Being an average gamer, I can understand why today’s age contains universities that offer rewards as scholarships to their fellow student gamers. A perfect example would be Robert Morris University located in Chicago which will offer League of Legends scholarships to their students under their athletic program. 

As much as I love gaming, and realize in today’s modern age some are considering certain games to be equivalent to a sport, I cannot say I agree with scholarships being given to gamers. My first reason would have to deal with the money that is provided for these scholarships. Many universities around the nation struggle with funding and have to decide what programs and organizations to cut from their programs in order to maintain a budget. I can’t imagine the stress of being a president of a university or even a member of a board of people who has to make these decisions. Just think, after cutting major programs and faculty members, they sleep at night knowing there are other universities who are throwing out money for scholarships for people who just play video games.

My second reason would have to revolve around the fact that people are considering League of Legends a sport. League is the most common example used for of these scholarships. While other competitive games have rose up over the years, such as Smite, Defense of the Ancients 2 and Heroes of the Storm, they’re all considered Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games, MOBA for short. Players can sit in these games for hours upon hours training as hard as an athlete to understand the game. 

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be treated as a sport. They are competitive, and I can understand why universities would create teams and tournaments for these games. 

Yet my only concern here is whether it’s really worth that much time and effort or not. People can train and play as hard and as long as they want, they can even study their opponents, but at the end of the day it’s just people sitting in their chairs playing a game. No matter how hard people train for League, or any other type of game, at the end of the day it’s always the same: it’s just a video game.

My third problem, the effort put into these scholarships. Gamers put tons of hours into what they do, but there’s a difference in what the effort is put in. If someone received a scholarship for engineering, that student put endless amounts of time into their studies, their grades and focused on achieving a certain grade point average to make sure they could have earned that scholarship. 

While one student received the same recognition and reward for a mere video game, whether it be League of Legends, DotA 2 or even Smite, it is nothing compared to what other students strive for. This just means these particular gaming students put more focus into their free time hobby than what was actually important. It would have to be a horrible experience of watching everyone work hard and knowing a particular student put effort into their work and studies and didn’t receive any reward. 

No matter how much effort someone puts into it, no matter how hard they “worked” to get that scholarship, at the end of the day it’s all the same and I find it hard to really process this scenario, knowing that there are more important things to fund in any university and yet here we are in the twenty first century where people can now receive money for just playing games. It’s scary to know that’s what we have come to.