Major League Gaming is the largest organized international league for the world’s fastest growing competitive sport: professional video gaming. MLG’s ongoing professional video gaming tournaments have attracted millions of competitors from over 28 countries in only 3 years, with game tournaments featuring competitive play for Halo 2, Gears of War, Shadowrun, Counter-Strike and many more. The events spark instant celebrities out of the most hardcore video gamers, all of whom strive to win mucho moolah from major prize purses (this year’s first-place team grand prize is $100,000 at the National Championships in Las Vegas this weekend). MLG’s six-season events span eight-months, some of which been televised last year on the USA Network, hosting 16 professional teams and dozens of other semipro and amateur teams. Even ESPN columnists have covered the event in the article, “So you wanna be a professional video game player?“.

Sounds like a major, worldwide sporting event, doesn’t it?

Okay, so we call gaming “professional” and “competitive”, but can we call it a “sport” as well? No doubt, there is a physical side to gaming. Marathon sessions of gaming leave you exhausted; I’m sure all of you have experienced this state at some point in your lives. Gaming can take a toll on us physically if we let it. After all, idle hands are the Devils tools, if you know what I mean.

Still, can competitive gaming be called a sport? What is a sport? Does it really matter? How many more questions can I ask? Anyway, a sport is defined as the following:

sport[spawrt, spohrt]
–noun
1. an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.

MLG columnists Brick and blandestk have given their point and counterpoint on the official MLG blog in their featured opinion editorial, “Is Gaming a Sport?“. Read on for selections from their arguments on both sides of the answer to this question regarding life, the universe and everything.

No, professional gaming is not a sport. While it’s a viable form of competition and, according to some definitions of the word sport, it’s easy to define pro gaming as such, the key to distinguishing viable forms of competition, such as competitive gaming and basketball, from sports is athletic activity. While poker, chess and gaming are viable professional, competitive activities they are dissimilar to sports such as basketball and tennis that require physical exertion.

The fact that gaming is not a “traditional” sport defines it as something else while not taking away at all from what is has in common with a sport.

Some would say that the amount of quick thinking, strategizing and hand-eye coordination involved in competitive gaming makes it have more in common with basketball or baseball than, say, chess or poker. This is a fine line. Whereas in football these activities are done in tandem with running (and thus placing rigorous demands on the cardiovascular system) gaming is done from a sitting position. It’s easy to find a common thread in activities that are competitive and require physical exertion. It is a lot more difficult to find a positive attribute to activities such as poker, chess and gaming, they do share the negative attribute of not requiring any sort of taxing physical exertion. Because of this I think it’s best to continue calling the activity of playing video games competitively “professional gaming” or “competitive gaming” and leave it to the linguists (or another article) to define where it falls in the naming spectrum.

Competitive gaming definitely requires skill, so that portion of the definition is covered. As is the nature oft competitive. The sticky parts come when you ponder competitive gaming vis-a-vis with athletic activities and physical prowess. Does gaming require physical prowess? I suppose that depends on your connotation of prowess. Usually we think of hulking, beastly NBA or NFL stars when we think about physical prowess. The definition, however, cites “exceptional or superior ability, skill, or strength.” MLG professionals aren’t all strong, but they do possess exceptional and superior abilities and skills, namely hand-eye coordination and intelligence. Not to mention, the original definition of sport requires skill or physical prowess, which means one or the other, at least.Is gaming an athletic activity? At the risk of leaning too much on the dictionary, the denotation for athletics is “Activities, such as sports, exercises, and games, that require physical skill and stamina.” As we can see, it seems athletics can cover activities and games that require physical skill and stamina, both features of competitive gaming.

Further, if we revisit the original dictionary entry, included in the list of sports is bowling, hunting, and fishing. Do these activities take more athleticism than gaming? Sure, you can argue that walking around in the forest to hunt requires more physical activity than gaming, but since when has hunting been viewed as an aerobic workout? Plus, I think we all know a lot of fat bowlers. The real argument comes when you discuss golf. Can anyone sincerely question whether Tiger Woods is a sports figure? Golf requires physical skill, but it does not do much for a cardiovascular system. Still, most people consider golf a sport. If golf, bowling, fishing, and hunting are sports, then so is competitive gaming.

Somewhere along the line we decided as a society that a sport means sweating off ten pounds in order to qualify. To me, poker, chess, bowling, and gaming are all sports. They all require stamina, skill, and intelligence to succeed. Most gamers probably couldn’t run a marathon, but most runners probably can’t BXR in a split second, either. Different “games” require different skills and the way in which they tax the body might differ, but they are all sports.

I love traditional American sports as much as the next guy, but I think it’s time we stopped viewing sports so narrowly. That includes competitive gaming. It’s a sport, in definition and in practice.

So what do all the readers in MEGATONik land think? What’s your answer?