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from the it-worked-for-judo-and-beach-volleyball dept.
Alibaba is venturing out of e-commerce and further into esports.
Esports will appear at next year's Games in Indonesia as a "demonstration," Alibaba said, but will be an official medal sport in China's 2022 Games. The Asian Games are recognised by the International Olympic Committee, meaning in 2022 esports will be an official Olympic sport.
Esports is a growing market that is expected to garner 191 million global enthusiasts by the year's end, according to research firm Newzoo. As of last April, the industry was worth over $450 million -- a number expected to grow to $1 billion by 2019.
That growth is manifesting in many ways. Not only is esports now technically an Olympic sport, the NBA will soon be creating its own esports league, and there are gaming schools to groom the next generation of pros.
Can't decide--is this exciting, or sad?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Zedrick on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:16AM (17 children)
...just stupid. I'm not a luddite, I've been playing computer games since the mid 80's and I'm currently wasting way too much time on World of Tanks, War Thunder etc. But it's not a sport, no matter how good you are at it or how long you sit in front of the screen.
But whatever, money decides so it was expected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:23AM (1 child)
Decades of video games have strengthened my athletic hands. The rest of me is flabby fat.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Oakenshield on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:28AM
Actually, I think that is the result of your other unhealthy diversion.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:26AM (14 children)
...it's not a sport, no matter how good you are at it
You're right, if you have the same understanding of "sport" that I do, i.e., a head-to-head athletic competition. That would include a foot race, a football game, or even a sailing competition. However, it does not include very many of the current Olympic disciplines. Synchronized swimming certainly does not qualify - heck, most of gymnastics fails this definition. So does weight lifting, diving, or anything else where the competitors take turns.
However, once you loosen the definition, where do you stop? Turn-taking disciplines (gymnastics, diving) have been included since forever. Artistic dance disciplines (synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics) are relatively new. Purely intellectual disciplines (Chess, Bridge) are recognized by the IOC, and are likely to be added to the games soon. Given all this, why not eSports?
The biggest problem I see is that eSports is based on commercial products. Why should League of Legends be included, but not Overwatch? StarCraft, but not Rocket League? No one owns swimming, or fencing, but someone will own whatever specific game is chosen. The corruption problems for the IOC are already bad enough; this will make them worse. Also a problem is that games change - LoL may be popular now, but will it even exist in 10 years? Who knows?
Also, eSports have problems regarding spectators. First, they are only watchable if you know the game extraordinarily well. The game action is just too fast-paced, and recognizing what is happening requires a lot of specialized knowledge. Second, you don't actually want to watch the players, because all you'll see are a bunch of twitching, sweating nerds staring at a screen. So the spectators will have no bond to the individual players, which is part of what makes spectating interesting.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:38AM (5 children)
Sure. We could also have Olympic Monopoly, Candyland, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon Go, Rock-Paper-Scissors, Guess which hand, and Pull-my-finger. The Olympics have been a big joke for many years. This just demonstrates the depths to which they will sink for short term ratings so they can keep those participation and sponsorship dollars flowing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:04PM (4 children)
Sure. We could also have Olympic Monopoly, Candyland, Magic the Gathering, Pokemon Go, Rock-Paper-Scissors, Guess which hand, and Pull-my-finger.
Luck based games go against the spirit of the Olympics, where as tasks demanding extraordinary human ability such as playing Chess or Starcraft do not.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:13AM (3 children)
So you are telling me that Starcraft is a completly deterministic game? There are no calls to a random number generator? If you restart the game over and over and replay the exact same game controls for all players the gameplay will be identical every single time?
Huh? It doesn't work that way? So there is a large element of randomness, or luck you might even call it, which contributes to the game? Even variations in the interrupt processing of the CPU or random disk activity cause changes from game to game? Latency and congestion of the networking connections might cause differences? There may be skills involved, but you can say the same thing about Monopoly or even rock-paper-scissors. Did you know they have a world championship for rock-paper-scissors? http://worldrps.com/world-championships/ [worldrps.com]
I'm sorry, but claiming video games are competitions worthy of an Olympic contest is pure weapons grade bullshit.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:16AM (2 children)
The 100m sprint makes a call to a random number generator: the delay before the starting gun is fired.
P.S. The game OpenTTD is completely deterministic by design, to keep network traffic low in multiplayer games. Only players' actions need to be communicated.
(Score: 2) by Oakenshield on Thursday April 20 2017, @12:26PM (1 child)
False equivalency. Randomized events within video game-play confer advantages and disadvantages to players during the actual contest. The random firing of the starting gun is by design to deprive any advantage to a contestant who might anticipate the start. The ONLY reason I brought up random events was to refute the absurd idea of placing video games outside the realm of "luck based games" with my own absurd list of Olympic contenders (Monopoly, Candyland, Rock-paper-scissors, etc) should video games be deemed worthy of Olympic acceptance. The items on my list each require some level of skill just like video gaming. Perhaps not like the -chuckle- "extraordinary human ability" skills required for Starcraft though...
