e-Sports

What defines a sport? Is it physical activity? Rigorous competition? Skill required?

The list goes on, the answer remains ambiguous, and questions continue to arise.
Can a sport have subjective scoring? Can a sport be appearance-centric? Why is
curling still in the Olympics?
A sport (n) is an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual
or team competes against another or others for entertainment
Society, however, looks beyond archaic definitions to debate and determine what
truly defines a sport. Granted, it is absolutely impossible for everyone to agree at
every point, so the topic will remain hotly contested at home, on TV, and at the
local bar scene.
We now make the transition to eSports, one of the fastest growing industries in the
United States, South Korea, and other places around the world. Since the late
1990s, impassioned gamers have flocked to the various pro circuits to test their
skills at the ol joystick against other gaming diehards.

Electronic sports (also known as esports or competitive gaming) is a term for

organized multiplayer video game competitions.
The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are realtime strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena
Early history (19721989)
The earliest known video game competition took place on October 19, 1972, at
Stanford University for the game Spacewar, where students were invited to an
"Intergalactic spacewar olympics" whose grand prize was a year's subscription for
Rolling Stone.
The Space Invaders Championship held by Atari in 1980 was the earliest large
scale video game competition, attracting more than 10,000 participants across the
United States
Esports goes online (19901999)
In the 1990s, many games benefited from increasing internet connectivity,
especially PC games. For example, the 1988 game Netrek was an Internet game
for up to 16 players, written almost entirely in cross-platform open source software.
Netrek was the third Internet game, the first Internet team game, the first Internet
game to use metaservers to locate open game servers, and the first to have
persistent user information. In 1993 it was credited by Wired Magazine as "the first
online sports game".
Rise of global tournaments (2000 onwards)
Recently, esports has gone through tremendous growth, incurring a large increase
in both viewership and prize money. Although large tournaments were founded
before the 21st century, the number and scope of tournaments has increased
significantly, going from about 10 tournaments in 2000 to about 260 in 2010. [2]
Many of the largest tournaments today were founded during this period, including
the World Cyber Games, the Intel Extreme Masters, and Major League Gaming.
The proliferation of tournaments included experimentation with competitions

outside traditional esports genres. For example, the September 2006 FUN
Technologies Worldwide Webgames Championship featured 71 contestants
competing in casual games for a $1 million grand prize

In 2014, Nintendo hosted an invitational Super Smash Bros. 4 competitive

tournament in lieu of their traditional Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press
conference.
Halo developers announced in 2014 plans to turn Halo into an esport with the
creation of their own dedicated Halo league and a prize pool of 50,000$ USD.
Both Blizzard Entertainment and Riot Games have their own collegiate outreach
programs, aimed at cultivating new esports talent at the university and college level
Numbers
More than 27 million people tuned in to the League of Legends tournament, which
ran from Sept. 18 to Oct. 19 earlier this year.
The World Series averaged 13.2 million viewers each day over the past three
years. The Super Bowl, the most watched television program in the US, easily tops
100 million watchers.