A Rebuttal For eSports

Recently there was an article that went up titled My problem with eSports and after reading it, I noticed that I felt about the same way towards real sports as he did about eSports. Throughout my life, I've loved playing football. My dad is a coach and I played it during my formative years, from Atom all the way to Midget. I couldn’t get enough of it but the actual act of watching it never really caught my attention. And this goes for most sports: I just never really found it very fun.

This changed slightly when I started watching professional League of Legends, like Adam said in his article. I first started off watching streams to get better. I had heard a lot of streamers studied VoD’s (Video on Demand) of their games to see mistakes and strategies used by their opponents, similar to the way other sports teams might do it. So I figured why not learn from the “best” and see what I can pick up. Overtime I grew to like and enjoy the streamers.

The first streamer I ever started to watch outside of attempting to better myself was Dyrus. Now Dyrus has been around for a long time in the competitive scene and it’s weird to say but I’ve seen him develop over time and become a better player, eventually establishing himself as a dominant force in the League community. The weird part is this is exactly like following the career of a college football player. You see there are a lot of similarities between eSports and real sports, aside from the physicality. There's really not that much different and I think that's why so many people gravitate towards eSports. If you ask a sports fan there’s something innately fun about watching a good game even if you're not invested in the teams; if it’s a good back and forth it’s fun to watch. The same goes for League of Legends: you can watch two teams of unskilled nobodies go at it and if they know what they're doing, the games are incredible to watch. Streaming has made this extremely accessible for the fanbase. At any given moment you can go onto Twitch and see actual competitive League of Legend play, which isn’t as easy with all sports.

The biggest factors though for me are the teams and the players. Professional League of Legends is broken up into five major divisions. There's the North American division (NA LCS), the Europeans (EU LCS), the Korean Championship League (OGN), the Chinese League (LPL) and lastly, the south-east Asian group Garena Premier League (GPL). These divisions each have their own stable of teams all playing against one another during the regular season fighting for the top spots to go to worlds, while at the same time there's also the Challenger division.

When you think about Challenger, consider it the minors to the majors and it’s built up of several teams all jockeying for a spot in the majors. The top twenty teams that climb the ladder in-game are pitted against each other weekly and accumulate wins and losses. After the regular season finishes, the top three teams go up against the bottom three teams in an attempt to knock them out of the LCS (League Championship Series) and take their places. This is honestly one of my favourite aspects of the competitive scene as it allows you to see teams come and go, and it keeps the game from becoming stale. If a team is on a massive losing streak there’s consequences; it forces the players to recognize their position and strive to better themselves or get relegated and have to fight their way back.

The last thing—which I think is the most important—is the viewer to pro interactions that go on in eSports. In eSports there’s not even remotely as much money as in traditional sports, which makes sense, but it forces the players to look for alternative sources of income, which basically means computer equipment sponsorships and streaming. The latter portion leads a lot of players to have great relationships with the community because you're never gonna see a professional hockey player practicing and simultaneously interacting and entertaining a crowd, which is what these guys do on a daily basis.

You see, professional League is a job. Professional players have to play eight to twelve hours a day just to stay relevant in the scene. And I’m not trying to say that they lead the hardest life out there, far from it, but it builds camaraderie and friendship between the players and the people who watch them. All of this culminates into these rabid fan bases you see for these teams because the community feels a personal investment in these players. They want to see them succeed because they know that they can do awesome things. I’ve been a fan of Team SoloMid (TSM) since I started watching the LCS and they have these insane fans—and they really are insane. They're the most diehard group of people out there and they constantly just chant TSM over and over again at live competitions. This affects the players: they’ve come out of so many do or die situations as the winners. It's insane to watch and the feeling you get as a fan watching this is the same as watching any other team you like succeed. eSports may not be considered a “real” or a “traditional” sport but like the wrestling fans of my childhood used to say, "It’s real to me damn-it."