Ethical analysis of esports: a step backwards compared to traditional sports?

Abstract

Electronic sports, also known as esports, are a groundbreaking phenomenon based on sports competitions in which the human beings develops and trains mental and physical abilities using competitive videogames. Its special approach to the new generations has created certain social concern about education, specifically ethics, which this manifestation offers to the youngest. Supported by the hermeneutical current, our objective is to analyse, from an ethical prism, the phenomenon of esports and how they can contribute, are contributing or could contribute to their practitioners having a fulfilling life. Among the analysed elements we find the process of virtualization, corporeality, freedom, virtue, self-knowledge or violence. After the analysis, it can be concluded that this socially based concern and criticism is not founded, since electronic sports can contribute to an ethical development of the individual and, with this, to his education. In this way, the ethical development of the subject contributes to the ethical development of society. Some aspects developed can be the conceptions of corporeality, gender and feminism, the democratization of human competition, the dissonance between reality and virtuality, the conception of aggressiveness, violence and catharsis, the idea of freedom as authentic existence or the implications of the game and sport in humanity.