What is the difference between a sport and a game

Difference Between Games and Sports

January 23, 2011 Posted by koshal

Games vs Sports

Understanding the difference between games and sports can be done when we first identify the two terms as two different words. Many of us use these two words as synonyms. That is because game and sport appear to be one and the same, but they are not so. There is certainly a difference between games and sports. A game tests the skill of several persons whereas a sport tests the skills of an individual and his performance. However, there is more to the difference between games and sports which will be discussed in this article.

What is a Sport?

According to BBC, a sport is an activity that requires physical effort and ability and usually some degree of mental skill. Mainly physical energy is put to test in a sport and a sport is played with the sense of competition. A set of rules defines a sport that is played as part of recreational activities in the early days. In a sport, the individual participant is called an athlete or a sportsperson.

The capabilities of the sportspersons can be really tested only in sports and not in games since it is the individual who determines the outcome in a sport. For example, take a sport such as cycling. The outcome of the sport is dependent on each individual cycler. If he or she rides well, the outcome will be good. If he or she fails to do a good job, the outcome or the result will be bad accordingly. This is because there are no other people to support the individual sportsperson as this is an individual activity. Moreover, track and field events such as 400m sprint or shot put determines the skill of a particular sportsperson depending upon the achievement of the individual goal. That is because it is a sport activity.

What is a Game?

According to the BBC, a game is when two individuals or teams meet to play against each other. In a game, mental strength is put to test. The individual participant in a game is called a player. Games flourished at a later period and they are also played on the basis of a set of rules.

Games are usually team activities. In games, individual talent does not determine the achievement of a goal. Let us take for example the game of cricket. Cricket is a game that involves more than one player and the achievement of the goal is due to collective and team effort and not due to any individual’s effort. Here, if one individual fails to do a good job there are others to balance his or her failure by a good playing.

It is interesting to note that both a game and a sport are played for enjoyment and hence both of them require spirit among players. It is also noteworthy that a large organized sports event such as Olympic is also called Games; it is called Olympic Games.

A game is played with the sense of friendship. Take Olympic Games. They are played to strengthen the friendship between countries. However, they are competitive too. The capabilities of the sportspersons can be really tested only in sports. It is because individual talent determines the achievement of a goal.

What is the difference between Games and Sports?

• A sport is an activity that requires physical effort and ability and usually some degree of mental skill. Game is when two individuals or teams meet to play against each other.

• Both games and sports are played on the basis of a set of rules.

• In a game, the individual participant is called a player whereas in a sport he or she is called an athlete or a sportsperson.

• The capabilities of the sportspersons can be really tested only in sports. It is because individual talent determines the achievement of a goal.

• In the case of a game, individual talent does not determine the achievement of a goal.

• Both games and sports are played for enjoyment.

• Mainly physical energy is put to test in a sport whereas mental strength is put to test in a game.

• Sport is played with the sense of competition whereas a game is played with the sense of friendship. However, a game can be competitive too.

Difference Between | Descriptive Analysis and Comparisons

Key difference: Essentially, a game is any structured playing that is undertaken for enjoyment. Some games may be educational as well. It is a recreational activity. It may involve one or more players. A game usually has goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. A sport, on the other hand, is a physical activity. It has an agreed set of rules. It may be played for a recreational purpose, i.e. entertainment or for competition. A sport must have casual or organized participation; it must maintain or improve physical ability; and must provide entertainment.

Game and sport are two words that are often used interchangeably. However, no one is exactly sure of what the difference is between the two. Still, there are certain guidelines that can be used to differentiate the two. First, let’s look at the definition of the two words.

According toDictionary.com, ‘game’ is defined as:

While, ‘sport’ is defined as:

Essentially, a game is any structured playing that is undertaken for enjoyment. Some games may be educational as well. A game usually has goals, rules, challenge, and interaction. It will stimulate the player mentally and/or physically. Games are often used as a form of exercise or for entertainment and enjoyment. It is a recreational activity. It may involve one or more players.

A sport, on the other hand, is a physical activity. It has an agreed set of rules. It may be played for a recreational purpose, i.e. entertainment or for competition. A sport must have casual or organized participation; it must maintain or improve physical ability; and must provide entertainment. Sports are usually governed by a set of rules or customs, which aim to ensure fair competition and a justified winner. It may involve one player to even hundreds of players participating in teams or as individuals.

Sports are often popular for spectators, as they provide entertainment for viewers. Sporting events often draw large crowds.

