With two months until the Olympic Esports Series finals in Singapore, one Gold Coast academic is calling for the Glitter Strip to become the future host of the Olympic event capable of thrusting Australia into the esports spotlight.

The Series, for which qualifications are already underway, will be held from June 22 to 25 and could give Australia the platform to transform its gaming industry into one of the best in the world.

Associate Professor of Creative Media at Bond University Dr James Birt said it would come down to our youth.

“For Australia to be competitive within the esports industry, which now encompasses the International Olympic Committee level of sport, we really do need to start growing our grassroots,” Dr Birt said.

“Playing games casually is wonderful, but if we want to start thinking about high performance, we need to be training high performance.”

Dr Birt said for Australian esports athletes, the very elite are currently getting their “break” from playing in international tournaments, rather than ones on home soil.

While Australia has found some level of success on the international stage, they are not yet winning tournaments.

And when teams do find success, international talent scouts quickly identify the best athletes and luring them over to overseas teams where the talent pool is greater, and the money more forthcoming.

“The talent scouts are at those tournaments and have said Australian players are performing at elite levels, but they’re being essentially taken from Australian teams into international teams where the real money is, because we don’t yet have that level of industry here,” Dr Birt said.

“We have an emerging industry (in Australia) in certain sports, be that League of Legends or Call of Duty, but it’s now about building that local ecosystem, something akin to the AFL or the NRL – that kind of level.”

But unlike Australia’s football codes, esports doesn’t have decades of history and professionalism to draw upon.

“One of the biggest difficulties we have is because training (at a) high performance (level) means lots of hours playing, and we have this stigma around the idea of too much screen time.

“So we need to be looking at home how we can balance screen time with those other industries, whether it’s in psychology, diet, physical movement and connecting those other types of initiates around our grassroots.”

With over 250,000 participants in the 2021 virtual iteration of the series (due to Covid), Dr Birt said the Gold Coast was the ideal destination for such an event with Brisbane 2032 on the horizon.

“If the Gold Coast can host the Commonwealth Games, I don’t see why they can’t host something like the IOC esports week,” Birt said.

“I think we’re in a very unique position, we’ve got the Brisbane Olympics coming up, the Gold Coast is setting up its position (as a global tourist destination), we’ve got the legacy of the Commonwealth Games.”