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The ESports Athletes Who Tried To Switch Games
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Jordan's infamous attempt at baseball aside, athletes have sometimes switched sports successfully in the past — and perhaps a sure a sign as any that eSports are coming of age is pro gaming's top players are now trying to do the same. A new feature looks at the top players who've tried to make the jump from one first person shooter to another, or even between genre — from StarCraft 2 to League of Legends — and finds that while some have thrived, others has shown that each title can require a very particular, and sadly non-transferrable, skill set."
Most of those jumps are relatively small. Switching between HoN, LoL, and DOTA isnt really similar to switching from basketball to baseball. Many of the skills (kiting, lasthitting, etc) are very similar in the games; a lot of the barrier is just knowledge (what champions do what, particular mechanics differences.
Ditto BroodWar to SC2. Its been pretty widely known that BW players moving to SC2 tend to be very good at SC2 because of the similarity of the games, and the reputed higher difficulty of BW.
because they're constantly subjected to rule changes. Every week, month, year, decade, there is the potential for having a very upsetting change in the fundamentals of the game. If eSports players can't keep up with these, then they fall out of brackets. That's why the people who were the top of the top 3 years ago aren't. Maybe that's what'll prevent eSports from ever gaining the same prominence as regular sports--an athlete can expect to have a 10-25 year career. A pro-gamer would be lucky to see a 10 year career, and I don't expect that'll ever change.
and completely useless in real life. Video games are a waste of time and energy like no other.
While I find the moniker "ESports" somewhat humorous, calling gamers "athletes" borders on the ridiculous.
It's competitive gaming, and nothing more. Gaming is not a sport.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
"Athletes".
Stop trying to pretend gamers are something that they're not. If gamers are athletes, then watching movies is like personal non-competitive physical exercise.
That and the fact that a video game's publisher has the power to declare that a particular game shall no longer be played competitively at all. It can turn off the game's official matchmaking servers and assert copyright against providers of alternate servers (as in the bnetd case), or it can assert copyright against a league's streams of the game. Physical sports don't have nearly the same copyright danger
opposition to LGTB marriage. how is speculating on including something new into a definition getting this much of a rise out of people?
Unlike with video games, nobody owns the exclusive right to play baseball. This means nobody has the power to force someone to switch sports. Even if a player for a Major League Baseball club is "banned from baseball", that ban is unenforceable in leagues other than Major League Baseball. These leagues existed and continue to exist.
Please watch the great 30 For 30 episode Jordan Rides the Bus . Even I, as a Chicagoan that grew up in the Jordan era, was surprised at how good Jordan got at baseball. It seems at the end he had quite a few game winning hits. It seemed there was no guarantee he'd be called up to the majors in 95, but any question of that was nixed with the baseball strike that year. I don't think a lot of people knew how much he improved. Even his main man Spike Lee made jokes about Jordan - with a commercial about his struggles with "the wicked double-A curveball..."
Hell, watch most 30 For 30. The 16th Man is as good as most movies out now.
It's not the same at all!
Marriage means something in the eyes of the law and entitles couples to many benefits. Denying LGBT people marriage is denying them everything that goes with that, and still singles them out as not being even legally able to do something that straight people can do.
Saying that button-pushing and glowing-rectangle-staring isn't sport (which is it not), means only that they can't call it sport. Call it something else and everything moves along fine and no one's rights are impacted. Gamers are not legally barred from playing real sports.
With very few exceptions, I don't think refinements to the details like exactly what counts as a catch have changed how the game is played much. A receiver tries to catch a ball today the same way they tried to catch it in 1970. The skill hasn't changed. It's possible that an attempted catch might be ruled a fumble today and incomplete 40 years ago, but that changes what the officials do. The player will still do the exact same thing - reach out and try to get control of the ball.
Of course there are exceptions, primarily changes related to player safety, where it's now against the rules to do certain dangerous things.
How about the professional gamer who became a professional soccer player?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Holden
Can you explain the "fundamental" changes that happen in these games?
In single-player Tetris since 2001, infinite spin and playing forever made score attack trivial, and Ryan Davis of GameSpot wrote of infinite spin that "it actually breaks Tetris". It ended up changing the most common single-player game format to time to complete 40 lines. In multiplayer, the rules on when a T-Spin sends extra garbage to the other player have fluctuated ever since the rotation rules were revised in Tetris Worlds .
One advantage that regular sports has over ESport is longevity.
Baseball is being played for the most part the same as it was 100 years ago.
ESports are short lived and are lucky to be around 5 years later.
Therefore someone that makes a living playing sports can earn a living for a lifetime without having to re-learn the sport.
However someone that makes a living playing an ESport can only expect to earn a living for only a few years playing the same game.
the definition of a cat means small with pointy ears and a dog is larger with floppy ears.
