There are so many ways that the title of this article is wrong. When I look at a pro-gaming team, I see people that have devoted their lives to become the best at something, just like an expert of any field devotes their life to knowing everything there is to know about that field. Pro-gaming is not easy, nor will it ever be easy. I always wanted to be a pro-gamer, but never had the patience, the mindset or really the time.
The first thing I will say about it is that professional gamers do not just sit around all day doing nothing, or "being lazy". They spend every minute of every game analyzing their plays, or the plays of enemy teams. The pro gaming scene is like a battlefield of the mind. In the most well-known E-Sport (Or electronic sport) League of Legends, scouting out the enemy teams can be the difference between winning and losing a game. Since you can ban champions in that game, if you know what the enemy is best at, you can stop them from playing it by banning it (League of Legends has a pick and ban phase). Also pro-gamers tend to try to get outside as much as they can. People tend to view it as they chose to just stay inside and play games, but they did more than that. Just like an athlete learns the ins-and-outs of the track and the best way to run or jump, a professional gamer learns the ins-and-outs of the game, and train their mechanics to the best they can be, to outplay the other team.
E-Sports are getting bigger and bigger. I watch it sometimes myself whether it be League of Legends, Call of Duty or Overwatch (There are many more E-Sport games, I just don't tend to watch them as much). In all of these games there tends to be a moment when I think "How did they even do that?". That's because I haven't dedicated my time to learn the perfect measurements and timing to land a certain skill on the enemy. E-Sports are a mental challenge with every game that is played. Different teams use different strategies. The best teams from different regions come together to see who is the best. The longer that gaming rises as a large part of peoples lives, the bigger E-Sports will become.
There is one more maybe not so well-known game that is played professionally is Magic: The Gathering. Yes, the card game.As someone who started playing Magic just over a week ago, I have realised I started playing a game that takes a lot of thought and preparation. Every deck needs to be thought out precisely and there's a theme to every deck played. The professionals in this game spend every day trying to improve and perfect their deck. They travel to different events, whether it be a Grand Prix or the Pro Tour. Just like video games, these professionals have to do just as much hard work trying to predict the opponents moves and what cards they may have in their hand to counter or destroy a creature.
My personal feelings about professional gaming, if it wasn't already clear, is that it is just as difficult to achieve greatness in that field as any other. To not give up with it and keep pushing yourself to achieve the thing you want, isn't that the same with anything? We all in life want to achieve a certain thing, or a set of things. Some may include working in a more physical job, some may include a more mentally stimulating one. Gaming is massively mentally stimulating. It's not for the unintelligent, lazy people that cannot be bothered with trying in school or college etc. It takes a lot of skill and knowledge to be even relatively good at a video game, so think about how much a professionals mind must be working to think about all possible situations at all times for a best of 3 with 45 minute games.
Gaming Psychologists are now being employed by teams to keep players minds completely focused. I think that in itself shows how much effort and determination is put in to their dreams. They also make sure the players get off the game and spend time doing other things and have more than just the game controlling their lives (I might go in to if in extreme cases the game is controlling us, but that's for another time). Professional gamers tend to go out, whether it be to the gym or out for dinner with their team.
Let me pose a question. People work in offices all the time, using word or excel to input information about their company or their clients. Should we be pushing negative press onto gaming? Is that not where your home is the office, and instead of inputting information on word or something, they are using a mentally stimulating application, pushing them to the best of their mental capability. Surely we should be happy for that. If these people can be in a job where their minds and skills are constantly being pushed to the best of their ability, that's something everyone would enjoy.
People tend to talk about how boring their job is and how much they want to leave and just find something they would enjoy more. This is already happening from my knowledge, but if we had a way of developing our companies to keep people mentally stimulated, I think that everyone would enjoy their jobs a lot more than right now. What I find is when I am busiest, I feel the least bored when I'm working, so maybe we need to work out a way to make it so everyone can keep busy at all times, instead of sitting there trying to find work to do because they are so bored. We can develop ways to make anything relatively stimulating to the brain.
So here's what I think. The only thing that professional gamers have that is easier than us is the enjoyment of being pushed to their limits almost all the time that they are working. Yes, they are not outside picking up crates or anything physical like that, but they are learning new tactics, scouting out other teams and learning new characters to play. They are working just as hard as everyone else, they just have a more fun time doing it.
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