Videogames vs. Sports

Although I agree with some parts of Dennis Hemphill's Cybersport saying sports and the internet video games have similarities, I cannot accept his overall conclusion that video games should actually be considered a sport. A sport is any recreational activity; a game, competition, etc. requiring bodily exertion. A person cannot use their body while playing a computer video game, mainly the only thing that is being used are the hands.
Sports is highly considered as a masculine activity. "English argues that the most popular and lucrative sports feature height, weight, strength, and speed, giving most men, statistically speaking, certain advantages over most women.Masculinity of this type can operate to define "real" sport as sport that involves the most face to face agression, power and body contact." Though Moody describes face to face as spoken words, facial experssions, inflections in the speaker's voice, and so on, that all contribute to the information conveyed in his Internet Use and its Relationship to Loneliness article. Also in this article he talks about people that use the internet a lot and says they either have emotional or social loneliness. Social loneliness is the feeling of boredom and marginality due to lack of meaningful friendships or a sense of belonging to a community. Emotional loneliness is a feeling of emptiness and restlessness sue to lack of intimate relationships.
"All sports appear to be games of skill rather than games of chance, and, further, the skill is physical." There is no physical movement between two human beings in video games on the computer. So how can it be considered a sport when the definition of sport says requiring bodily exertion? A lot of the arcade or "home-computer" games such as football, basketball, auto-racing programs are considered as games not sports. Sports and games all are connected with play and some of the language used in play theory, for example, by Huizinga and Schmitz "associates play with unreality, nonseriousness, or suspension of reality." "Linked to this view are sociological accounts that place play, game, and sport on a continuum, where the playful freedom of childhood gradually becomes restrained, structured, and codified as games and, when fully institutionalized, becomes sport."
New technology has tried several ways in modernizing computer games trying to get them more and more like sports. They've given the characters in these video games in-human like qualities jumping heights and distances impossible for an average human to land without any injuries. Reasons for this is because they are trying to promote a more "natural" way to play games getting them away from keyboards using more hand and feet movements. Also they have "augmented reality to superimpose graphics, audio and other sense enhancements over a real-world enviornment in real-time." They also use this in military aircraft using it for flight, navigational, or targeting data.
Video games should not be considered a sport. If video games should be considered a sport what is the point of all the athletes making a career out of it. Anyone can just play on the computer all day, but it takes skills to be able to play sports such as football, baseball, basketball, soccer, or even tennis not just luck. Now technology has made it to where you can look at your games in third person, which is impossible for a normal human. Computer programs have no physical involvement when sports are a face to face activity. "Sports is reserved for games that feature and value physical prowess."