E sports compare and contrast paper
Cody Cross
Mrs. Carper
English 12
27 March 2015
E-Sports and Sports: What’s the Difference? Over the past few years people have begun to debate whether e-sports are sports. Both have their differences form each other but are also similar in many ways. The fan base of conventional sport has been rather large for a while now, but e-sports didn’t begin to take off until the early 2000’s. The only country to really accept e-sports as a sport in 2000 was South Korea, but today e-sports competitors are considered athletes in parts of Europe and the United States. The increase in viewership over the last few years has been incredible. To put this in perspective, in June 2011 the first League of Legends word championship was held and got 1.6 million viewers total, but in 2013 they held the third world championship event and this got 32 million viewers overall and 8.5 million concurrent viewers. This is an amazing amount of growth, but is still a fraction of the 114.4 million people who watched the super bowl this year. There are countless similarities between e-sports and sports so I’ll only focus on a few. So what makes a sport a sport? The definition of a sport according to dictionary.com is an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often competitive in nature. Both e-sports and sports require about the same amount skill but time is a completely different story. Amar'e Stoudemire shared in an article that he wakes up at 8 a.m., eats breakfast, then practice for more than three hours a day. A professional League of Legends player will scrimmage for six to eight hours a day and plays even more without their team, adding up to around twelve or more hours of practice each day including weekends. E-sports athletes are able to practice so much because there is not the same amount of strain on their bodies, but there is still a great deal of mental strain that these athletes go through. Sponsorships are huge in both sports and e-sports. Since there is
Mrs. Carper
English 12
27 March 2015
E-Sports and Sports: What’s the Difference? Over the past few years people have begun to debate whether e-sports are sports. Both have their differences form each other but are also similar in many ways. The fan base of conventional sport has been rather large for a while now, but e-sports didn’t begin to take off until the early 2000’s. The only country to really accept e-sports as a sport in 2000 was South Korea, but today e-sports competitors are considered athletes in parts of Europe and the United States. The increase in viewership over the last few years has been incredible. To put this in perspective, in June 2011 the first League of Legends word championship was held and got 1.6 million viewers total, but in 2013 they held the third world championship event and this got 32 million viewers overall and 8.5 million concurrent viewers. This is an amazing amount of growth, but is still a fraction of the 114.4 million people who watched the super bowl this year. There are countless similarities between e-sports and sports so I’ll only focus on a few. So what makes a sport a sport? The definition of a sport according to dictionary.com is an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often competitive in nature. Both e-sports and sports require about the same amount skill but time is a completely different story. Amar'e Stoudemire shared in an article that he wakes up at 8 a.m., eats breakfast, then practice for more than three hours a day. A professional League of Legends player will scrimmage for six to eight hours a day and plays even more without their team, adding up to around twelve or more hours of practice each day including weekends. E-sports athletes are able to practice so much because there is not the same amount of strain on their bodies, but there is still a great deal of mental strain that these athletes go through. Sponsorships are huge in both sports and e-sports. Since there is