[quote=Hank]
There's a reason the whole industry is generally called People acknowledge the difference between this and more traditional sports like football or golf by emphasizing the electronic part. Fundamentally I think it's the same thing (people playing games on a professional level; let's not forget that kicking a ball into a net is nothing more than a children's game) and the United States recently acknowledged League of Legends pro players as athletes (for visa purposes)... but yeah, it's e-sports, not 'regular' sports. I agree with that.
[/quote]

I just feel the term "e-sports", and referring to them as "athletes", is inaccurate. A sport requires physical exertion in some way, according to me and the folks over at Oxford dictionaries. It isn't that the games and players aren't 'deserving' (so to speak) of being called that, or don't deserve the same Visa privileges as athletes, or any such thing - it's just that typically the term applies to something else, and it makes more sense to invent a new one rather than stretch the definition of the old word. We don't refer to chess as a sport or its players as athletes; we use different words, because there are blatant differences between chess and football, rugby, etc. despite them all being games played on a professional level.
So my quibble with it is more to do with language in a general sense than with the actual activity itself. The whole point of language is to communicate, and to do that each word has to carry a distinctive meaning. Stretching the definitions of old words to cover new things that don't readily fall into the same category doesn't really make any sense. It's better to invent new words for new things, no? Language stagnates when you refuse to do that - case in point, French.

EDIT: Oh my fucking god I'm turning Spam into Off-Topic. Put me out of my misery now, please, before I start quoting and replying to everything sentence-by-sentence.