Project 2 Final

Alain Mayo

ENC2135

Mat Wenzel

1 August 2017

Click Clack, I hear that distinct sound of gamers hitting their keyboards and mice in rapid succession as they are nearing victory in their online battles, I hear laughter and chatter over at the televisions that are surrounded by gamers enjoying themselves by playing casual console games. It feels like a whole different atmosphere than anywhere else at Florida State University. All the people that were here at the Askew Student Life Center enjoying their time gaming online or offline with friends intrigued me. I never seen a large community of gamers gathered at one location before. It seemed like a place where gamers can come hang out with other gamers in a social environment without being judged by anyone outside. I can relate to these people, and once I discovered this location on campus, I wanted to become involved in it and learn more about its purpose.

The Askew Student Life Center is home to FSU’s Cyber Café, which is a hub for gamers to come and hang out in a socially orientated environment while having access to several gaming consoles and gaming PCs. With all this unique gaming equipment, the Cyber Café attracts all kinds of gamers that attend FSU. I visited the Café a few times every week to check out what was going on and played some video games with one of my high school friend. Every visit I notice something in the Café, and that is the attendance and the different type of gamers that attend. Besides playing games myself, I truly enjoy spectating. Each time I visit I notice that around ten people are their hanging out, and as time progresses, more people start showing up. Video gaming itself is a very general topic, similar to sports. They both categorize things within themselves. In video gaming, you have two main diverse groups, one consists of casual gamers, and the other consists of competitive gamers. I enjoy spectating gamers in the café to see everyone’s different play style and what games everyone is interested in. You can tell a lot about a person just by seeing what games they enjoy playing. I find myself striking up conversation with those who play the same game or the same genre as me. I enjoy spectating the casual gamers play fun party games such as Mario Party, and Super Smash Bros. My favorite is watching the competitive gamers play on the PCs. You can feel the intensity as they focus on pushing the correct keys on their keyboards and timing their clicks on their mouse perfectly to be as effective as possible. These games are unique in my opinion, anyone can play them, but few people master them. These competitive games take practice and learning to be considered good at it. That’s why I prefer watching these competitive players play, because they spent their time practicing these games to be good at them. As I spectate a gamer play League of Legends, I can see him stress over the decisions they make in game. You can tell he has experience with how familiar is with the game and the call outs he makes to command to his in game team. The whole fun aspect is turned into seriousness and a competition to achieve victory.

That leads me into my questions. Why does such a massive university, have such a small gaming community? What makes competitive video gaming different from a traditional sport that everyone is familiar with in this country? Can and should video games be considered a sport? The main argument that is made in the classification debate on video games is that video games lack true physical exertion. Video games don’t require physical exercise and conditioning that a football or basketball player requires for their sport. People argue that video games don’t have that same team dynamic that traditional sports carry. These people who view video gaming this way, are uneducated in todays competitive video gaming scene. These people look at gamers as lazy people who don’t go outside to play “real” sports. Competitive gaming is huge today and it has changed immensely from what it was ten years ago (Hamari). These qualifications that people say video gamers don’t have such as physical exertion is completely false. ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is one of the largest sports broadcasting networks today. ESPN has broadcasted all kinds of sports, including a very well known board game known as chess. Chess requires deep knowledge of the game and strategy, which is what is required for a competitive video game (Ratto). Once again, the other side of the argument can argue that chess being broadcasted on ESPN does not make it a sport, since it is called “Entertainment AND Sports Programming Network”. I struggled finding a counter argument for video games being a sport, until I found something that debaters on both side miss. What is a “sport”? Merriam-Webster defines sport as “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” That brings me back to the physical exertion argument behind video games. Video gamers are prone to joint injury and wrist injuries from intense mouse movements and rapid finger tapping on a keyboard. If someone can physically hurt himself or herself playing video games, then they’re had to clearly have been some sort of physical exertion. Video gaming continues to apply to the rest of the definition as well. It involves skill and it is not something where someone can just sit down for the first time and beat someone who has far more experience than the other person. It takes time and practice to be familiar and good at that particular game. Video games also involve teamwork just like the definition implies. There are so many different kinds of games, the big competitive ones, Dota 2 and League of Legends, are played in a five versus five style for an objective both teams are trying to complete, which is defeat the enemy team (Funk). Both of the games have a huge fan base behind them, which satisfies the last part of the definition since video games are entertaining.

So why is professional gaming not as publicly know here in the states? Sadly, professional gaming is not as common compared to other countries. The professional gaming scene in Europe is so massive that according to San Diego International Law Journal, the European Union passes the first competitive video game anti-doping policy. Professional gamers are being treated in a manner that professional athletes would. Drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin have been banned to prevent gamers to have an edge at majors under the Electronic Sports League (ESL) over in Europe (Stivers).

