No amount of money should make computer gaming a sport

Did you know the US authorities give visas to competitive gamers on the same basis they do to footballers or golfers, because they’re professional sportspeople? Did you know there are professional gamers? Do you care?

Me neither, really. It’s like that recent tiff about whether or not bridge is a sport. Who cares, apart from bridge fiends eyeing any funding that might come with being classified as a sport rather than simply competition.

Anything can be a competition. Two flies going up a wall, piss-heads guzzling pints, team-building suits paint-balling each other: it can all be competitive. That doesn’t make it sport.

It doesn’t really sit right getting strident about the language of something so trivial. Language pedants can be a colossal pain in the arse, often so bedevilled worrying about the minutiae that the point becomes irrelevant. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

The late Con Houlihan famously said a man capable of misplacing a comma is capable of anything.

Since Houlihan often seemed out of synch with his own time, what he might make of the use of language in a digital time is enough to make one think checking out when he did was a final example of his own impeccable timing.

Sadly for Con’s memory, a culture that regresses technique to an extent that the simple concept of “friend” gets morphed into a mammoth corporate game of competitive popularity means commas are as redundant as dictionaries.

But I don’t care how infinite the digital vocabulary might be, there’s no way in hell “E-Sports” constitute sport. You know this. I know this. No judicial review is required. No legal contortions over definitions involving competition, rules, skill or physical exertion are necessary.

Worth a fortune

Yet the trend is growing worldwide for competitive gaming to be regarded as sport, in much the same way as eating, sleeping or scratching your backside might be regarded as sport if you shoved the word “competitive” in front of it. Gaming’s different though for a very simple reason – it’s worth a fortune.

There are forecasts the global industry will be worth over $100 billion next year. For that kind of money, the business instinct is to let anyone call anything anyway and anyhow they want to.

So when headlines in mainstream American media ponder whether or not competitive gaming is going to be the next major professional sport, definitions suddenly become more relevant and important than quirky crap about bridge.

Pinning the sport label on to competition provides a legitimacy it doesn’t otherwise have. And I could reel off figures containing an eye-watering quantity of zeros which make it resolutely in the corporate interest to legitimise sitting in front of a screen as some sporting activity.

It might be an alien concept to fogies but sports channels in America are already televising gaming tournaments; essentially filming people who play Call of Duty.

Madison Square Garden gets sold out for this stuff. Top players rejoicing under names suggesting an excessive devotion to Game of Thrones or Star Wars are known globally, raking in seven-figure annual earnings. And good luck to them. But let's not go down the road of selling it as sport, with lines consciously getting blurrier in the drive for ever-more sales.

You only have to watch hopelessly old-fashioned TV and the language employed for advertising something like Playstation: Messi & Co staring at their computer selves flicking the ball, sitting on couches next to handsomely coiffed gym-bunny actors thin enough for us to know their lives aren't being spent perfecting their own gaming flicks.

One of my youngsters was watching such an ad recently, pointed to Messi, and asked who “yer man” was.

Yet he can reel off chapter and verse on cockney gits called “Skankyshortarse” or something equally attractive, characters who film themselves gaming and have somehow got half the pubescent world thinking it’s a productive use of their time and energy to stare endlessly at anonymous weirdos endlessly staring at screens.

Generational thing

Clearly it’s a generational thing. And I know to the billions devoted to their shiny sexy digital Elvis that I’m coming across as a dull and Luddite

Pat Boone

– look him up, or ask your granny. But in a world where one in four primary school kids in Ireland are obese, the idea of this stuff getting insidiously legitimised under the guise of being some sort of sport is offside.

There have already been calls for gaming to be included in the Olympics. Since the list of Olympic sports already runs a broad gamut of comparative irrelevance, it is no huge stretch to imagine a lobby possessed of the financial clout that the gaming industry does being able to present a convincing case for inclusion.

There is certainly worldwide evidence of a demand for it in spectator terms. Stadiums don’t get filled with audiences for shooting or archery but they do for gaming. There is also a skill factor, not to mention the competitive bit. The fact no movement is involved is a minus of course but that doesn’t seem to be a problem with shooting. Successful cases have been made on flimsier substance. But such cases are rooted in the sort of linguistic gymnastics that makes lawyers rich because they bear little relation to the bleedin’ obvious.

No one’s saying gaming isn’t competitive, skilful, popular, and great fun if that’s how you like your fun. And if it doesn’t involve the unhappiness of someone else, fun is impossible to argue with: each to their own and all that. But it isn’t sport.

Because arguing that kicking a digital ball is as legitimate in sporting terms as going outside and belting a real ball off a wall fundamentally compromises meaning. And not just in language terms either.