If someone was to tell you about an activity that involves a dedicated community as well as other aspects including teamwork, communication, and practice, your mind would automatically convince you that the activity being discussed is something along the line of sports.

Of course, these characterizations do describe the necessary components to be successful in an activity like a sports, but they also describe something else that can often have a bad reputation but is certainly underrated – video games.

As children, our parents insisted that video games promoted laziness, loneliness, and in some cases could even lead to violent behavior. Many people that play video games are often stereotyped as introverted individuals unable to connect with the outside world.

Being one who has played numerous games for the majority of my life, this is simply not the case.

I began playing video games around the time that I received my first PlayStation 1 in elementary school. These games, now basically unplayable with the implementation of improved graphic display and enhanced response time, consisted of Crash Bandicoot and Pong that I often played with my sister and neighborhood friends.

A few years later with the PlayStation 2, I became a member of a band that consisted of a few of my best friends, my sister, and my mother. The games were Rockband and Guitar Hero that brought us all together each weekend to hone in on our talents.

The most influential piece of technology during my youth was no other than the Xbox 360. The platform it provided was Xbox Live, a way to communicate with others also playing Xbox as well as the ability to have private parties where friends could come together and chat using a headset.

From around seventh grade to the middle of high school, some of the best friends I will ever have were made through experiences on this console playing a number of games including Call of Duty and FIFA.

Around this same time, I became addicted to a new and flourishing concept on YouTube – livestreaming video games. The concept was enormously enhanced and gained popularity with the help of a man named Felix Kjellberg, better known as his online alias Pewdiepie.

Every night, I laid in bed and watched the games he played that seemed to bring me almost more joy than playing the games myself which was also evident by the community that he was able to establish.

Although his YouTube channel is no longer based off of solely gaming, he still remains a controversial public figure on the internet amassing 60 million subscribers on YouTube, an accomplishment no other has even come close to reaching.

In the first paragraph, I discussed characterization including teamwork and practice and how this applies to video games similar to the way it applies to sports. This comes from the now burgeoning gaming league known as eSports. Similar to organized sports such as basketball or soccer, eSports gives serious gamers the opportunity to showcase their talents in competitive video games from first-person shooters such as Call of Duty to battle arena games such as League of Legends or Dota.

Taking up much of the questionnaire surrounding the eSports community is how much money a player or team makes upon winning a tournament or online league and the answer can be up to millions.

This concept of competitive gamers making this much money is often under fire as people can’t seem to grasp the idea of people making money from simply playing video games. One of the main advocates for competitive gaming comes from a member of the Boston Celtics NBA team named Gordon Hayward who began playing games competitively around the same time he began to be recruited for college basketball. He even went on Collin Cowherd to help eliminate the stereotype of professional gamers as they are often perceived.

It isn’t difficult to understand. If a person is great at something, whether it be sports, acting, managing, or even video games, why shouldn’t they be paid for it? The perception that a gamer is one that sits alone in their room to isolate themselves from the outside world is preposterous in almost every case and is a stereotype that I hope is eliminated. Video games have created communities for many that have felt out of place with similar interests as well as provided a platform for many to make a living out of.

Some of my best friendships manifested through gaming, and this is the case for millions of others.