
The Staples Center, an iconic sports entertainment facility that hosts home games for professional basketball teams like the Lakers and Clippers, holds 18,118 people. In 2013, players like future Hall of Famer Kobe Bryant brought swarms of fans in at $85 per seat. However, the last championship to occur in the Staples Center was a League of Legends World Championship between SK Telecom T1 and Royal Club. Tickets for the event went on sale for sixty dollars apiece for viewers to sit and stare at two enormous screens of the game being played with the players from each team sitting below. The tickets sold out in under an hour. What is League of Legends and why is it selling out the Staples Center, a sports complex? League of Legends is the biggest of all eSports, a recognized online competitive video-game with professional teams that are placed in tournaments to win prize money. The eSports community is growing rapidly and critics are knocking it for not being a traditional sport, which is considered an activity that takes physical gifts and skill along with competitive participation. Those in opposition find eSports to be more of a mind game like chess or checkers, lacking physical qualities of 'real' sports like basketball or football. However, eSports should be considered a traditional sport due to the physical qualities needed to compete along with the similar league structure to that of every professional sports association has for its teams within.

Doing a simple google search of the word 'sport' it gave a universal definition, "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others."(topend) All of these traditional sports began as a simple contest that required the participator to have the strength, speed and skills that were better than the opponent in order to be considered the victor. Following these either genetic gifts given to the player or hard work to obtain the skills needed to compete, each player participating followed the same and simple rules to give each side a level playing field. These Simple rules soon turned into specifics and "sports became highly organized with formalized rules and national competition. Sports became commercialized with expert athletes entertaining paying spectators." (Encyclopedia.com) Basketball turned in to the National Basketball Association, baseball to Major League Baseball and football turned into the National Football League with the expert players now professional athletes. Traditional sports revolutionized even further with privately owned teams and sponsorships who invest millions into the players and teams to have their company recognized by the millions of spectators who follow the sport. Traditional sports bring people together "You can go anywhere in the nation, and if you are wearing your team's logo, you are sure to strike up a conversation with other sports fans. It serves as a common ground for people from different states, ethnicities, religions or whatever, to connect on." (Duggan)  These traditional sports have been around for decades and have been able to rise over time to become what they are and that is what people grew up with so that is the only traditional sport that they know. However, many other skill and physically inclined activities are pitching the idea that they are too sports as well but since they were not what a majority grew up they are classified as a hobby. Despite matching the same qualities explained above cheerleading, marching band and eSports are still shunned as being traditional sports along with many other 'hobbies'. But soon people will begin to recognize and accept the qualities of these activities and once more come together and connect on a level that only traditional sports are able to achieve. 

Competitive gaming has been around as long as the creation of video-games themselves. It all began with a United States military project in the '70s that created the "TCP/IPv4 protocol" which is "protocol that rules every LAN event, every Client-Server connection, basically every piece of communication online" (Djuricic). Video-games took flight with the arcade era which consisted of game like Pac-man, Tetris, and Space Invaders in the 80's where the only competition was beating other people who had high scores on the local machine. Doom, a revolutionary game and the original "first person shooter" created a new genre that was introduced in 1993, the game made it possible for the gamers to play multiplayer and cooperative play. Multiplayer is when several players can play in the same environment despite being in different places. With this new internet technology that was connecting people worldwide gaming evolved by creating leagues for competitive tournament play, from the first Cyperathlete Professional League in 1997 to Major League Gaming in 2002. The only profit found in this activity was if the player or team would win the tournament, the worlds considered first professional gamer Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel "earned approximately 450,000$ in cash and prizes from professional competitions, won World Championships in 4 different games and appeared in Time, Forbes and New York Times"(Djuricic) As time went on computer games started to be driven by MOBAs or a Massive Online Battle Arenas with the figurehead being Dota and League of Legends. The companies Riot and Valve, the creators behind these games announced tournaments that had prize pools in the millions. "According to GameSpot, in 2014 Dota 2 Internationals with $10.9 million prize pool exceeded Tour de France ($2.73M), The Masters Golf Tournament ($9M) and Super Bowl 2014 ($9.9M)."(Djuricic) The term eSports was given to these games and they are growing rapidly in player count along with prize pool money for the champions. It came up from a simple idea like nailing peach boxes to an elevated board and throwing a ball into the basket, every traditional sport started off small but with the rise in popularity came the recognition it deserved.

