Video games as a sport is an awesome idea. In a way, it’s currently happening. Both sports and video games promote competition and team building. Sports and Video games can both be real or virtualized, and the people who play them are no longer just nerds and jocks. 

 In sports, you’re competing to win the championship. In video games, you’re competing for many different things. For example: to be the last one standing, to be the first to complete the game, or to collect the greatest number of items. Sometimes there are official competitions where people come from all over to compete. In these cases, there are real world rewards like cash or a trophy exactly like sports. 

 Most sports require teams. When you're playing a video game, you're learning how to cooperate with those around you and playing as a team. For example, there is a game that my brother and I like to play called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. It’s a game requiring strategy where one player wears a V.R headset and the other has the manual on how to dismantle the bomb. You must work together as a team to complete all the puzzles under the time limit and within three strikes. While playing this, Hunter and I have learned how to communicate with each other and work together which are the same skills you would be getting from a team sport. 

Some video games require movement. This results in physical exercise similar to sports. New technology makes it possible for games to register your movement. This creates a more interactive gaming experience. You no longer have to leave your living room to hang out with friends, kick a soccer ball, or go for a run. Virtual Reality is also being used in sports for training. Some don’t consider this a video game because it is directly related to sports. However, the same technology is being used for both making the lines between sports and video games blurry. The only difference is that the training simulations are based off of real-world experiences, and video games have free reign on how realistic they can be. 
As sports are slowly becoming more virtualized, video games are slowly starting to seep into the real world. One example of this comes from a game called Fortnite. Fortnite is a battle royal game where players compete to become the last man standing by killing each other off and building forts. It seems basic enough until you realize everything the creators have done up to this point was to reveal hidden lore in their game. Recently they began to hint at the idea of in-game portals that suck up monuments in the game and spit them back out into the real world and vice versa. People throughout the world have found items that have disappeared in the game hidden in various places. An infamous example are llamas that look like piñatas, the symbol for the loot boxes, found scattered around the globe. These new additions include clues where to find the next hidden item. Because of the massive size of this project, Fortnite fans from across the globe are forced to work together to figure out the meaning of all of it. As a result, the Fortnite community are more united than ever before.  
In this day in age, people can no longer be defined as jocks or nerds. The sterotypes that you see in the movies no longer exist. You can find kids who play basketball who also like Dungeons and Dragons, and kids that are band geeks that play football. A nerd might get poor grades, and a jock might get straight A’s. If people can create this grey area between all the different cliques, then why can’t games and sports be united as well?  

This goes to show that the difference between sports and video games is no longer black and white. They cannot be defined as virtual and reality, or competitive and recreational because there is a little bit of both in each of them. In the end, I hope that the gaming and athletic community can put away their differences and live happily with each other because at the end it doesn’t matter whether or not it’s a sport. If you’re doing something that makes you happy, then that’s all that matters.