Are E-sports Really Sports?
An answer to Jim Parry’s “E-sports Are Not Sports”
The word “sport” has gone through a number of meanings. When Shakespeare said “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,” he obviously wasn’t talking about sport in the same way as the International Olympic Committee, which as far as I know does not recognise fly-swatting as a sport. While we expect that kind of thing in Shakespeare (for whom “naughty” meant “nihilistic” and “punk” meant “prostitute”), some changes in meaning are comparatively recent. When a friend of mine was applying to Oxford, the octogenarian professor interviewing him said “I see you say you’re interested in sports — huntin’, shootin’ or fishin’?” When my friend replied that he actually meant football and cricket, the professor sighed and said “Ah, you mean games.” For an English gentleman of his era, a real sport had to end with the demise of an animal; propelling a ball around a field was a mere pastime. It is not surprising then, that as new activities get called sports, some will stand up and deny that they are really sports. This is nowhere truer than in the case of e-sports, which some critics seem to regard as a contradiction in terms.
A reasonable answer to the question “Are e-sports really sports?” would be “Well, kind of,” but that would take the fun out of it, and would make it hard for people to write academic papers on the subject. And write they do. This article is largely a response to Jim Parry’s paper “E-sports Are Not Sports,” from the journal Sport Ethics and Philosophy, though I will also mention Seth Jenny’s counter-argument “Debate: are eSports sport?” and name-drop Bernard Suits, Aristotle and Wittgenstein for good measure. What makes it interesting is that not only did Parry get it wrong about e-sports, he also inadvertently revealed that the way we generally think about sports is extremely muddled. His argument against e-sports as sports rests on three characteristics he assumes are essential to sports, namely rules and institutions, direct human competition, and physical prowess. Of these, only the last is an essential feature of sports, and even that criterion is rather fuzzy.
Rules and Institutionalisation
Parry sees all sports as requiring rules. While rules are a defining characteristic of games, they are also generally found in sports; most sports are also games (e.g., football) and those that we might not count as games (e.g., mountaineering) will usually have some rules, if only for practical reasons. They may be safety rules rather than game rules in the strict sense detailed by Bernard Suits (i.e., rules that exist only to make the activity possible) but this is not an important point here. Since e-sports have a multitude of rules over and above the constraints embedded in the game’s code, that should satisfy those who insist on sports being rule-based. As Seth Jenny points out, ESL One has a “thirty-page rule book which covers event, player and game-specific regulations.”
A much bigger WTF moment comes with Parry’s assertion that a genuine sport must be “institutionalised”. Citing an article by Cem Abanzir, he claims that e-sports tournaments are organised by game publishers, and thus impose arbitrary changes on the competition. They cannot be compared to Olympic sports, which are governed by the Olympic Committee, who sit on over a century of tradition and are at least in theory beholden to no commercial interests. As it happens, though, there are independent e-sports organisations. To quote Jenny again, “On the world’s stage, the International eSports Federation has been created while in the United Kingdom, the UK eSports Association and in South Korea the Korean Esports Association (KeSPA) have been created to standardize the sport in those respective countries. In the United States, this is being done by Major League Gaming (MLG) and ESports League (ESL).”
In any case, institutionalisation is an accidental rather than an essential characteristic of sports, as Aristotle would put it. Sports tend to generate sporting institutions; sporting institutions do not make sports. Parry claims that hula-hooping is not a sport because it has no regulatory body. This is not actually true (there are hula-hooping organisations who organise competitions and provide certification for instructors), but in any case it is irrelevant. Let us imagine that hula-hooping took off in a big way and was accepted as a competition by the International Olympic Committee. Would this mean that hula-hooping had suddenly transformed from a pastime to a sport? If so, does that mean that before the foundation of the Football Association in 1863, football was not a sport?
Direct Human Competition
Parry claims that while e-sports are highly competitive, they do not involve direct human-to-human competition, but are mediated by a computer system. Counter-Strike is thus no more a direct competition than a spelling bee is. This argument falls flat on two counts. Firstly, the fact that the competition is mediated is irrelevant. In motor sports, the competition is mediated by machines; drivers do not push cars around the track like Fred Flintstone but manipulate controls to power and steer their vehicles in much the same way that electronic gamers do. In response to this objection, Parry employs a No True Scotsman argument, saying, “This is motor sport, not (Olympic) sport.” Note the sneaky parentheses. Are we talking about sports or about Olympic sports? In the former case, enough people class Formula 1 racing and rally driving as sports to assume that either (a) motor sports really are sports, or (b) there is mass delusion going on. Given that Formula 1 is a sport, would there be a crucial difference between a Formula 1 race and an electronic simulation involving consoles which perfectly reproduced the feel and performance of an actual racing car? A game that simulated a sword fight by tracking players’ bodies and their manipulation of a fake sword would not be different in any important way from a fencing match (which already employs technology to determine whether a hit has occurred). The differences between simulation and reality are interesting, but irrelevant to the question of whether something is a sport.