Everyone can tell that the National Football League has a longer history than the biggest eSport League of Legends. However, the growth of American Football compared to League of Legends may shock people. The first intercollegiate game of American football was played on November 6th 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, with 100 spectators watching. On November 25th 1892 approximately 25 years later "American football was played between the Allegheny Athletic Association and Pittsburgh Athletic club" (Aaron) In 1892 the first professional player was paid, by 1920 the NFL was established with 14 teams, by 1960 the AFL established 8 teams, by 1967 the 1st Super Bowl was played and the NFL and AFL merged creating a 20 team league. For all of this to happen to American Football it took approximately 146 years with years of labor strikes and problems. If this timeline was used for League of Legends as far as contracts go the game would be around the 1940s era of football and around 1985 for average viewership. Using statistics and data it is said that even though "League of Legends has only been around for six years, but it is evolving about 12 times as fast as American football did." (Aaron) Football is considered one of the top traditional sports and it took almost 100 years to finally have a sound structure that people could follow, meanwhile League of Legends has only been around for 6 years but the structure is already set and is building up fast.

Manager, Coachers, Starters, Reserve Players, and Referees doesn't this sound like what teams need for professional football? Traditional sports fans would agree but these are just the basic requirements needed for an average professional eSports team. Just like traditional sports the league play has strict rules from how many players can dress for the game and act as substitutions if a main player becomes injured. For example, each NFL team can dress 46 total players, 11 being offensive and 11 defensive starters with at least 1 back up per position. Each League of Legends team has a total of 10 players, 5 starters and 1 back up for every starter that practices with the main players just like spring training in the NFL. These teams train together and work together during the game getting strategic advice from their coaches and captain mid game constantly, doesn't that sound familiar? Furthermore, the average American professional football player practices approximately 5 to 7 hours while MOBA players are up to 8 to 12 hours a day. These video-games tournaments are taken very seriously, just like how every other traditional sport has regulations that keep the playing field on an equal level.

"To appreciate this game to the full you must know something of its background" (Aaron) but first it is necessary to explain the structure of the leading MOBA League of Legends using another top traditional sport, basketball. The NBA or National Basketball Association has 30 teams across the United States and Canada. The teams play each other two times during a season that goes from October to April which culminates in a playoff tournament. This tournament recognizes the two best teams in each conference who go on to play one another in a 7 game series known as the NBA Finals. League of Legends has 20 teams across the United States and Europe, they are split into two divisions based on the continents. The schedule for league play happens around 4 to 5 months out of the year, with playoffs determining the North American and European champions. The winners from each continent advance to the World Championship which consist of other leagues from around the world. The structure of both leagues are very similar, but how about the teams themselves?

The National Basketball Association has each team recognized by the NBA, pretty much an approved group. The League of Legends teams do not actually work in this way, they work even better than the NBA set up. Hundreds of MOBA teams are admitted to major championship events after winning their way through a qualifying challenger series, basically playing their way up the ranks every year to become a recognized group in their game." (The Game Theorists) This system that the MOBAs use recognizes the best overall players democratically compared to the NBA where they force players in an already recognized team before even playing. For MOBAs this would be considered a Meritocracy, the best players get recognized which overall creates better competition. The teams however are similar by the means of sponsorships, for example the Los Angeles Lakers are sponsored by Adidas, Big 5 and Budweiser meanwhile Could 9, a popular MOBA team is sponsored by Alienware, NVidia, and Logitech. A recent article from Fortune magazine explains how "Male millennials are spending a record amount of time watching professional video game tournaments. And Coke, Intel and Nissan are just some of the brands taking advantage."(Gaudiosi) these traditional companies are moving their sponsorships away from traditional sports and are focusing more on eSports campaigns. The reason these companies are doing so is because it is easier to market and is more effective due to the amount of viewership this newfound industry has.

