One thing that has been absolutely hilarious to me lately is the raging that people do when it comes to arguing over professional gamers as if they were professional athletes. The story is a little old now, but about a month or so ago, there was a “professional” League of Legends player who was given a one-year ban for being what most 22-year old mouth-breathing internet-dwelling socially inept male virgin gamers are: a dick. In the midst of this all, there’s a pathetic little internet verbal battle royale about how it’s right, how it’s wrong, and then there are the people that just show up to troll for the sake of trolling and other dickish behavior because most of the people involved in these barbs are just like the guy that was banned in the first place: dicks.
Throughout all of this, I can’t help but take some steps back and look at the scenario in context: many people arguing over the banning of a guy who plays video games that managed to go so overboard with his toxic conduct to where someone of authority actually did something about it.
Take a few steps more back: many people are arguing over a kid who plays video games.
So the player in question is some early-20s, skinny looking dweeb, who just happens to be good at LoL because he has played it for many, many, many, many hours. He’s good enough to be recruited onto various “professional LoL teams,” and they participate in tournaments where there are legitimate cash prizes that are split five ways to those who win them. But when not participating in tournaments the dweeb is in his personal lair, playing with random strangers, to hone his skills and practice playing, because LoL is a game where your individual skill is irrelevant if the team does not work together.
However, playing with random strangers, the dweeb apparently easily loses his cool, and verbally abuses others, complains, whines, and occasionally rage quits, leaving his teammates to succumb to nothing but the numbers game. He is repeatedly reported by the community, but he believes himself to be invincible to the reprimands of Big Brother because he is a well-known (to the LoL community) as a professional gamer, and is an utter ass and a dick to those who draw his ire. But eventually, the complaints and reports about him grow to such magnanimous numbers to where Big Brother literally has no choice but to give him repeated warnings, and finally, the year-long ban in question.
The arguing that surrounds this is that there is a camp that whole-heartedly agrees with Big Brother, because it sets an example that nobody is above anyone else, and that if the professional players who are essentially human billboards for the game are not immune from banning, then your average trolls should be careful to not cross too many lines either. If I were participating in these futile and pointless debates, this is the camp that I would be a part of.
But then there is the camp that believes Big Brother is messing with a guy’s finances by banning him, which is SO NOT COOL because playing LoL could very well be his living and main source of income.
- Take LoL out of the equation, but competitive gaming as an occupation is about as reliable as gambling. There’s zero projectability, and no guarantee that money will come in at all, if you don’t win. Putting LoL back into the equation, it’s also five times the risk with teammates to whom any one player must rely on the other four to also be at the top of their game. These guys are all 20-somethings too; any one little thing can throw these guys off, whether it’s the niggling thought that their internet girlfriend could be cheating on them with another internet boyfriend, or perhaps the Ahri cosplayer at the event’s panties are showing, and they can’t stop thinking about it while they get ganked by the opposing team’s Shaco. Relying on a bunch of 20-something retards to make a living doesn’t exactly sound like a good investment in the first place.
- Occupation: “League of Legends Professional Player.” Do you really want that to be your actual job title?
- He’s 20-something, and probably doesn’t have any sort of contemporary education since he was spending all his time playing LoL. Otherwise I’d be saying he’s 20-something, and should probably be considering getting a real education or a real job by now.
Relate this kind of scenario to professional sports. Recently, a baseball player called one of his bros a faggot on Twitter. He was fined by his team, and had to take sensitivity training. A while back, a basketball player assaulted his head coach, and was banned from the NBA for a year. The baseball player was a minor leaguer who hasn’t even seen the light of the major leagues yet. The basketball player was easily the best player on his team going into the season. Neither were above their teams or their leagues as a whole, and punishment was duly doled out on both.
Back to the professional gaming topic, there is a smaller sub camp of people that simply feel bad for the toxic dweeb’s team, for losing one of their members. This argument might actually hold the most weight, but let’s go back to professional sports again. When a player gets injured or in this case, banned, it opens the door for someone else. There’s no more awesome story in professional sports of the man from nowhere who gets his opportunity to shine during someone else’s misfortune, and this could very easily be the same case in professional gaming, especially in LoL. There are so many stupidly good players that play on a regular basis that whoop my ass, making me second guess my decision to play sometimes. I highly doubt the team is going to care in the long run; from what I understand, they already had backup players, and always have, in the event that one or more “starters” are rendered unavailable.
But that’s the thing about sports fans; when the day is over, most sports fans are bigger fans of entire teams than they are of any individual players. It only makes it easier for people to forget about professional athletes if they did something deplorable to out themselves as opposed to getting injured, and the same should probably apply to this retard dweeb gamer who trolled his way into the banhammer. His team will likely do just fine with his replacement at the helm, and in a year, they might not even want him back.
Who knows, maybe in the year, the dweeb will have to go to school, or go outside and get a real job, because he can still continue to play LoL under smurf accounts, but it sure as hell won’t be for money. If this is the case, he should be thanking Riot for leading him into the real world.
All in all, I think I kind of lost my direction while I was writing, but fuck it I think I still got to the point of what I was going to write about. It is really silly that people get so up in arms over people who have somehow managed to find a way to play video games for a living, as unreliable and unpredictable of an occupation that could be. But I think there would be a way greater understanding of certain aspects of professional gaming if enthusiasts of professional gaming knew anything about organized sports, and related some of the scenarios that exist in professional gaming to professional sports.
