Gaming should be taken more seriously and be considered a real sport.

Before I continue, I shall state the definition of skill for my opponent, for they clearly do not know what it is. Skill is the ability to do something well; expertise. To have skill in a game is to do well in it. You use the example of Star Wars Battlefront and use that one game to judge all games as easy button mashing that requires no skill. Battlefront is very much a casual game, but I'll talk more about that later on. You imply that button mashing is all it takes to play video games, and I ask you, how many competitive matches of CS:GO have you played? That is just one example of a game where button mashing will get you no where. You need to react fast in order to stay alive and win. When someone comes round a corner unexpectedly and neither party expects the other to be there, the one who reacts to the situation first with accurate shooting (which requires skill to control the recoil and spray pattern which I will get onto in a second) is going to win that fire fight. If I pit you against some of the worlds best players in CS:GO, you would be defeated very quickly, because they are much more skilled at it than you. They can react faster meaning that if they are using an AWP (sniper rifle) for example, and you pass a narrow gap, they posses the reflexes to aim at you and kill you before you can cross that gap. If we put you in the exact same situation, you would not poses the reflexes nor the skill to accurately kill the other person before they manage to pass the gap. Players can move quite fast in CS:GO, meaning you have to react/respond quickly to take them out in situations like that. As a side note, when I say I had learnt Fur Elise in a month, I meant that I had learnt what keys to press and when. I didn't get into grand master pianist levels, I just learnt how to press keys. I wasn't very good at it was fairly basic. I was not trying to say that it takes the same level of skill to play video games as it does playing the piano, as they are two very different things and the level of skill required cannot really be compared because being good at playing the piano and being good at playing video games are two very different things. I was merely stating that simply because you can learn how to do something without a lot of difficulty, that does not automatically mean there is no skill. You may notice that I am using CS:GO as an example a lot here. That is because CS:GO is a "hardcore" kind of game. What are hardcore games? Well, there are two kinds of games. You have casual games such as Star Wars Battlefront is an example of a casual game that is fun to play when you have nothing else to do. Casual games are quite easy and don't require much level of skill to play due to the low difficulty. They tend to offer very noob friendly mechanics and don't punish the user for mistakes too harshly. Hardcore games on the other hand such as Dark Souls, or CS:GO offer a more challenging game play experience and punish the player for making mistakes. CS:GO is a game where you need to have more than a few brain cells to do well. It requires the user to have good knowledge of it's maps, at least some knowledge of weapon spray patterns so that 3/4 of your shots don't just hit the wall behind the other person, and even tactics to an extent, such as knowing when and how to use grenades to gain an advantage, or knowing where to flank. Is it not true that to Snooker, at it's most basic, which I'll remind you is considered a sport, you just hit a ball into some other balls? Is it not true that there is no physical exertion in Snooker, unless you count walking around a little bit physical exertion? Could I not then say that Snooker requires no skill and should not be considered a sport? No, I could not say that because there is much more to Snooker than hitting a ball into other balls. You need to be able to predict ball movement, know how certain spin will affect the movement and, to an extent, even have good knowledge of angles and basic addition. See, I only looked at Snooker at it's most basic form, just as how you are looking at video games in it's most basic form. There is much more to gaming than merely pressing a few buttons. There is a lot more than that goes on in some players heads, especially professional players. I myself find myself thinking about tactics when playing Battlefield. I think about potential flanks, I think about how best to deal with the armada of snipers camping on the other side of the map, I think about many things when I start to get serious with it. Even going as far as to spend quite a bit of time finding out what the best attachments are for my gun to make it perform at peak performance and picking the right camos for the map, even though it doesn't really matter. When playing CS:GO, you have to think about a lot of these, and more. There's a lot more to these games than you realise because you are just looking at the surface and using a casual game as an example of games requiring no skill because casual games rarely require much, if any skill. Much like there is a massive difference between a professional Snooker player like Ronnie O'Sullivan and that fat bloke who's always playing pool down at the pub, there is a massive difference between casual games and hardcore games, including their respective playerbases. You need to look beyond the surface, see through the stereotypes and misconceptions about gaming and gamers, and realise that there really is a lot more to it than simple button mashing. Take Megaman for example. It's a very old game, but it does require a decent level of skill to play. There is an easter egg where you can use the Hadouken. However, it requires you to complete the entire game without getting hit once. Whilst you can take a pianist, give them Megaman and they can probably complete it after a while, I highly doubt that they will ever unlock the Hadouken in under a year. Very few people have managed to unlock it because this is challenge is very hard and requires a very high level of skill, much like how playing much like how it is very hard to play Traced Overhead on the piano. Don't take it the wrong way - I am not saying that video games require the same skill as playing the piano here, it is merely an example to try and get you to understand that gaming can be very challenging and can require a lot of skill.