For millions of gamers, playing is just a hobby. It’s a way to blow off steam, socialise with friends, meet new people, and test your skills. You fund your gaming in the same way you fund any other recreational activity, using some of the disposable income you get from your work.
However, for a small number of gamers, it is much more than just a hobby. For them, gaming is a job or even a career. They earn their living by taking part in professional esports matches, leagues, and tournaments, deriving an income from prize money, sponsorship deals, and online streaming sessions.
But some people have taken umbrage with the term given to these professional video gamers. It is common parlance for them to be called ‘esports athletes’, suggesting that they partake in a sporting and athletic endeavour.
Can we really call esports sports, though? After all, playing League of Legends involves sitting in front of a computer screen for hours on end. Does that make every office-based Excel jockey an athlete too? Let’s examine it a bit closer.
What is an ‘eSport’?
Esports are video game competitions. Generally, the difference between you and your pals playing Call of Duty on a Wednesday night after work and a true eSport is the fact that the latter is a professional affair organised by a commercial entity.
Therefore, esports are professional video game competitions that are run in the form of leagues and tournaments. They also usually have an audience, either made up of people watching an online stream of the action, spectating live from the venue, or both.
Does That Make Them a Real Sport?
There are a few different ways you can define a sport. If we take the dictionary definition, we see that it is “an activity that involves physical exertion and skill” where two or more people or teams compete against each other(s) for the entertainment of others.
On those grounds, esports couldn’t count as a sport and the players that compete in them couldn’t be athletes because there is no ‘physical exertion’ involved. However, as we established earlier, by every other metric, they absolutely would.
What About Other Low-Exertion Sports?
Yet, there are already sports that don’t require much or any physical exertion. Fishing is often called a sport, but that involves long periods of sitting around waiting. Similarly, both chess and poker are categorised as ‘mind sports’ where players compete by exerting their brains rather than their muscles.
However, these mind sports have also faced similar contentions with some people arguing that the term ‘sport’ shouldn’t be used to describe them. That argument has been largely won by the proponents of mind sports thanks to the creation of events like the Mind Sports Games which involves players from around the world competing in a range of different board and card games.
The Sporting World is Taking Note
Regardless of where you sit in this debate, there is one thing that is undeniable; esports are growing in prominence. In just the last few years, the number of people watching tournaments and leagues has exploded, with some estimates suggesting there will be more than half a billion viewers in 2023 alone.
This has caught the attention of traditional sports teams and leagues, many of whom are starting, buying, or partnering with esports teams. European football clubs have been some of the biggest movers in this market, with RB Leipzig, Manchester City, AC Monza, Schalke FC, and FC Basil all investing heavily in their FIFAe teams.
Formula 1, the NBA, and MLB have also been throwing money at esports as they attempt to appeal to younger audiences and build life-long affiliations and relationships with them.
Verdict
If you passionately possess a position on the point of whether esports can be considered real sports, then it is highly unlikely that you’ll have moved much (or at all) in this discussion. However, for everyone else, it is probably fair to conclude that esports do, by almost every measurement, count as sports.
The argument falls apart a little when the matter of ‘physical exertion’ comes into play, but this isn’t unique to esports as we’ve seen the same debate occur within the world of mind sports which have enjoyed wider and wider acceptance over the years. We can, therefore, probably expect esports to follow a similar trajectory as they become more and more mainstream in the coming years.