Professional Esports : An Avid Gamer

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As an avid gamer I have been intrigued with professional esports for better part of 4 years and it would always grind my gears when people said it didn’t take any skill or effort like a sport. However in reality it takes just as much skill or effort, if not more to compete in esports. As esports becomes more predominant in our culture and around the world I believe it deserves the recognition and respect that any other sport would receive. Did you know that some colleges have made esports teams and given out scholarships to students for them? In 2014, Robert Morris University in Chicago became the first U.S. college to make video gaming a varsity sport, even offering scholarship prizes(choices.scholastic.com). I will be explaining how the definition of a sport applies directly to esports, how it includes strategy, technique and opponents, all of the elements of a sport, and then how the rapidly booming industry is pulling millions of viewers and money each year. They even feature games with ESPN-style analysis with commentators and giant touchscreen game-review boards. To start off I will be going into the background and history of esports. Competitive gaming, or esports has existed almost as long as video games themselves. Even the earliest arcade games led to some fierce competition. Early on, a lot of that competition took the form of friends challenging each other to best their high scores, but it didn’t take long for organized tournaments to begin popping up. The first video game tournament was held by Atari in 1980 for the game space invaders, even though it was just the first one it attracted 10,000 participants. This tournament sowed the seeds the seeds that would become the esports we know today (Tyler F.M Edwards). Af... ... middle of paper ... ... spend a huge amount of time working on strategy. Esports players may sit in front of a computer screen for 14 hours a day and you may think they are unhealthy, well on the contrary most of them work out too stay healthy because a healthy body leads to a healthy mind which is the most important tool in esports. Esports athletes have incredible reaction times and esports players can make more than 300 actions per minute, which takes multitasking to a whole new level. Their technique must be impeccable otherwise they will get crushed the strategy based game known as LOL. All the game is strategy and macro play. Every esports event held for LOL has around 10 team competing twice a week. That is 20 games a week versus another team. They sure as hell do have opponents. They have everything that falls under the category of every other sport. So why isn’t it recognized?

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