More obviously, though, it only takes a moment’s thought to realise that there are many sports that do not involve direct human-to-human competition. Free-diving is competitive in that divers try to break each others’ records, but there is no direct competition — everyone dives alone, usually on separate occasions. It would be fun if divers could poke or tickle each other, but that would turn an already dangerous sport into a suicidal one.
Many traditional sports are non-competitive. The old professor talking about hunting, shooting and fishing may have enjoyed them but probably didn’t compete in them. Field sports (a.k.a. blood sports) can have competition grafted onto them, but it is not in their nature. The aim is not to out-perform a human, but to kill an animal. (And the days of human-animal competition are by-and-large over; salmon fishing in Scotland is not exactly Moby Dick.) Similarly, mountaineering may occasionally inspire competition (who gets to climb a mountain first) but it is not central to it. The important element in all these examples is challenge, not competition. What makes mountaineering a sport rather than mere exercise is the possibility of failure: you may be forced to turn back from the summit because of fatigue, injury or bad weather.
Parry is aware of this, and even mentions field-sports and mountaineering, but again his solution is not to revise his definition, but to claim that these activities are not sports. Now there are certainly times when we can and should say that something commonly called X is not in fact X. You can make a case that a party called “The Socialist Party” isn’t actually socialist, or that a language widely regarded as Altaic is actually Finno-Ugric. But the first implies a deception that needs to be exposed, while the second requires a misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up. Neither is the case with field sports or mountaineering; as with the motor sports example, these are well-known activities about which there can be no deception or misunderstanding. Neither are they historical curiosities, like gladiatorial “games”, which aren’t really games in the modern sense of the word. If a well-known sport doesn’t fit a certain definition of “sport” then it is probably the fault of the definition, not the sport. It is true that competitive sports have risen to prominence in the last century, but it is a mistake to regard competition as a defining feature of sport because it is a means to an end, and the end is challenge.
Physical Prowess
Although Parry doesn’t use the word “prowess”, I will, partly because it’s a nice word and partly because it describes that combination of acquired skill and innate capacity we associate with success in sports. It is here that the detractors of e-sports are on their strongest ground. When we think of sports, we may think of Olympic athletes pushing the limits of the human body or heavily armoured American footballers slamming into each other. These are prototypical sports for the reason that sports began, and to a large extent continue, as ways for men to test their manly abilities. The original Greek games were tests not just of physical prowess but of specifically martial prowess, involving not only running and throwing things but also chariot racing and pankration, which was like MMA only naked. But while prototypes are useful in helping people place something in a category quickly, they are less useful at the boundaries of a category. We can tell immediately that rugby is a sport, we concur that rhythmic gymnastics is a sport, and we hmm and hah about whether darts is a sport. E-sports are right on the fuzzy boundary of the sports category.
Let’s examine the case against e-sports. Few people regard chess as a sport. It’s a game, and a very challenging one at that, but it is only physical in the very indirect sense that you need a certain amount of physical health for your brain to be in shape to compete in a chess tournament. The physical activity in chess — moving pieces around on a board — is completely unrelated to the game events. A player can move the piece with maximum efficiency to its intended destination and the effect is the same as if they had thrown it in the air, bounced it off their head and caught it before slamming it down on the square. (Note: some people actually do consider chess to be a sport, and the World Chess Federation is part of the International Olympic Committee, but counting chess as a sport would make the word “sport” almost meaningless.)
Like the mediated competition argument, some critics argue that since there is no inherent relationship between physical acts (moving a mouse, hitting a key) and game events (running, shooting) computer games are like chess: there is a physical side, but it is not relevant to the game. This is true to the extent that there is usually no simple analogue relationship, but there usually is some relationship. Unlike chess, the speed with which a player moves is crucial. No matter how hard I practiced, I would never be much good at e-sports because at 57, I don’t have the reflexes of a twenty-something. Jenny again hits the nail on the head: “professional eSports players have been known to skillfully perform more than 300 keyboard or mouse actions a minute (some up to 10 per second).”
