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Haochen Tian Instructor: Malcolm Campbell English 1102 09/23/2013

Pro Gamers: I Ain’t No Joke

As a kid born and raised in the early 90s, the decade of the burgeoning technology industry, I have been a gamer my whole life. I grew up playing Mario and trying to finish quests in Zelda without understanding the Japanese dialogue. Date back to the early 2000s, I remember finding out that there were professional gamers out there that compete in a world level tournament called the World Cyber Gaming (World Cyber Gaming), with a prize pool as big as $200,000. This career sounded amazing to me, but little did I know how hard it is to become a  professional gamer. Such a career is cutthroat competitive and requires unfathomably intense training. But, becoming a professional gamer was one of my favorite excuses when my m y father asked me why am I on the computer again. ‖I’M GOING PRO DAD!‖ But, I’ve slowly became more a fan of professional gaming than actually attempting to become one, mainly because I understand that it is very difficult to be a professional gamer. As the video gaming industry blossomed in the past decade, the professional gaming and in a good way. There are more scene has expanded way beyond everyone’s expectations — and organized annual events, large prize pools, p ools, and of course, more professional gamers. Currently, formal guidelines for professional gaming are in their nascent years, and one of the topics that  people discuss all the time is whether or not professional gamers should should be considered athletes. Professional gamers make a lot of money, they the y get scouted, they sign contracts with professional

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clubs/teams, they train constantly, and at the end of the day, they compete at a very high caliber. So why shouldn’t they be consider as athletes? Basic Comparison

An athlete is a person who is proficient in sports and other forms of physical experience, according to Merriam-Webster  (athlete), and that is also what comes to our mind when we think of the term athlete. Michael Jordan, the proficient basketball player; Jackie Robinson, the  proficient baseball player; and Jerry Rice, the proficient football player all fit these characteristics. They all are amazing at what the y were trained to compete in, they all are winners, and they made large amount of income. Now let’s look at professional gamers, and we should address them as their actual title –  eSports Participants. Over 60 eSports participants have earned beyond $100,000 solely from tournament prize money (Russell). Pros also profit from streaming (broadcast his/her live gameplay of daily practice/games, not tournaments, over the Internet), sponsorships, and special event appearances; so, there are a large number of pros that makes at least six-figure salaries.  Now let’s compare the career developing structure between American pro sports, and

eSports. The process of developing a sports athlete in the US is a fully fledged system: kids start as early as pre-k. This applies to all sports from basketball to cross country; they all tend to start training at an early age. The elimination process begins in elementary school, when you start  playing for a team; the process continues in middle school and in junior varsity and varsity teams in high school. If the athletes successful, he/she will and should get scouted by colleges, receive a scholarships and play at least a couple years. Then, they will go pro, to play in a professional league or represent the country. The ones that are eliminated in the process may still look for a

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ways to make a living out of this talent through coaching and such, but they don’t profit nearly as much as the pros do. On the other hand, eSports pros have an equally strong system for development. Every single eSports game nowadays has its very own ranking system, which usually evaluates a player  based on their performance and match history. The game really doesn’t care about where you went to elementary school, or if you have torn your ACL before. The only thing people see about you before one becomes professional is their stats, gameplays, and whatever the player decide to  put on his or her profile page. A player ’s ability to perform and compete is almost the only thing that matters in this field. Players will get scouted for being top ranked in the game. Contracts with professional teams will be offered to the player. And in some cases, they will even be asked to represent the country on a team. eSports pros don’t go to fashion shows and they don’t take drug tests. With less publicity, they can be more focused than professional athletes, but still receive the credit they deserve and be recognized as a legitimate profession by the general  public. So the income gap isn’t that big, the y go through a similar process to become

 professional of what they do, and yet they are being looked at completely different. Why?

