This is one of four articles that was chosen by Scroll Editors from a seventh grade writing competition in Mrs. Dyer’s English classes. All students were required to write an article about a topic they had an opinion on. The competition was modelled after a student editorial competition in The New York Times. From all four sections of that class, 17 articles were picked by the seventh-grade students as the best and sent to The Scroll without names. The 17 articles were then narrowed down to four by opinions editors Dom Alberts and Charlie Gorrivan. The articles were then ranked from first to fourth by the entire editorial staff.
In a class of twelve students, nine of them play video games for fun. Even though many people play, that does not mean it should be considered a sport. Everyone does things for fun, but something being fun does not always mean that it has to be a sport. For example, hanging out with friends is fun for me, but it is not classified as a sport. Video games should not be a sport because they don’t respond to the definition of a sport and have a positive impact on you and your health.
The first reason why video games should not be a sport is because when you look at definitions of a sport, video games don’t apply to any of them. The Oxford Dictionary says a sport is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.” This definition does not apply to video games because video games do not involve physical exertion whatsoever, unless you considering moving your fingers as physical exertion. Although video games involve some level of competition and has entertainment, so do many other activities that are not considered a sport.
In addition, Free Dictionary explains physical exertion as “the activity of exerting your muscles in various ways to keep fit.” Physical exertion is the key to a sport, and this definition proves that video games don’t have it. Video games do not exercise your muscles. All they do is damage your brain, affect your body negatively, and make you lazy, because all you do is sit down, and move your fingers.
Another reason is that video games have a negative effect on your body while other sports don’t. CBS News tells us how video games affect your physical health too. This is because they cause eye irritation, dryness, fatigue, and blurred vision. Although some sports involve some injury, they are not the common ones that video games have. All that video games are doing are causing bad things for your body and hurting your physical health.
These effects on you don’t impact you in a positive way, while sports like soccer, tennis, baseball, golf, basketball and more do by keeping your body healthy. Likewise, Psychology Today shows that children that are on a screen for more than seven hours a day have “lack of sleep, become nervous, moody, and can’t pay attention.” It also makes you very aggressive. As the previous example shows, video games disrupt your life. This example shows this because it interrupts your life by changing your attitude (makes you moody), and making you nervous. That leads to not paying attention to what you’re doing in your academic life.
To add to my point, The Elsevier says that, “We tend to see a lot of controversies like this around young people; moral panics about teens are nothing new.” This shows that children at a young age get affected in this way, and it’s extremeness makes teens get panicked. They get these panicked because with the amount of time they play videos they cannot control their nervousness and then therefore get panicked. These effects show the reasons why video games cannot be a sport.
You might think that video games might require skill, but for a matter of fact they don’t. The Raise Smart Kid website show us video games that require strategy, and some skill. They say it requires skill because you need to have the concentration to know what you are doing. Well just because some video games require strategy, that doesn’t mean that they all do. Looking at this shows that not all video games have skill, and even if they did they still have all the negative effects on you that was mentioned earlier. According to many sources, Gamerant Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Rocket League, Call of Duty, NBA 2k16, etc. are the most popular video games that YouTubers make videos on, and are most played. Yet, if people are saying that those popular video games should be considered a sport, then they are wrong because those are definitely not the ones that require skill. The top video games that require skill are Starcraft, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Civilization and more. This shows that if people were to call video games a sport they would have to narrow it down to only the ones that require skill (even then there are the negative effects on health).
In summary, these previous examples show how video games don’t have the ability to be a sport. If a sport should be doing positive things to your body (except for accidents), then video games can’t be a sport looking at how it is bad for your health. It also doesn’t fall with the definition of a sport, and how all definitions talk about how a sport should have physical exertion. Video games do not have that physical exertion at all. Overall, these two things show that whatsoever video games should not be a sport. Some people think that video games should be considered a sport, and if people start thinking that then people are not playing productive sports that involve physical exertion. If it was a sport then the productive ones that require physical exertion could be provided in PE or after school. A solution is limiting the amount of time that teenagers play on video games so they don’t get the bad effects. This is an important topic that needs to be addressed because many people are getting the bad impact on themselves, also this is crucial for teenagers today because it interrupts their education. Parents should be aware of this and try to address it as well.
