I know this story is a week old, but I must address it. A week ago Sunday, 60 Minutes ran a segment on professional gamer Fatal1ty and how he’s making a ton of money winning video game tournaments.
The piece details the exploits of Fatal1ty (a.k.a. Jonathan Wendell) and his growing celebrity as a gamer and his clout as a commercial endorser. His agent tries to argue that Wendell is an athlete for a new form of sport.
No. No no no no no no no no no NO. He is not.
I’ll agree that video games are sport in that they consist of people competing against one another and that they are quickly becoming a spectator sport, but gamers as athletes? Please.
One of the primary aspects of being an athlete is skill of a physical nature. Don’t tell me that a largely sedentary activity such as playing video games is a sport, the most excursion of which requires sweating over controller.
Wendell clearly has mad skills as a gamer (and actual athletic skills, as the piece points out), but to call someone an athlete merely because they excel at video games is purely absurd.
Watch the 60 Minutes Video: