Tag: cricket

Stop being a sports fan | Thoughts #33

I think almost all of us, regardless of how much sport content we consume, what category of it, support one team or the other for reasons either unknown, unacknowledged or justified. There is something very intriguing about sports that everyone jumps to know which team won. But sports shouldn’t matter, at all for its fundamentals, let me explain why.

I, like many others, have played tons of sports matches, from cricket, to football, to badminton. And I totally understand the importance of playing the sport, but not the importance of the sport. And yes, there is a difference.

Sports has become a “religion”, and this is not an overstatement. Just imagine the “fans”, they buy clothes that represent them in the team’s identity, they have chants that they shout in gatherings, they feel actual pain at a loss, and pleasure beyond comprehension on a nail-biting win, some have passed down the support from one generation to the other, they pray for the team’s success, they spend entire savings to attend the matches around the country, their team goes to “war” with the other teams and so on. Here I’m not trying to mock religion by the way, it is the “religiosity” that has been induced into sports, which creates the issue. A proud “super-fan” rather a fanatic, will buy shirts and chants slogans, go home and drink beer on victory and shout at kids on a loss, and then repeat this over every weekend – which it has become.

Read more

Why the young commit suicide over video games | Thoughts #26

I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines, its almost every other week or so we see a detrimental act by a teen or child sometimes even adults committing because of a video game. Now all I see in response to that is shock and confusion, as to why would one kill oneself, or take loans (to buy items) for the game, after all they’re just pixels running around. Firstly I’d like to defunct the reductionist view of the matter, if video games are just pixels running around, well then we’re just atoms running around, that doesn’t mean that we don’t matter and nor do our actions. If it seems like an unfair comparison, well to give you a real life example, in 2019 a popular video game Fortnite held a competition as to who plays the best by eliminating all the other players and the winner of that tournament went home with $2 Million, the total prize pool was of $30 Million. Those pixels created a huge effect in the atom-world. This is nothing, one of the oldest game CSGO has professional players, that are paid to play the game (games like LoL, DOTA have it too), apart from the tournament prize pool they may or may not win, the monthly salary of the average top tier teams is 20,000 Euros, and this is excluding the sponsorships, the contracts (the latest one being of $1 Million), the ads they do, the streaming that some do and so on; just like a sports personality. The eSports (as they call it) is on track to beat the $1.5 Billion net worth mark by 2023, and a single game as League of Legends (LoL) has already crossed the Billion mark in revenue, which I’d say isn’t too shabby for pixels.

Read more