You can’t, other people can. The ADVANTAGE that chess/go/videogames have over “real” sports, is that extremely gifted individuals can stay competitive for much longer.
In football, you’re limited by your body. Below 17 years of age, you’ll be too weak to play at a reasonable level because even if you’re a hyper talent, people will just run you over. Above 35-40, your body will have deteriorated enough to make you a shadow of your former self.
In chess, I can stay competitive from age 8-80. Sure, just as with any other sport, I’ll peak out at some point; but it’s gradually increasing and slowwly decreasing, not the extremely quick falloffs that are observed in physical sports.
I don’t see how “An 8 year old kid can compete” would make something a joke of a sport. Just because there is no real physical barrier, a game isn’t competitive? That’s pretty stupid.
Stop comparing fighting games to either chess or team / solo play sports. Fighting games are dissimilar to traditional games due to their turnbased nature. Fighting games are not like basketball because you are alone, fighting games are not like golf because you directly interact with your opponent.
Fighting games are like fencing. Both are more about anticipation and outplaying than they are about pure conditioning. They are about conditioning your opponent.
When I was 20 pounds lighter and in my fencing prime and getting second in epee and placing in foil in local tournaments I was still getting trounced by a 70 year old man with gout weekly. Because even though I was in far better shape and not too shabby myself, he had a good 40 years of experience on me and was far better at reading me and hiding his next trick.
Like UltraDavid said in the past, no one is calling poker “card sports” “cSports” or whatever to try to dress it up and present it as something else. We are just playing video games competitively.
The word is stupid because it keeps bringing up shitty topics like this where people want to compare it to football/basketball.
You’re stupid to focus on the semantics of the words used, and not on the point itself:
Currently there are people who dislike the professionalisation/commercialisation of competitive FGs. They level many accusations towards this phenomenon.
Presumably some of these people are fans of other competitive activities, be they sports or traditional games, which are already professional. Do they level the same accusations towards those activities? If not, why? Why is the professionalisation of FGs different from that of other competitive activities?
just trying to not really say what it is… you play videos games seriously…
“oh im not a janitor im a custodial engineer”
Fighting games are not deemed “esports”. Fighting games are simply popular right now and EVERYONE an they cousin are trying to get the most value (both experience and monetarily) out it since we have used the new age of communication to make it more visible (pay for lessons, watch us play 24/7…streams…etc. etc.). Only a small chosen few are SPONSORED… dont confuse human advertisers that just do things in exchange for a plane ticket an venue fee…
no one is making a living off this… everyone is simply hustling to get what you can get while the getting is good even if it means altering your personality, habits, ways…etc. Think on that real good.
Don’t care anymore, I’m not in the upper tier of players that this change would effect.
All I can do is keep trying to convince people to play the games, play the games they like, fuck the fame and the $$$, don’t let the focus change from being about the games. It isn’t working, the $$$ and celebrity are too enticing nowadays so you have to bring that to the games if you want people to play them.
I think the thing is, that “esports” is a route in which people fear we will eventually turn what we have, ie, a niche community that was created by players for players for the sake of the games we love, into something of a for-profit spectator sport.
In other words, if gaming got an NFL level (won’t happen), where evo was no longer a ‘fly out and pay your entry fees, etc and you can play with the best of the best’ type of open event, to a closed event where only those who were invited or accepted to some form of league get to play, and the rest of us are just at home watching, and playing locally. Not because we choose to, but, because we’d no longer be welcome at events that were once our own.
I understand that people would be unhappy if the “Anyone can attend an event with the best of the best” nature of the current FG scene is lost. But isn’t that inherently due to the small and niche size of the FGC? Let’s say a particular tournament can practically only support a maximum of 500 entrants or something. Currently we have say, 10 top players, 90 pretty skilled people, and the other 400 are just random participants. What happens when, due to increases in player population, or even bigger prizes/sponsors making it more feasible for players to travel, we have 50 top players, and 450 pretty skilled players? Random participants won’t get a chance anymore, which is a shame.