When looking at colleges specially, we can see all kinds of sports played on the college level. We should see the same thing for professional video gaming. FSU in particular will benefit from it greatly similarly to football and how it’s a huge staple here on campus. California has often been the home of entertainment for many years and has recently adopted professional video games into its ranks. Today, California often hosts many large tournaments yearly that solely relate to professional video games. In fact, just last year the League of Legends Season 3 Championship netted more than 32 million viewers in the Laker’s Staples Center (McCormick). It should also be noted that McCormick states that the League of Legends Season 3 Championship was on par with Felix Baumgartner’s ‘Jump from outer-space’ and the Superbowl XLVII. The massive viewer count of this event is no doubt the largest in the professional video games history yet and it truly reflects the ever growing professional video game scene and its potential to grow into athlete culture. In addition, professional video game has also found home in many of the Californian universities. Ironically, Californian universities like UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC Davis have hosted competitions that solely relate to the video gaming scene (Young). Timothy Young from TEDTalk UcIrvine says, “Waves of nerds would literally line up and hang with one another to watch this event. And no, I’m not talking about a football event but an event that features a video game”. It is impressive not only to see that a single professional video game event has attracted just as much viewers as the Superbowl XLVII, but the fact that many Californian universities are slowly branching out and accepting, what many would call, nerd culture. The popularity of video games in the U.S. is by no means small and is constantly growing.

In the past, video games have often been overlooked as a potential candidate for athlete culture. While the popularity of professional video gaming grows immensely worldwide, the money from tournaments and its players puts it on a similar level for athletes. In the world, there are many professional athletes who play sports for a living; the same can applied to professional video game athletes. Professional video game is no different than regular sports, as in they both require phenomenal knowledge and skill to play at a professional level. In addition to the requirement of expertise, professional video gaming is also a staple way for some players to earn money for a living similarly to professional athletes in sports. Like many professional sports, professional video gaming often has large tournaments, some of which pack large prize pools. For example, the same League of Legends Season 3 Championship that netted 32 million viewers had a large prize pool of 1 million dollars (McCormick). On the subject of large prize pools, Dota 2, a popular game made by Valve, has an estimated 1.6 million USD prize pool just from a single tournament known as The International 2011 (Taylor). The possibility of earning one million dollars from a single tournament, is nothing to look past and is similar to the rewards that sports offer. Players can live off of tournament earnings and sponsorship, take for example Lim Yo-Hwan a retired South Korean cyber athlete who has lived off of professional video gaming (Taylor). Information given from T.L Taylor estimates that Lim Yo-Hwan makes roughly $500,000 USD annually through professional video gaming. Although tournaments can supply players with large sums of money, a majority of the money made by cyber athletes is composed of sponsors. In professional video gaming, professional cyber athletes earn a majority of their money through sponsors like Razer, Logitech, and Steelseries (Taylor). The annual earnings by cyber athletes is no doubt a joke and can be a staple source of monetary income. The potential of earning almost half a million dollars through sponsors alone makes professional video gaming a clear example of the potential that it has for becoming the next big sport within athlete culture. On the subject of cyber athletes, the living conditions of those involved in the professional video gaming scene is no doubt identical to professional sports. For cyber athletes, making professional teams live together in a simple environment known as a ‘gaming house’ is no doubt the best way for athletes to improve (Taylor). A gaming house is not exactly what it sounds like but is simply a house full of computers, TV’s, keyboards, and any other gaming peripheral that allows players to master their gameplay (Feurer). As quoted from Alan Feurer, “Like sport stars everywhere, professional level gamers need a place to practice, and for the high-tech athletes of the Evil Geniuses - the Yankees of the video gaming world - that place is the Lair, a sock-strewn tract house on the ordinary side street in the breezy island city of San Francisco”. Gaming houses are no doubt the stadium that are necessary for cyber athletes to improve and is a clear reflection of why professional video gaming has the ability to integrate itself into athlete culture. In the process of professional video gaming growing as a whole, official organizations have recognized the potential of making professional video gaming a legitimate sport. We should view professional video gaming the same way at FSU. We are slowly progressing to where one day, we would have division one games such as League of Legend and Dota 2.

Works Cited

Feuer, Alan. "Grooming the Champions of the Keyboard." New York Times, The New York Times Company,

28 Sept. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/sports/grooming-the-champions-of-the-keyboard.html.

Funk, John. "MOBA, DOTA, ARTS: A brief introduction to gaming's biggest, most impenetrable genre."

Polygon, Vox Media, 2 Sept. 2013, www.polygon.com/2013/9/2/4672920/

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Hamari, Juho and Max Sjöblom. "What Is Esports and Why Do People Watch It?." Internet Research, vol. 27, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 211-232. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1108/IntR-04-2016-0085.

McCormick, Katherine E. "Time to Be Grown-Ups about Video Gaming: The Rising Esports Industry and the Need for Regulation." Arizona Law Review, vol. 57, no. 3, Sept. 2015, pp. 823-847. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=110216612&site=ehost-live.

Stivers, Colby. "The First Competitive Video Gaming Anti-Doping Policy and Its Deficiencies under European Union Law." San Diego International Law Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, Spring2017, pp. 263-294. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=123744799&site=ehost-live.

Taylor, T. L. Raising the Stakes E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. MIT Media

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Young, Timothy. "E-sports, the future of competition: Timothy Young at TEDxUCIrvine." YouTube, 4 May 2012,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPoxgvaKrTs.