Is it a Sport? - Other Sports

So far, I have only written about Counter-Strike on the video games side, and football on the physical sports side. I believe they are the best examples of their categories, but there are other comparisons to be made. There are a few games that are considered sports that are more similar to video games than you may think.

Motorsports
Auto racing, motorcycle racing, motorboat racing, air racing, just about any racing qualify as a motorsport. The ones that have become accepted as a sport are the car races like NASCAR or Formula 1. They are aired on television, and they might have a more dedicated fan base than most other sports. I have family in Wisconsin that are huge fans, and they will travel around the country just to follow the races.

But all they do is drive cars, right? In NASCAR all they do is turn left and stop in for a Gatorade once in a while. Like Counter-Strike, Quake, and StarCraft II, NASCAR is more complicated than that. These racers are not a one man team, they have a team, just like Counter-Strike. The racer does have to be a skilled driver, and he has to know how to react to weather changes and the position of his opponents. But, he does need a good pit crew for when he and his car need some Gatorade. They must be extremely efficient with everything they do: deliver fuel, change tires, a tire pressure change, or any other tiny adjustment. They must also know how their car will perform on different tracks.

The cars are plastered with company logos that sponsor them, similar to the t-shirts of e-Sports players. Just like e-Sports, many things would not be possible without sponsors in NASCAR. Teams in Counter-Strike without a sponsor typically can't afford the plane tickets to make it to an event, and teams without sponsors in NASCAR simply don't exist because it costs about twenty million dollars a year to run a NASCAR team.

The Red Bull NASCAR car
Taken by  Jeff Wackerlin
Source: http://www.jayski.com/schemes/2007/84cup.htm

An Evil Geniuses Counter-Strike player
image courtesy gointernationalgroup.com

And finally, in order to be successful in NASCAR, you need a fine tuned car. This is what they spend night and day perfecting. In e-Sports, you need a reliable computer, made of just the right parts. Without a good computer, the games might lock up at worst moment possible, and it always does. Too many times have I lost matches where someone's computer randomly restarted or overheated or their Internet went out.

Chess
Chess might not be as widely considered a sport as NASCAR is, but it is played around the world by all sorts of people. Just like e-Sports, chess is not exactly physically demanding, but it sure is mentally demanding. Chess requires strategy and the ability to see what moves to make several moves ahead. Chess pits one person against another, so it automatically has many parallels with video games. In video game design, chess comes up a lot in conversation about how game play should be, and many strategy video games use the fundamentals of chess to enhance their game.

An e-Sports example of this is StarCraft. It is almost a futuristic, better imagined, less rigid in movement chess. In both games, you strategically control your army in order to kill the other person. Almost every unit in StarCraft has something it is strong against, and something it is weak against. This is also true in chess. StarCraft players have to be able to predict what their opponent will do, and base their strategy on that prediction. If that prediction is wrong, the player has to quickly adjust and form a new strategy. This is also true in chess.

I hope my comparisons through the last three blogs have convinced you that e-Sports should be considered a sport. The players have the same competitive passion and for their respective games. They both have games people grow up playing and enjoying. And, there are already games that are considered sports that video games have a lot in common with.

References:
Withers, Mark (2010, July 14). Playing Video Games Is A Sport. Retrieved from http://www.platformnation.com/2010/07/14/playing-video-games-is-a-sport/

Jenkins, Chris (2002, June 12). Sponsors make NASCAR's wheels go 'round. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/sports/motor/nascar/2002-07-12-acov-sponsors.htm