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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.
While I find the moniker "ESports" somewhat humorous, calling gamers "athletes" borders on the ridiculous.
but throwing a ball is use full like all other? if useless means you can earn a living doing it, is it still useless?
It's competitive gaming, and nothing more. Gaming is not a sport.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
How is it different than baseball? hitting a fast moving ball with a bat is useless in real life. Both are forms of entertainment or recreation, one being physical, the other being mental. I'm sure there are plenty skills from video games that can be used in real life (information processing, team work, decision making, etc).
I understand you never said sports weren't a waste of time and energy, it just begs the question...
"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
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.
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.
It is the same in how opposition to the notion seem to be offended at the thought of it. its truly amusing.
Funny you know my mom used to say the same thing. Every time I played video games she'd tell me how useless they were and what a waste of time.
Back when I was in high school, I had a buddy who wanted to play FIFA all the time. So we'd play online (this was back in the day when you'd have one modem call the other modem). I wasn't really interested in soccer, but I was competitive, and wanted to beat him at the game.
Fast forward 10 years. I ended up getting transferred to Europe. After work we went to a bar the first week I was there, and small talk one night included this funny sport called soccer. And I knew all the teams, and all the rules. And it helped me out professionally.
Thank you video games.
I disagree with you. Pretty sure a past-time is in some instances part of the definition of sports. Plus, if I don't show prowess am I still playing a sport if I'm playing in a softball league. Definitions are not and have never been static. Accept change.
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 .
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?
The first guy mentioned in the article, Lee Jae-dong, may disagree with you. He's made a little over half a million dollars playing StarCraft. There's a guy from China who's made more than a million just this year playing Dota 2. I can't quite call that useless.
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.
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.
Your definitions are simultaneously pedantic in tone and broadly wrong.
Not all sports are games. Many people would describe (for example) fishing as a sport, but few would call it a game. There's a broad intersection of these categories, but sports are not a subset of games in either a prescriptive or descriptive sense.
Not all games are hobbies. A gladiator may compete in games, but... uh... gladiating was certainly not a hobby. "Hobby" has all sorts of connotations that are not satisfied by many instances of games or gaming. You could call them subsets of "activities" maybe, but certainly not hobby.
I think it's debatable whether competitive gaming is properly called a "sport". From a prescriptive standpoint, some dictionaries give definitions of sport that would be met, other definitions would not be met. Looking at etymologically, you'd assume things would count as "sports" that prescriptive definitions would not consider.
Popularly - descriptively - the term "e-sport" certainly seems to be catching on.
And it's doing so because it's useful in many ways. The substance of these competitions and their supporting organization has a lot in common with "normal" professional sports. There's teams and jerseys and player positions and sponsors. The point of words is to communicate, and calling these competitions sports is communicating a lot of information efficiently, while varying only in one (possibly key) bit - they're not terribly physical competitions (even if they do require a surprising amount of stamina and physical preparation).
Further complicating the matter is that the activities simulated in the game are also often sport-like (though often involving less killing).
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
You are subjectively determining the definition of "sport" and "athlete" and considering them set-in-stone. That's fine. But as the rest of the world continues to use the term athlete to define a professional gamer and you become more and more bitter towards this fact, many of us will continue to roll our eyes and think "who cares"? I get it, marriage is not gaming. One has a lawful meaning and one doesn't. That only makes it more likely that your expiring notion of the term athlete is going to change to include pro gamers - in this case, there is no lawful definition.
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.
but throwing a ball is use full like all other? if useless means you can earn a living doing it, is it still useless?
Even if you don't manage to make money at it, throwing a real ball around is a good way to stay in shape which is important for overall health. Throwing a virtual ball? Not so much and you are even more likely to need a day job which also will not give you the exercise that you need to stay healthy.
I reject this idea because who says women can't marry multiple men?
Yeah, and someone wins the lottery, too. That doesn't make it a good investment.
The number of people who make any money at video games vs the number who waste the biggest portion of their lives when they could be learning things is about as miniscule as your chances of winning the lottery. I stand by my assertion that it is a waste of time.
The vast majority of people who play physical sports also don't make any money from them. I guess that's a waste of time, also? Are there hobbies, other than education, that aren't a waste of time?
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
Playing real sports is a social and physical activity. Both can be beneficial.
Sitting on a couch swilling red bull, munching on funyuns, twitching your thumbs, and tea-bagging your virtual victims hardly compares.
Playing real sports with friends can harm you for life as well, so be sure to put that into your equation. After all, presumably the casual football players are fucking unhealthy idiots in your world too, as after all, the casual videogamers are "swilling red buff, munching on funyuns".
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.
Until it starts being used in another way in which case the dictionary will catalogue that usage right alongside that one.
Dictionaries don't define words; they only tell us how people use them.
Okay, sports are physical, and video games almost never are. But they can certainly be social. Not all gamers are as you describe; some actually physically congregate and socialize.
It seems like reading books could be every bit as big a time waster as playing video games, when a person shuts himself off from the world and just reads books all the time. Surely, there's some balance to be found in life between doing things that you enjoy but are not "beneficial" and doing other things. That doesn't make the former activities a waste of time.
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.
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
This is why I've taken up golf. I don't need to be in spectacular shape to enjoy it and be decent and have fun. Swing the clubs, carry your bag, and walk the course. It's a lot of exercise, fresh air, and sunlight.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork