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Organised Chaos - Cape Town

I have been thinking about sports and the “sport” of online gaming. My own personal experience comes from Call of Duty 4, which is currently one of the largest and most stable competitive games played in South Africa. With roughly 50 teams competing online, it is anything but chaotic. AGASA, the powerhouse when it comes to competitive gaming in South Africa hosts different leagues and divisions splitting teams of similar skill and ability into groups of 12 teams playing online 3 times a year. The final of the online leagues is hosted at the premiere electronics expo rAge.

For all intents and purposes this is a formal sporting event. Teams compete with set rules, in set matches and in certain time frames. Should teams or players digress on the rules they can be harshly punished. Just like any other competitive event, eSports functions run and operate under very similar pinciples. There are tournament specific rules and regulations and the particular tournament decides how to go about seeding teams that have entered and how best to represent the overall winner of the competition. However when you look at the definition of the word “sport”, almost all the definitions include at least one phrase relating to physical activity and ability. Taken from freedictionary.com, “Physical Activity that is goverened by a set of rules…”

With that in mind, can one look at computer or console games being classified as a sport? If you do some digging and googling it is difficult to find the definition of eSport or anything similar in any official recognised dictionary. Wikipedia however says this on the topic,

Electronic sports, abbreviated e-sports or eSports, is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. Other terms include competitive gaming, cybersports, cyber athletics (used by the CPL) and V-Sports (used by the GGL)

These games which are considered electronic sports normally belong to the first-person shooter, real-time strategy, or sports game genres.

eSportsmen Competing

When we look at the infrastructure of competitive gaming, even in South Africa, where we are lagging behind the internatioal community by a very large margin. All those issues aside however, if gamers are treating the game like a sport and acting like sportsmen, is eSport a sport?

Abroad in the US and the EU, they have thousands of teams competing. The teams that are the best or the “professionals”  in fact drawing a salary for the time and effort they put into their game of choice. This salary in western hemispheres is not enough to make a living off, however in the eastern hemisphere gamers are treated like celebrities. They date movie stars and fill stadiums for grand finals. This little tid bit makes them sound even more like the sporting stars and leged on more “standard” sports.

Korea is a special example, as the broadband penetration is nothing short of fantastic and has lead to this overwhelming numbers playing specific titles online. In addition to this, very early on formal competitions sprung up whereby players could compete and win prizes for being the best. From here it just snowballed, with more people wanting to compete and win and getting the game and broadband which lead to bigger and more frequent competitions happening. As the years have rolled on, Korea is still playing the aged Starcraft which is 11 years old this year. And just like other sports they are using standard rulesets that have not been changed for years. If things have been changed they are minor updates and revisions.

If this works in Korea and the primary catalyst was the right mindset, the proper implementation from both the gamers as well as the corporates. With the correct sponsors, the correct eSportsmen and the right organisations bringing this game to a wider audience. Showing how gamers are in fact sportsmen in their own right, we can slowly bring this game to the masses in the west and get those that don’t play, to tune in and watch. Just like your folks sitting down to watch the T20 world cup, or the Springboks playing the British and Irish Lions, only in a few years it might be the Springbok COD4 team vs the Lions COD4 team.