WIPOD – Arbitration and Mediation Matters: Transcript of Episode 12

The International Games and Esports Tribunal

Oscar Suárez
Welcome again to this WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Matters podcast. My name is Oscar. Today, we are joined by Stephen Hanna, the Chief Executive Officer of the Esports Integrity Commission, or ESIC. Stephen leads the organization's mission to safeguard the integrity of esports on a global scale. With a professional background in law, accounting, and business strategy, Stephen's strategic vision has established ESIC as a trusted authority in the eSports industry, building strong partnerships with key stakeholders and governing bodies to drive transparency and accountability in the industry. We are excited to have him here to share his insights on the groundbreaking initiative of the International Games and eSports Tribunal, or IGET for short, which is a collaborative effort between ESIC and the WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center to help build the future of dispute resolution in gaming. As always, we hope you enjoyed this conversation and please don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. Welcome.

Oscar Suárez
Thank you, Stephen, for being with us here today. It's a pleasure to have you and to speak about eSports, about this new initiative of IGET to talk about ESIC. How are you doing?

Stephen Hanna
Good, good. Thanks, Oscar, for having us. It's a show that I've listened to a few times now. I think we've made the big leagues here.

Oscar Suárez
Thank you for that. So, tell us about your story. What brought you into this industry, in particular into video games, and what led you to focus on this integrity and dispute resolution in this space?

Stephen Hanna
Yeah, good question. I have a story that I think is very common to most people in the video games and esports industry. You almost always find yourself entering the industry from a position of passion. From a young age, I found myself an avid gamer, played everything, all the titles in from console, starting at the PS1 and N64 and followed all of the development in the video games industry. Always wanted to tie my professional background in law, in forensic to the passion and stumbled upon esports and realized that there's a great deal of good work that needed to be done in the competitive integrity space and was fortunate enough to land in ESIC. That's the high-level introduction into esports and gaming. Again, an entry point of passion, but now it's become definitely something that has taken a different stride entirely, still fueled by passion. I mean, anybody in this space has to be. Definitely excited to talk about both, both ESIC, but more importantly, this new initiative that we are working on together.

Oscar Suárez
Okay, I'm intrigued. Which kind of games did you play before? Or do you still play?

Stephen Hanna
That's a good question. Everything from when I was really young, everything from Spyro the Dragon all the way through to the Call of Duty franchise, everything from Crash Team Racing and Crash Bandicoot, Raymond all the way through to Counter-Strike and Dota 2, League of Legends and so on. So I had a very wide spectrum in terms of video gaming. Definitely a central part of growing up, so to speak. Yeah.

Oscar Suárez
Okay, fair enough. I can definitely relate. Following to what we're discussing at the beginning, can you tell us what's ESIC’s mission? What is it and explain how it connects to this new initiative that we're going to talk about that is the International Games and Esports Tribunal.

Stephen Hanna
Fundamentally with ESIC, the high-level mission is that ESIC serves as an integrity body for the industry. ESIC is a members body, a not-for-profit organization that works to set best practice standards and competitive integrity across many different areas. We've had the mandate from our membership to tackle areas like anti-doping, anti-corruption, also match fixing, cheating to win, cheating to lose, and also how professionals should conduct themselves as they participate in the esports industry on a global scale. And so what we found with ESIC over time is that mandate has slowly expanded and expanded because esports has just grown and grown. What we found interesting was in the past when we had a more primitive industry that wasn't already clued into the complexities of competitive integrity risk. We had more fundamental challenges to tackle as ones I mentioned earlier, anti-doping, anti-corruption and a code of conduct issues. Now we're seeing because of this growth that we've had over the last several years, I've been now with ESIC for close to a decade. And what we're seeing is the industry now demands a more mature level of risk management. so ESIC's mandate has grown and developed alongside that industry growth. And that leads us to what was the main subject of our discussion today, which is the International Games and Esports Tribunal.

Oscar Suárez
Yes. What is your view on the why of establishing this IGET tribunal? Also, what are the challenges that you foresee or the gaps that the industry needs to address in this area?

