Video Game Scholarships: The Blurring Line Between Sport and Esport

Robert Morris University has been in the news lately for its League of Legends team. Its scholarship League of Legends team.

That’s right. A scholarship for video game players. How both delightful and terrifying. And I don’t really know why either emotion strikes me, much less both simultaneously. Perhaps I’m terrified because — much in the way my grandfather, born in 1901, became dismayed at the increasing popularity of the NFL in the 1970s — I am witnessing an irrevocable change in the universe of sports. Esports — or electronic sports — are going mainstream. They’re going NCAA.

Well, not necessarily NCAA, but they’re getting legit like crazy. Actually, the video game tournaments themselves are already legit. Consider pro gamer Nadeshot’s discussion about the team roster around the 2:50 mark in this interview. He makes it very clear how the players inside the industry already see themselves as brethren to the pro athletes of traditional sports. Students of the history of pro sporting leagues (or perhaps just anyone who’s seen the first two episodes of Ken Burn’s Baseball documentary) will no doubt suffer from deja vu at this juncture: Players rapidly jumping from one team to the next; the league lacking clear regulation; the popularity outpacing the structure.

I doubt the world of esports and gaming will ever have a business model identical to the NFL, Premier League, or any other stadium-based sports league, but at the same time, the models of these leagues are changing rapidly, too. The proliferation and growing demand for services like MLB.tv, NFL Rewind, and similar streaming services suggests that an online broadcast would not only be successful, but well-positioned for the next decade of broadcasting trends.

So esports happens to be an activity that people care about. It makes sense, then, that good esports players could make a living doing this popular thing makes sense — that’s how all our current pro sports leagues came into existence. Jim Creighton got paid (under the table) to play baseball, and he got paid with the money from the ticket booth. And when radio coverage started making the sport more money, tickets, hot dogs, and toothpaste commercials lined Babe Ruth’s wallet.

Now, Peyton Manning makes the heft of his income from television. Gate receipts for an NFL game represent only a fraction of the NFL’s revenue. But a guy like Manning also makes a great deal of money in non-NFL advertisements. And this is another piece of the economic puzzle that is pro game.

SK Gaming, one of Germany’s premier gaming teams, has sponsorship deals with Intel, Medion AG, and previously Adidas. As recently as 2008, the 85% of the team’s funding came from sponsorships.

The other side of this inquiry is the question: Is this a sport? Should gaming be considered athletic? Are the Robert Morris gamers student-athletes? I think the answer is probably yes. Maybe it has to be yes. If NASCAR, with it’s heavy reliance on mechanical and electronic components, is a sport, then so is gaming. Like racing sports, gamers cannot survive on intellect alone — so it is unlike a chess or board game tournament. Esports have a very specific, very real physical component to their execution — the rapid maneuvering and manipulating of the hands and fingers; the ability to communicate reflexively and across multiple mediums (with the headset and, say, on-screen flares).

Of course, if we don’t consider pro racing athletic (and I think there’s semantical room to argue that), then we can easily paste that same conclusion on the Robert Morris students. But I’ve digressed.

I would like to point out another similarity of the pro sports and pro esports worlds: Rapid player obsolescence. Whereas the pro tennis, basketball, football, soccer, or baseball player has finished his or her career by age 40, the 30-year-old gamer is an equally rare sight — which is especially surprising since video games have been around for nearly 40 years. But gamer fatigue appears just as real as NFL running back obsoletcence — though with far fewer life-altering concussions to worry about.

So from a collegiate perspective, I think a gaming scholarship is perfectly rational (assuming any sports scholarship is at all rational). It is a sport that could draw attention and attendance to the school; it nurtures an ability that can — though unlikely — result in a lucrative pro career; and it is a topic that is relevant to the interests of many students’ and many in the coming generations.

I say: Well done, Robert Morris. You may have broken the sports and esports barrier, and I think we can all agree that’s delightifying.

(Header image via Piotr Drabik)