Essentially, a game can be anything that is played for entertainment or education. However, in order to be considered a sport, there are certain guidelines that must be met. According to SportAccord, a sport must:

Furthermore, SportAccord says that a sport “can be primarily physical (such as rugby or athletics), primarily mind (such as chess or go), predominantly motorised (such as Formula 1 or powerboating), primarily co-ordination (such as billiard sports) or primarily animal supported (such as equestrian sport).”

Also, a sport usually has a governing body that builds the sport up, manages it and enforces rules and guidelines.

Sport vs Game
People often take game and sport as to be the same one. However, game and sport are entirely different. A game involves more than one person and a sport pertains to only an individual’s skills and performance.

A physical activity, Sport is carried out under an agreed set of rules. Sport is related to recreational purpose, either for self-enjoyment or competition or for both. A game is also for recreational activities and it involves one or more players. Played on the basis of a set of rules, a game is defined as a goal that the players try to achieve. As like sport, game is also played for enjoyment.

Sport is an activity or activities where the material capabilities of the sportsperson are looked upon. In a sport, it is the sportsperson or the individual who determines the outcome. Well, an individual’s talent does not determine a game. It is the entire performance of the players that determines the winner in a game. An individual’s skill or performance, though has much significance, does not count much in a game; it is only the coordination and team spirit that leads the game.

A person participating in a sport is called as athlete or a sports person. A person who participates in a game is known as player.

When a game relies on strategy, sport is based on individual performances and luck.

In a sport, the athlete can take independent decisions, but a player cannot take such independent decisions in a game. A decision is taken at a game collectively among two or more players.

Another difference between sport and game is that the former is based on physical energy and the later is based on mental strength. Sport is played with a view of competition in mind while game is played with a friendly attitude.

One can come across more professionalism in sport than the game. In a sport, the athlete or sports person is expected to show good sportsmanship and also have high standards of conduct like respecting the opponents and the officials. But in a game, an individual may not deliver such character. In game, the performance of the whole team is taken into account.

Sport is organized and competitive. It also requires commitment and fair play. An athlete or a sports person always gain popularity and maintains a name for his skills. But in a game, it is not the individual who gains popularity but it is the entire team that carves out a niche.

Summary
1. Sport involves individual skills. In game, it is the collective responsibility of a team
2. Sport is based on physical energy and game based on mental strength.
3. Game relies on strategy, sport is based on individual performances and luck.
4. Sport is an activity or activities where the material capabilities of the sportsperson are looked upon. It is the entire performance of the players that determines the winner in a game.

The Difference Between a Game and a Sport

L ate last year, a University of Kansas professor discovered what is likely the only audio recording of Dr. James Naismith, basketball’s proprietary designer. The interview was conducted in New York on January 31st, 1939, and Naismith was asked about the genesis of what is now one of the most popular sports in the world:

One look a sold-out Quicken Loans Arena — home court for the Cleveland Cavaliers, reigning champs of the National Basketball Association — makes it easy to forget that basketball began as nothing more than a Canadian P.E. teacher’s invention. Boiled down to its basics, the sport is just two opposing teams and a map with strict dimensions, but at some point, whether it was Russell & Wilt or Magic & Bird that cracked the ceiling to its constitutive evolution, a simple P.E. game became basketball. Its reputation elevated until it lost its inherent lightness and ‘professional play’ became necessary to withhold its rapidly increasing sense of seriousness. It would be misleading to say Dr. Naismith created a sport. He did not. He designed a game to placate young East-Coast male aggression, yet over time its gameplay became so sharp its ancestor would have found it uncanny. So how did a game become a sport?

League of Legends

In 2009 Riot Games released League of Legends, and in a few years it became the most played video game in the world. It has transcended the industry’s home-consumer model, and is now the face of a genre coined “eSports.” The term has come to symbolize competitive video games that are somewhat confusing in a constitutive sense. They are obviously video games, unplayable without an electronic display and human input, but they also intersect with a lot of the same skills demanded by traditional sports: quick reflexes, physical dexterity, macro strategy, etc.

: a contest or game in which people do certain physical activities according to a specific set of rules and compete against each other

(as defined by the Merriam-Webster English dictionary)

“certain physical activities”

We have two lenses with which to examine the “people that do certain physical activities according to a specific set of rules.” The first is in-game. It is the most presentable, and often the most immediately impressive. In an essay titled “The Heresy of Zone Defense” Dave Hickey touches on the most iconic play of legendary basketball player Dr. J’s storied career:

“Just the celestial athleticism of it is stunning, but the tenacity and purposefulness of it, the fluid stream of instantaneous micro-decisions that go into [Julius] Erving’s completing it… Well, it just breaks your heart. It’s everything you want to do by way of finishing under pressure, beyond the point of no return, faced with adversity, and I am still amazed when I think of it.”

