When I was in elementary school, I used to spend recess every day playing basketball with my group of friends. As I got older and moved into middle school a year earlier than the rest of them, my enthusiasm for the sport began to wane as I spent less time outdoors playing sports with my friends and more time staying at home inside playing video games. Eventually, I completely lost interest. Nowadays, however, I find myself with a renewed interest. Why? Ultimately, it’s because of eSports, and games like League of Legends.
If you’ve been paying attention to video games over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with eSports, the competitive side of gaming. Video games have always been competitive — just look at GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, or to use an example that’s a bit more dated, The Nintendo World Championships which took place all the way back in 1990 — but it wasn’t until the medium evolved alongside streaming technologies like YouTube, Twitch, and Azubu that eSports became commonplace and eventually an industry.
Small competitive tournaments have always existed, but it was that technology coupled with the popularity and accessibility of video games like League of Legends, DOTA 2, and SMITE that led eSports as they are today to really take off. If you want to play an exciting, team-based game with a high skill ceiling and low barrier to entry, all you have to do is install and play League of Legends. It’s not that easy to become a professional, but it is that easy to play, and it’s that same accessibility and understanding that allowed sports like Basketball to take off.
I can see why people are skeptical; eSports aren’t exactly something you’d associate with physical activity, which is traditionally a typical requirement for something to be a sport. But, as many have argued, the same could be said of Poker or Chess. Both of these games are continued to be a sport, yet neither are known for their physically demanding gameplay. If those games can be sports, so can video games, or at least that’s what people say.
Personally, I’m in the camp that believes in the sound logic reasoned above. But, I’m not here to support that argument. There have been countless articles written on the subject by great outlets, and if you really want to get into it, I’d recommend reading some of them. Instead, I’m going to tell you about how eSports and sports are connected for me. You’ve probably already realized by reading the title, but eSports have been a driving force in my renewed interest of sports.
If you’re wondering how that works, well, it’s complicated. Going back to when I was younger, sports were something that I had a lot of interest in. But, as I got older and became more reclusive, my enthusiasm for sports was replaced by video games. It’s not that the two were at all similar — at the time, eSports didn’t really exist as they do now — but that my time and priorities shifted to include more time playing video games and less time playing sports, something that I think is far more common today than it was back then as people adopt technology at a younger age.
It wasn’t until I picked up an issue of Game Informer and saw an advertisement for League of Legends in the back that I began to become interested in competitive gaming. I had played Call of Duty, but it was never really a competitive game for me despite the fact that the series had already begun to grow a competitive community centered around tournaments at that time. In fact, I started to lose interest in the Call of Duty franchise because of the competitive nature.
I wasn’t a big fan of competitive games because I no longer had much of a competitive spirit. This was part of the reason that I had lost interest in sports to begin with, but League of Legends changed that. I played it with my friends, and we played to win. This was a game that, in my mind, wasn’t any fun to play unless you played competitively. It completely changed my outlook on not just competitive video games, but competition as a whole.
Eventually, through competitive games like League of Legends, I met a lot of friends. These friends weren’t just fans of video games, though. They were also fans of Basketball and Football, and it was largely through their influence that I started to regain my interest in sports. The thing about sports is that they’re inherently social. They require a team of players to make them work, and it’s that sense of community that makes them popular among friends and people of different localities.
If you’re from Denver, you can bond over the Broncos, and it’s the same way with eSports. If you’re from North America, you can cheer for Team SoloMid. There are a lot of similar traits shared between sports and eSports, and whether or not you think that videogames can qualify as sports, you at least have to admit that there are a lot of similarities.
Sure, eSports might not involve traversing a field or carrying around a ball, but it does bring people together in the same way that sports does. The fact that I’ve regained my interest in sports and their competitive nature is proof of that. Regardless of whether or not eSports are sports, they’re both selling out arenas of like-minded fans, and that’s what’s important.
If eSports aren’t sports, that’s fine. If nothing else, maybe they can co-exist. As more people transition from fans of eSports to fans sports and vice-versa, I think it will become clearer just how similar the two are. I might not be as into sports as I used to be, but thanks to eSports, I’m on the way.