In one of the most famous single season performances in Major League Baseball history, the 2002 Oakland Athletics won a league-topping 105 games on a paltry $33 million budget. Their secret? Sabermetrics—that is, the use of statistical analysis, rather than subjective judgement, to evaluate players’
Perfection is a rare and beautiful thing in Dota 2 (2013) no less than any other competition. In terms of prestige, a flawless game in Dota 2—by which I mean a game in which the winning team destroys the opposing team’s ancient without suffering a single death—ranks up there with a hole-in-one on a
If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Sutak, producer and director of The Foreigner, a new documentary about professional StarCraft II (2010), you can take solace in knowing that you’ve probably seen some of his work. Not, mind you, the two independent dramas—Up The River (2015), a romance, and Don’t Wor
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. In the aftermath of one professional player’s admission to using Adderall, the Electronic Sports League (ESL) is cracking down on performance-enhancing drugs by instituting a new set of standards and tests, positioning the league as a role mo
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. The eSports fever that has taken the world by storm is largely driven by its popularity throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas. But there are still billions of people on the sidelines in countries where competitive gaming has yet to take o
Droning on about the intricacies of Dota 2 is a sure-fire way to put the people around you to sleep. Sort of like listening to audiophiles argue over proprietary music formats, the way fans of Dota talk about Dota is is part of what makes the game seem impenetrable to outsiders. The patch notes for
While we were in our post-E3 stupor, a dev group went and announced a rather miraculous handheld system that plays Steam games. Due out in 2015, the SteamBoy, as the portmanteau suggests, combines the awesome library of Valve’s popular digital download platform with the play-it-anywhere-ability of a
We totally get that the Internet is a fantastic place for binging DOTA 2 matches and all, but got-damn did you people consume a lot of it in 2013. A new report from IHS Technology, people who track this sort of thing, has found that a cumulative amount of 2.4 billion hours were streamed to your eyeh
As evidenced in this new interactive video of space cadets shooting bullet-spongy, albino mutants, Evolve is getting its multiplayer-online-battle-arena on. The 4-on-1 giant monster battling game from the makers of Left 4 Dead, coming to PCs and next-gen consoles later this year, could be a bellweth
The dark fantasy esport Dota 2 is undeniably Steam’s killer app, according to the number-crunching-smiths at Ars Technica, who found that over 25 million copies have been downloaded and played on Valve’s popular digital download service. We shouldn’t be shocked that such a hardcore, complex game—eve
Fantasy football has the natural ability to turn even the most casual of pigskin fans into rabid stat-obsessed fanatics, and soon that tenacity will be rubbing off on DOTA 2. With the newest patch, fantasy DOTA leagues are now a thing. They work pretty much like their somewhat-distant football cousi