Stephen Hanna
I think if we start from the premise of what I was alluding to earlier, which is that ESIC’s mission has slowly been expanding over time, what we realized is that the industries of both video games and e-sports don't just have e-sports integrity issues. There are a broad range of issues. And what we realized is with no fit for purpose, specifically designed dispute resolution process, the only thing that the stakeholders in these industries had was traditional court system or perhaps an arbitration service that wasn't necessarily specialized and therefore face challenges understanding the complexities of those industries and the types of disputes that sit within them. And so that was the genesis of IGET in the sense that we realized that it's an extension of ESIC's mission. It addressed disputes that were beyond just integrity, contractual, commercial, intellectual property matters with the help now of WIPO. The next thing was how do we build this to actually deal with such a broad range of issues? We realized that traditional courts or generic arbitration systems, they lack that specialized knowledge. And that was our really strong driving point for the building of IGET. The thing that we really have honed in on and focused on is ensuring that there is specialized knowledge, both in video games and e-sports, with the arbitrators that get assigned to the matters that IGET handles.

Oscar Suárez
How do you feel the industry is going to react to this? Do you think it's going to welcome it? Do you think it may be something a bit too new for them? What are your views on this?

Stephen Hanna
Yeah, look, again, a good question. It's hard to sometimes predict a universal answer from the industry at large. The benefit that ESIC has is that we have a very strong membership. The world's largest tournament organizers, the world's largest esports stakeholders, they work with us either on a membership capacity, which means that, essentially, they adopt our standards, our codes and our sanctions or our bans and punishments. Or alternatively, they work with us on a collaborative basis through MOUs and the like. And so the benefit of having that really tested and proven infrastructure of stakeholder engagement is that we can ratify these ideas. And look, our feedback indicates that at least amongst our members and supporters and those that we work with, this is a welcome development. My personal opinion is that we might be a bit early with this. This is something that we're seeing emerge to serious need. It's very important for ESIC and its mission that we build the infrastructure before it's needed. And that's key motivation behind building this. This is definitely a critical piece of infrastructure that the industry will need and is fit for purpose. And so it will be utilized.

Oscar Suárez
On that point, what are the main objectives of IGET and how does it ensure fairness and partiality in resolving these disputes that we're talking about?

Stephen Hanna
The main objectives of IGET is to provide that practical and specialized platform for resolving disputes in both the video games and the e-sports industries. In specialization, there is the key for the objectives. We really wanted to build a system that promotes trust and transparency and a resolution process that is heavily predicated on that idea of specialized knowledge yields better results. Those that have seen the IGET website and visited our costs section will see that the aim is to make it as accessible as possible for all parties, regardless of their resources or their location. At least in its startup period, IGET is taking a very different approach to costing for these matters and providing a very flexible means to make sure that it's as accessible and useful as possible to people from all over the world in any part of the industry.

Oscar Suárez
Who can get to use those services of IGET and what does the process look like for someone who wants to bring a dispute to IGET?

Stephen Hanna
IGET services like most traditional arbitration systems are open to parties that have a dispute in the industries. As long as the parties agree to utilize IGET, they are welcome to submit their dispute to IGET for mediation or arbitration. Generally, what we're expecting to see from a stakeholder classification perspective is we're expecting to see players, teams, organizations, developers, or publishers or any other adjacent stakeholders like tournament organizers, etc. that have dealings with either video games or eSports or perhaps both and need to resolve a dispute in an expedited manner that keeps parties out of court and gets them back to the thing that they love doing sooner than later. So that's really what we're tailored for. But look, these parties could bring a variety of different disputes that could have absolutely nothing to do with eSports and something really minute like in intellectual property matter for an asset in a video game being misused, used somewhere else, where it shouldn't be, or a contractual dispute where there's a non-payment of some sort, falling foul of a valid contract between two parties. That's the beauty of what the IGET is in the sense that we're casting that broad net and we're making sure that specialized expertise sits at the top, ready to be applied in the course of resolving disputes.

Oscar Suárez
So Stephen, just to clarify a bit, what is the reach of IGET? Is it going to be a national, regional, international approach? What is your view on this?

