back

what is an e-sport

Disclaimer: I am not a competitive gamer, nor do I care much for it - this is just a silly mind-dump.

One of the fun things you can spend your time doing is just thinking about “fairly” hard-to-solve problems that actually has little impact on the world. Some time ago I thought of the age-old question - what is the difference, if there is one, between e-sports and “real” sports?

E-sports started as a term to separate competitive gaming from sports in the traditional sense - competitive games before the advent of video games. There is no clear reason why there is a distinction, which is the primary reason for why there is somewhat of a debate of what constitutes an “e-sport”. Many e-sport athletes want to be considered “real” athletes because, I guess, they want to be taken more seriously. Then there are people on the other side that argues that e-sports can’t be considered “real” sports since it’s not physical - you’re just pressing keys on a computer. This is easily countered by mentioning all the fairly non-physical sports, be it darts, skeet shooting, or poetry.

This led me to the conclusion that physicality, that in a “real” sport requires a certain set of physical prowess, is not a good metric of what separates e-sports from “real” sports. But what rather separates the two is simply the fact that “real” sports take place in such a way that the difficult part is interacting with the rules and laws of the world around us. We can’t change these rules as easily as you can change the settings of a video game, which restricts us in performing the “real” sport. Or, in shorter terms

e-sports are sports that are completely identical when performed in real life or on a computer1.

You might be able to play football on a computer - but is pressing a button to kick the ball identical to yourself having to use your leg to physically move the ball? No. This rule saves some sports like darts and skeet shooting from being classified as e-sports. But it also means, to the dismay of many, that

chess is an e-sport.

  1. This statement kinda falls apart when we invent some crazy VR + haptics system that allows us to basically simulate in full detail the real world on a computer. But hey - at that point, who cares? ↩