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Not more than a year after being sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee, eSports will be featured as a medal sport for the first time in the 2019 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in our home turf at the Filoil Flying V Centre in San Juan come December. It has been questioned whether it should really be considered as a real sport or not. After its inclusion in the SEA Games, one could say it’s now a real sport, or is it?

According to the United Nations (UN), sports is a powerful tool that promotes one’s individual and health improvement, as well as disease prevention. We see the SEA Games as an event organized to give delegates from Southeast Asian countries an opportunity to showcase their athletic prowess as the fruit of their months and even years of disciplined exercise, eating regimen, conditioning habits, and training.

The SEA Games is for sports that require intense exertion of effort, both mentally and physically, and not for participants who would just sit down and face LED screens for hours. The eSports community, however, claims that anything that requires a specific set of skills, great hand-eye coordination, training, and has a strong competitive format, is a sport.

Besides the fact that prize money is at stake and lucky participants can bring home six digits at least, online games, when played on the pro level may help one’s mental, strategic, and decision-making skills. However, it may pose danger to the players' health.

The Harvard Health Letter Electronic Screen gives the following alert: Avoid this vision risk, one main problem of prolonged exposure to electronic screens is eyestrain due to the brightness or glare that comes from the screen, no wonder most of the gamers you’ll see wear eyeglasses as a result of deteriorated eyesight. Other consequences of really getting into online games, according to unc.edu, are migraines, sleep disturbances, backaches, eating irregularities, and poor personal hygiene.

The inclusion of eSports and the formation