Video Games As A Sport Essay

Video Games as a Sport

Video games are a sport; they have the potential to rival if not dominate traditional sports in viewership alone on a professional level, and they challenge their players to the same extent as conventional sports. E-sports exist and are defined as such; the competitive play of video games as a commercial spectator sport. Yet despite this fact, many still foolishly believe it to be a farce, a sham, or even a mockery of so called actual sports like baseball, football, and soccer. These vacuous individuals are often, but not always, of the older generations often dismissing e-sports as the fatuous creation of the youth, but they are attached to their ancient ways of thinking, shackled by tradition. The definition of sport is an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment. Although not quite as old as the great American pastime known as baseball, video games should still fall within the purview of this definition.

The most debatable thing that comes out of this definition is most certainly physical exertion, however one thing that doesn't come immediately to thought is the exertion of the mind, mental exertion is undoubtedly required in any sport, think of chess, for example, you do not need to be the most physically fit to be able to take another individual on because it is a sport of the mind.

Take football as another example, despite requiring a greater amount of physical exertion it also requires a certain amount of mental exertion as well, despite not being focused on as much as chess, there are strategies to be followed and mind games to be played in the form of juking, or moving in a zigzag fashion, to dodge the enemy. The exertion of body or mind is only a part of the definition of sport, however, the competition is done for the entertainment of others, an audience, so that it may be enjoyed as a display of skill and

prowess.
Henry Young writes in his article that “The general consensus is that if physical exertion and sheer power are dispelled, reflexes and mental agility come to the fore.” This means that despite the lack of plainly visible physical exertion there is still a factor that falls within that definition. Rick Fox, a retired basketball player who has played for the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, has even said that professional gamers are athletes, despite not being always in the most peak of physical conditions, he lists concentration, dedication, practice, preparation, and stamina as the things that he himself had to work on as his career as a professional athlete. Fields, a former StarCraft II champion, says, "When I played in Korea [from 2008 to 2011], the training schedule excluded any activity that wasn't eating, sleeping and practicing." Their lifestyles completely change to surpass their own skill day by day and use it against their enemies for the entertainment of their viewers during days of competition.
In terms of audience the e-sports scene is definitely not lacking. League of Legends, a popular online video game, has held multiple World Series and championships, the final of the Season Four World Championship was watched by twenty-seven million unique viewers. The entire finals series averaged nearly sixteen million viewers, however the NBA Finals series averaged fifteen and a half million viewers, and twenty-six and a half million people watched the World Cup final for soccer in the United States alone, but meanwhile the 2014 Daytona 500 averaged just over nine million viewers. In 2015 the number of unique viewers for the final of that championship was up to thirty-six million, a whopping thirty-three percent increase in viewership from the previous year.
The numbers don’t lie and that’s only one of the few incredibly popular games in the world, there are several others that hold championships, have cash-prizes, entertain the masses, and have similar amounts of viewers League of Legends is not alone in its number of professional e-athletes and teams dedicated to training, focusing and bettering themselves at the games they play to earn their salary and entertain their many fans: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Overwatch, Dota 2, and StarCraft 2 just to name a few are incredible video games with considerable audiences and all of them have held some type of competition in which the winning player or teams are rewarded with cash-prizes and watched by hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from across the globe.
Viewership is not even limited to strictly competitive events such as world finals and occasional tournaments; Twitch.tv is a video streaming website that focuses largely on video games. This website allows people to livestream whatever video game they may be playing and share it with whoever wants to watch. Professional gamers and people have never touched a tournament setting use this site to share their in-game experiences and entertain an incredibly wide scope of audiences, and some even make a living from doing this.
Concentration, dedication, practice, preparation, and stamina, these things can be applied to anything and professional gamers have chosen to proudly apply it to their passion, video games. The definition of sport is very malleable, and things we once have not considered sport may become as such depending on what the general populous wants to view for entertainment, now is the time for video games to be recognized for what they are. A sport.