Whenever games are brought up in traditional media, specifically the sports scene, esports is usually scrutinized to be something that takes no skill and the professionals within any esports should not be counted as real athletes. This whole notion is really dumb in my opinion the even though esports don’t have as much physical strain as traditional sports would its not like being a professional in a game is easy. Most people don’t consider the amount of time the player has to commit once they are playing for a pro team in any game. A game where I have a lot of knowledge on what the pros go through is counter strike. A typical day for a cs pro would be start the day around 10 for everyone warmup, and go over any executes, or mistakes from previous scrims for around an hour, and food of course. Then we would start scrims around noon and play for four hours, then an hour break and then another four hours. Then we call it a day there, but in some situations people would be playing more after practice is over. They would play pro ten mans where there are a bunch of pros from other teams and just play for money. I know for me I like to just play deathmatch at the end of the night to help keep my aim consistent. At this point these pros are putting in 12+ hours of work each day, and compared to traditional sports it’s greater or equal to the time esports pros are putting in (Of course not every team runs how I described it, I just used my experience from running a team in the past). Even though physical activity is not the main factor that needs to be cultivated in esports pros, a healthy body has shown to be better for players in general in terms of stamina, and reaction time. Even some organizations have sports psychologists to help with the mental side of the game, specifically in counter strike, it can be a very emotional game for a lot of players and an org called Astralis has shown that a sports psychologist has proved as a good investment. In the past Astralis were known to be a great team, but whenever the big games would come around, their big hitters wouldn’t show up for the match/series. That trend changed when the players got more involved with the sports psychologist and eventually became a really dominant force in the international scene. I’m referencing all of this as proof that the work people in esports deserves to get as much credit as people within the traditional sports scene.