Kim also said that the Harvard eSports Association tries to combat the stigma surrounding video games on college campuses.
“One of the tenets that Jason and I wanted for our club was to help with the destigmatization of gaming,” Kim said. “At Harvard, people are hard-working and are judged if they’re seen as wasting time on something not important. But just because you’re playing games doesn’t mean you’re wasting time.”
Now, the club hosts monthly LAN parties in Pierce Hall, where anywhere from 30 to 80 Harvard gamers come to play various games for several hours. The group also competes in intercollegiate tournaments. Pietra competes in Smash tournaments both on campus and larger city-wide competitions.
“Normally, the weekly tournaments in Boston are at bars,” he said. “There could be as many as 50 people at the tournament. I don’t go super often, but a lot of people there all know each other and are very much a family.”
eSPORT OR SPORT
Even with the continued rise of competitive gaming—both on college campuses and nationwide—there remains a debate over what qualifies as an eSport and whether eSports will ever gain legitimacy on the scale of traditional sports.
The debate begins with the term itself, and whether it is an accurate descriptor of competitive gaming.
“I like the term eSports in describing competitive gaming because it makes it easy to understand for someone who doesn’t know what it is,” Kim said. “It’s the electronic version of sports. But it also limits the identity of eSports to be an inferior version of sports. There are similarities, but it doesn't have to be considered a sport for it to be considered legitimate.”
For some gamers, the debate over whether competitive gaming qualifies as a sport is relatively unimportant.
“It depends if you consider chess a sport,” Pietra said. “[Super Smash Bros.] is very much a mental game, outthinking your opponent, and it’s competitive. I don’t know if that makes it a sport, and I don’t really care. eSports is a term to categorize gaming. It doesn’t need to be made into an athletic feat because that doesn’t make sense.”
But Kim sees many similarities between eSports and traditional sports, even beyond the aspects of teamwork, competitive mentality, and muscle memory.
“There is a stark difference between professional and amateur gamers,” Kim said. “That’s what sets League of Legends apart as a sport rather than a game. In a game like foosball, there’s some degree of similarity in that a set of skills are involved, but you don’t see the same distinction between the levels of players.”
Kim further noted that eSports are physically demanding in ways that differ from traditional sports.
“Obviously, I’m not running around,” he said. “But at the same time, there’s a lot more subtlety in video games. In basketball, if your dribble is a little off, it doesn’t matter. But in eSports, success or failure can be decided by subtle, millisecond differences in how you move your character, or attack. You need to be very good mechanically.”
Additional hurdles remain before eSports can achieve widespread acceptance, with the stigma surrounding gaming and the gender imbalance of gaming participants both concerns.