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Competitive computer games as sports?

This is an excerpt from Ethics in Sport-4th Edition by William J. Morgan.

By Jim Parry

For the purposes of this paper, I shall consider e-sports to be ‘competitive computer games’.¹⁸ This enables me to concentrate primarily on the kind of e-sports that are currently most popular, and that are currently being touted as sports. Some of them are actually seeking recognition as Olympic sports, and I shall consider this development in the next section. This does leave aside, though, the separate question of the status of ‘physical gaming’, or ‘kinetic e-sports’, in which physical activity is an important component, and which I will address in a separate paper to follow.

I have defined sports as institutionalised, rule-governed contests of human physical skill. In the context of computer gaming, the idea of ‘contest’ requires a moment’s construal. Llorens makes an important point regarding the element of competition in certain computer games (2017, 467)

. . . not all video games engage in eSport gaming sports practice. World of Warcraft or Diablo, for instance, are highly popular competitive and online video games. However, they are not fundamentally constituted as competitive personal interaction, but rather as a ‘profile upgrading’ exercise. . . . Therefore, it may be argued that . . . the result-oriented competition requirement for sport is not met.

In agreeing with her disinclination to accept a ‘profile upgrading’ exercise as a genuine contest, and so as a sporting practice, I accept the refinement of my idea of ‘competitive computer games’ as those involving ‘essentially contestive practices’. In thus accepting that competitive computer games are rule-governed contests, that leaves open for discussion four remaining criteria: human, physical, skill, and institutionalisation. I shall take them in turn.

Human

Just as, in Robot Wars, the contestants are physically distanced from the action, so are computer game contestants. They are remotely contesting over what they can make happen on a screen as a result of their manipulations of a console. The contest is indeed (in a sense) a human vs human contest, but only in the way that a spelling contest is also human vs human. However, a spelling bee is not sport, and the interactions in computer games are also inadequate for sport, on a human level.

Computer gamers (like the Robot Wars controllers) also experience the intense emotions of battle (as do the spectators and viewers). But they are not, coddled in their special arm-chairs, direct competitors. They are distanced, image-manipulating remote-controllers. This is not sport – although, I suppose, you could call it e-sport (analogously to robot-sport), if you really wanted to – because the contest is only indirectly, and therefore inadequately, ‘human’.

Physical

To be sure, there might be plenty of physical action and effort in computer gaming—but the question is whether the physical exertion involved is adequately physical in the required sense. For example, Kane and Spradley (2017) rely on a spurious stipulation and a failure adequately to construe second-level concepts. ‘Physical exertion’ is accepted as a criterion just because the dictionary says so; and the kind of physical exertion appropriate for ‘sports’ is unexplored. Of course, levels of physical exertion, thus unconstrued and unspecified, can easily be demonstrated, just as they can in gardening, coal-mining, cookery or sex.

As noted earlier, the sporting sense of ‘physical’ requires that the movements bear a direct relation to the outcome of the event. The actual movements made must directly produce the result. This was one reason for our disqualification of chess and Robot Wars from sport. In the present context, considering computer games, Holt makes an interesting distinction between a domain of execution and a domain of application.

The domain of execution is subject-specific, a matter of where the execution occurs; by contrast, the domain of application is object-specific, where the action’s outcome is meant to obtain. (Holt, 2016, p. 8)

Holt goes on to assert (see p. 9) that a crucial difference between sports and computer games is that the technological nature of computer games necessarily separates the two domains. Whereas in sport the two realms coincide (where I take my shot is the same actual realm in which I aim to score a goal), in computer games the skills executed in the actual domain must necessarily be transposed into a virtual domain. (From my $399 gaming throne,¹⁹ I operate my console so as to achieve digital effects on a screen.)

This is one way of clarifying, specifying, exhibiting the lack of direct physicality in computer games, that argues against its status as sport.

Skill

Whilst all sports require the development and exercise of human physical skill, not all human physical skills qualify as sporting skills, such as those skills required for gardening, art or craft production, sex, or playing a musical instrument. So it is not enough to claim that, because computer gaming requires human physical skill (of some kind) that this qualifies it as a sport.

