lukewarm take: speedrunning (and probably (other?) e-sports) is objectively more interesting than sports-sports.
it seems like a much more social activity, with people innovating with new techniques, training tools, and inspiration from TAS.
it seems much less about rivalry for the world record, but about creating something together. i'm sure that's not entirely absent from regular sports but it seems obviously not the focus…
also for the sake of the argument, board games count as e-sport 🧐.
with games like these, people may take playfully antagonistic roles, and try to win in a sense. but i think it's more accurate is to see it as a cooperative effort to come closest to a perfect game you can.
i was inspired by self-playing go AIs that really brought that point home.
i guess the biggest counterargument would be: why do people prefer to play roughly evenly matched games, instead of against the best possible players (especially if they have the patience of a chess engine).
@sofia I feel like a big part of "playing roughly evenly matched opponents" is that it yields unpredictable outcomes; the game can easily take unexpected turns, and result in a different outcome than you thought. Whereas with uneven matching you already pretty much know the outcome before you start playing.