With these big companies seeing the future of eSports to be marketable so do people like Rick Fox, Shaquille O'Neal, and Mark Cuban along with many other big names. Rick Fox, a three time NBA champion with the Lakers is now the creator of the Echo Fox a League of Legends team. Fox went on to say "It's a $750 million business, and in a couple of years it's going to be a $2 billion industry. It mirrors everything I've experienced in my own professional sport environment, and so after doing enough research and doing my due diligence, I put together a team that's obviously bigger than just myself." (Erzberger). Shaquille O'Neal teamed up with Alex Rodriguez and Jimmy Rollins to support NRG eSports a League of Legends and Counter Strike group that is pretty well known. Finally, the media mogul Mark Cuban and owner of the Dallas Mavericks an NBA team "invested in eSports startup Unikrn (that's unicorn, not uni-kern), a platform currently focused on betting in the growing competitive gaming industry as part of a Series A round of investment worth over $7 million." (Lingle) Along with many more professional athletes these guys understand the validity behind the rapidly growing eSports community that is looking like a worthy investment. If traditional sport athletes are participating in sponsoring and even playing this game why shouldn't it be considered a sport?

When looking at baseball and the players participating, one would find that several of the players are not from the United States and require athletic visas. There are players in other sports like football and basketball with this occurrence but baseball by far has the most players from outside of the country. For these players to compete in the United States they must acquire a P-1 athletic visa, they are "applicable to aliens entering the United States to perform at a specific athletic competition as an athlete, individually or as part of a group or team, at an internationally recognized level of performance." (immihelp) On opening day in Major League Baseball "The 230 players born outside the U.S. (26.5 percent) come from the pool of 868 players"(Release) most of the players being big names like Robinson Cano and David Ortiz. If these visas were not legitimately passed by the government of the United States than baseball along with other traditional sports would not be the same. About a decade ago it was almost impossible for the United States to host an eSports competition due to foreign competitors not being able to acquire visas. But in 2013 the United States made a seminal move to recognize eSports players as professional athletes providing them with athlete visas like the ones baseball players and Olympians receive. Now, one of the world's most influential governments recognizes that eSports players are professional athletes.

Though there are many influential people and governments that support eSports as an on the rise sport, there are still those who are not convinced. The figure-head of opposition is ESPN president John Skipper who said "It's not a sport  --  it's a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition ... .Mostly, I'm interested in doing real sports," (Tassi) Along with others who feel that eSports cannot be a sport due to the Artificial Intelligence coded into the game that is able to beat real players, traditional sports do not have that yet. Many people also believe that video-games do not show enough physical exertion that traditional sports due and that they can be compared to writing an academic essay. Another argument is that since we consider the best players in eSports athletes why do we not consider the best employees at a banking firm athletes of their business? Finally, the biggest opposition to why eSports should not be a sport is that is does not require the same physical attributes that traditional sports need, people feel it is less stressful to do and can be played longer in comparison to traditional sports.

MOBAs are already free to play and the rules are relatively simple along with their easy accessibility to the most casual players. Though personal computers capable of running these games are not as popular in the household in comparison to console based games, eSports has taken steps to diminish that gap. Making the game easily accessible and not intimidating is the goal, where anyone can play just like how anyone can toss a ball around or shoot a ball into a net. The game Smite has done that, with characters based off popular mythological gods make them easily recognizable and more relatable with visual styles that are more console based games. I feel this makes it better for people like myself to connect to the game I am watching, I see the professional players using the same equipment I have at home, it is like seeing the basketball shoes I have being worn by the professional player on television. If these professional gamers can use the same equipment to win games for their team than why can't I do the same thing?

In conclusion, the definition of a sport fluctuates depending on how society is structured at the time. Decades ago eSports would not even be considered a sport but due to societal change it has been given a chance. Nothing over time stays the same just like how the strike zone in baseball is still changing despite the game being over 100 years old. "An activity we perceive as sport in one context may not be in another context, sport takes on many forms and our notion of "what is sport" is continually changing."(Richards) So when John Skippers decided that spelling bees, the world series of poker, and cup stacking should be aired on ESPN rather than eSports it is just what he feels a sport really is. His thoughts may be vastly outdated but anyone over the age of thirty five or forty mostly agree with him that eSports is in fact not a sport. However, those who are up to date on societal norms like Mark Cuban and company recognize that the majority of the social interpretation of eSports is that this sport could be in contention with those of traditional sports. At the end of the day it is all about making a connection with your audience whether it is on the football field, basketball court or in a five vs five digital arena. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"(Gretzkey) and  bridging this gap on the dichotomy between traditional sports and eSports has a greater shot now than ever before, so why not give it a chance?

