
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 competing in competitions. 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'. People will begin to recognize and accept the qualities of these activities and be able come together again and connect on a level that one point only traditional sports were 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 1970s 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 1980s 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. 

Time went on and computer games started to be driven by MOBAs or a Massive Online Battle Arenas with the figureheads being Dota and League of Legends. A MOBA is a real-time strategy game where the user controls a single character on one of the two teams. A lot goes into these massive online battle arenas when it comes to gameplay but the primary objective is to destroy the opposing teams' mains structure, with assistance from teammates and artificially intelligent units set on specific paths. Ultimately, the winner is determined by destroying a set of towers to reach the main tower and the first to destroy that tower is crowned the winner. League of Legends averages a player count of over 30 million players daily, why is this game so popular amongst personal computer gamers? For starters they have a low barrier to enter and start playing considering like League of Legends most MOBAs or free to play. These games are also team based and this gives friends the ability to play together on a team against possibly other teams of friends. The amount of skill needed is important as the player continues to level, which motivates the player to want to get better and do well, which means they would need to log more hours into the game for experience. These MOBAs are also able to be run on low end machines making it more accessible to people who don't have computers devoted to gaming. 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.

The National Football League obviously has a longer history than the biggest eSport League of Legends by approximately 140 years. The first intercollegiate game of American football was played on November 6th 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, with 100 spectators watching giving football the kick start it needed. In 1920, 51 years after the first game colligate game was played the NFL was established with 14 teams and by 1967 the 1st Super Bowl occurred and is an iconic event that most Americans watch every year. American Football took approximately 146 years to become solidified creating a game that was for the most part stable, however the present day NFL is still struggling to find the perfect set of regulations for its players. If this timeline was for League of Legends the viewership for an average professional match would be the same as the 1985 season in the National Football League, this does not take into account the Super Bowl and the Championship Series. 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 may be 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 is already well off when it comes to the complex structure needed of a big time industry. However, the lack of awareness of League of Legends to the majority of the population is hurting its bid to becoming what people consider a traditional sport.

Building off the rules and regulations foundation came the structure of every professional team requiring managers, coaches, starters, reserve players, and referees. Traditional sports fans agree that all sports require these positions but these are also just the basic requirements needed for an average professional eSports team. Just like traditional sports the league play for League of Legends has strict rules that every team must follow it makes the game universally even. For example, each NFL team can dress 46 total players, 11 being offensive and 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 and these back-ups practice with the starters consistently just like the training camps in the NFL. The average American professional football player practices approximately 5 to 7 hours while MOBA players are up to 8 to 12 hours a day focusing on their next matchup and strategies. During game time MOBA teams are getting strategic advice from their coach just like how a quarterback in the NFL is connected audibly to the head coach or offensive coordinator. But those who do not follow eSports most likely do not realize how much is going on during the game along with the complexity of the basic rules set up by the league commissioners. 

These results occur very often, where people usually knock new things before they do their research but "to appreciate this game to the full you must know something of its background" (Aaron). The structure of the leading MOBA League of Legends using another top traditional sport, basketball which started up 26 years after the NFL. 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, an approved group that is qualified to compete in the league. The League of Legends teams do not actually work in this way, they work even better than the NBA set up. 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. Hundreds of League of Legends 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). 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? And what is stopping others from seeing League of Legends the way athletes and media moguls do?

With eSports growing rapidly and top tier people investing thousands in this community it will gain considerable attention. This attention is from the government especially when it involves aliens entering the country to compete for the grand prizes being given out at these events. For example, 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.

Even though there has been no media outlet or celebrity personality that has risen to challenge John Skipper, it can be said that his argument on the matter is vastly outdated. For example, if I was the use a social media site like Twitter to express my opinion on the matter and tried to tweet at John Skipper my rebuttal it wouldn't be possible; why? Because John Skipper does not have a Twitter, as I said a little behind the times. Besides just calling out his age John Skipper stated that he is only interested in real sports, but on ESPN they televise the World Series of Poker which has no hallmarks of traditional sports. Team based competition? No. Precision? Not in the traditional sense. Athletes in peak physical form? Not at all. Also in ESPNs programming lineup are about spelling bees, championship cup stacking and scrabble competitions. However, if you are looking for more of the S in ESPN (Entertainment and Sport Programming Network) then looking at MOBAs would be much closer than any other program listed above. Also, the physical exertion that an eSports athlete undergoes may not match that of a traditional sports player but if watered down they both are the same. These MOBA players are in peak physical form with heighten reflexes and clicking and typing speeds that are strenuous on the brain and hands. As silly as it sounds that eSports injuries are possible, does it sound any less silly than breaking a leg trying to catch a ball to score some imaginary points?

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. The definition of a sport now can be anything that involves competition at a heightened level that has basic rule structures and athletes participating. 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).You are the one taking the shot, 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?