The objection to mentions of manual dexterity is to claim that sports need gross motor skills, not just fine motor skills, or in other words, that the whole body must be used. Parry claims that this is true even for target shooting, but in that case it ought to be true also for shoot’em’up games. Anyone who’s played a lot of these games will know that although the observable movement is all in your hands, the the rest of your body is as important as it is in target shooting: you need to have a good posture and relax if your hands are going to do their work freely. You also need to be pretty fit overall; the stereotype of the couch potato gamer certainly doesn’t fit e-sports competitors.
To be fair, it’s probably best to leave both target shooting and virtual shooting on the fuzzy boundary of the sports category, and admit we can’t make a firm decision. This is one case where insitutionalisation has its uses; if the Olympic Committee decides Counter-Strike is an Olympic sport, then it is.
The Roots of the Problem
If we think more about the physicality problem, it becomes clear that it has two roots:
- lumping competitive computer games together under the heading of e-sports;
- a borderline case becoming prototypical.
Trends in sports and gaming are not overseen by the kind of people who agonise about definitions — that kind of thing comes much later, when activities become institutionalised. When people started calling activities as diverse as paragliding, mountain-biking and free-running “extreme sports”, they probably had no strict criterion of extremity in mind; it was just “stuff that could get you killed”. (Fun fact: the sport with the most fatalities is actually fishing.) Putting competitive computer games under the heading of e-sports probably seemed a good a idea at the time, but “involving a computer” is not actually a good way to classify activities in an age where almost anything seems to involve a computer somewhere along the line.
Let’s look at two extremes on the physicality spectrum. No matter how competitively Civilization is played, and no matter how strictly such competitions are regulated, it should not be classed as a sport for the same reasons that Monopoly, poker or (the IOC notwithstanding) chess are not sports. It’s a turn-based strategy game in which physical prowess plays no part. Unlike many computer games, you do not need fast reflexes or good hand-eye coordination; you just need a good strategy. At the other extreme, Dance Dance Revolution is pretty damned physical, requiring not only gross motor skills but considerable stamina. It would be fair to call it a sporting activity because although it’s based on dance, the aim is not to dance aesthetically but to perform movements rapidly and accurately. (Incidentally, it has been officially recognised as a sport in Norway since 2004.)
In the middle, we have the games that are most popular in e-Sports, like Starcraft, Counter-Strike and Dota 2. As said, they involve physical prowess, but it is limited and not the main focus of the game or determinant of success. This is what I mean by the problem of taking a borderline case as prototypical. E-sports really got off the ground with Starcraft, a real-time strategy game that requires physical skills but is still first and foremost a strategy game. This results in the prototype for the e-sports category being far removed from the prototype of the sports category. This phenomenon is known in cognitive linguistics as a radial category: you have a base category with its own prototype (e.g., MOTHER) that then radiates other categories, each with their own prototype (e.g., SINGLE MOTHER, STEPMOTHER, BIRTH MOTHER). Whether you see your stepmother or your birth mother as your “real mother” depends largely on how you feel about them.
Conclusion: A Better definition of (E)Sports
It should be clear by now that Parry’s definition of “sport” as “an institutionalised, rule-governed contest of human physical skill” is too restrictive. We have seen that institutions are an effect of an activity’s being a sport rather than a cause, and that competition is a means, not an end. We thus need a better definition of sport. I propose the following:
A sport is a structured activity performed primarily for the physical challenge it provides.
“Structured” is important to distinguish sports from spontaneous play, and is what results in all those rule books and committees. “Physical” is important to distinguish sports from cerebral pastimes like card games or crossword puzzles. “Challenge” can include but is not limited to competition. A physical challenge could be anything from kicking a ball into a net to climbing a mountain to shooting a target. Finally, the challenge should be a primary motivation. Performing a difficult physical activity to some other end is very different from performing it for its own sake; the former is what Suits calls “technical activity”, or in other words, work, in the broadest sense of the word. Running a race is different from running to escape a charging bull. Of course, people do sports in order to get fit, but if that is the only purpose, then it is just physical exercise that happens to resemble a sport, just like fit-boxing bears a resemblance to real boxing.
This is not a perfect definition because there is no perfect definition of sport, just like there is no perfect definition of many things (as Wittgenstein pointed out while talking about games). However, it seems to cover most things we call sports and exclude most things we don’t, which is as good as we can hope to get. At the moment, the only reasonable answer to the question “Are e-sports sports” is another question: “Which e-sport are you talking about?”
