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"I know that, with Mario Kart, calling this an eSports tournament is a very loose use of the term," he tells me. "From my point of view, eSports is any sort of electronic game that is competitive. I think that as long as you live with that terminology, any type of competition done by a game at any type of level could be called eSports."There's an interesting distinction here between sports and eSports, which perhaps ties directly to that grammatically odd capital S that has ensured the use of the word as a proper noun, a name for something very specific. Sport can something enjoyed casually: a Sunday tennis match between friends, a mixed company softball team that genuinely doesn't care if it wins or loses the season, an indoor football team made up of tired dads who want to lose weight. But eSports, traditionally, is a term only applied to professionals taking select games designated "worthy" very seriously.At the Mario Kart 8 Ultimate Challenge, there were only a handful of people taking the game seriously. By the time the competition reached the semi-finals there were all of 30 spectators left, the rest having left hours ago as the 67 competitors—well below the 400 the organizers anticipated—were whittled down. The man who eventually comes third, Jacob Aiossa, entered with no intention of winning, and spoke with me after the final race: "I thought it would just be a bit of fun. And then I got here and started winning, and just kept going." Jacob didn't follow eSports beyond following a few streamers, and hadn't considered Mario Kart 8 as a game with eSports potential until participating in Ultimate Challenge. "I always thought of it as the party game that everyone goes to.""I know that, with Mario Kart, calling this an eSports tournament is a very loose use of the term." – Tom Radmonski
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What is clear, though, is that Xenophon considered this a proper sporting event, one that attracted the same potential issues that any sport can. As an outsider, the distinctions that others might make between Mario Kart 8 and other, more "serious" games, aren't there. When you take away the question of what can or can't be an eSport, of what games need to do to qualify as eSports, it makes sense to look at a huge group of people playing a game competitively, hoping to win a prize at the end, and call it sport. For all its issues, the Mario Kart 8 Ultimate Challenge showed how this cartoony, cacophonous, fun game could work as an eSports experience, albeit one that would be very different from what typical punters are used to.Mario Kart 8, for what it's worth to the argument I'm about to make, is a brilliant game. It's easily the best Mario Kart ever released. The track designs are wonderful, the weapon balance (Spiny Shell aside) feels right, and there's definite scope for planning and strategy. But it wasn't until the game's final DLC release, which added in a 200CC mode for all players alongside its pay-walled extra tracks, cars, and characters, that the game's real competitive potential emerged. The final two rounds of the competition, when the race speed was increased from 150 to 200CC, were by far the most fun to watch."As an outsider, the distinctions that others might make between Mario Kart 8 and other, more 'serious' eSports games, aren't there."
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So if high-level Mario Kart 8 is tremendously exhilarating and fun to watch, then why isn't it being taken seriously as a potential eSport? In gaming parlance, there has long been a casual/hardcore divide between the games that are easy to pick up and play and those that require hours of practice and patience just to learn the fundamentals. In professional sports, this divide often boils down to an issue of athleticism—the world's best basketball player is going to be more famous and earn more money than the top competitors in bowling, darts, pool and chess. But "sport" is a term that embraces a wide variety of disciplines and activities.Mario Kart 8 was chosen for this event for its accessibility. "I'm sure that if you talk to anyone, you'll find that Mario Kart is one of the best-known games (series) in the world," Radmonski theorises. "The Esports Gamers League is not designed for the one percent—it's for the other 99. It's to provide a fun, safe atmosphere, and for people to come together the way they would for any sport. The changing face of eSports will make it seem, in the next couple of years, that we're just another notch in the [growth of these] sporting contests." It's that very same accessibility, though, that has prevented the game from being called an eSport.For a game like Mario Kart 8 to ever really emerge as a "genuine" eSport, our idea of what eSports are would have to shift. We'd need to think of eSports as something that isn't reserved for the absolute best in the world, and start taking the legitimacy of minor gaming competitions more seriously. There's plenty of talk about how seriously eSports should be taken, of the relevancy of eSports as a profession, to the point where the Olympic viability is a topic of debate. But perhaps for eSports to really expand, to truly meet its potential, we also need to think about how we could use the term in less serious contexts.New, on VICE Sports: How eSports Can Survive When the Sponsorship Bubble Bursts
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