Competitive gaming has been a thing for quite a while now. Ever since video games became popular in the old arcades, gamers would strive to have their three initials or letters at the top of the high score rankings. But those gamers would not have been what we would recognize, or refer to, as athletes.
Today, esports has broken free from the confines of just the video game world and become a global phenomenon. There are a number of reasons why this has been the case. But now titles and gamers can be found on TV, featured on countless websites, and even the subject of markets on all the best Florida betting sites.
The entire world of video games has been completely transformed and the line between the worlds of sports and gaming has become blurred. But how did we get to this point where gaming is essentially a sport? And what does the future hold?
The Beginnings
As we have mentioned, there has always been a competitive edge to gaming. But the earliest stirrings of what could be considered a sport – or esports, as it has become known – came in 1972. Stanford University hosted the Spacewar Intergalactic Olympics, in what is now recognized as the first esports competition.
The first official competition wasn’t until 1981 when Atari organized a Space Invaders event in which 10,000 players competed. More events were held throughout the 1980s and then the 1990s saw the introduction of online gaming. This was a revolutionary moment that transformed the esports industry completely.
Spectator Sport
As bandwidth increased, interest in esports and competitive gaming increased, building an ever-growing global community. There were soon millions of gaming fans that wanted to watch as well as play and Twitch appeared at the forefront of the streaming industry.
Twitch’s ability to stream events saw esports grow even further and its acquisition by Amazon in 2014 brought competitive gaming – and gaming as a sport – to an even wider audience. If one of the core principles of “sports” is fans watching events, esports had crossed that line easily.
Global Events
In the same way that the NFL or the NBA have an official fixture schedule, esports now work to a recognized calendar with its numerous leagues and competitions. Just like what we can now call traditional sports, esports and gaming have a tiered structure to determine its champions and top players.
Many of the top esports titles, like Dota 2 and League of Legends, also have high-profile tournaments with huge prize money amounts (and the adulation of the community) up for grabs. These can be seen in exactly the same way as a soccer World Cup or an Olympics, further justifying gaming’s reclassification as a sport in its own right.
Traditional Sports Involvement
In what could be seen as an attempt by traditional sports to remain relevant in an ever-increasing online future, we have also seen it get involved in esports and further grow gaming as a sport in itself. By the end of the 2010s, all major US leagues were holding their own esports tournaments and even player drafts for the best athletes.
Soccer has gone even further. With the FIFA title being one of the most popular games, entire league systems have developed, with existing clubs developing an esports team to represent them in tournaments. Top sports athletes then investing in esports just made the whole enterprise even more successful and potentially more profitable.
Esports at the Olympics
Since esports was included as an event at the 2007 Asian Indoor Games, the idea of gaming becoming part of possibly the most recognizable global sports event – the Olympics – has been eagerly discussed and debated. An aversion to violent games has meant that many of the popular esports titles are not considered. But the desire to appeal to younger generations has kept the International Olympic Committee (IOC) interested.
An online-only event was held during the COVID lockdowns, as traditional sports were forced to postpone all fixtures. But the IOC has resisted calls to include esports in its Summer Games. Instead, a separate Olympics Esports Series event was announced as an annual tournament. It doesn’t seem as if there will be any full integration into the Olympics any time soon but the classification of gaming as a sport alongside football, basketball, and track and field confirms the place of esports in the wider sports world.
Figure 2 Fans watch esports just like traditional sports supporters
The Future of Gaming as a Sport
From a small competition with the prize of a magazine subscription to the multi-million dollar global tournaments of today, the gaming and esports journey towards acceptance as a sport like any other has been relatively quick.
Esports now encompass many of the elements of traditional sports, such as athletes, coaches, training regimes, leagues, broadcasting, and fan culture. When more people tune in to watch a League of Legends event than the Super Bowl, we surely have to accept that gaming can at least be regarded in the same way as we do football, soccer, and basketball.
As for the future, greater integration with the traditional sports world seems inevitable. There will always be some commentators who will never see gaming as a sport in the same way but the younger generations have a different perspective and many have only known gaming in its modern incarnation.
As long as gamers are happy seeing esports as a sport, then surely that is all that really matters.
