Traditional sports, like football and basketball, are just plain boring to some people. There’s an eccentric cousin out there called E-Sports waiting to be discovered by those who don’t enjoy watching or playing sports ball.
E-Sports are a type of competitive online sport which lies next to the realm of traditional sports like soccer, tennis and cricket. While traditional sports have large professional organizations like the National Football League, E-Sports have the Overwatch League where teams of the best players in “Overwatch”, a popular first-person team-based shooter game, compete to see who the best players in the world are.
E-Sports also has many different levels of competition. There are collegiate teams competing, just like college football, and there are professionally hired and contracted players duking it out to see who the best is.
E-Sports doesn’t come without its controversy. One hotly debated topic is whether E-Sports are considered sports because they are video game competitions rather than physical. Most public figures in the E-Sports community agree that esports are considered sports.
Jeff Kaplan, the lead developer of “Overwatch”, said in an interview with Jiyeon Kim, director of operations at Inven Global, he wants E-Sports to feel more like traditional sports, acknowledging E-Sports as part of the “sports” category while also calling to light the fact the two different genres of competition look completely different.
The crux of the argument that E-Sports are real sports comes down to what people define sports as. The definition of a sport from Oxford Languages is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment,” which E-Sports falls under. E-Sports includes the physical exertion of being able to press the buttons needed in exactly the way you need to be able to always control your character perfectly and the skill of knowing what your opponent will do and knowing how to counter it, much in the same way a football coach might switch up the formation of a play to counter their opponent’s.
Not only do E-Sports fall under the realm of sports, but they have a long history to match. Dennis Fong is considered the grandfather of E-Sports, alongside the popular 1996 game Quake, which is considered the “grandfather” game of E-Sports. Fong was the winner of the first big E-Sports tournament in 1995, which was officially sponsored by Microsoft. That tournament launched the entire scene of E-Sports, and it led to Fong winning the personal Ferrari 328 of Id Software’s CEO, John Carmack.
The history of E-Sports has plenty of players and games, but there are also a ton of significant moments too. For every time Tom Brady has won a Super Bowl, there has been a myriad of incredible moments in the E-Sports community. The famous Evolution Championship Series moment No. 37 where Daigo Umehara, one of the most famous Street Fighter 2 Turbo players in the world, was in a losing scenario against his opponent in the last possible game of the tournament. His character had such little health left that he would’ve lost if he took any hit, even if he blocked it. His opponent let loose a super attack, which was 17 hits all in quick succession, and everybody thought that Umehara had lost. However, he parried all 17 hits of the super attack, which means he blocked all the hits within one-sixtieth of a second that they connected and returned a combo of his own that won him the match, the tournament, and enough fame to launch the entirety of E-Sports into the limelight.
While the history of E-Sports is full of incredible plays, huge personalities and the highest level of competition, anybody can play because all you need to participate is a controller.
Dylan Shepler can be reached at [email protected]