The textural quality of that layup — the heartbreaking sense that you just witnessed someone do the impossible — is essential to defining an athlete. But do those moments have to be physically astonishing in the traditional sense? In the 2013 North American League Championship Series, CLG player Doublelift made a play that is, on some levels, as surreal for the average person as Dr. J’s famous up-and-under layup was. Doublelift managed to “kite” the attacks of four opposing players, dodging shots like a weaving prize fighter, and scored a clean ace in a position that should have spelled his obvious doom. He did not, however, have to jump very high or even break a sweat. Its intellectual prowess is easy to argue for; Doublelift had to perform very quick, subconscious calculations about where he could position his in-game avatar without being slain. But there remains disagreement on how much physicality a competitive contest needs to be considered a sport. While physical prowess is not featured in eSports, there are actual measurables: aim, reaction time, tiny fast-twitch movements. That might not seem like enough to call someone an elite athlete, but it’s worth wondering if our ideas of peak athleticism are influenced by the sports we watch, and not the other way around. Would Dr. J have been considered superhuman if Golf was the most popular sport in the world? Maybe. Would Doublelift be an elite athlete if we all agreed League of Legends is a sport? Without a doubt.

“a specific set of rules”

Our second lens with which we can examine and define an athlete is their practice habits, a lifestyle state totally primed to optimize performance. We seem to agree that to be an athlete you must implement a training regimen that regular persons would find unreasonable. Compare these two statements, one from a basketball player, the other from an eSports athlete.

The first selection is from an unnamed DOTA player in a study on eSports athletes published by ScienceDirect. The second quote? Kobe Bryant talking about Shaquille O’Neal. The gravitas hanging over both statements is identical. Kobe muses at the fallacy of being an inconsistent athlete; for him, it doesn’t exist. He preaches the doctrine of playing a simple game very seriously as the distinguishing factor between “gaming” and “athletics.” There are no breaks, only rest geared towards work. The aspiring DOTA player, on the other side, is learning the same concept. They’re not playing. They’re training.

Twitch.tv & TNT

What about the spectators? The Merriam-Webster definition skimps on them entirely, but they’re a vital strand in the DNA of sports. Game 2 of last season’s NBA Finals matchup between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors drew in a record 18.8 million unique viewers, per NBA.com’s official report. Last year’s League of Legends World Championship matchup between SKT and the Koo Tiger’s drew in a high of 14 million unique viewers, according to lolesports.com’s official report. Without an arena a match is reduced to a closed-door competition, and a closed-door competition is not a sport. We need divisions, championships, TNT, Twitch tv, series breakdowns, and fantasy leagues. Without spectators, basketball might not have made it past Dr. Naismith’s gym class.

While a sport does not require a certain number of eyes, it does necessitate a specific mode of consumption. In 1958, anthropologist Clifford Geertz embedded himself in Bali, and came away with an examination of Balinese cockfighting culture (which is not really a sport, but is for sport):

“As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track, or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men.”

While athletes are not Balinese chickens, they both share a similar relationship with their respective audiences insofar as their deification. Sports, in essence, require not just watchers but fanatics to make lions (or cocks) of men. Geertz took note of this too:

“What sets the cockfight apart from the ordinary course of life, lifts it from the realm of everyday practical affairs, and surrounds it with an aura of enlarged importance is not, as functionalist sociology would have it, that it reinforces status discriminations, but that it provides a metasocial commentary upon the whole matter of assorting human beings into fixed hierarchical ranks and then organizing the major part of collective existence around that assortment.”

There are NBA fans that have gotten into actual fistfights over petty, meaningless disputes (“Kevin Durant is a traitor!” vs “Kevin Durant exercised his right as a free agent!”), and there are contentious League of Legends forums in which fans debate eerily similar topics (the League of Legends subreddit hosts these on a daily basis). On the other hand, there are gamers that are vocal about their own preferences (“Skyrim over Bioshock!”), but there seems to be a key difference. Sports fans are fanatical about human beings playing games; the game is secondary. Gamers are fanatical about the game itself. The two can overlap, but they are distinctive.

Does it really matter what we call them?