Some breeds that are genetically Canis lupus familiaris are in fact "small with pointy ears". Kitty?
Chess is an Olympic sport
True in the sense that the IOC recognizes FIDE as the governing body of international chess. False in another sense, as unlike shooting and curling, chess is not contested in the Olympic Games.
This story is just sad on so many levels, and not for the reasons the author thinks.
I'm not so sure I agree. When you practice out routes and sideline routes your whole career counting on push-out rules and then suddenly being pushed out means you're out of bounds for the catch, that's massive. An out route can't go as far out, and a sideline route has to be further in from the sideline. It's probably a bigger change than going from NCAA football with the one-foot rule to the NFL with the two-foot rule.
The reply rules made what counts as a catch a lot more strict, but a good solid catch with control of the ball was always the goal. Thayt didn't change too much other than getting incomplete passes more accurately called. The push-out rule changing OTOH changed how the routes are run on the same size field.
Why?
Oh, I see. You said "gamers", so as to include not just the men who train daily and think about almost nothing else, but just like, casual players. Because those are gamers too.
Of course, the dose makes the poison. If you play football with some friends after work, are you a "footballer"? An "athlete"?
You, and everyone who keeps making this same crap comment over and over again, are just getting tripped up.
Try this:
"Professional Gamer"
There, see the difference? Now your buddy with the doritos doesn't count, just like he doesn't count as a profession football player because he can throw a good pass to you after work.
The limitations, training requirements, etc. are all very similar to other sports. If you look at chess, starcraft, golf, tennis, soccer, football- you'll notice something. Some of these, like tennis and soccer require a high degree of physical athleticism. Some of these, like chess, starcraft, and football, require a high degree of strategy. Some of these, like starcraft, tennis, soccer, and football, require a high degree of tactics.
What's your metric? The kicker on a football team doesn't need to maintain the ability to run a fast mile, and neither does the starcraft player.
So which of these is not a sport?
Chess.
Because the parts related to physicality have been minimized or removed.
Everything else is a sport.
I've been wondering, e-sports require quick response to real-time events. Daytrading seems to be the same thing.
Could there be alot of transferrable skills from strategy and MOBA games to daytrading?
It's fucking called e-sports. That's its fucking name. Every time slashdot runs a story about an e-sport, the comments sections is fucking filled with worthless bullshit like your comment, inevitably modded insightful by someone who thinks that their cheetos munching nephew is a gamer, so profession gaming isn't an e-sport.
Get over it. Lets actually get comments in the e-sports section that discuss the esports, and neural plasticity, and peak human performance, and reaction times, and how much is genetic versus trained and what could change this or that, and maybe even discuss what the article is about.
If I wanted a bunch of this shit, I'd go to reddit. "Insightful" for pedantic bullshit indeed. Christ.
Knowing the game mechanics notwithstanding, it still takes muscle memory for the mouse movements and keystrokes. I was readings something about baseball pitchers and how it takes some ludicrous amount of hours of the same motion for the muscle memory to set in. I can't imagine any other "sport" that uses a physical interface would be any different.
Specificity of exercise is a well known principal in physical training, rehab, etc. "World class" athletes are generally very fit and may excel in speed, strength, coordination, endurance or or other fitness areas, but when you learn baseball or lacrosse, you get good at very specific skills that have very little crossover to anything else.
Gaming has some similar aspects, speed of response, speed of recognition, strategy, etc, but ultimately if you are highly skilled in one game there will be some of the 10,000 hours invested that are specific to that game.
Who said the mind and the body are separate?
Dear slashdot, thanks for escaping the "#" in the link in my above post to a "%23". How helpful of you to break my intra-page link. I'm curious if this just applies to "#"-signs at the beginning of the URI, or if you can't link to parts of a page at all. Here is a test of linking to a sub-page on Wikipedia:
Fragment Identifier
athlete [ath-leet]
Noun
A person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.
Origin:
1520–30; Latin thlta Greek thlts, equivalent to thl- (variant stem of thleîn to contend for a prize, derivative of âthlos a contest) + -ts suffix of agency
I don't care what your APM is in Starcraft 2, you are NOT an athlete. You have a top 1% skill in SOMETHING, but it is NOT "athletic."
Therefore, the contest you are participating in is NOT A SPORT. Not anymore than chess or monopoly is a sport.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
You asked how video games were different from baseball. I gave one way in which video games were different from baseball: video game exhibitions have more potential copyright problems.
Now after rereading, it appears you were asking about how video games were different from baseball specifically in the sense of whether skills would transfer to activities that aren't "games" (competitions organized for spectators' entertainment). In this case, skills learned by swinging a golf club or a baseball bat transfer to defense of self and property.
