Why Is Competitive Gaming A Real Sport

Competitive Gaming a Real Sport

In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game, it was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong, (Tretkoff 1995). Ever since video games have been talked about throughout the years. There have been multiple discussions about video games which can vary from "do violent video games contribute to youth violence" to "glitches in video games". Though, a topic that has been overlooked quite often is whether video games should be grouped into the category of sports as well. Just like sports, competitive gaming requires some amount of talent in the form of reaction time or critical thinking abilities, and require hours of practice and

The difference is that StarCraft is considered an RTS (Real Time Strategy) game. This means that there are no turns. Unlike Chess, where either side gets time to evaluate the current field of play and make a single move accordingly, and RTS has both player building and maintaining a base and constructing an army to attack and destroy their opponent's base. Time is constantly moving. The challenge is managing your time while trying to outsmart and outmaneuver your opponent. It takes not only a strategic mind, but a fast mind, too, to come out on top. This means that it requires much more mental fortitude than your standard game of Chess. As for physical activity, a player's speed must be taken into account. A faster and better trained player can input more commands per minute than their opponent, which can grant a strategic edge during a match, but this requires twitch reactions, which can be straining, and has caused injury in the past. In all, it is a much more challenging and athletic game then Chess because the amount of reflex and coordination that it takes to play this game is both physically and mentally exhausting. With that in mind, if Chess is officially recognized as a sport, competitive gaming could be considered as

However, this isn't necessarily true anymore. Hence to new technology, new consoles are being created that require physical activity such as the Wii and Xbox Kinect. A week after Nintendo's Wii debuted in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that the gaming console was leaving some users as sore as the gym often does (Schmidt 2007). Previous consoles, like the Ps1 and Xbox, would just require people to press buttons while sitting on the couch just to be able to play the video games. Of course, that changed when the gaming industry, Nintendo, introduced the new motions sensors into the Wii console. It was the first console that required people to move around to be able to virtually play the game. For example, in Wii sports, a game that came with the Wii console, people had to mimic the motions used in real life sports such as bowling, tennis, golf, baseball, and boxing to be able to play the video games. On the downside, the Wii was known to be easily " hacked" because in some games the motion sensor just required the Wii control to be moved up and down just to play the games. This resulted, with many people sitting down on the couch, but instead of just pressing buttons, they would just move their hands up and down. Still, the Wii wasn't one hundred percent physical like it was hoped to be, but it inspired future