Stephen Hanna
We've seen different structures in our study ahead of constructing this tribunal. We thought it was very important to ensure that the tribunal is international in nature, not bound by any geographical restriction. And so working with WIPO, of course, we set out to build a body that was just that. The great thing about an international approach is that it's accessible to anybody, anywhere. And it needs to be that way, right? For gaming and e-sports, like if we're disputes in that industry in particular, those disputes are always across borders. They're always, sometimes they're across countries. And so an international approach was definitely needed. And what I've been really happy with, Oscar, is that we've made it possible for people to physically meet with IGET in four countries, in Switzerland, in Singapore, in Australia, and in the United Kingdom so far. And that just speaks volumes about how accessible the solution is.

Oscar Suárez
I love the concept of a one-stop shop and I think IGET will, in my understanding, aim to do that.

Oscar Suárez
Could you maybe share an example or a hypothetical situation that illustrates the kind of disputes that IGET will be or is designed to handle?

Stephen Hanna
Sure, the variety of different stakeholders that use IGET will really test the limits of what we call that broad approach, the one-stop shop, so to speak. I'm looking forward to that. think both in the industry category of video games, but also in the industry category of e-sports, I'm expecting to see some diversity in terms of cases that are submitted to IGET. Some examples that we've seen and are familiar with are intellectual property disputes between game developers. For example, a small independent game developer might claim that a larger studio has copied a particular gameplay mechanic or characteristic or character or stolen art assets from the game and the developer is seeking a resolution to prevent further use of their IP in that situation. So they might come to IGET because IGET's arbitrators have the expertise in video game IP law and they can assess those claims and mediate or arbitrator resolution. could expect perhaps like a terms of service violation by a content creator to come to IGET, a publisher or a platform banning a prominent content creator, for example, for breaching terms of services. And then IGET mediating between them, perhaps in the hypothetical ensuring both parties are heard and that specialist knowledge is applied in that instance as well to resolve it. Or perhaps in the e-sports side, like a player contract dispute where a professional e-sports player claims that their team terminated their contract without any cause or failed to pay them, for example, a performance bonus or something like that. or a sponsorship dispute, tournament organizer, versing a team or having a dispute with a team. For example, we had a case recently that came to us where a tournament organizer excluded a team and provided no explanation. Something like that could very validly go to IGET, especially because for all intents and purposes, that team looked like they qualified. And so the allegation there was that you excluded us with no basis. And so something like that could come to IGET. Really, it's a blue-sky approach, Oscar. It could really be anything and everything. And I'm looking forward to seeing what comes forward and takes advantage of that specialized knowledge sitting at the top.

Oscar Suárez
What do you envision as IGET long-term impact? And, also, how can stakeholders support this mission?

Stephen Hanna
Look, our vision for IGET in the long term is to have a positive impact on both the video games and e-sports industries. We want IGET to be a cornerstone of professionalism and trust in both of those industries. A place where stakeholders can go and speak frankly about their disputes, reducing conflict and fostering a collaborative approach to resolution amongst them. Essentially, I guess in summation, our aim is for IGET to become the global standard for dispute resolution in both video games and e-sports. From a support perspective, stakeholders can support IGET by adopting its framework. One of the things that makes IGET work well is when IGET's model clause is integrated into contracts and agreements that find themselves in both of these industries. so to promote IGET's mission, it's important that stakeholders, if they're satisfied with the proposition that IGET presents, adopt its framework and propagate its framework.

Oscar Suárez
The clause, of course, will be in the web page. Everybody can just go there, grab it, put them in their contracts, and that way support the initiatives.

Stephen Hanna
Right. So everything is found on the website, which is iget.gg. The model clause is available for anybody to take and utilize. And thankfully, we have quite a lot of availability for anyone who has questions about IGET adopting its framework or becoming part of the journey. Anyone who feels that they have something to contribute or support, we definitely always welcome feedback and participation from the industries, both the video games and the e-sports industries. So, yeah. Excited to see what's ahead for it. Yeah.

Oscar Suárez
Exciting times ahead to see where this leads us to.

Stephen Hanna
It was definitely a great project to build and a much needed piece of infrastructure for both the video games and esports industries and it's been done correctly. I'm looking forward to seeing the benefit of this infrastructure. So with this in place, we can build that really strong foundation for a more sustainable and collaborative future for both the gaming and the esports industries.

Oscar Suárez
Stephen, thank you so much again for joining us today and for taking the time. It's quite late over there. thank you. Have a nice evening.

Stephen Hanna It was a pleasure. Bye. Thanks, man.