Slashdot Mirror
Should Video Games Be In the Olympics?
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC is running a story about e-sports and competitive video game. It's based on comments from Rob Pardo, formerly of Blizzard Entertainment, who says there's a good argument for having e-sports in the Olympics. He says video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport — an opinion supported by Amazon's purchase of Twitch.tv for almost a billion dollars. The main obstacle, says Pardo, is getting people to accept video games as a legitimate sport. "If you want to define sport as something that takes a lot of physical exertion, then it's hard to argue that videogames should be a sport, but at the same time, when I'm looking at things that are already in the Olympics, I start questioning the definition." The article notes, "Take chess, for instance. Supporters of the game have long called for its inclusion the Games, but the IOC has been reluctant, considering it a 'mind sport' and therefore not welcome in the Games." So, should the Games expand to include "mind sports" and video games?
NO
Don't need the IOC corrupting my hobby, plus how would you even chose which game was in the Olympics?
If only to watch the IOCs' heads explode when the suggestion is put forth.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...so why not "virtual" shooting?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Not insurmountable - hand out performance-enhancing drugs, bots and hitbox hacks and you've made a good start.
Requiem for the American Dream
Video games have at least one advantage over many of the Olympic sports: They can have clearly defined objectives and scoring. Many of the Olympic sports don't really qualify in my book because they rely on judges to tell us who was better. Even if they were fully objective in every respect, it still smacks of a beauty contest rather than an athletic competition. If we play a match of FIFA 2015 there will be absolutely no question as to who the winner is.
I still think it is silly to talk about video games as an olympic sport, but it is also silly that we have sports like ballroom dance and synchronized swimming in the Olympics. My rule of thumb is "if you have to ask someone else to tell you who the winner is; it isn't a sport, it is a recreational activity."
Olympics is for sports. Not games. Sport is "activity involving physical exertion and skill" google. And no, pressing keys or buttons doesn't count.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
Except that Sailing and Curling are both current olympic sports, Chess is apparently under occasional consideration, and according to wikipedia, even ballooning was once an olympic sport....
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I think some ultimate Dance Dance Revolution would make an interesting olymic event. Singles and in groups.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The origianl games revolved around martial sports; javelin, wrestling, archery, etc. Then came shooting, pentathlon, biathlon etc. So limit it to the games actually used in warfare such as drone strikes, gunship strafing, and the perennial favorite thermo-nuclear war. Though the last one would actually be pretty boring. The players would have to do nothing to compete.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Bennett Haselton is working on one for you right now.
The Olympics lost all meaning when it was decided to admit events for people missing fucking LIMBS into a sporting gala previously for those who were ACTUALLY BETTER THAN AVERAGE! Better, stronger, faster. What the fuck is "dressage", anyway??
Take my favourite competitive sport: archery. OK, we have the longbow, which is pretty fucking difficult to STRING, never mind DRAW and AIM, but now we have the olympic event where they get to use counterweights, spring cam mechanisms to bring the draw weight down yet maintain nock energy, composite bows and superthin strings, peep sights(!) and drop scales, and the basic event which runs just 33 feet, where it is entirely possible to gain a gold medal. I *PRACTICE* AT NINETY FEET. WITH AN ENGLISH LONGBOW (and the trainer at the club across the river wonders how I don't tear the shit out of my shoulder muscles every week, it's because I've been shooting bow since I was FOUR). I could piss the basic event with my bow on a *bad* day.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Sailing actually requires a LOT of physical exertion. Most sailors have abs of steel.
I think relaxing ought to be an olympic sport. We could judge it by attaching biometric sensors to the competitors.
Among those you named only chess can be considered a proper mind only game. And if even Chess is only under occasional consideration, computer games are right out. None of them is even close to matching Chess as a proper sport. Will need centuries for this to happen.
It's the Olympic Games. A game shouldn't be accepted or rejected based on if it's a "sport", it should be based on if it's socially or culturally relevant to a significant fraction of the participating nations.
Get rid of the sports that cannot measure the success of the competitors using the Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. That means no figure skating, no synchronized swimming, and, especially, no more rhythmic gymnastics. Essentially, nothing that requires assigning a number to a performance via a panel of judges. (I'm a little torn about any sport that chooses winners based on the points that they score on a particular day but when I think about the excessive coverage given to beach volleyball in the last few Summer Games I lean hard to the "drop them, too" side.)
