a deeper sense than in a standard office, so this argument appears to miss the mark somewhat – though it would be unfair to judge the author too harshly as the thread is from 2014 and not more recent.

The next thing I want to address is in part a follow on to this Reddit thread I read, the author suggested that instead of scraping gaming houses they should instead become more professional, but this made me wonder at what point a gaming house is either not required to begin with, not viable or just not needed after so long. During G2’s 2021 roster, it was common knowledge that Rekkles the ADC of the team did not live with the rest of the team, though the team had a gaming house. Rekkles defended this decision saying he found it better to live away from the team so he could mentally prepare for work each day and then reflect on the day on his way home (completely valid), but this made me wonder if there was actually a requirement for the gaming house in the first place. Most of that particular roster had played together for years (Rekkles was the only new addition) and the team were otherwise familiar with each other so their synergy (ignoring the results of the team overall) was high, so the gaming house was perhaps more of a choice than a necessity. This got me thinking, if team synergy and sense of community is so high, was a gaming house necessary? This is in no way to suggest G2 shouldn’t have done it, as they said in the tour video, Carlos had to spend the NA money somehow, and I'm only using G2 as a case study as they were one of the most open teams about their gaming house. But it does beg the question of where, when and if a gaming house is actually required. At the start of this article I said that gaming houses are not necessities in esports though they are common place, and that there isn’t a requirement to have a gaming house to be a recognised esports team. So in what scenarios are gaming houses outright not viable? You would have to assume the answer to this question is to do with cash flow, that a gaming house is not financially viable and so isn’t taken but aforementioned I would assume that a high level of team synergy is another situation where a gaming house isn’t necessarily needed.

While we are on the topic of when gaming houses stop being needed/viable, I want to quickly touch on the topic of when a player stops playing for a team as part of a break or is released from contract (we are not going to discuss the implications of doing this mid split as that’s been discussed plenty this last year) and what it means if they were living in a gaming house. We aren’t going to discuss contracts or anything to do with that in terms of orgs, merely the implications of gaming houses. I'm sure you can all autofill an example for this – but as I could find no concrete information, I will not be giving specific examples as I do not wish to receive any emails from orgs accusing me of defamation. I attempted to research what happens when a contract is ended for whatever reasons where gaming houses are concerned but didn’t find many sources, so if you know what happens (please feel to correct me) but my understanding would be that once released from contract the pro in question would have a period to find new accommodation before needing to move out of the gaming house, so not making the homeless but putting them in a potentially awkward position. This of course creates a lot of questions, the big one in my mind being does that make gaming houses risky for the pro player. Of course orgs are not likely to kick pros mid split but as it has been known to happen, and so the pro player in my mind at least, takes a risk moving into a gaming house, maybe I am perceiving it incorrectly but it seems to me that the pro carries the risk by moving in, because if a contract ends for whatever reason they are then obligated to find a new housing situation especially in a short time fame given the potential of having nowhere to go.

Still going off my list of points about gaming houses and linking quite nicely (if that is the appropriate phrase) to the end of a contract is the environment of the gaming house. Returning to the earlier Reddit thread, a team manager commented explaining that gaming houses only breed ‘animosity when it isn’t handled correctly by a coach or manager’ and this brings me to a specific example – if you are familiar with my blog you will be familiar with this team from an earlier article. The infamous Team Siren had a gaming house, and one of the players sighted part of their failing under ‘it was hard living under the same roof as someone who hates you’ so the next point is going to be discussing the team working environment, and when it turns toxic. We are of course all aware that League of Legends can be an inherently toxic game, and of course that toxicity can bleed out of the game into real life. But in regards to a gaming house, the important point to note is on how that toxicity is handled. As the Reddit user who was a team manger points out, animosity only becomes a problem when it isn’t handled correctly and dealt with efficiently and effectively; so the example of Team Siren’s gaming house and how it was discussed to be a toxic environment can be put down to the issues (both inside and outside of the game) not being handled well – I'm not pointing the finger at any specific member but this point of toxicity seemed particularly interesting. Especially relating to other points about how gaming house should be structed, from my understanding of Team Siren – there was no team manager per say, there were the five players who outsourced video editing but otherwise the team leader handled everything internally. So how does this relate to gaming houses? Well, a point I saw quite frequently related to a ‘too personal’ relationship between the players and members of staff, but continuing with the example of Team Siren I think this proves the opposite. There is a need for members of staff to be personal with the players so they can defuse any toxic situation that can rise, and also points to the need for staff in the gaming house as well as the players – perhaps if Team Siren had had a separate team manager, the issues of alleged toxicity could have been handled differently.

