Los e-SPORTS como deporteuna aproximación desde las ciencias de la actividad física y el deporte

Resumen

The professional video game competitions have become into the phenomenon of the so-called e-sports or electronic sports. The expansion and the success of the phenomenon among practitioners and followers, along with its economic profits as a business, have brought about the approach of the competitions of video games to the sports environment. In light of this situation, an intense international academic debate about whether the e-sports are a sport or not has been opened in the field of the Physical Activity and the Sport Sciences. The purpose of this article is to identify and analyse the main arguments developed in the specialized literature to consider if the e-sports are a sport or not, from an academic perspective. In the first part of the paper, the sport concept is addressed from a social, institutional and academic approach. From this theoretical framework, in the second part, the arguments on the topic raised in the scientific publications of the field are reviewed. Although it is observed a predominance of contributions that consider the e-sports like sports, or like games immersed in a sportification process, which sooner or later will turn them into sports, it is also found any divergent isolated point of view which considers them to be games but not sports.