Misconception

Let’s face it, not that many people understand the art of videogames. Parents of our

generation dislike videogames, they hate it, they hate the idea of it, and they hate the fact that their kids are always playing it. Why? In the U.S. there’s the infamous Grand Theft Auto series

where all you do is kill, steal and rebel against law enforcements. Daniel Petric shot his parents over a copy of Halo 3(Caniglia), and let’s not forget the Columbine High School Shooting

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(Lamb); in Asia, you have kids that spend every night in the Internet café, and spend their  parents’ lifesaving on online games. Point being there are so many reports on the negative effects of videogames, and if the readers did take a side on any of those reports, they will hate videogame with passion.  Now, how do you convince the general public that there’s a legitimate career in pla ying videogames? Well, besides the paycheck and the training process, maybe the size of various  professional gaming leagues can help make a point here. The general public can never imagine how organized eSports events are. Tournaments are not just a group of gamers who get together and play without guidelines. There are professional gaming leagues and tournaments all around the globe, and they are broadcasted live over the internet or sometimes even over television. Cyber athlete Professional League is one of the early eSports tournaments, founded in 1997 and has distributed over $3,000,000 prize money ("The CPL Heritage"); World Cyber Games largest international scale gaming tournaments, founded in 2000, have been noted as the most influential gaming events in the history ("WCG Concept"); Major League Gaming is currently the most active gaming tournament hosting organization in North America, with over one million  participants ("About MLG"). At the end of the day, eSports is expanding at a rapid rate and it shows no sign of slowing down, but the winners are only receiving the buzz from within the community and the rest of the  participants are being described as gaming addicts. There is still a long ways to go before  professional gaming is embraced by the general public.

Recognition

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Pro gamers are being treated complete differently in other countries. Pro gamers in South Korea are being praised like rock stars, for ex ample, ―NesTea‖, a Starcraft 2 player from South

Korea, is being sponsored by companies like LG and Steelseries, he also has a large loyal fan  base (Russell). South Korea has been known as a country that is video gaming enthusiastic, and their government has been very supportive on aiding the eSports participants by giving them the same level of access as national sports representatives when attending international competitions. Athlete visa are offered to Korean eSport Pros. China is another country that’s been slowly catching up; the government is putting

funding into training national gaming representatives in order to attend international eSports events. The United States government made a huge decision that would give eSports a huge leap forward: they have decided to give eSports participants athlete visas. This means in the future, a P-1A visa will be given out, which means the athlete is an ―international recognized athletes‖ (Good). This is substantial progress , because the government’s support is one way to close the gap between culture differences, and it is also the signs of the government’s recognition of the

expanding influence of eSports.

Conclusion

On a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2013 in downtown Los Angles, Staples Center is  packed and the fans are excited to see two teams go all out against each other. With a million dollars on the line, the two teams that are in this have to give everything they’ve got to secure the  prize money. This is not the season tip off game for the Lakers, but instead, the season finale for League of Legends, which took place on October 4th, 2013 in Los Angeles. With over 20 million

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viewers across the globe, this was the most anticipated gaming event in the history of eSports. Those gamers are competing in the same arena as Kobe Bryant and Chris Paul, and they have more fans watching online. Why shouldn’t they be considered as professional athletes?

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Work Cited

"athlete" Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, Web. 20 Nov 2013 "About MLG." Major League Gaming . Web. 24 Sep 2013. "The CPL Heritage." Cyber Athlete Professional League. Web. 24 Sep 2013. Lamb, Gina. ―Columbine High School‖, Times Topic. Web. Nov 15 2013. Good, Owen. "First 'Internationally Recognized' Athlete Visa Awarded to Pro Gamer." Kotaku. 10 08 13. Web. 24 Sep 2013. John, Caniglia. ―Wellington teen Daniel Petric gets 23 years to life in prison for killing his mother ‖ The Plain Dealer. Web 12 Nov 2013. Russell, Kyle. "The Highest-Paid Professional Video Gamers in the World." Business Insider . 15 06 2013. Web. 24 Sep 2013. "WCG Concept." World Cyber Gaming . Web. 24 Sep 2013.