Should E-sports be Considered Sports

The rise of E-sports has been truly meteoric. This rise has always puzzled me, but then again I am not that into the video games that are primarily played such as Counter-Strike, Dota2, Call of Duty, Overwatch and League of Legends. It turns out that there are countless people that are into these games that decide to watch them. “Just as with traditional sports, fans follow teams, watch matches and even attend cup finals, cheering on their favorite stars from around the world” (Hattenstone, 2017). Because of this passion from the fans, there is no telling just how big E-sports will get, but are these truly to be considered sports?

Just like professionals in other traditional sports, E-gamers spend countless hours training to be the best gamer they can be. Faker, a League of Legends superstar says that he spends a minimum of 12 hours training every day and sometimes around 15 hours a day when it is close to a match (Hattenstone, 2017). The first traditional athlete I thought of after I heard of this was Peyton Manning, a future Hall of Fame quarterback who played for the Indianapolis Colts and Denver Broncos. Manning would spend countless hours studying and examining game film to be as prepared as possible to beat his opponents. While Manning did have a fairly good arm, he was more known for picking apart defenses with his knowledge of their defensive schemes rather than his arm. Just as with Manning, Faker’s reaction velocity isn’t exceptional. What makes him so great is his concentration. He says that League of Legends is like chess or other board games while also resembling traditional team sport games being that strategies become more important than individual skill on a professional level (Hattenstone, 2017). With that being said, it does start to seem that E-sports most definitely should be considered a sport.

The Olympics are the pinnacle of sports and even chess and the card game bridge are applying for inclusion in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. The games that get included in the Olympics can be controversial. Kirsan Ilymzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation has compared curling to chess by saying curling is simply “chess on ice, and it is an Olympic sport but classical chess is not?” He has been attempting for over a decade to get his “sport of the mind” to be included into the Olympics (Haire, 2008).

While success in curling definitely hinges on strategy, it also includes a great deal of physical skill. While it might look simple to just slide a rock down a sheet of ice, it isn’t so easy. As in all sports requiring physical skill, physical mistakes will happen and the curling rock won’t necessarily go exactly where you want it to go, and because of this extra variable, curlers have to react and scheme accordingly. So what’s the difference between curling and chess? Chess also requires you to react to your opponents moves, but it doesn’t require you to react to your or your opponent’s physical actions. In my opinion, this is why curling is a solidified Olympic sport and curling is not.

So to which of these two sports do E-sports more closely resemble? Just as in both curling and chess, E-sports requires a great deal of strategy and mental awareness, but E-sports also requires some physical skill. To me, sports are a combination of strategy and physical skill. While E-sports might only require a minimal amount of physical skill to be successful as Faker has shown, it most definitely requires a ton of strategy. It is because of this that I do think that E-sports should be considered a sport.

Works Cited

Haire, M. (2008, August 5). Should Chess Be an Olympic Sport? Retrieved from Time: http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1827716,00.html

Hattenstone, S. (2017, June 17). The Rise of eSports: Are Addiction and Corruption the Price of Its Success. Retrieved from the guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/jun/16/top-addiction-young-people-gaming-esports