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The story
Streamer Yoshida Seisakusho remarked, “I still don’t get esports. Isn’t that just a TV game tournament?” The comment got picked up on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board and snowballed into a full-blown debate over whether esports can really be called a sport. Posters fired back that “a game tournament in English is literally esports,” while others countered that “sport” properly refers to physical competition. The thread spiraled into examples like shogi and go being classified as “mind sports,” and extreme hypotheticals about whether manga-drawing skill could count as a sport. What emerged was both a discomfort with the term “esports” itself and wildly different lines people draw when deciding what counts.
What people said
The Self-Defense Forces even take part — there are military esports tournaments held overseas.
Though really it's just killing practice.
That's just karaoke.
And the result…
So what?
Sport = competition, that's the correct answer.
Even go and shogi fall under the sports category.
By that logic, wouldn't drawing manga, writing novels, and even studying for school all count as sports?
Etymologically that's true, but in modern English 'sport' basically means physical sport.
Even in the West, there's an endless debate over whether golf even counts as a sport. As a professional competition it gets filed as a 'game,' like billiards or darts, while as an amateur hobby it's classified as a 'pastime/leisure activity.'
Calling go, shogi, and chess 'mind sports' is just a classification label used by bodies like the IOC — in general, nobody actually goes around saying 'it's a competition, so it's all sports!'
No, it wouldn't.
Because it's fundamentally a head-to-head competition.
Go ask the pharmacy if there's a cure for stupidity.
Manga and novels could become 'figure-skating-style' judged competitions, and studying already gets ranked by test scores.
I guess if you ran those as competitive tournaments, you could call them sports too.
There's a TV show where celebrities draw pictures and get scored on them.
Is that a sport?
If the show slapped 'sport' in its title and insisted on it, nobody could really deny it.
It's just that nobody does, so it isn't one.
Drawing doesn't really count as physical activity, so it's not a sport.
I bet it's really that people hate the crowd trying to cash in on the esports gravy train.
Isn't it the same as how people don't call martial arts a 'sport'?
It'd feel weird if someone suddenly started calling poker or Uno a 'sport,' right?
While athletes get called 'pro (sport name) player,' no matter what game you play, you're just a 'pro gamer ( )' — blank parentheses.
F1 is similar — the regulations change all the time too, forcing teams to redo the chassis and engine every time.
Then by that standard, games would be excluded too.
That's exactly why it's called 'e'sports.
Are you dumb?
So, 'art-sports' then?
By that logic manga would become 'm'sports too.
They're all just entertainment and games that happen to have a competitive element.
You say it's about exercise, but video games move your hands too — probably more physical exertion than sport shooting, even.
When asked what you do for a living, compared to saying 'baseball player' or 'soccer player,' saying 'pro gamer (League of Legends)' or 'pro gamer (Street Fighter 6)' — people wouldn't even know which is more impressive, let alone rank them.
Re: #72
Even the official Street Fighter 6 broadcast is painful to listen to — limited vocabulary, giggling and just repeating 'crazy' over and over, with that cliquey insider vibe hanging over it.
It feels like a bunch of otaku forcing themselves to sound hyped.
Meanwhile, when foreigners commentate in their own language, it comes off as cool — like the 'popular kid' version of nerd culture.
If that had actually gone through, it would've stayed etched into Olympic history as a record of shame for thousands of years to come.
If it had been adopted, I bet the people now screaming 'never host the Olympics in Japan again' would've gone quiet lol.
Even if there were a competition built around manga, what's the problem with calling it that?
Then literally everything becomes a sport — even studying at school.
Umehara is about the only player I've heard of with a normal human name, lol.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
The term “esports” spread from the 2000s onward with the aim of positioning game tournaments as competitive sports, and the definition of “sport” was never uniform to begin with — even the IOC classifies go and shogi as “mind sports.” The thread’s split came down to a single question: whether “sport” means “physical movement” or “any competition with a winner and loser.” Under the first definition, esports and shogi alike get excluded; under the second, the extreme conclusion is that even manga-drawing contests would theoretically count as sports. The discussion also touched on how adoption of esports as an official Tokyo Olympics event was considered but ultimately scrapped, illustrating how far the term has spread without a matching consensus on how to judge the real thing.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “[Sad News] Yoshida Seisakusho: “I still don’t get esports. Isn’t that just a TV game tournament?”.”
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