Just think how much less expensive it would be to hold an Olympics would be if all those judged "sports" were taken out. The potential sites for the games would mushroom without a need for all the additional venues for the judged events. Cities that hold the Games can rarely afford to and the citizens wind up footing the bill for facilities that will rarely see use after the closing ceremonies. Plus, if it would get Bob Costas' interviews with prepubescent gymnasts off the air, we all win.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
There are people who would love to play FIFA football, and have the talent to do so, but lack legs. They can play sledge hockey, which is at least as good as ordinary hockey, but they can't play kicking games. eSports allow them to kick with their thumbs.
davecb@spamcop.net
What a fecking dumb idea, who wants to watch sweaty geeks with over "developed" wrists play computer games ?!?! Half of them wouldn't be able to make it up the steps to get their medal!
Can't wait for the network coverage.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I'm not going to watch the retarded shit anyway. I do think that video gaming nowadays should be lumped into regular sport, because it's the same kind of people who play the button mashing games anyway.
A game that required actual intelligence can hardly be found, never mind made into an Olympic sport.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I vote for the old game, Decathlon for inclusion... It fits, serious physical exertion, coordination with all the keys with a result of trying to run faster or jump higher.
I never once succeeded at the pole vaulting game in it...
They published this too early. Would have made a good April fools story.
In any case, there's a world alternative games ... let it be submitted for that.
When I think of a real sport played by athletes, I think of something like no limit Texas hold 'em.
Except that Sailing and Curling are both current olympic sports
Ever watched Olympics-level curling? The curlers are generaly in great shape.
But e-sports, in the olympics, get out of here. Is there poker, chess, or any other more traditional and widely respected table games in the olympics? no.
Cast the chess pieces in lead and make the board cover an acre such that the chess opponents would have to pick up a 100 lb. chess piece and run to put it on the next square. Seriously chess would not take an upward step by joining the Olympics. It would lower the status of chess players. Or put simply brains are better than muscle tissue unless one is a republican.
They should bring back Tug of War!
both mentally and physically,
QUAKE
Believe it or not, at one point, someone tried to get Bridge qualified as an Olympic "sport".
Luckily, they failed.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Shooting (pistol/rifle target shooting) is the Olympic sport I think that most supports the inclusion of e-sports. Most "sports" involve physical strength, dexterity, and endurance (and the mental faculties to coordinate them). Shooting is nearly entirely dexterity-based. Just like video games. After shooting would be archery, which adds a physical strength requirement to holding the drawn bow. Interestingly, wheelchair-bound persons have competed in the regular Olympics in shooting and archery.
Any argument against e-sports works equally well against shooting and archery, except for the arbitrary requirement that the consequences of the "athelete's" actions have to be limited to the physical world. I suppose you could argue for the exclusion of shooting and archery from the Olympics, but competitive archery is one of the oldest sports, at least 2800 years old.
You can look back at the 1950 olympic games and see people running and jumping and doing other things that we still do today.
Now imagine that video games were included, and you look back at the 1980 olympic games. Overweight geeks with mullets and bowl cuts competing intensely over.... Pong and Breakout.
50 years from now, watching old footage of overweight geeks with lip piercings competing in Counter Strike and Call of Duty will seem just as lame and outdated.
Even non-traditional sports like skateboarding and snowboarding have things like the "x-games", because they simply aren't olympic.
poker and chess are not olympic sports and video games should never be. the only real argument is that its a massive promotional value for game manufactures nothing more.
Sport is "activity involving physical exertion and skill"
How do you explain sports like Shooting and Golf? Both of which are Olympic events. If pulling a trigger counts, why shouldn't pressings keys. Would it be O.K if competitors used controllers? They have triggers.
After all, competitions in music, literature, sculpture, painting and architecture were part of the Olympics at one time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bowling is a legitimate sport and should be represented in the Olympic games.
The Olympics are for athletes of the body, not athletes of the mind (although there are psychological aspects to physical sports, and physical aspects to computer games). More over, if we start adding mental games, why not first chess, checkers, go, connect-6 etc.? There are world championships for all of those, and also for computer games. This is the way it should be.
