Sportsmanship

sports·man·ship

• The fact or practice of participating in sports or a sport.


• Conduct and attitude considered as befitting participants in sports,
  especially fair play, courtesy, striving spirit, and grace in
  losing.

Adapted from Dictionary.com

I just had my very first game of DOTA (for those who don't understand, I'm just keeping the neighbourhoods safe from monsters) on Battle.net. DOTA is a team game, and to play it on Battle.net meant playing with people you don't know at all (typical for most online games).

Before you decide to close the page on the idea that I'm going to go into the nitty gritty details of how I performed in the game, please move your cursor back onto the page and scroll down.

I had a very rare chance of playing a game whereby everyone in the game displayed sportsmanship.

For those who have neither played online games nor have played with a group of about 10 people, to have everyone display the spirit of sportsmanship is a rarity. If you assume that everyone has a 50% probability of being a good sportsman, go do the maths and find out the probability of having 10 good sportsmen.

Anyway, this is not a lesson on probability and statistics. This is about being a sportsman.

Although the above definition given by Dictionary.com did not specify so, sportmanship can be applied to computer games too. A player with good sportsmanship does not:

• scold players on his team for under-performance


• push the blame to others for mistakes or losses


• abandon the game when the going is bad


• try to gain at the expense of team mates

I've played countless games on Battle.net before, and I dare say that in most of the games (80% or so) I've played, I encountered at least 1 person in the game that has at least 1 of the undesirable traits mentioned above.

You may say that such people are not worth any attention and should not be worth the effort to notice. This is not quite possible. Imagine having someone curse you every 10 minutes or so, just because you made a mistake. Or someone leaving the game after a minor setback. Only when you play the game yourself do you realise that it takes sportsmanship on the part of every player to make the game a pleasant one. Even if you lost the game eventually.

I just lost my 1st game, but it was great playing with those people. Seldom have I seen a game played to the end without harsh words or quitters.