So are you arguing that OpenTDD should be nominated for inclusion to the Olympic Games? My whole point in this thread is that the trend of watering down the Olympics by adding the equivalent of "Dancing with the Stars" level contests has cheapened the whole event to the point of irrelevancy. Look at the TV ratings of the last Summer Olympics an you can see where the trends are heading.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:40PM
Neither of the above. Luck and random chance does not play a large part (to my knowledge) in any current Olympic competition, and it's generally minimised or controlled wherever possible (e.g. starting order when going down the ski slope). I just wanted to flag that absence of random chance isn't a suitable criteria for the exclusion of video games.
I would not argue for OpenTTD or any other video game to be included in Olympic competition: I don't see them as being very equivalent or compatible. (My personal opinion is against the likes of chess, too.) I think gamers would be better served by developing their own top-flight competition instead.
Given the effort required by the International Rugby Board to get a form of rugby included in the Olympics (when it had already been included until 1924!), I don't think the IOC waving e-sports in through the side door is good practice.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:00PM (3 children)
...if you have the same understanding of "sport" that I do, i.e., a head-to-head athletic competition.
I would remove, "head-to-head" in that definition, as I consider gymnastics, diving, and even weight lifting (though just by the thinnest of margins), to be sports. Any athletic competition that takes place in the real world can be considered a sport.
But video games?! That is just stupid beyond all measure. While video games can certainly be competitive, there is a distinct lack of anything even remotely athletic about it.
I agree that the Olympics has been a sad joke for a long time now, but this is just a new low. I suppose the next "sport" to be added to the Olympics will be, "competitive thinking really hard."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:33PM
Chess is already recognised as an Olympic sport.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Wednesday April 19 2017, @02:11PM
In terms of physical dexterity, hand/eye co-ordination and reflex times it seems to me to be on a par with target shooting and archery, both of which are regular Olympic sports, and well ahead of Chess and Bridge which are both recognised Olympic sports and, to quote your phrase "competitive thinking really hard.".
(Score: 1) by Roger Murdock on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:42AM
I'm not sure I'd consider diving to be more of a sport than weight lifting. Weight lifting has objective measures of performance - the weight being lifted. Diving is some judges opinion of whether the diver did good stuff. I'd also remove the head-to-head requirement as well otherwise we're excluding sports like rally driving, downhill mountain bike, even golf as you're rarely going head-to-head with the person who ends up winning.
(Score: 2) by romlok on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:28PM (2 children)
I think the answer is evident from the video game industry itself: Individual games come and go, but popular genres generally continue to be popular,and evolve year to year. There could be olympic events for FPS, RTS or "fantasy sport", and simply name the specific game one or two years in advance.
Or if you want to go the whole hog, the events could be held exclusively using FLOSS games. Maybe then we'd finally get online multiplayer for SuperTuxKart...
That depends entirely on the game. Hearthstone and LoL, sure, but things which have simpler rule-sets, and rely mostly on visuals and physics, like Rocket League or most FPSes, strike me as games that most people could understand well enough just using their pre-existing knowledge (of cars, soccer, action movies, etc.).
AFAICT, in most sports the personalities of the athletes are mostly interchangeable while they're actively participating. It's during in the downtime before and after a game that people get to see and bond with an athlete's individuality.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Wednesday April 19 2017, @03:00PM
No one owns swimming, or fencing, but someone will own whatever specific game is chosen.
if you want to go the whole hog, the events could be held exclusively using FLOSS games.
I agree that free software ought to be a requirement for a legitimate e-sport.
At one time, Henk Rogers and Alexey Pajitnov of The Tetris Company wanted to turn Tetris into an e-sport. But with its having successfully sued the publisher of a workalike product in U.S. federal court in June 2012 (Tetris v. Xio), as well as Pajitnov's claim that free software destroys the market [slashdot.org] and DMCA threats toward developers of free software workalikes, I can't see how that would be practical. One analogy I like to use is that of a company suing a company for making tennis balls or suing a city for putting a regulation-size tennis court in a city park.
And without tolerance of fan games, there's no way for the community to experiment with evolving the game's rules to quash game-breaking exploits that eventually arise or to improve the spectators' experiment. Such changes to basketball that arose from experimentation have included the gradual widening of the free throw lane, the American Basketball League's 3-point field goals, and the NBA's (ultimately unsuccessful) ban on zone defense. Nor is there a way to work around experiments added by the game's publisher but poorly received by competitive players, such as the infinite spin and T-Spin triple rules in Tetris or random tripping in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @10:03PM
That's the biggest problem. Games do come and go from the Olympics over time as sports get popular or people lose interest, but the games that appear are mostly ones that are played for centuries. The Olympics themselves usually have the same games for decades.
In terms of esports, I have a hard time imagining how they could do it where there would be meaningful records and have people watching olympiad after olympiad.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @04:32PM
Despite still being closed software, Blizzard impressed me by supporting their software for 20 years.