Henry Marken
Yeah you read that right. I guess I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently there’s a movement that video gamers are athletes, making this an argumentative statement. Jesus Christ, when does the nightmare end.
After releasing my last blog, a kind gentleman informed me that I had mistakenly forgot to mention video gamers as athletes. I then sent the kindness right back to him and respectfully told him that this was not a mistake, but rather an intentional move to display my public opinion that video gamers are not athletes, as video gaming is not a sport.
The mutual kindness quickly vanished when this gentleman then told me that I knew nothing and I should go have sex with myself.
Sick.
I’m not saying video games aren’t great. They are great. They saved my sanity, I mean some days in quarantine were dark. I was clawing at the walls! If I didn’t have Battlefront II and Warzone to blow off some steam for the last 9 months, you’d see my mugshot in a future Netflix bizarre crime documentary.
Anywho, I love videogames. But I wouldn’t say that video gamers are athletes. Athletes are proficient in playing sports, but video games aren’t sports… they’re games. People who are good at video games are gamers, people who write well are writers, people who are good painters are artists, and Ted Cruz is a twisted fuck. These are just facts. That’s just how things are.
Video games are inherently games, thus the players are gamers.
“But Henry, what about the world of Esports,” some tramp would ask.
Esports? Oh, you mean *Esports. Yeah I’ve heard of *Esports. It’s big. You can’t spell *Esports without that asterisk though. Why?
Because we are really talking about televised video games.
Remember quarantine season 1? You know, mid March to late April, when the world completely shut down and everyone watched Tiger King. Live sports were also nothing but painful memories. Commentators were making videos doing play-by-play of civilians walking around and the PardonMyTake guys were televising their video game battles.
That sucked.
We were laughing and cheering, but we were all crying on the inside. Because it wasn’t really sports, and we needed real sports.
Video games may involve intense strategy and competition, but they just don’t capture the same magic that comes with watching real sports; watching fellow humans harness the warrior within and compete.
Watching them do it themselves.
I’m not saying that gamers aren’t skilled or that there weren’t a lot of hours put into it. I’m just saying that we gotta keep the line drawn between sports and video games, otherwise ESPN is gonna be filled with a bunch of crap.
And that brings me to my next point. Video gaming is sometimes shown on ESPN. Obviously not on primetime, as their time slots are usually during Grandpa’s naptime, but nonetheless video gaming has been seen on ESPN.
“But Henry, if it’s on ESPN, then it must be a real definitive sport, right?”
No.
You know what else is on ESPN? The Westminster Kennel Club Dog show. Do you really think Gramma running around in her pantsuit with her french poodle is an athlete?
It’s entertainment. Sometimes content that airs on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, also known as ESPN, is to satisfy the pure entertainment sector.
I hear this next one over and over and over again, but I’ll diffuse it once more.
“If golf is a sport then video gaming should be a sport.”
No. No God Jesus no, fuck. No. You know what, go take a lap.
I’m not gonna break my back and present why golf is a sport, because that’s just a silly waste of time. I don’t think any other sport has caused my cholesterol to rise and my hairline to shrink more than golf.
I’ll say this. At the very least, golf is a sport because it encompasses the earliest known elemental factors that defined a sport: using a stick of some sort to hit a ball. Not to mention, you gotta do it WAY better than someone else and that takes practice, countless hours of playing, and now it’s proven that the best golfers are the ones that have included rigorous weight lifting into their training programs.
No one’s lifting weights to be better at video games. Gamers lift so that when they leave their gaming station, they can look like an athlete from afar and attract a MATE at the bar!
Athletes play sports and Gamers play video games. That’s it. You can most certainly be both, but let’s not fuse the two as one, otherwise we’re gonna have a weight problem and we are all going to look like the big people from Up. You remember those guys right? The ones who were carted around that mall sized spaceship, with all of them glued to their screens and clocking in 600 pounds a pop.
For the love of God, let’s not head in that direction. Go outside and play.
