Opinion: The argument has always been whether it could be a sport, but it won’t benefit esports to push for this recognition. Keep gaming as gaming — it’s better for the industry and the gamers.
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I’m fairly certain that you’ve heard this argument at least once. Maybe you heard it in high school –– when the kid in the Halo T-shirt and those glasses that darken when you step outside voiced that he was just as skilled as the guys on the football team. He would be immediately opposed by the junior varsity kid who still wore his jersey to class on the varsity team’s gameday, for some reason.
They’d go back and forth, ignoring their only true shared experience: Neither of them were getting any play that night.
The debate of whether professional gaming should be considered a sport has been going on for nearly two decades. The New York Times wrote an article on this in 2013, Wired reported on arcade gaming being a spectator sport in 2008 and Ninja has doubted the athletic ability of NFL kickers on Twitter. Not a lot of people were with him on that one, kind of like when he flossed in front of a crowd on New Year’s Eve.
Between all this bickering over the lack of physical effort and advocating for the skill and craft of the gamers, an important angle of the discussion is being overlooked: Does it even matter what we call gaming?
Is it even beneficial to the future of professional gaming if it is socially accepted as a sport? Do the majority of gamers even care to be considered athletes?
To understand how the gaming community felt about the debate, I bravely traveled to the bogs and trenches of their home on campus. I stopped inside the lion’s den, or as it’s more commonly known, the esports lounge.
Talking to the students without a headset on, I asked their take on the tired debate on whether esports should be considered a sport, and the majority of gamers I talked to felt indifferent on the case. One student told me it wouldn’t change how much they played video games or watched professional gaming, and that the label attached to the industry didn’t change what the industry is. Another student shrugged and told me the audience wasn’t going to change if professional gaming was reputed as a sport tomorrow. Gamers would watch CSGO, sports fans would watch football.
“I feel like people push gaming to be considered a sport just to validify their belief in it,” second-year Randolph Duran, who works at the esports welcome desk, said. “I think people that are into esports should just be proud of calling it esports and professional gaming. I don’t think the older generation will ever come around to understanding esports as a sport.”
Another student, Matt Rados, brought up a counterpoint to settling without the professional sport tag in the future. He told me that with his understanding of marketing, you push for as wide-sweeping a reputation as you can, then scale back once you know the boundaries. He told me of friends he knew that are pushing to play esports collegiately, but aren’t receiving support from their parents to pursue that career.
Rados’ point was that if gaming was unilaterally considered a sport, his friends might find more encouragement to further their path into a field they enjoy. This was something I had yet to consider, and did make me question how professional gaming and esports would garner the respect it needs for young participants to feel supported in that community.
Branding gaming as a sport just doesn’t seem like the most viable pathway to gaining that societal respect.
Speaking from the sports community, there will always be an unavoidable boundary between traditional sports and gaming: the one between the actual and virtual worlds. As Duran and I talked about, that gap will just be too much to convince an older generation to bridge.
I don’t minimize professional gamers at all. I have a few friends in the esports sphere, and I know the amount of effort and time devoted to their craft and the excess of skill they possess compared to the average person in their particular field. Calling them athletes just doesn’t seem necessary or beneficial, even.
If the goal of branding gaming as a sport is to garner respect for the gamer as an entertainment industry, there are more accessible avenues to establish the industry as a respected community. Unfortunately, in a cynical capitalistic society, the avenue is revenue. Esports had great financial backing initially with many organizations growing the number of professional players and broadcasters, until a recent “winter” stumbled the building hype around the industry.
To me, a part of this downward arc esports is currently on is how it is being branded. Getting esports onto SportsCenter may seem like a great opportunity to grow the industry’s audience, but I feel like the opposite effect is happening. Some sports outlets seem to only post the video game/sports debate in order to gain interactions of angry sports fans on their page. Tweets about gaming on ESPN’s Twitter are mostly stuffed with stubborn sports fans refusing to give it any validity. Don’t take it too personally, gamers. ESPN’s audience also hates anything about women’s sports; they’re a pretty pathetic bunch.
The audience for esports isn’t going to come from sports. It comes from gaming at its roots.
“I wouldn’t market it as a sport. If we want to actually grow the market, we need to target the casual gamer to buy into the esports idea,” Duran said. “The esports fanbase right now is super young, so when our generation gets older we’ll have the money to fully support esports and it will grow.”
Once the industry booms again, which it would if its marketing focus shifted this way, the income and financial support would give the industry the respect it needs to establish itself. Don’t rely on a Bleacher Report notification to get people to watch Rocket League; develop an independent entertainment broadcast just for esports and professional gaming.
Why does gaming need to be a sport for it to be validated as a hobby or profession, anyway? There are plenty of spheres like chess and poker that take professional levels of dedication and have the financial backing they need to broadcast to their audiences without branding themselves as sports. Gaming can certainly fit into a category similar to them.
Further, pushing for gaming to be a sport may alienate the gamer fanbase that doesn’t identify as sports fans. It may feel disingenuous or like it’s creating a facade to not admit what gaming truly is: Some people that are just dope on the sticks. There should be pride in that, and gamers shouldn’t feel the need to brand themselves higher than that.
Keep the name esports. It’s catchy. But market yourself away from gamers, and market yourself as the best gamers.
