One thing my boyfriend and I easily bicker about is my interest in League of Legends. I like to play the game, but I also enjoy watching other people play online. This season, I've dedicated myself to watching both the League of Legends Championship Series as well as the World Championships in support of my favorite team, Team Solomid, and my boyfriend didn't keep his comments to himself when I received the first YouTube alert on my phone notifying me that TSM's first game was going to be streamed in half an hour. Bjergsen, arguably North America's best mid-laner, would be showing himself off on the World's Stage for the first time, and I would get to see it all in real time, however my excitement was met with incredulity from my significant other. For whatever reason, he couldn't understand why I took the game and the championships so seriously. To him, League was just a video game, a way to pass the time until something better to do came up.
League of Legends is an MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) video game developed and published by Riot Games. Players make accounts and are grouped into teams of five (or three or six depending on the game mode) then set against other teams to battle it out for anywhere between 20-60+ minutes. When playing, users operate "champions", pre-made avatars with specific skill sets, and fill particular roles to accomplish the goal of destroying the opposing team's nexus at the heart of the enemy base. The game has 120+ "champions" to choose from as well as three different game maps that determine the way the game is played as well as the objectives of the match. Player accounts start out at level one, and, with each game completed, gain experience until level thirty is reached. At that point, players can choose to continue forward into ranked competitive games. Rankings range from Bronze to Challenger with five classes in between. I've been playing League since 2013 when the marksman "Jinx" was released. She was my first "champion" that I purchased (with the in game points won from each match) and since then I've reached level thirty on my main account but never attempted to play for rankings.
For the most part, I follow competitive League the way many people follow the sport/sports that they love. Some people have basketball teams that they love or hate, players whose styles they can't get enough of, and championship tournaments that they wait for eagerly each season, and I have the same relationship with League, however most of the traditional sports fans would deem my delight in watching Bjergsen get a Pentakill on Syndra before flashing into the enemies fountain at the end of the game illegitimate in comparison to their delight at watching Steph Curry sink his fifth three pointer in ten minutes from an impossible angle while being fouled by opposing team's defense. No one wants to acknowledge that video games are a sport of their own, an e-sport to be exact.
The first known video game competition took place in 1972 at Stanford University. It was for the game Spacewar and the grand prize was a year long subscription to Rolling Stone. In 1980 Atari held a Space Invaders Championship and it attracted over 10,000 players from around the country. In 2015, the League of Legends World Championship was viewed by 36 million people, and the grand prize was $1,000,000. Those sort of stakes force competitive play of League out from under the label of "hobby" and into the realm of sports. While the accepted definition of a sport is "an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment", the inclusion of "physical exertion" narrows our understanding of what a sport is far too much in our digital age. Yes, in traditional sports one is likely to exercise their body, but mainly on holistic level. To play a mainstream sport competitively, in search of the expensive contracts and roles in commercials, one would also need to train his/her body to improve their strength, stamina, and overall performance. All of this is necessary for competitive League players, but on a microscopic level.
League players have to train, but you won't find them training for games on treadmills or courts. They have to train their focus, their patience, their mental endurance, and also their comfort with champions. They have to train their fingers, their eyes, and they have to train with each other. While football teams will drill themselves into a haze to get a certain play right, competitive League players will sit for hours at their computers playing nonstop to master maneuvers and get just a step ahead of their opponents. They only real difference between traditional athletes and competitive League players is the venue of their game.
League of Legends is online, imagined, impossible to bring into the physical world, while a baseball, a volleyball, a soccer ball, etc, is undeniably real. For many, this distinction is enough to go on, enough to write League off as undeserving of the following it has garnered, but I would challenge those people, people like my well-meaning but biased boyfriend, to step away completely from their digital life as a consequence to their judgement. If the virtual nature, the intangibility, of a thing makes it unimportant or invalid, then much of their lives would be forfeited because so much of it is spent online, on cellphones or laptops or even televisions. So much of most Americans' lives are unreal and experienced through technology that it only makes sense for e-sports to have arisen. We are in a new day and age. We should be allowed to have sports to match it.