GuitarBizarre

K, so here's the deal.

Right now, I think eSports, videogames played for money on a professional basis, are legitimately sports.

Others, who shall remain nameless unless they want to join in, believe not.

Arguments For eSports being legitimate sports:

1 - Pros in the most popular games practice 14 hour days to be at the top of their fields.
2 - The most popular games have professional teams who manage and run contracts for their major players.
3 - Sponsorship exists, and on a very wide scale. Evil Geniuses, a single team, for example, are sponsored by Intel, SteelSeries, Monster Energy, Kingston Technology, InWin, Beyond Gaming, Sapphire Technology, Six Pool Gaming, Bigfoot Networks, Intel Extreme Team, GUNNAR Optiks, SLAPPA, and SPLIT REASON.
4 - The top players are as much celebrities within their scenes as in most other sports. I'm not talking like Soccer or Baseball, which are culturally huge, but any smaller sport like Snooker or Curling or whatever, they have their own stars that are respected, and so does eSports.
5 - They have a spectator audience of people who DON'T play the game themselves. Barcrafts are a global thing and they're frequented by plenty of people who don't play and can't play, but who love to watch.
6 - There is real depth to the games that attain status as eSports. Starcraft Broodwar, for example, is still developing as players discover new strategies and tactics to this day, 10 years after its release and 2 years after the release of its sequel (Which is currently exploding in popularity)



Arguments against -

1 - They're not an activity defined by serious physical exertion.

Thats just some arguments off the top of my head, with the Con argument being one I've heard multiple times before.


I will say that personally, I don't think the con argument I've listed holds water. Starcraft at a high level, with up to 800 actions per minute being input by keyboard and mouse, is many times more physically demanding than, for example, darts or snooker, both of which are recognised sports.


So whats everyone's view? Are eSports legitimately sports in their own right, or are they not?

If not, why not? I'll admit to some personal bias here - So far, nobody has been able to provide me with a solid argument as to why apart from the physical exertion element, which has, to my mind, been rendered inoperable as a debating point by the existence of many other sports with low physical requirements but high dexterity requirements.

__________________

Paedantic Basterd

sport

   [spawrt, spohrt] Show IPA
noun 1. 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.

Not according to the definition of the word.

GuitarBizarre

Which part of the definition? Its an activity, it requires skill and some measure of physical prowess, and it is competitive by nature. I see no part of the dictionary definition for sports that conflicts with the concept of eSports, assuming that the dexterity requirements qualify it as a sport the same way they do for Darts or Snooker.

I had thought that perhaps "athletic" would be contradictory, but all definitions of athletic or athletics depend on the definition of an athlete, which is defined in accordance with eSports also, as both the current and classical definitions accept the skill/dexterity requirement as a possible defining factor.

noun
a person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.
Origin:
1520–30; < Latin āthlēta < Greek āthlētḗs, equivalent to āthlē- (variant stem of āthleîn to contend for a prize, derivative of âthlos a contest) + -tēs suffix of agency

__________________

midnight rain

Explain to me how racing or hunting, or fishing requires more athleticism than eSports.

I think the dictionary definition would be better if they removed the word "athletic", then eSports (as well as the others I listed) are indeed considered sports.

Paedantic Basterd

To be fair, I don't consider hunting, fishing, darks, snooker, billiards, or curling to be sports either. I suppose then that I shouldn't have taken a dictionary definition including them to make my point, however, I think this argument is silly and not worth the effort of substantiating my opinion beyond "No".

GuitarBizarre

You missed my edit, but athletics can be, and is, defined in a manner friendly to the concept of eSports as sports.

I fail to see how you can arbitrarily define sports as what you want it to be (by removing them at will. Particularly notable in the case of Curling, which has sufficient status to have been an event at the winter Olympics for nearly a century), and then claim my inclusion of a different set of activities is invalid.

What part of the concept of sports, does eSports violate? Is there a defining quality a sport must have, that eSports does not, and is it central to the concept?

__________________

Paedantic Basterd

As an aside, it's a profound statement about our generation that something like this can be construed as "athletic".

midnight rain

Yes, I agree then. The hand eye coordination required in competitive video gaming is no different than that needed to make contact with a baseball, and the strategies teams or individual players use is no different than basketball teams running a play.

GuitarBizarre

Why is it profound? The classical latin definition encompasses games of skill also, not just definitions involving physical strength or stamina.

You seem to be making the argument that a sport must be defined as involving physical exertion. There are plenty of sports with rich histories and widespread acceptance that don't qualify under those rules, including, as I noted, an Olympic Event. (And Billiards is recognised as a sport by the Olympics, though not contested there)

On what grounds do you dismiss those sports from being sports?

__________________

Zer0

So you mean because they're playing video games for money it becomes a legit sport? Professionalism is not what makes a sport, in fact you could even argue that professionalism ruins sport, a legitimate sport is a physical activity that is at best enjoyed by amateurs. Would you consider a guy sitting in front of his TV at home playing Gears Of War an amateur sportsman?

__________________