Okie onto the next point, a lot of the articles I found sighted the positives of gaming houses – which of course are important – especially when we consider the number of scrims that are completed and the level of practice that is generally required, with the ultimate intention of ‘improving performance.’ There was a specific article point that interested me, what about the teams who are based outside of the nation where the competition studio is, and have to fly in regularly? Surely this more than ever is where a gaming house becomes important, in an article by Esports News there was a discussion point about Excel and Origen’s ‘training facilities housed remotely from LEC studios in Berlin and both teams confirmed they will fly back and forth each week to compete’ bear in mind this is an article from 2019 (and will of course be linked) so this is no longer the case – as showcased in Excel’s BBC documentary. But even so, this to me seems like a pretty good reason to have a gaming house, to not have the pressure of constant flights and to be able to focus on game – the only downside to this particular point I can see is if the entire team is in one room and the wifi crashes mid match (which isn’t something anyone has any control over). Of course, the team being under the same roof is important for the level of play but a question I would have isn’t one I can provide an answer for, it is dependant on players but even so, do the pros of a gaming house outweigh the cons? Specifically in terms of leaving behind friends, families, pets and significant others – which was sighed as a major difficulty in an article by The Loadout about Excel’s struggles of living in a gaming house. But also to do with whether the environment becomes stifling, is there a point where you would crave to be alone and not think about the game for five minutes and how would you cope with this when you live with the same people you work with.

While writing this I researched what if any rules exist in regards to gaming houses, be that for staff or pros. Admittedly, Google was not overly useful on this one but I did stumble across an article with a Fnatic team manager (team manager during 2016) about his rules for the gaming house with the players; to be fair to him, the main rule that was stipulated clearly – and recurrently throughout the article was not surprising. It pertained to the allowance of females into the gaming house, specifically that only girlfriends were allowed inside the house and no ‘randoms’ (his words not mine) were allowed to come to the house for fear of breeching the privacy and secrecy of the location. There are of course other rules demonstrated in Excel’s documentary such as curfews, breakfast and practice times, etc. but I thought this rule on females specifically – though I’d prefer to phrase it as significant others and ‘evening choices’ – was interesting on the basis of other research I’ve done that has said about significant others for pros often being secretive, not accepted or difficult to gain. My knowledge of the 2016 era of LEC is very lacking as I had no idea about esports back then but judging from the Excel documentary which was filmed in 2020 and discussed the large stigma around pro players having significant others (while it had only become recently acceptable for support staff to have significant others) – I can’t imagine 2016 having been very accepting on the topic of pros have significant, so this rule was particularly interesting to me. I want to come back to the topic of pro players and romantic relationships in a future blog so for now I will leave this particular topic at what has been said.

So now that we have discussed many of the points surrounding gaming houses, I want to make it clear that I think gaming houses are a great thing and can be very successful; the reason for this blog was that I wanted to cover the questions I had on gaming houses as a whole especially as I didn’t see anyone covering the questions I had that seemed to be quite important in being able to understand the whole idea of gaming houses. This was super interesting to research as although there were a few recent articles – there was a lot of gaps left, which I hope this blog did a little to fill!

So that’s all I have for this blog today, if I missed anything please feel free to let me know or if you could expand on my points, especially to do with the gaming house rules, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks for reading!

See you on the next blog! ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ

Notable Sources of Information –

Reddit Thread (2014) Why Gaming Houses Are Holding Back Esports –

https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2eiv92/why_gaming_houses_are_holding_back_esports/

League of Legends House Tour G2 x Logitech G –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFiYx7mQDTc&t=268s

Excel Esports BBC Documentary Fight for First (moving into the gaming house ep 1) –

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p091lx83/fight-for-first-excel-esports-series-1-1-on-the-path-to-greatness

The Story of the Infamous Team Siren YouTube –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alAzuD2-Qks&t=1s

The Changing Face of Gaming Houses and Esports Training Facilities Esports News UK –