E-sports: wherefrom roots grow. Historical and social digression

The author analyzes the history of the emergence and development of eSports as an element of a new social reality corresponding to the era of digitalization of modern society. The article gives the definition of eSports, as well as its distinguished features and standards of compliance with the requirements regulated by the current regulatory documents, highlighted and comprehensively analyzed. It has been established that the main criterion is wrestling, characterized by the establishment of superiority between e-sportsmen or teams of e-sportsmen. At the same time, the author emphasizes that a prerequisite for sportiness is the performance of athletes on the same playing field. Other eligibility criteria are considered in detail, establishing the presence of computers (simulators) with the help of all possible possibilities for participating in competitions and the independence of their results from the element of randomness. With the help of the proposed criteria that determine the subject matter of a video game to computer sports, an analysis of known historical facts related to the emergence and development of various computer games was carried out for their relevance to computer sports. According to the author opinion, the first sports digital video game that fully meets all the proposed criteria of compliance, was the game "Spacewar", created in 1962 by Steve Russell with the participation of Martin Gretz and Wayne Vitenen.The article provides examples of other video games of various genres and their peculiarities from the point of view of compliance with computer sports.