Is it a Sport? - The Game

Those that play video games competitively and those that play sports professionally have many similarities, and in some cases they are the same people. A man named Stuart Holden was a professional Counter-Strike player until he decided to pursue a career in professional soccer. He played with the USA team that played in the World Cup this past summer. Now I will compare the play of e-Sports and sports.

Team
Most e-Sport games and sports are team games, and teams are made up of people. People have to get along with each other in order to achieve success in what they do. They require good chemistry and experience playing with each other. The team has to have a unified passion to win.

Team 3D after winning gold in the World Cyber Games.
Source: GotFrag http://www.gotfrag.com/css/story/32907/

In order to be a good team, the team needs a good leader. The head coach, offense and defensive coordinators, the quarterback for the offense and typically the middle linebacker for the defense are the leaders in football. Since there are not as many people involved in a Counter-Strike team, there is generally only one leader. There might be someone who manages the team, but that's not a leader.A Counter-Strike leader acts much like a quarterback; calling plays during matches, making team decisions in the middle of rounds, keeping people focused, motivated, and in high spirits. When the momentum is with the other team, the leader must convince his team they can turn it around.

Both e-Sports and sports have organizations that consist of more than just the players. An organization has a business side of things; handling contracts, salaries, merchandise, travel, advertising, and providing a way for fans to show their support. Organizations have to scout out new talent in order to improve over time.

It's a Game
Sports are games, just like e-Sports. Games are meant to be fun, and people that play these games enjoy them because they provide competition that requires a high level of skill. If you listen to locker rooms before football games, someone will say "let's go out there and have some fun," because after all, it is a game they started playing because it was fun. The same goes for Counter-Strike. If you are having fun, you are calm and relaxed, which gives you a better chance at playing well. My Counter-Strike team jokes a lot during matches because it keeps us in a good mood and focused on the game. Joking around might sound like it would take away focus, but it takes our mind off things going on in the match, like who the other team is. This is especially true if we're playing a team that is in a higher league than us. Some people might just give up, submitting to the better team, but if you keep the mindset that they're playing the same game as you, you can win. We beat a top team in the country in a scrimmage recently just by playing how we normally play and not trying to over-think things.

Beating a great team gave us confidence, and we went on to win both our matches this week by huge margins. This is because we practiced a lot. This brings me to my next point: both e-sports and sports require a lot of practice if a team expects to succeed. Football players practice for several hours during the week after games, and much of that practice is making sure new and old plays are executed flawlessly. This is hard to do because there are eleven guys that need to know what is going on, and if even one guy doesn't know what he is supposed to do on a given play, you end up looking like fools just like the Cowboys did in their first two games. We do the same thing in Counter-Strike. We come up with plays to run as terrorists, and they involve precise flash bangs, smoke grenades, as well as perfect timing and positioning. If one person doesn't know what they're doing it's possible the whole round can be lost. When something goes wrong you'll typically hear "well I thought you were watching that!" or "I didn't know I was supposed to throw a flash bang!" To avoid such awful mistakes, we do what football players do: dry runs, where we execute a play against no one just to get the timing down. Quarterbacks and receivers value these because the quarterback can perfectly time his pass with a receiver's route. Certain movements the receiver does when he decides he is turning somewhere will queue the quarterback to throw the ball.

These plays Counter-Strike players and football players come up with are sometimes countering what they think the other team will do, and the only way to know what the other team is going to do is to study their film. Football teams do this, and we do it in Counter-Strike. Knowing the other team's tendencies allows you to recognize things you saw in film study, and take advantage of what they do next. We saw this in the last Super Bowl, where Tracy Porer intercepts Peyton Manning. In film study he saw this play the Colts run a lot, so he recognized it and took a chance, and it paid off. We do the same thing in Counter-Strike, although not to the extent football players do.



Not only are the players in e-sports and sports quite similar, but since they both involve games people play for recreation, there are many similarities. Competition is at the heart of both, but in the end it's all about having fun and truly doing what you love. Being paid to play video games is just as much a dream for many people as being paid to play sports, even if makes thirty thousand and the other makes thirty million. In the next blog I will talk about some of the less traditional sports that have many similarities with e-Sports.

References:
Shields, Duncan (2010, May 28). Ex-CS player makes US World Cup team. Retrieved from http://www.sk-gaming.com/content/29602-ExCS_player_makes_US_World_Cup_team

 Mcleod, Brandon (2006, June 5). Counter-Strike Source: Pbmatrix's Playbook: Team 3D Source. Retrieved from http://www.gotfrag.com/css/story/32907/