Think of the NFL as "football's publisher"
That'd be like saying MLB is baseball's publisher. The NFL can ban people from playing in the NFL. This ban would not extend to other leagues playing substantially the same sport, such as the AFL (which merged with the NFL), the WFL, the USFL, the XFL, and the new USFL, not to mention the massive derivative work that is indoor minor league football. The owner of copyright in a video game, by contrast, can veto leagues entirely.
Not hating on pro gamers, I think it is great that there's a market for this and personally I enjoy watching pro gaming content. But they aren't athletes. It is a word with a pretty specific definition. It means, well, someone who is athletic. You don't have to be professional to be an athlete, and just doing something competitive doesn't make you an athlete.
They are gamers. Professional gamers to be sure, but gamers. That isn't a positive or negative trait, it is just a descriptor. They play games, hence are gamers, and do it for money, hence are professionals in that regard. Professional gamers. Same thing with anything else. I'm a Professional systems and network administrator. The reason is I administer servers and a network, and I get paid to do so. I'm also a gamer, but not a professional one, nobody pays me to play games.
Words mean something, let's try not to blatantly misuse them. If you want gaming to get more respect as a hobby and as a profession, the correct method is to own it, not to try and pretend it is something it isn't.
It's a pretty bad example. I would say that NHL is a better comparison. When European players started to play in NHL teams they had to make a pretty awkward transition to smaller rinks and slightly different rules. The cost of this became very noticeable when they got back home and tried to play for their home nation in the Olympics.
But by that analogy, there are any number of MOBAs, for example, so there are several choices of publishers. Sure, for a given exact rules set, there's only one, but again that's the same as pro sports.
The difference is that even if other leagues were to use exactly the same rules as the NFL, the NFL wouldn't have grounds to sue. For example, the new USFL plans to use exactly the same rules as the NFL with the intent that skills in the USFL will transfer directly to the NFL. In video games, on the other hand, if your game has exactly the same rules as an incumbent's game, you can get sued and lose. Tetris v. Xio . The only time I've heard about that happening in a ball sport is when the AFL asserted its patent on end zone rebound nets, and patents expire 20 years after filing anyway.
Mates, I am happy with the term pro, but in the same way a chess player is not an athlete, a fat ball of lard handling a fucking joystick is NOT a fucking athlete
-- 29A the number of the Beast
A) eSports aren't sports and the players aren't athletes.
B) Switching games is easy because an actual gamer can easily juggle being extremely good at more than one game.
So disappointed in this comment thread for this article. I was curious to know more about pro-gamers switching games, and instead I get a debate over whether video games are a sport. Actually, worse, I get a discussion bitching about how we need to stop calling these gamers "athletes" and how it's not a sport and how stupid people are for calling it a sport.
Unfortunately, I've heard these debates before and participated in a few discussions. I've heard this debate as a chess player.
So chess is a game. It is a game that can be played on a computer as a "video game" with little difference from the physical experience of having a board with pieces. If you read Wikipedia on chess, it states, "Chess is a recognized sport of the International Olympic Committee and international chess competition is sanctioned by the World Chess Federation (FIDE)..."
I hear this debate with not just video games and chess, but also other things like: weight lifting, hunting, fishing, bowling, NASCAR racing, ballroom dancing, rock climbing, scrabble, etc.
If you use a dictionary definition of "sport", it's probably more inclusive than you think. In fact, the definition I read over at dictionary.com listed hunting and fishing as sports.
If you use the definition from an authoritative organization on your game/activity, it may define it as a sport (as is the case in chess).
If you use your personal definition of what a sport is, it may or may not be a sport. And it's hard to convince someone that you're personal definition is more accurate than someone else's personal definition, so good luck on that debate.
And just to hammer this in that this is a useless debate over a definition of a word, I want to mention that the meaning of a word does change over time, especially in areas of technology. The word "phone" has changed. I rarely used a "phone" for "phone calls". I use a "phone" for text messaging and checking email. You might say I'm not using a phone if you had a 100 year old definition.
Now I have two questions for all of you. One, isn't the question of whether it's a sport just semantics? And two, why do people seem to care so much about whether you define video games as a sport in the first place?
Last comment for me that's not about a definition. Why do people care about viewership and popularity? I'm reading comments and comparisons about how eSports (or pro gaming, if you prefer) is not as popular as baseball, football, or basketball. For example, there's a comment comparing viewership of LoL to the Superbowl. Well, there's lots of traditional physical sports that aren't as popular as many video games too. Pro gaming does not need to be as big as pro football for me to enjoy it or take it seriously.
Wish I could have learned more about the topic at hand. I watch pro StarCraft II and I occasionally hear about gamers that made the switch from Brood War. Would have loved to hear more insight on that. Oh well...