ESPN’s President John Skipper rejected the legitimacy of video games as sports last week, Saturday, September 6 during the Code/Media Series: New York conference.
While speaking in regards to Amazon’s acquisition of video game live streaming website Twitch for $970 million, Skipper explained his disbelief in eSports as actual sports.
“It’s not a sport — it’s a competition,” he said. “Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition.”
Despite Skipper’s rejection of these games as sports, many of these ‘competitions’ share a number a characteristics with conventional sports. The Association of the International Olympic Committee Recognized International Sports Federations currently recognizes chess as a sport. The United States government has offered athletics visas to multiple professional video gamers. Even the ESPN2 and ESPN3 television channels featured coverage of The International Dota 2 Championships 2014, a video game tournament featuring a grand prize of $5,025,573 according to the video game’s website.
Regardless of other’s perceptions of eSports, Skipper stood by his opinion.
“Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports”
Spencer Hu, sophomore at the University of Wyoming and winner of the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 tournament at the Anime Detour convention provided his opinion on the ‘sport’ status of video games.
“Sports could be defined as something that takes a lot of physical activity. It could be defined as something that just has a lot of competitive elements. There are a lot of possible answers. I would consider video games sports in that they are really competitive. There’s a lot of work that all of the competitors put into it. I certainly wouldn’t consider it a sport by conventional means. However, I definitely think video games are just as difficult. At the end of the day, it just depends on how somebody wants to define it.”
Hu went on to explain that video games do not provide benefits in his day-to-day life.
“Gaming is heavily neglected in the eyes of the public. I’ve never told a girl that I want to be a competitive gamer and witnessed her become flustered, because she wouldn’t recognize games in that way. But, if I said ‘Hey, I play for the UW football team’, that would probably give me a little bit of credit. I think that competitive gamers should also receive some sort of credit. So sports and video games aren’t equal in the eyes of the public, but I do think they are equally as good. They are on a par. But saying one is better than the other isn’t an easy value judgment to make.”
Regardless of the position of video games as sports or not, Hu is still happy that eSports receive any amount of publicity, and hopes that the gaming community continues to grow.
“As a competitive gamer, I think that the bigger the scene is, the better. It allows people to grow. It allows people to compete at higher levels. It would be nice for competitive gaming to become bigger, so long it’s not just slapped into some program and appropriated inappropriately.”
