IBM Master Inventor: ‘What We’ve Done Is Revolutionary in Esports’
In any sport, rankings are essential. Who’s hot? Who’s not? Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s the best? Who’s the worst? It’s a critical part of the sports debate and an indelible part of sports culture.
For a video game, like Overwatch, however, ascertaining the answers to those questions can be a lot more difficult. Within the Overwatch League, the professional esports league based around the Overwatch game, there are 32 different heroes, each with different abilities and roles. In a given match, there are more than 360 performance stats that lead to over two million data points. How, then, can you possibly narrow all that down to answer one of the most essential questions in the sport?
Enter IBM Watson.
Watson, IBM’s powerful artificial intelligence technology, can now, for the first time, calculate rankings for the Overwatch League through Power Rankings with IBM Watson, being introduced for the 2021 season. Using Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Pak for Data, a team of experts around the world cracked the code of how to correlate which stats matter most. Using AutoAI with IBM Watson Studio, an innovative algorithm was formed to finally determine how the teams rank against each other in the League.
“What we’ve done is revolutionary in esports,” says Aaron Baughman, Distinguished Engineer, IBM GBS Interactive. “It’s the first time ever we have had completely objective rankings in the Overwatch League. All the different combinations of data created in the game are head-spinning,” he said. “It’s a fun and exciting problem space, but it was hard to tackle that. With Red Hat OpenShift, it gave us an incredible platform to compute and flexibility to spread compute load.”
The rankings will be updated once a week on Monday, following the conclusion of the last weekend match. That will give fans and experts plenty of time to pore over the results.
“I genuinely believe that the most foundational question in sports is, ‘Who’s the best?’” says Jon Spector, Vice President, Overwatch Esports at Blizzard. “Before, we had stats, but it was hard for newer and even hardcore fans to see what matters. Now, it’s a little like the revolution in baseball with advanced stats. When stats like WAR got popularized, it unlocked a whole new conversation. I think this is a similar type of moment.”
The 2021 season, which started April 16, will be the first to incorporate this data. The hope is to not only inspire debate among hardcore fans, but also use it as an avenue to bring in new fans. “The game is fast,” says Baughman, a new Overwatch player himself. “If you blink, you’re going to miss something. By seeing the Power Rankings, organized by overall stats, by role, it breaks down the game. That helped me to learn what works, and what doesn’t work.”
The beauty of IBM Watson Studio is its simplicity. It works by a user asking it to solve for specific variables, simplifying the process of data collection and machine learning. According to Baughman, it also has applications beyond the Overwatch League. “I'd argue that some industry problems are easier to solve than the challenges with Overwatch League. IBM Watson Studio is helping businesses across industries apply AI to complex data challenges,” he says.
To create Power Rankings, a team of six experts worked remotely from around the world through IBM’s Area 631 incubator program. Using source code repositories and shared notebooks, the team was able to come up with this solution in three months. “We’re all used to remote work by now, but we were a team based across Germany and three different U.S. time zones,” says Corey Shelton, IBM Digital Strategist and IBM’s Overwatch League project leader. “Coordinating schedules that far apart was interesting, but we managed to do it. It’s about understanding the challenges and giving it enough attention.”
For the Overwatch League and other esports, which are still relatively new to the world of sports, the upside is huge.
“I’m excited to see everyone argue about it,” says Spector. “Saying things like, ‘I know Power Rankings with IBM Watson say this, but I say that.’ That type of dialogue will be a lot of fun.”
Adds Shelton, an avid Overwatch player: “This will help fuel more conversation within the Overwatch social community. There’s already a lot of opinion and passion and I think this will help that conversation grow and extend.”
As the season gets underway, as millions upon millions of data points are collected and analyzed, one thing is clear: The debate around the sport will be fiercer than ever. Let the rankings begin.
