Dota 2 Essay

the following piece is a work from early on in my writing career. It remains largely unedited (since the published date), and largely not fact checked. Published date is an approximation

One day in Seattle Washington, two teams were set to compete for the 2.7 million dollar prize pool in Benaroya Hall. The vast crowd of adoring fans were preemptively waiting for the biggest sporting event they would ever experience in their entire lives, but this was no ordinary sporting event. The two teams were not competing for goals, nor were they competing for touchdowns or even baskets. Each teams’ only aim was to destroy the enemy teams’ ancient, in the third Dota 2 international tournament.

“But what in the world is this Dota 2?”, you may be asking yourself. Dota 2 is an acronym that stands for Defense of the Ancients, and it’s a competitive and extremely popular eSport in which you destroy the other teams Ancient (Your base) while defending yours. ESports, short for Electronic Sports are games that are defined as being competitive enough to be played for large prize pools. These video games tend to be known for having extremely high difficulty and skill curves, but can be watched, understood, and enjoyed by large audiences. It doesn’t take much knowledge of the game to have a good time watching it, but playing it well can take thousands of dedicated hours. Two other highly popular eSports are Starcraft 2, a Real Time Strategy game, and League of Legends, a game very similar to Dota 2. The two main countries that tend to produce the best eSport players tend to be Sweden, South Korea, and The Netherlands.

Now that you know everything there is to know about eSports, let’s move on to the most important topic of today, the controversy surrounding them as real sports. One of the recurring examples I will use is American Football. Here in Virginia, almost everyone knows about football, how it’s played, and at least 3 teams. It’s not uncommon to be asked about last night’s game, or if they are going to watch the college team compete on Saturday. Nobody ever seems to bat an eye when you’re on the sofa watching football all day. Now let’s look at eSports, more specifically Dota 2. If you spend an hour watching the really important game of the tournament, cheering it on just like a football fan would cheer on his favorite team, your family will give you weird looks and call you a lazy bum for watching video games all day. Others will call you a ridiculous gaming addict that can’t stand being away from a computer for an extended period of time. Going back to football, a child can spend his entire life playing football, practicing for hours, even going to college and playing professionally and he will be seen as the town hero. “Oh look at that guy who spent his entire life dedicated to a game that he loves to play, what a loser”, says no one. He worked hard, he did well, and his talents paid off in the end. Meanwhile, the Dota 2 player is constantly being told that he is wasting and throwing his life away. He is constantly berated about how he’s a good for nothing burden to society and he should go out and get a “real job”, or that he should go to college for marketing and hate himself for the rest of his life. Many will call him a pathetic loser who lives with his parents, and blame him for how kids these days are lazy and stupid. If he loses a major tournament and comes home empty handed, this awful torment just gets even worse, and his parents call him a failure. Come home with a large prize pool, and his parents won’t fail to point out that it’s as much as they make in 4 months, and others will say that he simply got lucky.

Being an eSports player is a very thankless job, and as stated in the previous paragraph, it’s a job that many people won’t respect you for having. The stigma associated with it alone enough to drive many people away from it. For the few that do enjoy watching it, there is a glimmer of hope. Recently, the popular sports bar Buffalo Wild Wings agreed to stream a popular League of Legends tournament in a small number of restaurants in the states. Although these are incredibly small steps to garner eSport popularity to the average person, it’s a huge step for fans of all games. I have a strong belief that eSports will eventually be as popular in the US as they are in South Korea and Sweden eventually (That’s not to say that players don’t get as much prejudice as they get in the rest of the world).