“Video Gamers compete in huge arenas, cheered on by thousands of screaming fans, with millions of dollars in prize money at stake,” said a 343 Industries worker, who also helps in gaming competitions, you also get a trophy. Only the top teams battle it out for a chance to become the best, which sounds exactly like professional sports that we broadcast on television. Video games create focus, takes codification, and skill in order to become a real professional at it.

Video games should be considered a sport because it takes teamwork and coordination if you want to be able to win. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition for sports is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment,’ and video games have all of those qualities. If we take the video game, Halo 5: Guardians and observe the main objective of one of its game modes “Team Arena,” on multi player, you can see that it glorifies competitive teamwork and strategies to complete an aim, just as many other sports such as football, soccer, or baseball.

Video games should be considered a sport because even if it doesn’t train you physically, it trains you mentally. With video games, to play competitively, you to need focus and to predict  your opponent’s moves. So the difference could only be that one is through the body and the other is through the mind.  Physical sports and Esports (electronic arts) have a lot in common along with intense training.

Video games should be considered a sport because we also consider Chess and Poker games as sports. to the International Olympic Committee, Chess has been considered a sport since the year of 2000 and Poker is considered by the International Mind Sports Association in 2010. Both of these “sports” are considered mind sports and use strategy and skill in order to win. Only difference I see is Poker and Chess is played on a board and video games played virtually.

You may think that video games takes absolutely no skill and you aren’t really doing much, but it’s more than that. Video games are a piece of entertainment, but actually take work compared to other things like music or television, because you really need to focus.

If we push video games into the competitive aspect, we can understand how video games are close to actual sports, minus the physicality. We should critique these other mind games with the same criteria as video games, Video games aren’t dying any either, console sales are higher than the previous console generation and is one of the biggest forms of entertainment I know. It’s quite ridiculous that we don’t consider competitive video gaming as a sport from the similarities gamers face in competitions.