Roborant: entry

So, here’s my rundown on the ‘Are pro gamers athletes?’ question raised by Granite recently.

Well… let’s start with one point about pro gaming, before getting into the meat of the problem. Granite mentions people “excitedly talk[ing] about SC” as if it were a real sport. Now, from the audience perspective I don’t think there is any real difference. Whether it’s the Super Bowl or the WCG finals, I’ll be watching it from my computer chair with a bottle of water and a bag of M&Ms. They are both just games that I could never play as well as the people putting their skills on display, and I will never, never, see either of them played live by ‘world class’ players.

When it comes to the term ‘athlete’, I’d say that he’s mostly correct. I think that the term intrinsically associates itself with people engaging in physical activity. That is definitely a basic ingredient of the phrase, and it is also a defining factor in what makes something a ‘sport’, as a specific subset of games. All sports are games, and all athletes are players (or gamers), and the reverse is not necessarily true.

However.

I don’t think that there’s a clear-cut line, and therefore the terms themselves are what cause confusion. Hockey players and SC players are definitely on different ends of a spectrum, but there is plenty of grey between them. I mean, where do you put professional arm wrestlers? They are also people honing particular skills in a game which is physical. But would you call them athletes or gamers? Let’s face it, having super huge arms really won’t take you that far in life (outside of the ‘sport’), and they aren’t really increasing your health in any meaningful sense. And a big part of Granite’s reason for not calling pro gamers ‘athletes’ is that games do not improve your body or your health.

What about this? It’s an Olympic sport. You’re telling me these people are ‘real’ athletes who ‘actually work… to compete in their sport of choice’?

And these dudes. Also an Olympic sport. All of them are considered professional athletes. A large part of their sport involves standing as still as possible for long periods of time.

But to return to an above point, once you get a certain bit above average fitness, you’re not really increasing your life expectancy or anything else health related anyway. You’re just pushing your body to get better and better at a more and more limited skill set (which, reduced to those terms, is not that far from what pro gamers do), and you’re radically increasing your chance of having a serious injury. Aaaaaand the principal of dominishing returns means that you need to work harder and harder just to keep your head above the water, let alone improve.

The obvious exception here is the cardiovascular exercise most athletes do. But again, get past a certain point and you might live to 85. Just with no knees. And many sports are not that cardio-oriented. While running and swimming are wonderful cardio exercise, both sports have a huge percentage of athletes focused on sprints, which are anaerobic exercise (since they don’t really tax your oxygen intake, your heart doesn’t need to improve as much as it could). In the NHL you will probably only play on the ice for 3 minutes before being rotated off again.

Which makes for another grey area because it is in pro gamers’ interests to perform physical training. Good cardio health can really help you keep calm during any tense situation. Additionally, spending hours and hours in ‘training’ at the PC or console will give you repetitive strain injuries. Those can only be avoided by carefully honing form (in much the same way that a musician would to avoid similar injuries). You might also resort to specialized equipment such as wrist braces to deal with the increased load on your carpal tunnels, just as many athletes will use braces and tensor bandages to compensate for increased load on major joints in order to keep playing. Although for that matter, your special equipment should also include all your IO devices (And I’ll touch on input devices again farther down), your chair and your desk.

And by Granite’s reasoning, nutrition should be at least as important to pro gamers as it is to ‘real’ athletes if the gamers want to be considered athletes. Sitting in front of a screen all day will make you ‘larger and lazier’, if you don’t watch what you eat. Since there is less time in the day for the pro gamer to devote to calorie burning exercise, the gamer needs to be even more careful than the athlete. Not to mention that a good diet keeps memory and cognition at their finest.

Of course, we know that most pro gamers are not this careful.

So why?

I’d say that the easiest answer is that pro gaming is not yet ‘a culture’, or at least anything approaching a mainstream one here in the west. And I’d say that the main reason for that is that it is still too hard to associate a face with a game. Players still get sponsorships, sure. But how many pro gamers’ faces can you recall right now? For me the answer is zero. How many ‘real’ athletes’ faces can you picture? I’m not a dedicated follower of any sport, and I can picture at least 10 without trying.

So, let me say 2 things:

1) One day pro gamers will be accorded the same status as athletes in the west (I can only assume that they hold that status in South Korea). When that day comes, they will not look anything like you or I. They will be fit, with gelled hair and all the other bullshit.

But I don’t think that that day can come before:

2) A revolution in input devices/methods. I know that Brendon wrote something about this a while ago. This might be the article, but I can’t remember. It seems to be from a long time ago, possibly before I was reading his blog regularily. Anyway, I don’t think that anyone will be taken seriously as an athlete while manipulating a mouse and keyboard.

So it’s interesting that Granite caps his article off with a reference to the closest thing to a revolutionary interface that we have: The Wii. Now, I’m with Wolfgang on the Wii basically being a sugar-coated novelty item (please don’t leave any comments about that. It isn’t the focus of the post), but it is a step in the right direction. I think that pro gamers will get more cool (and mainstream and rich) the more that they are able to customize their gameplay. And having a more personal interface with the machine is a good way to get there (obviously more in-game customization would be helpful as well, and the Miis are… sort of doing that… not really).

Tangent: Should DDR be considered a sport sooner than SC? DDR fits the definition much better than SC, and the major difference is the input method.

Anyway, it’s also important to note that by adding more and more motion to the game interface, we emlinate the very problem with which we began: Video games making you fat and lazy versus sports making you big and toned.

There. That’s why I couldn’t just leave a comment. I know there’s no real conclusion, but I just really want to sleep.

Epilogue: Pro athletes are douchebags.

They’ve spent their entire lives being given free rides in other areas of importance because they’re so fucking good at throwing a ball. They get laid all the time. The best ones are elevated to places of fame and paid incredible ammounts of money. Yes, what they do does take skill, but does anyone here not remember high school? There were fellas there who shouldn’t even have graduated, but never had to worry about a thing. Many of them got really nice scholarships for it.

I’m certainly not beholden to those fuckers for anything, and I didn’t think Granite was either. I’m not trying to start a class war here, but I could really give a shit if anything I do demeans guys who are constantly told that their sports are more important than basic academic achievements and that they are more important than other human beings.

I’m not saying pro gamers aren’t douchebags either, but I doubt most of them get tattoos of their favourite games, or go out expecting to fuck any girl they meet. Or get short-listed for co-op jobs in Kitchener-Waterloo so that they can play out the season without having to commute.

Pax.