Nowadays, you hear the term “eSports” almost as regularly as someone talking about “real” sports. With the rise of popular games such as "StarCraft," "DOTA," "DOTA 2," "League of Legends," "Smite," and many console games like "Halo," "Call of Duty," "Super Smash Bros.," and a bevy of others, each game has begun to foster their own competitive scene, with some already having hosted many World Champion Series’. While the rise of these games is certainly something for their professional players to be proud of, for the fans of “real” sports, it’s looked as almost comically. To say that a professional player’s efforts are less than that of a professional athlete is almost childish. One cannot compare the amount of prep work that each player has to do in order to be able to perform at their peaks. With this, I’d like to go into how labeling each and that stating that one is less than the other is foolish. Let’s begin, shall we?
For starters, I’d like to approach how practicing for a professional player differs from a professional athlete. Athletes practice and prepare by running reps of different plays, they ingrain these into their brains as they attempt to predict what their opponent might do in an actual game. For an eSports player, this changes; with the ability to use the game of their choice’s “ranked” mode, players can continuously hone their skills on human players, to add to this, because the player relies more on their character selection, competency with said character, as well as knowing what the enemy characters can do, allows for these players to come into tournament play with a more certain idea of how things could play out. Both our athlete and player share a common method however, and that is scrimmaging. Each one is able to set up mock matches with other teams in order to test their teams own synergy and various tactics that they might have drummed up while in talks with the team. These scrimmages can also give each team a hint as to what their opponents have practiced, and how they can adapt to those strategies.
One thing that I will lean to the player, is the ability to ban certain characters. Games like "Smite," "League of Legends"and "DOTA 2" have introduced a banning system into their competitive scenes, to sort of balance out the game. Most athletic sports compensate for this by introducing restrictions to their players, acts of violence, for instance, towards players on the opposing team are forbidden. Similarly, any sort of medication that enhances an athlete’s ability to perform is also forbidden and can be met with termination from their team or expulsion from play period.
Probably the most important thing to each category is victory. That moment when the winning team takes the World Champion Cup/Ring/Belt/what have you, instills a feeling of pride that these teams value. It is validation for their hard work and struggles, it is why they eat, breathe, and think their profession almost twenty-four-seven. This feeling of pure accomplishment is what drives the players and the athletes. Saying that one is less than the other, is effectively lessening the efforts of THOUSANDS of players, and that isn’t right in any sense. They all work hard, they all deserve what they’re striving for.
