Svenska E-Sportforeningen (Swedish e-Sport Association), Chairman, Magnus Jonsson
I often get the question which “real” sport most closely resembles e-sport. When I am finished with the unavoidable debate whether e-sports is a real sport or not I rarely come up with the same answer. The answer is that there is no other sport that resembles e-sport. This is mainly because different e-sports are so diverse. The only things which games like StarCraft and Halo is that they are both played on an electronic devise and requires a lot of concentration. However, looking at the organization of e-sports there is one sport that closely resembles e-sport and that is boxing. Just like boxing there is no official federation regulating the world of e-sports and no official world championships. Many actors compete with each other to become the biggest and best tournament in order to get some sort of unofficial world championships status. I would very much like to see the IeSF as that official body. I would also like to see the IeSF World Championships as the official world championships even if I do not find that as important. The road to becoming an official e-sport federation is not a trivial one. Today the IeSF consists of 33 member countries and this is a fine start, but it is only a start. So, where do we go from here?
The IeSF has always been about bringing countries together and through that cooperation become stronger and stronger for each new member joining the federation. Some members are quite established with government funding and approval while others are still struggling to reach that status. As the chairman of the Swedish e-sport association I can only start from our situation: In Sweden we have no government approval and getting it would be really hard. This is not so much a problem of acceptance as it is how sports are organised in Sweden. Without going into details which are nothing but confusing e-sport will only become official and approved by the government if enough people support it and demand that it should become a sport. This is one area where the strength of IeSF could be a real benefit to countries like Sweden. By working together with countries where e-sport is an official sport we can show our politicians that e-sport is considered a proper sport elsewhere and convince them that it should be the same way here.
At the last IeSF general meeting the member nations discussed how many of us who had received government acknowledgement. This is an important question on an international level and every member which has that status makes the IeSF stronger, so helping member nations like Sweden would not only make Sweden a stronger member but would also make the IeSF stronger. This may sound like a real cliche but as a federation we should really accept the concept of strength in numbers.
This is of course not the only way the IeSF can help individual members. All members have different difficulties, some which could really benefit from the support of other nations and the IeSF as a whole. If the IeSF really aims to become the official international federation for e-sport we all have to chip in and help each other to make ourselves stronger. This is not something we should do to be nice, this is what a federation is all about.
