The Essayist

Essay 3: e-Sports

01/13/15

Last year, Sangam Stadium in South Korea, which is also known as the Seoul World Cup
Stadium, was packed with fans eager to watch the best duke it out against each other. 45,000
seats were filled, and 32 million people were watching the event online. 1 The 2014 League of
Legends World Championships marked the ever growing popularity of e-sports. League of
Legends notwithstanding, there are a plethora of games such as Defence of the Ancients 2 (DoTA
2) and Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) that hold a tremendous player base and
actively maintain a professional element to gaming. It is hard for the non-gamer to avoid noticing
the pervasive growth of games, and the term e-sports is more than a loose term floating around
the web. How accurate is this coinage? Is the term "e-sports" wrong? To a larger extent, can
professional gaming be categorized as sports? I argue that although the term e-sports is
technically inaccurate, it captures the common ground between traditional sports and
professional gaming well enough to deserve the name. Ultimately, the advent of professional
gaming may challenge the traditional definition of sports.
Let us start by defining "sports." According to Dictionary.com, a sport is "an athletic activity
requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis,
golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc." Similarly, Merriam-Webster Online
defines sport as "a contest or game in which people do certain physical activities according to a
specific set of rules and compete against each other." As these examples show, the general
understanding of sport is fixated on physical competition. On this basis alone, we can rule out the
term "e-sports" to have any legitimacy. While competitive gaming does require physical
endurance and significantly more "athleticism" with respect to fingers and hands, there can be no

1 http://arcadesushi.com/league-of-legends-world-championships-45k-seatsseouled-out/

The Essayist

Essay 3: e-Sports

01/13/15

comparison between it and traditional sports. After all, we would not classify a pianist as a sports
athlete. However, is sports primarily and only defined by the physical prowess of the players?
Even the most physically demanding sport is in essence a game. If there is no objective,
no rules and no field, then the sport will amount to athletic men and women just standing around
somewhere. Both sports and gaming share a competitive nature because there is something to
compete for. All sports share in common some form of scoring points against the opponent. If
anything, traditional sports are games with a physical element. In that sense, professional gaming
is about games without a physical element. Both are types of games. Consequently, both require
teamwork, strategy and tactics. Each sport and each game are characterized by different ways
these factors combine. Each team is unique because how they execute these common traits.
Because video games came much later in history, traditional sports had already
established itself firmly as the de facto form of "game" compared to video gaming in its infancy.
Consequently, it is virtually impossible for non-gamers to conceptualize that a teenager clicking
a mouse could ever be compared to a 250 pound linebacker. It must be understood that no one is
trying to assert video gaming as sports or that gamers are athletes. Rather, by labelling itself as esports, gamers are asserting that professional gaming embodies the spirit of competition in a
fashion that closely parallels sports.
Also, it must be acknowledged that ultimately, sports is an industry. Today, it is about the
money. Contracts, trades, ticket sales, advertisement all factor into what sports is. While it may
be a secondary or even a tertiary factor, it remains that what we understand as sports is framed
around the real, capitalistic industry of sports, not some pure, theoretical conception. In this
regard e-sports also mimics traditional sports exactly.

The Essayist

Essay 3: e-Sports

01/13/15

The only tangible difference between e-sports and traditional sports is that professional
gaming is done sitting while the latter is done in all fashions of active movement. If this
difference is truly that important, what do we make of competition, of rivalry and passion for a
favourite team? Is the excitement of seeing your favourite player competing on the championship
stage irrelevant? Are the laborious hours of practice insignificant? Those who scoff at
professional gaming or the term e-sports because "it's a video game" seem to know a lot about it
without having played more than a day of it if at all. Somehow, the archaic mindset that video
games are mindless, that they are for children and have no true significance other than to kill
time has antagonized modern day professional gaming. There is a denial of e-sports even as a
legitimate form of competition simply because it is digital. Those who are unflinching in their
belief that the argument "it's just a video game" cannot be persuaded, and my points up until this
point will have been for naught. However, those non-gamers that attempt to objectively evaluate
professional gaming will have no choice to fall back on the fact that athleticism, the physical
component is the only thing they can fall back on. This means that although it is not a superficial
trait, that element alone must represent sports while all the other aforementioned traits must be
abandoned; for acknowledging them would also legitimize professional gaming. To reiterate, esports is not an attempt to state that professional gaming is the same as professional sports. It is
an attempt to define gaming through similar traits that it shares with sports. After all, e-sports,
i.e. electronic sports, has already relinquished any claims of athleticism; to criticize it by
invoking athleticism has no logical bearing.
It is my belief that a work of writing can never have a final draft; this is simply the best draft up to date and by no
means is it a fully comprehensive coverage of the topic at hand. There is always room for improvement, corrections
and rewriting. As a mini-essay, this is but a simple introductory basis to start a discussion. Please feel free to quote
and cite my work. If you have questions, essay requests or wish to respond to my arguments, I can be contacted at
thevisualessayist@gmail.com.
Thank you for reading, and I encourage you to discuss, deliberate and write it down whenever you may.
- The Essayist

The Essayist

Essay 3: e-Sports

01/13/15