The semantics here have a real influence on the future of eSports. Graeme Kirkpatrick, in his paper “Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981–1995,” references a reflection of Pierre Bourdeiu on such implications:

“According to Bourdieu, art has an illusio at its core: the activities of appraising, esteeming and valuing artworks are essential pre-requisites for the existence of things like artworks. That we engage in those activities is what explains the appeal of the artwork. There seems to be a hint of the ‘emperor’s new clothes’ about this but actually it is a way of giving social substance and ‘reality’ to art and its effects: the illusio gains weight because art’s objects are entangled in social structures that are consequential. We recognize art and its value because we have learned to do so but we give it its social status and confer values on it by living out what we have learned.”

When NBA analyst and former player Kenny “The Jet” Smith laments on Inside the NBA that he doesn’t know if he can call eSports a sport, it signifies a bittersweet landmark for eSports’ legitimacy. On one hand, they’re being discussed at the same table as basketball, an achievement unto itself. On the other hand, they’re still being dismissed at that same table, and a denial of eSports by the constitutive conglomerate of sports discourse means it must find a home on its own. It cannot be featured on ESPN, SportsCenter, the last page of the LA Times, or any of the infrastructure already set in place for “sports.” While ESPN has recently invested into an eSports section, with a full staff and a plethora of content, it remains under “Little League World Series” in a dropdown menu on the home page navigation. Considering the peach-basket beginnings of one of the sports featured front and center on ESPN, it’s only a matter of time before eSports is accepted into the big picture. However, until further notice, it continues to sport its modifier — an unhyphenated “e” segregating the court from the Rift.

What is the Difference Between Games and Sports

The main difference between games and sports is that games involve both mental and physical activities while sports mainly involve physical activities.

A game is an activity involving skill, knowledge, or luck, in which you follow a set of rules and try to win against an opponent. Sports, on the other hand, refer to an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or a team competes against others. Although these words are sometimes interchangeable, there is a distinct difference between games and sports.

Key Areas Covered

1. What are Games
– Definition, Features, Examples
2. What are Sports
– Definition, Features, Examples
3. Similarities Between Games and Sports
– Outline of Common Features
4. What is the Difference Between Games and Sports
– Comparison of Key Differences

Key Terms

What are Games

A game is an activity generally involving skill, knowledge, or luck, in which you follow a set of rules and try to win against an opponent. We usually play games for fun or entertainment, but they can also serve an educational function. All in all, a set of rules, a goal, and competition are the three basic components of games. Generally, games involve both mental and physical stimulation.

Some games can be played alone; for example, solitaire and video games. Some are played between two individuals or two teams. Games can have a variety of forms. Board games like chess, Monopoly, and Ludo, card games like poker and bridge, guessing games, lawn games, video games etc. are some examples. Various games may require various skills and talents. They also help to develop practical skills.

Some Examples of Games

Note that game can also refer to a specific instance of a sporting event; for example, the game between Manchester United and Liverpool.

What are Sports

Sports are athletic activities that involve some degree of competition. It can be formally defined as “usually competitive physical activity which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing entertainment to participants, and in some cases, spectators.” Sports also have a set of rules, which ensures fair competition. Various physical activities, including cricket, baseball, soccer, running, cycling, rock climbing, swimming, diving, football, field hockey, race car driving, kayaking, and weight lifting, fall under the category of sports. As you can see from these examples, sports can include teams as well as individual competitors. Moreover, sports are usually outdoor activities.

Sports make people fit and keep them healthy. It also teaches people teamwork, and how to accept defeat. Therefore, it provides all-round development, physically, mentally and emotionally. This is why children are usually encouraged to engage in sports from a young age.

Sports is also a source of entertainment for spectators. Some sports like football draws large crowds to stadiums and reach a wider audience through broadcasting.

Similarities Between Games and Sports

Difference Between Games and Sports

Definition

A game is an activity typically involving skill, knowledge, or luck, in which you follow fixed rules and try to win against an opponent. Sports, on the other hand, refer to an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or a team competes against others.

Type of Activities

While games involve both mental activities and physical activities, sports mainly involve physical activities.

Examples

Chess, Ludo, solitaire, tag, hide and seek, and hopscotch are some examples of games while baseball, soccer, running, cycling, rock climbing, rugby, and cricket are some examples of sports.

Location

Games are mostly played indoors while sports are played outdoors.

Chance

Games usually involve chance, especially board games and card games, while most sports do not involve chance.

Conclusion

A game is an activity typically involving skill, knowledge, or luck, in which you follow a set of rules and try to win against an opponent. Sports, on the other hand, refer to an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or a team competes against others. The main difference between games and sports is that games involve both mental and physical activities while sports involve physical activities.

Reference:

Image Courtesy:

1. “Man Play Game Free Photo” (CC0) via Needpix
2. “1557777” (CC0) via Pxhere