Without concrete suggestion on which games to play, or how to select the games, and all the practicalities involved, this is a pointless suggestion.
If not, then no.
Video games can be serious pass-times, and have their own internal/external structures to foster competition.
But they are NOT "sports", any more than "competitive long-duration sitting" is a sport.
Yes, a certain modicum of physical skill is required for competitive play.
However, some of it can be substituted for using technology.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
2) Physical effort: Then figure skating and dancing should be in, but video games and chess should be out.
3) Both competitive and physical effort. Here figure skating etc. should be out, as well as video games.
Frankly, I can't see a way that figure skating and video games both belong in the Olympics.
Note, I LIKE figure skating. It is a lot more fun to watch than most races. Similarly it is more fun to watch than someone else playing a video game.
Personally I think tradition will win, which will keep it as a "physical effort", so figure skating stays and video games will not be allowed.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think it would be good as a demonstration sport for one of the games, if they select the game carefully to align with what the games are.
The thing is, the games are mostly about physical competition along with physical factors that have a strong psychological element such as endurance and reaction time. Video games are poor at the former but rely heavily upon the latter, which is why I think they would be excellent as a demonstration sport but not as an ongoing element of the games.
Its an interesting idea but there are so many issues to resolve.
Which platform do you use? Xbox? PlayStation? PC?
If PC, who defines the system specs? Which games do you use?
Who defines what settings are used for each match like the level to use? What would the rules be regarding player choices like e.g. which faction the player picks in an RTS? What happens if the internet or severs go down mid-match?
Of couse some of these questions have already been answered by existing e-sports contests and the IOC would probably defer to that rather than inventing new rules. (just like olympic golf, if it was a thing, would be played according to the rules set down by St Andrews Royal & Ancient instead of inventing ndw ones)
Epyx: Summer Games for C64. Then we'd have someone going,"Oh you won the gold medal for diving? Well I got the gold medal for diving too, and pole vault, and 100m dash."
God spoke to me
Surely, you meant "Bennett Haselton is squeezing one out for you right now."?
I would have preferred to have been asked, "should the Olympics be abolished?".
The Olympics is little more than dirty politics, enriching the members of the IOC with bribe money and having an overall negative impact on the common citizens of the countries that host the games. Of course, they do provide free condoms and a great opportunity for the few privileged participants to have lots of sex, but unless you're one of the uber-rich that can afford to compete then that probably isn't important to you. And lets not even get started on what they have done to legitimate businesses who innocently used the words Olympic or Olympus in their names for decades before the games came to their city. They do at least as much harm to the overall community as a Papal visit. The games and the IOC should be abolished, not grown.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Because virtual shooting changes far more rapidly than physical shooting. Strategies that work in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare may fail in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Even if you standardize on one particular iteration of a series, there's no guarantee that the game's publisher will still be willing to sell copies of the old iteration. And the demise of GameSpy has shown that multiplayer won't even be available in older games after a service provider hardcoded into the game pulls the plug.
If we play a match of FIFA 2015 there will be absolutely no question as to who the winner is.
Will multiplayer in FIFA 2015 still be playable in 2019? 2023?
So they had to have an international meeting to discuss how nobody wants Parkour in the olympics because, as they top level famous pros put it, if you think you did good then you did and you win. Then there's thousands of e-sports pros that do want to be in the olympics but the top olympics people are ignoring them.
Any argument against e-sports works equally well against shooting and archery
You can still buy new equipment for shooting or archery. You can't buy new equipment for pre-infinite-spin Tetris because Tetris Holding won't let anybody sell it.
competitive archery is one of the oldest sports, at least 2800 years old
I'm in favor of including any sport that's at least 95 years old.
How do you define dancing games as well? These are clearly very physically demanding games.
Once Konami's patents on Dance Dance Revolution expire in a few more years, I would be willing to add StepMania alongside floor exercise. StepMania is physical but doesn't need nearly as many human judges as the existing gymnastic events.
Bows aren't obsolete. The crossbow holds a silence advantage over firearms.