To be sure, there is plenty of skill involved in manipulating those little buttons, and doing so faster (with more hits) than others—but the question is whether this counts as skill of the required kind, and the comments in the last two sections argue that it does not. But there is a further consideration, relating to the distinction between fine and gross motor skills as a means of distinguishing sports from non-sports (or, in our case, to distinguish the relatively fine motor skills of console control from the relatively gross skills of Olympic sport).

I concur with Holt’s admonition (Holt 2016, 7–8) of Meier (1988) and Hemphill (2005) for their too-ready acceptance of the difficulty of ‘drawing a line’ between gross and fine motor skills. Often it is suggested that, because of the supposed difficulty in drawing a precise line between the two, this disqualifies it as an indicator. This is false. Difficulties at the margins do not disqualify. There is no precise line to be drawn between men and women, and borderline issues are the source of well-acknowledged problems for women’s sport. However, this does not mean that we cannot tell a man from a woman; nor that we cannot make borderline decisions (difficult and somewhat arbitrary though they may be).

So the gross/fine distinction, focussing on the use of large/smaller muscle-groups, does not seem to me to be unhelpful, as a general indicator. However, the intuition underlying this distinction might be recast in terms of ‘whole-body’ skills, as follows. Even in shooting, it is the exercise of whole-body control and whole-body skills that are decisive. Here, again, the image of the Olympic athlete floats before us: the skills required in Olympic sports are the ‘whole-body’ skills of the athlete.

Furthermore, these are skills that are not only required for successful engagement in the sport, but that also contribute to the development of the whole human. To be sure, engaging and practising my jiggling and joggling skills will improve my ability to jiggle and joggle, just as my practice of keyboard skills will improve my ability to type – but neither can contribute to the development of the whole human in the way that Olympic sport does, in its valuing of ‘whole-body’ engagement.²⁰

Institutionalisation

All sports are founded on rules; and so are computer games. This suggests some level and kind of organisation behind things, but the problem lies in construing just what level and what kind of organisation are we looking for here, to count as ‘institutionalisation’?

Abanazir (2018) calls the sets of rules the ‘source’, and he points out that the source of sports and the source of computer games differ in important respects. In sport,

‘. . . the source is created by the rule-making powers of an organisation having the power to lay down the rules of the game. But in computer games, ‘. . . the source is the video game, which consists of the “code” (so the code developer is the rule-maker) and the audiovisual representations (controlled by the publisher, who is an incorporated body within a particular jurisdiction).’

This means that there are no associations overseeing computer games, consisting of members or joint ventures of sports team owners creating a legal person with a view to laying down the rules of the source and the tournaments. Instead, we see a ‘dispersed production process’, where publishers organise tournaments for their own games.

When we consider the number of computer games and the number of publishers (which are actually industry rivals), we can see that the chances of establishing an umbrella organisation (institution) determining the production of video games and the tournaments based on them in a cohesive manner is almost impossible. (Abanazir 2018)

These observations are supported by Karhularti’s notion of ‘executive ownership’.

Since sports can only be administered, organized, and overseen (but never owned) by companies, the statuses of those sports cannot be compared to those of esport, which are defined by executive ownership (2017, 49). For an organized competitive practice to be considered esport, it should rely on a commercial play product that is governed by an executive owner. (2017, 52)

Another problem is the fast pace of change in e-sports fashion. Tournament organisers rapidly drop any game that loses popularity, to be replaced by a competitor. The fluid and fast-paced commercialised development of computer games, and the competitive production process, place serious constraints on the emergence of the kind of stable and persisting organisational structures characteristic of sports governance. As Abanazir says: ‘This situation . . . calls for another take regarding the analysis as to whether e-sports would qualify as a sport or not.’ At the very least, . . . ‘judgements passed upon the institutionalisation of e-sports are, at present, premature’.

More Excerpts From Ethics in Sport 4th Edition

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