Quote:
Originally Posted by Samonadreau
I was fully expecting a few responses like this. I realize it's my 100% opinion and I don't have any gaming consoles so I'm completely biased but it seems ridiculous to me. Nothing wrong with gaming. But I can't put a Sidney Crosby, Lebron James, Mike Trout, or Tom Brady in the same conversion as whoever is the 'Gretzky' of gaming. Sorry. You might, but not me.
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I don't expect to convince you one way or the other but there is a very high level of skill, dedication, and talent required for people to be at the pinnacle of some games.
For me personally it is mindblowing how good the top BlazBlue players in the world are - the gap between me and them is no different from the gap between a kid in Junior B and a Sidney Crosby - we are talking about total mastery of nuances and the ability to see deep and react at 1/60th's of a second. It might not be true for every genre , but I am honestly more impressed by Evo tournament videos than I am by, for example, baseball highlights. YMMV. Physical sports are obviously more physical but seeing the best of the best compete in anything that requires complex pattern recognition, hand-eye coordination, and twitch timing in person vs person situations can be very entertaining.
Heck even watching the elite players in the world for things like Chess, Go, Karuta, Musical instruments, or seeing and appreciating high-level photography, art, cinematography, or writing has its place. It's about appreciating people for their ability to master things that us plebes are happy to be "pretty good" at. It's not about the label of sport and fixating on the contrast between sport and e-sport is missing the intrinsic value.
Beyond that, even at the professional level human beings are drawn to try and emulate to the extent of their ability the highly successful businessmen and scientists and doctors and engineers who have left their mark on the world. Those are not public spectacles like sports and e-sports because they are long-play realities - but the autobiographies and research papers that the elite of the world provide us with are a source of fascination. Excellence breeding competition and competition breeding excellence - there is something incredible about that.