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.

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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

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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.

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?

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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.

hip hop bunny hop

How unfortunate immigration made this mistake. Certainly, encouraging the notion that competitive sedentariness (which is all 'eSports' amounts to) is a sport will do nothing to lessen the obesity epidemic.

It boggles the mind that some people honestly think the athleticism required for hunting is similar to that required for sitting in your parents attic in front of a keyboard. Walking among the Badlands hours before dawn, avoiding prairie dog burrows & rattle snakes (among other hazards), setting up on a vantage point. Waiting for hours if not days until the proper Pronghorn presents itself within range. Then, there's the small matter of accounting for wind and the drop of the bullet, and placing the bullet in a vital organ of an animal that can run over fifty miles an hour. Should all this go well, one then must field dress the animal and carry the carcass back to the vehicle.

:P

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Have mercy on the poor.

djchameleon

That sounds exactly like gaming imo.

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Fame, fortune, power, titties. People say these are the most crucial things in life, but you can have a pocket full o' gold and it doesn't mean sh*t if you don't have someone to share that gold with. Seems simple. Yet it's an important lesson to learn. Even lone wolves run in packs sometimes.

Cuthbert

Have a look into the fitness of F1 drivers. They will lose kilograms of sweat during a race, burn a ton of calories, heart rate 170+ for two hours straight.

It's incredibly tough on the body. They also have to keep their weight down.

Jenson Button finished a triathlon in 4 hours 40 mins, fast enough to qualify for the World Championships in the triathlon but he just does this shit to stay fit enough to race his car as well as he can.

&

http://uk.askmen.com/sports/bodybuil...r-workout.html

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TheBig3

English changes.