49 GENIUS INTERVIEW Dr Florian Block
jumping and heading the ball. Whereas in esports you may react within a few milliseconds and you pull out just the right action to counter or prevent the enemy from killing you – it can almost be like rock paper scissors on steroids. It’s very intense and very fast paced in many cases. FEED: What applications for your research are there beyond entertainment? What other kinds of things are you learning? FB: We have two motivations in working with games. First, games are in their own right an absolutely fascinating form of mainstream entertainment. And the UK economy is the fifth biggest in the world in terms of interactive entertainment. So the research we’re doing is important economically to enrich the audience experience and empower people to better understand what’s going on in the space. But for us, esports is also an incredible space for experimentation. Because ultimately what we’re doing is looking at human behavioural data and translating that into a story that everyone can understand. And if I had to nail down a few challenges of the 21st century, the ability to make complex data and insights about us humans intelligible
to mainstream audiences – not just experts – will be one of the really exciting, transformative areas. Using analytics – and also using artificial intelligence and machine learning – it’s going to be absolutely disruptive. Esports today allows us to do research that we couldn’t do in physical sports and that we couldn’t do in many other parts of society. In esports we have a tech-savvy audience of early adopters. They love technology, they love data, they’re eager to engage and they have an appetite. With esports we can do something now that we probably won’t be able to for 20 years in other areas, but something that will definitely become relevant. FEED: You study the interaction between humans and technology. In a wider sense, what is your take on how society is interacting with digital technology now? FB: I think it’s obvious that digital technology and the way we share information is and has been evolving more rapidly than the culture broadly has adapted to. I think we’re really trailing the sorts of things that you can do with digital technology and communication. A lot of people see AI in particular as a danger in even further driving this gap between people and technology.
What we at the University of York and at DC Labs want to look at is how AI can be used to close that gap and to allow more people to judge large amounts of information. Whether that is how you can be better at esports or how you can judge whether a news article is authentic and genuine, it really is about giving people the opportunity to explore information more effectively, and using AI and data analytics to let people experience more information and make meaning from it. I think we all have to try really hard to push to close this gap and to give everyone a chance to catch up. This may sound idealistic, but I really think, from my experience in this research, that there’s a lot that can be done. I’m probably not as pessimistic as others – although the current political issues we have in this world are probably to a large extent caused by this gap between media literacy and the forces that manipulate the messaging. The more people we can enable to work with data, to become information and data literate, the more we can facilitate this. Through esports and games in general, but also through areas of science and learning, I think there’s some exciting stuff that’s going to happen in the next decade.
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