Definitions of esports almost always revolve around the concept of “video games.” What is meant by “video games,” however, and how this concept relates to esports, often remains unclear. Not all video games are esports, and not all esports are video games.

At their most basic, esports are practices and communities of competitive video gaming - whether amateur or professional, in-person or virtual, hyper-local or globally distributed. There is nothing that categorically separates “esports” from “video games”; more than a static object, the term “esports” describes a way of interfacing with video games.

While most multiplayer video games include at least some component of PVP (player-versus-player) play, frameworks for competition which are shipped with a game itself are typically not considered to be esports. For example, League of Legends is almost entirely a multiplayer PVP game - all play is competitive. Despite this, one is generally not considered to be engaging in esports just by booting up League and playing against others online. A core component of esports play is the infrastructure which supports it, an infrastructure which is almost always external to the game itself.

These infrastructures sometimes (particularly in the early days of organized esports) grow up organically around a game. There are many games which became esports at some point after launch, despite this not being originally intended by the developers (such as Fortnite). Other games are developed with the express intention of supporting esports play (such as Supervive, a game combining battle royale and MOBA mechanics). In these cases, esports is “baked in” to the design of the game itself.

Recent developments in the esports scene have complicated the core assumption that all esports are video games, however. Chess, for example, is rapidly becoming a popular global esport and enjoys considerable popularity among esports fan communities - superstars like Magnus Carlson and Hikaru Nakamura are signed to esports organizations and play in competitions like the Esports World Cup for a prize pool of $1.5 million. Somewhat like esports like esports such as FC and F1, we can view the incorporate of chess into the world of esports as its bifurcation into analog and digital forms; in this instance, what makes chess an esport is not some ontologically fundamental property of the game itself but rather its occasional mediation through a computer.

Similarly, sometimes it is esports play itself that turns something into a video game. Fringe esports such as Microsoft Excel esports and Wikipedia Esports take digital tools meant for private, non-performative use and adapt them to public competition. While such esports are, at their core, somewhat ironic, they attract broad viewerships and inspire intense training by their players - and, it should be noted, a layer of irony is present in all esports. Excel and Wikipedia are not intrinsically video games, but rather become something resembling them when the organizational and metagaming infrastructures of esports are layered on top of them.