Pros and cons of the growing popularity of eSports

The last part of you exam set asks you to discuss the pros and cons of the growing popularity of eSports, taking your starting point in one of the texts and using some of the following phrases: for some reason, partly, instead, although, in comparison, in other words, yet.

As both texts can offer you inspiration for your discussion, we will look at each of them at a time and outline the pros and cons they suggest with regards to the growing popularity of eSports.

“eSports: Are Pro Gamers the Athletes of the Future?”

In the article “eSports: Are Pro Gamers the Athletes of the Future?” author Michael Douglas Smith discusses the growing popularity of eSports, but he is more focused on the pros and cons of eSports being a sport. In fact, his main argument is that, despite their growing popularity, eSports are not sports:

… I must take a stand opposing the increasingly prevalent notion that professional gaming is, in fact, a sport. eSports do not fall under my definition of a traditional sport – they are exactly what their title defines them as: electronic sports. (ll. 17-19)

Yet, some pros and cons regarding the growing popularity can still be inferred from the article.

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“The competitive world of eSports”

The story from CBS News, “The competitive world of eSports”, is also focused on the growing popularity of eSports and it presents various opinions on the subject from those who are connected with this trend: video games companies, players, fans, sponsors, etc.

In the material, most of those interviewed focus on the pros of the growing popularity of eSports.

Some of the pros for the growing popularity of eSports as presented in the CBS News story are the fact that players can become wealthy based on their skills and gain access to universities or traveling visas: “Now at 22, Matt is a professional gamer, known as Nadeshot. He is so good he made nearly a million dollars last year playing Call of Duty.” (ll. 48-49); “In fact, the Athletic Department at Robert Morris University in Chicago began offering eSports scholarships this year. And last year the U.S. State Department granted athlete visas to pro gamers for the first time.” (ll. 70-71)

Another pro for eSports is that they have managed to encourage digital socialization, but also real-life interaction through the screening and viewing of competitions:

“Like sports, you want to watch it live, you want to be there when something interesting happens, you want to be there for that moment, and share that moment as a communal experience. It’s very much like being in a crowd, only digitally.” (ll. 35-37)

This also implies that companies producing video games and organizing competitions also produce a lot of revenue, which is, of course, a pro argument for them to support the growing popularity of eSports: “These people are following all these young kids that are playing videogames, and they’ve got these huge followings, and they’re signing autographs.’ And it became really evident to us that this was the beginning of something big.”” (ll. 12-14)

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