Esports: Difference on Display

 I play competitive video games. While I do enjoy sitting down and playing a single player adventure game from time to time to relax, I find the real engaging fun to be in competitive games, where I can outplay or outsmart other people. Maybe this stems from my hypercompetitive nature; I've always strived to be the best at anything I do, and games are no exception. Maybe it stems from the rush of being in a situation that requires fast-paced thinking and acting. In any case, I find that competing in video games is one of the best ways to access easy entertainment and happiness. 

I've played video games for as long as I can remember, beginning with my first Nintendo DS to when I built a computer from parts solely to play games two years. Beginning in seventh grade, however, I found what I consider to be my favorite game of all time - Rocket League. You may have heard of it, but if not, it's pretty simple to understand: soccer with cars. That's it! Three cars (that can also fly) on each team whack a ball around a field trying to score it into the other team's net as many times as possible within 5 minutes, and the team with the most goals wins. This was my first competitive game, and my love for it naturally led me to finding the esports scene - basically, competitive professional "sports", but they're video games instead of physical activities. There's huge fanbases and communities for esports around the world, cheering for their favorite players and teams to win major tournaments and even world championships. After following this esports scene for 5 years, I decided to take a flight to Dallas in Summer 2022 to watch the world championship myself. 

It was here that I was able to witness people play the game I'd played for years, but at the highest level. After playing the game myself for so long, I understood how difficult it was to be good, and the players here weren't just good, they were the best. It's only after experiencing something yourself that you realize the difficulty of achieving proficiency, and the time and effort investment required to do so. The craziest part about this was that these were people my age, sometimes even younger - while I kept my nose in textbooks and found time to play the game occasionally, these people had committed most of their lives to the game and earned hundreds of thousands of dollars for their efforts in the process.

The best part about going to this event in person was definitely the freedom from stigma. People who play video games are often stigmatized, being labeled as dorks, lazy, shut-ins, or "losers that can't find other hobbies" -- I've heard that last one explicitly before. People find it far more impressive, for example, when I tell them I like playing chess than when I tell them I like playing competitive video games, despite them practically being the same thing. Going to an event where the "spectators" were all united in their love for games and competition was really freeing - I was free to enjoy the game, both playing and watching, without fear of judgement by those around me. In fact, it was a shared interest that fostered interesting discussions that helped me talk to and meet these people who hailed from all over the world, despite my usual introversion and reluctance to talk to unfamiliar people. 

And, of course, we were all able to view these competitors playing the game at the highest level. Since we'd all played the game before, we all understood the level of difficulty of achieving those competitors' skills. I imagine that if you were to show videos of the gameplay from that tournament to a random person who'd never watched or played the game before, they wouldn't remotely comprehend the impressiveness of these players perfectly timing mechanical button combinations and split-second gameplay decisions in the way that those of us attending the event could. 

What I find funny is that these players competing at the world championships can't be boxed into "ideal" or "anomaly" quite easily. To us, the spectators at the event, they were the ideal - competitors who had perfected their craft to present to us the highest level of gameplay that we as players of the game should strive to achieve. To outsiders who typically stigmatize video games and players, they might be seen as the anomaly - "losers" who spent all their time playing video games and not finding "more productive" hobbies.