US Immigration recognizes League of Legends players as pro athletes | Hacker News Reader

US Immigration recognizes League of Legends players as pro athletes

pandodaily.com

27 pointschangdizzle9 comments

As the article notes, this is a pretty standard immigration classification for people who travel to participate in competitive tournaments; chess players are classified similarly. It's not really about the U.S. immigration service "validating" anything as a cultural category, just classifying what kind of business travel the people in question are engaged in, from the perspective of immigration law.

An issue I see here is the relatively rapid trend changes within e-sports compared to more traditional sports. What happens when League of Legends 2 is released (or everyone drops it and moves to DOTA 2)? Or Starcraft 3?

Would it not be more appropriate to classify e-sports as a single sport, with various subcategories for the individual games (or even game types)?

They can even recognize professional players as militaries.

I am sure that a crazy gamer will be like Ender.

Is 'athlete' really the appropriate term? 'Pro' yes. A pro LoL player is probably less athletic than pro pool player.

I only dabble with LoL, but in StarCraft, there is a physical element: it's really tiring to sustain a high APM while also maintaining accuracy.

Micro is certainly a different kind of physical prowess than sprinting 100m, but I think it's close enough to qualify.

Avid LoL scene follower checking in, most players are in fairly good shape. With the scene getting more serious and professional most teams are getting coaches that mandate healthy diets and exercise as part of a team's training, since you know healthy body healthy mind. So while the game might not be that physically intensive (though it definitely can be really stressful) most players do at least undergo some kind of physical 'training'.

Obviously differs from team to team and there are some overweight pros as well.

That still doesn't make LoL an athletic sport (a sport that requires athletic capability), it just means some athletic people play LoL.

I'm athletic and I play chess, but chess is not an athletic sport.

  ath·lete [ath-leet]

  A person trained or gifted in exercises or contests involving physical agility, stamina, or strength; a participant in a sport, exercise, or game requiring physical skill.

  http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/athlete?s=t

Totally agree sorry if that came across differently in my comment :)

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