Because both of those sports still require physical coordination brought to bear against real, physical objects. And there is a hell of a lot more to real shooting than just pulling a trigger.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
{nt}
I exercise with my fingers, hands, arms, eyeballs, brain, etc. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Basketball, team handball, soccer, rugby and gridiron football are members of a family of sports based on advancing the ball into the goal based on restrictions against arbitrarily carrying it. A Paralympic sport in the same family is wheelchair basketball. I wonder what sort of other sports in the same family could be invented for people with no legs like Jennifer Bricker in the same way that volleyball was adapted into sitting volleyball.
So are most pro gamers, so you're not saying much with that statement.
"Oblate spheroid" was not the shape that was being described.
Street Fighter II lacked symmetric starting positions. This was rectified in Street Fighter II' Champion Edition and later Street Fighter games.
Is that gaming, or masturbating, or one and the same? :)
Women's Softball was removed because the US kept winning (and lost the last year it was included, I think). Women's hockey is at risk of being removed because only the US and Canada ever win. So would video games stay in the Olympics when every medal is claimed by Koreans? Also, what would they even play? Games don't really last four years, and whichever game is selected will have a developer and (definitely) publisher that want to get the sequel in the next Olympics. Nobody would take it seriously if there's a different set of games every year. How would you track the advancement of the competition/skill/level of human achievement if they never do the same thing twice? Most events give you an example of how performances are improving over the years.
"This is considered plagiarism."
Caffeine is already banned as a PED above certain quantities. (Or at least it was last time I checked)
All of above. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I never said that they were a sport, and stuck the quotation marks around "sport" in the comment subject to imply they aren't. Video games do have certain elements of sports which may make them an interesting element as a demonstration sport.
If the game itself is open-source and written by an international body. Having Olympics based on a proprietary game would just be insane. Just as insane as saying that swimming is owned by a company.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
while competing then no, it is not athletics.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Get rid of the sports that cannot measure the success of the competitors using the Olympic motto: higher, faster, stronger. That means no figure skating, no synchronized swimming, and, especially, no more rhythmic gymnastics. Essentially, nothing that requires assigning a number to a performance via a panel of judges.
The motto was proposed by Pierre de Coubertin on the creation of the International Olympic Committee in 1894."These three words represent a programme of moral beauty. The aesthetics of sport are intangible."
I take that as an explicit rejection of the notion that the human element can be taken out of the equation.
That "higher, faster, stronger" implies an aesthetically pleasing and moral achievement, not merely something which can be captured and understood by examining the clock and camera alone.
Coubertin would go on to say that "The most important thing is not to win but to take part!"
Olympic symbols
Maybe we should limit it to those joystick waggling games from the 80's, and Dance Dance revolution.
When was the last time you played a video game without using your body?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Video games shouldn't be added simply so they're not even more stigmatized by the public and the media. The International Olympic Committee stands for nothing more than corruption and the breeding of children into pets that can do very specific tricks, win a medal, and 1) make money by being the face of sponsored cheap processed human chow if they're very lucky and good, or 2) fall into obscurity after training their entire life to be good at one arbitary physical activity. It's a human version of the Westminster Dog Show, but with slightly less inbreeding.
My touchstone is that if it doesn't make you sweat then it isn't a sport. Darts and snooker are entertaining, and require skill, but are not sports.
To all those who think we should do away with figure skating, rhythmic gymnastics, etc. because those sports require panels of judges, think again.
In a game of football (or soccer) and ice-hockey, you need referees. In badminton and tennis, you need umpires. In fact most sports require arbiters of sorts. How many times have you seen a match swing from one team/player to another because of a bad call (Maradona's Hand of God, anyone)?
Certainly it's a respectable skill, and it's no disrespect to people who work very hard at some tasks to improve that, but at its core, good video game playing is ultimately about having good mental reflexes and strongly developed hand-eye coordination. To excel, this can require no less time than it takes for an Olympic athlete to train, but that doesn't mean it should be an Olympic event any more than a spelling bee should be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
^ Played with real money, not casino money...
Show up with $100,000 of YOUR real cash and play against experts and tell me that it doesn't require a ton of skill...
A sport is a competitive activity that includes physical activity. Gaming is not a sport in the same way that poker is not a sport and if gaming has to be in the Olympics, then poker, monopoly and yatzee should be too.
-- 29A the number of the Beast