eSports FTW! (But No, New York Times, We're Not all Athletes Now)

The New York times had a piece on eSports yesterday (All We Want to Do Is Watch Each Other Play Video Games: Gamers are the new stars. Esports arenas are the new movie theaters.) that wasn't that completely inane, for a change, as so much mainstream games press often is^[1]. It dove a bit into the growing popularity of competative gaming, but especially gaming as a spectator sport. Part of the reason people have noticed is a recent twitch video where Drake and some other celebrities played Fortnite with a popular streamer.

Competative games, where each self-contained match takes a small amount of time (say, 5-30 minutes) are different than other online games (say, MMO's like World of Warcraft). There's no endless grinding for resources and experience: you you get better over time because you are actually getting better at the controls, the game mechanics, strategy and other aspects of "game sense" (a catch-all for things you need to understand in order to win). As I've written in other articles, these games share a lot with what draws people to playing competative sports.

The rise in popularity of watching other people play games also shares a lot with the popularity of watching sports: I like watching sports because I played them, and so I can appreciate the skill and difficulty of what the players are doing. I personally don't watch many youtube or twich videos of people playing, but I've watched some Overwatch League games (Go Gladiators!) and it feels exactly the same as watching hockey or basketball^[2].

Reading about the increase in the number and variety of venues for watching and playing these games is exciting, and stands in sharp contrast to the dystopian fantasy of fiction like Ready Player One, where everyone is physically alone, only coming together online.

When I listen to my son play online with his friends, I'm struck about the similarities to my youth, and how my friends and I interacted while playing sports, hangining out, or even playing Dungeons and Dragons. The same kind of teasing, joking, encouragement and occasional trash talking. Laughter and frustration. Jubilation and disappointment^[3]. For his recent birthday, we set up five gaming PCs, an XBox One, and an Switch on screens in our playroom, and he and his friends had a great time playing together late into the night.

So, yes, I totally get this rise in the popularity of watching games.

The one thing the New York Times article gets wrong is the section headline, down near the end, "We're All Athletes Now." No, we aren't. When we call someone "an athlete" we tend to imply they are athletic, not just that they are "part of a group of people that could, if they wanted, do athletic things." Just because anyone can play games doesn't make everyone "eAthletes", any more than the ubiquitous soccer fields and basketball courts, or the nets many of us have in our backyards, made us all athelets in the past.

Don't believe me, but haven't played these games much? Put in some time on Fortnite, get someone to teach you the controls, and some strategy. You can do it, but it'll be a while before you're something comparable to what we'd call an athlete in the non-digital world.

But so what? While we all can't be eAthletes, just like we can't all be athletes, we can definitely all be players now, just as many of us could be with traditional sports if we wanted to, even as those ubiquitous basketball nets see less and less play time. Certainly, the hoop in our backyard doesn't get used much anymore.