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Gamers or athletes? FIFA15 as an eSport

Hundreds and thousands of people sit and watch people play video games
Roar Guru
29th September, 2014
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The latest instalment of the iconic football video game franchise, FIFA15, is hitting the shelves in Australia, and hype is at an all-time high. This edition is the first specifically designed for the next-generation of consoles.

The franchise has sold over 100 million copies worldwide since its inception in December 1993, and countless football fans, budding managers, uninterested but sociable housemates, and semi-professional procrastinators have spent their best years virtually recreating scenes of sporting glory.

You’d be pretty lucky to find a PlayStation or Xbox owner who didn’t have a copy of at least one version of the FIFA game. It’s a badge, of sorts.

It shows the world that yes, although I might be a gamer, I like sports. I may be borderline overweight and horribly uncoordinated, but here is a sport at which I will beat just about anyone.

It’s a badge that a staggering amount of people wear proudly. Every 90 minutes there are half a million FIFA matches being played worldwide. That’s at least 250,000 people around the world playing FIFA14, at any given time.

With numbers this size, a sense of competition, a desire to be the best, is a natural outcome.

Gamers can compete online against anyone in the world, in randomly selected, rated, or invite-initiated matches. Results are kept track of, and in a very real sense, gamers are ranked and rated.

FIFA14’s internal ranking system (viewable here)

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However, external from the EA leaderboards, FIFA fans are assembling; players are organising their own competitions, battling one another for the top spot, and monetising their passion.

Most notably in the Western world, hardcore gaming organisation Major League Gaming, also known for their hilarious ‘MLG’ tagged Youtube videos, are forming their own leagues and tournaments,with actual prize money.

In the Eastern world, gaming is going fully professional, South Korea in particular. Universities in South Korea are now accepting gamers as student athletes for scholarship purposes. The best professional South Korean gamers can earn nearly US$500,000 in a country with an average annual income of US$16,000.

In saying all of this, there is a strong case for gamers to be recognised as athletes, and here’s why.

There is a strong sense of competition
Whether internally within the EA Sports leaderboard system or in externally organised competitions (such as MLGs), players will try their hardest to win. Seriously, you should hear some of the things that 10-year-old British kids say to me when I (very occasionally) score against them. People take this seriously.

Gamers exhibit extraordinary fine-motor control
The good ones do, anyway. To excel at any video game, you need skills that you can only gain by putting in the hard yards, playing until your eyes bleed.

Tactics, tactics, tactics.
You’re not going to beat a possession-focused 4-3-3 Barcelona set up with a 4-4-2 Manchester City side set up to swing in the crosses for Aguero to head in. It just doesn’t work that way. You’ve gotta know your craft.

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“But you’ve got to use your body to be an athlete!” 
Try telling that to a Nascar driver. For that matter, tell it to Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, the best darts player in history. He uses little more than his right hand to play his ‘sport’, yet people are happy to acknowledge his status as a sportsman (and rightfully so).

Let’s have a quick look at some of the finest e-athletes (e-thletes?) plying their trade, shall we?

Magic.

Heart-stopping action.

Watching “XxNoobzLoLzxX” pop a Cruyff turn, stepover and nail a 40-yard bomb to the top corner excites me way too much. But hey, I’m an athlete in training and Fifa 15 is my training ground.

I should be getting inspired by this stuff.

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From now on, whenever I’m ‘wasting my best years’ or should be ‘helping with the housework’, I’ll just say, “Honey, I hear you, but I’m in training. I’m trying to provide for our future”.

Let’s just hope my girlfriend doesn’t read this article.

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