Machine learning will be a game-changer for esports

Imagine a match between two teams where the maps are revised just prior to the start, based on pattern recognitions of the characteristics, preferences, and the tendencies of each individual team member on either team. Or subtle changes are made to static conditions during the actual gameplay in order to challenge and engage players and teams to play more consciously. Machine learning can intelligently manipulate the playing fields by adding in customized handicaps tailored for the specific teams of each match.

Now dive deeper and imagine a game that can do more than just look up your history but can read and respond to your real-time data and use it to anticipate your next move. The experience would be one of spontaneous creation of scenarios, characters, and world maps that are devised not by developers but by the game’s “mind” itself.

A whole host of features can be implemented and brought into play that will allow eSports to continually evolve, perhaps even by itself, in ways that transcends well beyond the confined limitations of traditional sports.

The real-time “telemetry” data, is the information you’re constantly receiving and sending back to the game. It’s what could offer an individualized experience that machine learning tailors to each player, broadcaster or even the audience pool itself.

Telemetry data allows for a spontaneous experience based on intelligent anticipation, referencing and augmented by historical big data, and may later lead to a type of co-creation experience that makes one think of the Mind Game played by the boy protagonist in the movie, Ender’s Game, but in multiplayer.

Machine learning is going to blow our minds, literally, and it will change the face of competitive gaming.