People who play sports (athletes) and people who play competitive video games (e-athletes) are very similar. In fact, most people who have achieved great success in e-sports once played a real sport. I played football for four years until I decided the coaches were concentrating more on yelling at kids than teaching them how to play the game. Athletes and e-athletes are similar in that they love to win, and they hate to lose. They are afraid of losing, so they try their hardest to win.
Fitness
A main point against these video game players being considered athletes is that they don't have to do any running around, lifting, or anything that requires peak physical fitness like real athletes. In fact, all they do is sit in front of a computer pressing a few buttons and moving a mouse around from time to time. While this is true, they do need to be in peak mental shape just like real athletes. Both need to be able to make extremely quick decisions based on what their senses. Both need to have extremely fast reflexes to put those decisions into action as quickly as possible. They need to have extremely accurate aim, whether it is throwing a football, shooting a basketball, kicking a soccer ball, aiming with weapons in Counter-Strike, or accurately clicking orders in StarCraft II. In StarCraft, people use something called Actions Per Minute to measure how good a player is, which is exactly what it sounds like: how many buttons or mouse clicks a person does in a minute. This most often translates into better play, but it is not too important to focus on when trying to get better.
Emotion
The players have to be able to control their emotions. A football player can't let a little smack talk cause him to push somebody around after a play and cost his team fifteen yards. A Counter-Strike player can't let the same kind of smack talk get to him and make him question his skills, causing him to play differently than he is accustomed to. Communication between players is a huge part of sports and e-sports, because they are, for the most part, team games. If a player isn't performing well they might be down on themselves and not communicate as much, and that hurts the team. On the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, there are the effects of adrenaline. When a football player is running with the football they have massive amounts of adrenaline flowing through them, and this causes them to run faster, make decisions quicker, be more nimble, or be stronger than they usually are capable of. These effects are seen in video games like Counter-Strike too. When a player gets a nice shot or hears several people rushing toward him, he will get excited and shoot more precisely, move his mouse around faster, pick up on visual or audio clues better than he usually does. This also causes a player to resort to their secondary weapon sooner than they should, which is when their primary gun runs out of ammo. However, since he just killed two players he feels he can take on another two with just a pistol, and he will overall play much more aggressive than usual.
There are intense moments in both real sports and e-sports. A close match coming down to the last second is moments away from one party screaming in joy, and the other sadly disappointed at the close loss. After a loss in football, teams will begin to think about those few key mistakes in the game that could have caused them to lose, like a missed field goal, or a failed fourth down conversion. Similarly, Counter-Strike has those moments. After a loss my team will usually go back and talk about what happened on certain key rounds that could have turned it in our favor, like a strategy executed poorly or someone was too impatient and left their position. One versus one situations are often another "what if" scenario, and they can have long term effects in the match.
Ego
Athletes have massive egos. This is just as true, if not more true, with e-athletes. E-athletes have the advantage of being safe in their own home behind a computer when they talk smack. They, just like celebrities and athletes, let their fame and skill go to their head and they seem to forget about friends from their past. I barely talk to the few people I knew that are successful in e-sports anymore because I guess they feel they don't need to respond to me since they are such a greater person than I. There is a lot of smack talk that goes on between players on a football field, and there is just as much going on in the servers of Counter-Strike. They can both be equally as brutal and hurtful, but they provide for some interesting entertainment.
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