I’m sure smarter people than me have already broken down comparisons of Professional Gaming to Professional Sports, but since this is my design journal, I figured I’d capture some of my own feelings on the matter.*

Now that I’ve had an opportunity to play some in my first real game tournament (one against game development peers, no less), I took some time to reflect on what I was feeling after a win in a match, and compared that to what I used to feel when I played sports back in high school and younger. Thankfully, I’ve been so busy lately I didn’t have time to write it until after I had also suffered a loss as well.

I tried to categorize everything by what people typically define as professional sports qualities, and how professional gaming seems to fit into each category.

Skill

One of the easiest to define and see in competitive gaming, you know a superstar when you see one. And just as in sports, some players are simply gifted and talented, and others hone and sharpen the skills they have through practice and repetition until they are as tough as the prodigies. If you can’t watch a video like this one and be amazed at the skill and dedication present, I don’t know how to impress you.

Team-Work

This is something that’s becoming more and more prevalent in competitive gaming within the past five years or so. Individually skilled players like Fatal1ty are being sidelined more and more as team-based competitions are now becoming the norm. Deathmatch is old hat. Make way for Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and a hojillion other team-based and objective based games.

There’s a lot of team-based activity that goes on behind the scenes, as well. I know many teams scrimmage on a regular basis against other teams for practice, and have involved strategy meetings. Sony is releasing a patch for Warhawk just so that folks can sit online and talk strategy, and Valve has released metrics on who dies where on their maps. There’s team managers, coaches, strategy meetings. Hell, there’s even equipment and corporate sponsors. And then there’s the fans.

Spectator Sport

In the old days you used to have to make some room on the server for folks to fly around and watch the match. Spectating dragged down server ping, and it allowed for cheating once folks figured out that they could have a ghost in the machine that could just report back on what the other guys were doing.

Now that gaming’s going mainstream and Korea’s filling stadiums for Starcraft matches, Valve has come out with a hot new concept: SourceTV. Watch tournament matches as they happen. There’s a 30 second delay in the feed, I imagine so it never lags the server and at the same time keeps anyone from reporting back relevant data to the team. But more to the point, it has something like 240 slots open for the public to view matches.

Hopefully there won’t be any commercial interruptions. And Red has just taken the first Choke Point! Back in a few after this imortant message! ARGH.

Adrenaline

Do I even need to talk about this? Has anyone not felt the rush while playing? I wonder if professional athletes feel better after being tackled or after scoring a touchdown?

More to the point, after a match, the sheer buzz the Pro Gamer feels sounds eerily similar to the sensation Pro Athletes discuss about what happens after a game.  Edginess, an inescapable energy that won’t go away.  Restlessness.  Mental engagement, it would seem, can be just as over-stimulating as physical sport.

Injury

I’m not sure if this comes up a lot, but I’ve actually given myself some repetitive stress injuries. It wasn’t from gaming (one of my previous job duties involved insanely fast mouse clicks), but it was certainly very real, and somewhat painful if not discomforting. I imagine this must be a real worry for professional players who practice for long hours? While certainly not as disabling as a Professional Sports injury typically is, it’s debilitating to the Professional Gamer’s career. In that sense, they are equal.

To boot, actual physical injuries can be just as debilitating to the Pro Gamer as the Pro Sports individual. A broken hand is likely to be just as big of an impediment to both camps, no?

Morale

Finally, we arrive at perhaps the most interesting and difficult to define characteristic of Professional Competition. It can make or break teams. It can make mice out of champions and make heroes out of scrubs. It doesn’t matter if your game is physical or mental; having good morale can mean the difference in any competition. Granted, fooling yourself into thinking you have a chance isn’t necessarily good morale, but when morale slides, so goes your team-work and your hopes for winning.  Morale knows no physical limitations.  Either you have it or you don’t.  In fact, it seems that morale is best played in a mental game, be it sport or gaming.

In the end, I think the only true factor separating the Professional Athelete and the Professional Gamer is physical muscle. Truly, all of the factors which define Sport apply to Gaming, in the largest possible sense. As gaming gains more and more popularity in a mass market potential, how many more years will it be before we see gaming as accepted as sport?

I hope I live to see the day.

Well, maybe not. I’d hate for the Atari Joystick sticker to be as prevalent as the soccer sticker on a mini-van…

*Apologies if this piece comes off a bit on the fluff or amateur scale. It’s late and I’m tired.