I'm not an e-sports fan, but there are plenty more monotonous jobs that people do for a living other than playing videogames. Is it silly? Maybe. Would I enjoy playing games for so long every day? Not really. Compared to watching "reality" contestants humiliate themselves to make a "brand name" for themselves, this is perfectly respectable.
I laughed a little when I saw the phrase "esports career". How decadent a society we have when people can make a living from other people watching them play games. No sillier than professional sports but still both are ridiculous IMO
To me, at least for professional gamers, they're really entertaining to watch. They understand the game they're playing completely and are dedicating themselves full time to be the best player.
It is something that I admire, plus it gives people that "live" for playing games a chance for a decent life and job.
This is no different from being any other professional athlete.
E-sports should drop the 'E' moniker, because the 'E' part is less significant than the 'sports' part. People think playing games is less taxing and less skillful than a 'real' athlete's work, but it's not. The same level applies, upto and including the revenue model.
There are people that spend most of their available hours playing video games against other players to get the most kills, wins, ... but of course we call them esports athletes.
For some people it's a job that generates income for others it's an addiction that impairs proper functioning.
Sports today aren’t what they used to be. Michael Jordan famously used to put down the basketball and pick up the golf club for nearly the entire offseason. Larry Bird wasn’t particularly fit. Now, athletes are practicing year-round in realistically unobtainable physical shape.
Likewise, esports used to be a fun thing that friends would do for fun money back in the day. You wouldn’t put crazy time into it because you still had a day job and $1,000 winnings won’t pay rent for long. Now, these e-athletes are practicing 12+ hours a day. There’s no healthy way to play video games 12+ hours a day, no matter how much you’re getting paid.
Until we remove the monetary incentive such that these unrealistic hours aren’t put into children’s games, we’re going to continue to see these athletes self-destruct their lives with these ridiculous regimens.
Competitive esports is a bit different from mindlessly playing video games, it has far more to do with consistency, reliability, and marketing. Additionally, the person was being quite dismissive, this dude was already studying CS at a university.
I don't understand the appeal of esports, personally. There's little less interesting than watching people play video games. But I also feel the exact same way about physical sports -- so perhaps that's an indication that esports have arrived as a "real sport"?
It seems like articles like this from BBC suffer from memory loss here and attempt to attract towards the survivorship bias in the Fortnite/PUGP tornaments to convince you that you can get a better job when playing games and not even mention the health risks that comes with playing video games all day long.
The Nintendo Switch is at least trying to improve how we play games (The Wii was a step in the right direction in terms of improving our health) but these tournaments are really just encouraging unhealthiness in sitting down for too long for a live-stream / tournament for the 'chance' to earn viewers or money.
So, I do not think that it is worth playing video games for e-sports all day to get you a better job even if money was involved (As tens of thousands of teams are competing anyway). I would either use video-games as for training / assessment or relaxing purposes but not to do full time. Perhaps a better skill would be building AI bots to play games and may the best AI win.
Nice try Beeb, but HN can detect bullshit articles like this in nano-seconds.
This is where I disagree, and I know I'm in the minority (clearly) by how popular streaming has become. Professional athletes are marvels because they look so much bigger, better and are faster than the average joe. That's their appeal - they're real-life super heroes. LeBron, Jordan, Ronaldo, Ali, Jim Brown - they guys are living, breathing physical specimens who can do what no normal person, no matter how much training, can accomplish.
Video gamers, while no doubt skilled and dedicated to their craft, look like regular guys off the street. There's no wonderment. It's why nobody has the world chess champion as a poster on their door (or desktop background, whatever today's equivalent). Poker is popular on TV too, but ask a kid who they want to be when they grow up, Messi or Phil Ivy and I'm pretty sure I know the answer.
This stuff is popular and more power to those who succeed, but I think it's unfair to just brush off people's bewilderment at the success of esports by trying to compare some 19 year old "esports athlete" to a proper athlete.
Esports doesn’t have to mimic traditional sports. My family watches a monthly Minecraft competition together, featuring not the best in the world but participants who are already popular streamers outside that context.
The competition is streamed from the perspectives of the participants, the teams change every month, and there is no prize money. Regardless of all these factors it’s still a fun, competitive event that delivers a good sports watching experience.
It doesn’t have the money or professionalism of major league sports, but for us it entirely doesn’t matter either.
This is kind of an exception though when it comes to popular team sports and far as I know E-sport is still far from even those relatively bad pay and terms.
I used to play League of Legends and could appreciate watching the pros play because they were so much better than me, it was like the way amateur golfers enjoy the PGA.
That makes it a disappointment to me but perhaps a wider audience might find real e-Sports to be harder to appreciate.
There is a difference between watching a E-Sports tournament and some let's play stream. As I understand it, OP talked about the former. As a gamer myself, I can say I feel exactly like him.
I find most of it boring. I only scroll through those videos on youtube to see how the actual game looks like since Demos have been dead for a long time now (or you have to pay for them now). Additionally the annoying stuff happening around the video on twitch is repulsive. Especially the chat reminds me of those webchats on crappy 90s-style pages.
On the other hand I do watch a tournament or some league play since german free tv started airing it.
While western media may not yet be open to embracing eSports on television, South Korea and several other nations have been televising video games for years and building followings behind them that rival "real" sports. The author's trying to make an opinionated point about the state of eSports without recognizing their following both internationally and online. There's a lot of money being thrown around in there. We're past the point of debating whether or not they are real sports and starting to seriously consider bringing them to the attention of a wider audience. It hasn't stuck (yet), but maybe in the future viewers will be receptive to it.
My comparison was running a Formula 1 team to making Video Games. Not playing them as an e-sport. Of course competing in a sport in real life is far different to doing so in a video game.
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