But aren’t tournaments all about skill, meritocracy, and all of that stuff? If the presence of Big Money means that suddenly we can have a worldwide tournament series and top players from around the world get free plane tickets to an annual event, if it means we can finally settle the “Central/South America can compete with Japan in KOF” holy war, if it means my previously mentioned 500 player tournament can attract 50 top players and 450 great players from around the world… isn’t that what competition is supposed to be about? Even if it means a nobody like me has zero chance of entering, and I’m stuck being a spectator just like professional sports?
At this point it becomes less of a ‘oh we got Japanese player x to show up I bet people will be dying to play against him’ and more of a ‘oh this tournament has a $50,000 pot, it looks like Japanese player, x,y, and z are coming for it’.
Tournament trailers don’t have names in it to entice you because you’re dying to play them and tournament organizers aren’t holding using those names to grant them more competition. They’re marking their territory at that point.
Of course this is the new crop. People value an autograph more than a match.
Maybe this highlights my spectator nature, but I can’t relate to what you are saying here.
Anecdote: Dark Geese once flew over a good japanese player to (somewhere in South America, I can’t remember) to play some of their top locals. iirc, the japanese player didn’t dominant them (maybe he even lost, can’t remember), but basically there was some gloating involved but also some excuses regarding american sticks and so forth. But yeah, there were some flamewars/edrama going on in the SRK KOF subforum at the time.
My reaction to that situation was, “Man, I wish we could get all of these guys together in lots of proper tournaments so we can see who the best really is.” So you can see my attitude is not “Oh, I’d love to play that guy,” because I play the good players in my local scene and they can destroy me instantly already - getting destroyed even faster by someone famous doesnt have much added value for me. I’ll always play competitive FGs in a casual manner, I’m not interested in devoting much more time and energy into it. (Just like I’m happy to train and spar in boxing, but have no desire to compete in a real match.)
But I would find it very interesting to see the best in the world go head to head, in proper conditions, over a long period of time. I’d like to see the differences in style between players of different countries. What tactics/techniques/gameplay can be refined to when you have many top players developing their game full time. What that reveals about the games themselves - character win/loss charts from top competition statistics, for example.
I don’t think that can happen outside of a full-blown professional international organisation - it’s simply not affordable for most people to fly internationally several times a year for a hobby, not to mention school, work and other RL stuff.
Of course, what we’re seeing now in MLG is a very far cry from a “full blown professional international organisation”, and it’s questionable whether FGs or gaming in general will ever reach that level of popularity/money/interest. But that’s the sort of thing I’m interested in.
Here’s the thing about eSports. It’s not a sport because you ain’t moving around at all. It’s eSports because it’s got such setups like leagues & tournaments & what not that supposedly mirrors Sports. But eSports is a shitty term because eSports is trying to be like Sports. It’s been said many times & I wholeheartedly agree eSports is a really dumb term in trying to mirror the actual thing, that is Sports.
Why not just call it Gaming? It’s short, to the point, no confusion at all. Sure call it Competitive Gaming, and now you have a long ass name to remember. But now, you have just Gaming. Now you can market Gaming as something cool to do, something you can aspire to become, something that’ll make your peers look up to you, blahblahblah (of course not at this point in time, but in the future this could definitely be the case).
BTW, remember how people were all up in arms about calling poker a Sport? Poker of all people, where you sit your ass down and think for the whole day. Poker is not a sport, never was, never is and never will because you sit your ass down all day. It’s the dumbest argument ever.
Think of it as a scale. 0 = neutral. Positive = like. Negative = hate. Thus, your answer would be, "I like pro sports but I hate esports."
It’s not that difficult. If you can’t see past petty semantics then you should reconsider bringing up the topic of intelligence.
Besides, I’m really only interested in the subset of people who vehemently hate professional video gaming, but enjoy professional sports / traditional gaming. Because the point of this thread is to explore what the difference is in their minds.