E Sports: Games for all
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In the last decade, a new type of sport rose from the depths of competitive play: Esports. In this sport, competitive video games—such as Smash Bros, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and StarCraft are backed by passionate communities of gamers and observers alike. Esports are already filled to the brim with underdog stories, gods of gameplay, and so on and so forth. Esports—just like all other sports—bring people who play the games closer together.
Just like how many people play sports and consequently understand and sympathize with the teams and players they watch on TV, people who play video games can have the same experience through watching professional Esports.
“Everyone loves video games, everyone plays video games, inside that group there are going to be people who play the game seriously, and everyone who watches can really connect to that,” Cameron Schmitt, 11, said.
The reason people back Esports so vehemently is because of the storylines played out in the games—each new match or new era is like a TV show, where there is an unbeatable champion, an underdog that everyone is rooting for, villains that we all despise, and the personalities that we like to watch.
Take the modern-day Smash Ultimate Esports community, for example. Right now, the person everyone wants to beat is MKLeo (the unbeatable 19-year-old from Chile is currently the number one player in the world, playing as Joker). Meanwhile, the underdogs are people like Samsora (a Peach player that recently beat MKLeo; Samsora came from the Smash 4 scene showing that he was a fantastic player and is showing himself to be even better in Smash Ultimate), and the villains, like Salem, are seen as disrespectful.
Everyone in Esports has a history; they have the context to why they play this game and how they got into their position. For example, famous Smash player Zero grew up poor in Chile before he started gaining some traction in Smash. He then moved to America with almost nothing and went to every tournament he could before breaking the world record for most tournaments won in a row, 56. This gave him the title of “King of Smash” for that era. People who play video games and care about it competitively look up to players like Zero and respect their craft. Most of all, it causes discussion among fans of Esports bringing people together to either love a player or team or distinctively dislike one.
Esports brings people together from all around the world—not just America, such as compared to UFC where a lot of the fights are in America but everyone comes from different countries, but that does not mean there are tournaments everywhere around the world like in certain game stores near us or even at school. These people back their favorite teams and players and watch them play tournaments. In Esports, everyone has a backstory, everyone is fighting for something, and everyone is engaged in the elite gameplay they present to set the stage for an entertaining sport that we can all enjoy. Esports players can be anyone, they come from around the world and many different backgrounds, they can be some of the most athletic to the least athletic, Esports can be anyone.