Previous discussion about olympic e-sports in tildes Sadly rather the perplexing choice of the IOC seems to be due to economic incentive (... and probably corruption + nepotism somewhere) rather...
“Instead of working with existing game publishers or well-established tournaments, it seems that the Olympic committee has instead decided to use this event as a marketing vehicle for brand-new, poorly thought out, unlicensed mobile games,” he added.
Sadly rather the perplexing choice of the IOC seems to be due to economic incentive (... and probably corruption + nepotism somewhere) rather than a philosophic choice.
At least they seems to have responded in part to that tone-deaf choices:
Responding to queries from CNA, the IOC said on Thursday that one of its goals was to engage further with the gaming community - and the addition of Fortnite was a "further opportunity to achieve this".
Apart from the main lineup, Olympic Esports Week will also feature exhibition matches in better-known video games like the iconic Street Fighter and basketball title NBA 2K.
But taking the most popular videogame at the moment seems like a "how do you do fellow gamer" moment instead of a deliberate choice.
It was popular in the previous post so maybe it worth repeating1: Tetris should be at the e-Olympics. It's non-violent, accessible, deep, popular to the point it's an emblem to the medium, and specific to the medium as well (you cannot replicate it outside of videogame unlike chess).
We also have 3 established scenes with different aims (classic: like marathon; TGM: like sprint; modern versus: like boxing) whose ruleset haven't changed for decades2. We even had a fosbury moment recently in the classic Tetris scene (a new technique was discovered that revolutionize the scene; in that case it's a way to hold and press the button on the NES controller).
1And also I'm a Tetris nerd and love to making people discover the depth of this rabbit hole 2Modern VS: 16 since Tetris Online Japan, TGM: 21 years since TGM3, classic: 33 years since NES tetris
This also seems like a space where speedrunning could potentially make sense. It is already strongly competitive in nature, and since it focuses on single-player titles, there's fewer risks than...
This also seems like a space where speedrunning could potentially make sense. It is already strongly competitive in nature, and since it focuses on single-player titles, there's fewer risks than onboarding a live-service title. If they picked games from older consoles, it could also give more credence to the emulator sphere as a means of ensuring longevity (although Nintendo would probably raise a big stink). But this is just me daydreaming anyway.
I'm not a gamer but I thought this was an interesting question. The inclusion of chess as an e-sport seems particularly bizarre.
In March, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) unveiled a lineup for Olympic Esports Week comprising mostly virtual recreations of physical sports... simulated versions of archery, baseball, chess, cycling, dance, sailing, tennis, taekwondo and motorsport will be contested by more than 110 players from across the world... Nowhere to be seen: Popular video games like Valorant, Dota and Mobile Legends, which typically headline major e-sports competitions around the world.
I'm not a gamer but I thought this was an interesting question. The inclusion of chess as an e-sport seems particularly bizarre.
Chess existing as an on paper Olympic sport has long been a justification for using the term e-sports at all. From where I'm standing it's all marketing (bad marketing, at that -- the target...
Chess existing as an on paper Olympic sport has long been a justification for using the term e-sports at all.
From where I'm standing it's all marketing (bad marketing, at that -- the target audience mostly isn't into sports to begin with!) and none of them are sports in any meaningful sense. "Professional gaming" was a perfectly adequate term when we were using it 20 years ago. Even today, you don't really hear about e-sports players so much as you do pro-(insert game here) players. Because it's a dumb and blatantly manufactured category.
If you want a term for people who take it seriously enough to get into competitive leagues but don't get paid for it, there's an established term for that, too -- competitive gaming/competitive (insert game here). And again, these are how they're actually referred to outside of industry puff pieces.
20 years ago streaming wasn't an established career path in the gaming world. You can be a pro-gamer without being in anything near e-sports, which is why people started differentiating more. You...
"Professional gaming" was a perfectly adequate term when we were using it 20 years ago.
20 years ago streaming wasn't an established career path in the gaming world. You can be a pro-gamer without being in anything near e-sports, which is why people started differentiating more. You can also be in an intramural/recreational league where you're not playing professionally but it's still more serious and done through sporting organizations. "Competitive gaming" refers to the class of games meant to be played competitively in contrast to cooperative or single-player games. Times change and language changes to suit it. I don't really know why whether the target demo is "into sports" matters either. Few people are into sports as a category. Your average football fan isn't going to be jazzed about going to the French Open or the Masters Tournament. Usually people are into the one or two sports they're into. In my experience, generic "sports" fans are usually actually gambling fans who prefer sports to horses or cards. (And I count Fantasy sports leagues as functionally gambling as well).
Because it's a dumb and blatantly manufactured category.
All categories are manufactured. That's how language and cultural evolution works. Whenever someone invents or develops something new, you create a new category for it. It's true you tend to hear more about pro-[game] rather than e-sports in general, but that's not because it's "fake" it's for other reasons. Firstly, e-sports itself encompasses a very broad umbrella, there's actually many sub-categories where skills don't readily transfer between them. In reality you'd probably need to differentiate RTS, fighting games, ARPG/MOBA, FPS, Arena Shooters, Turn-based strategy, and so-on in the same way you have tennis and golf and baseball. Tennis players might play singles or doubles, they're different games where the skills transfer well. They might even play pickleball. But they'll have a hard time playing rugby.
Secondly, game publishers have way too much say in the marketing and prize pools of the tournaments, and their primary interest is in boosting the popularity of the game rather than the scene. Hence all the promotion and word choice revolves around boosting the games and not around promoting the careers of the players or the associated talent/production teams like casters, announcers, event organizers, etc. The Fighting Game Community is, notably, the most established of the e-sports sub-categories and the least hitched to a specific publisher and you see this happen much less. The skills involved readily transfer across games, so FGC players do tend to get called "esports players" or "game players" instead of "Street Fighter" or "Mortal Kombat" pros. Because it's much easier to jump from Mortal Kombat to Injustice, or Street Fighter to Guilty Gear than it is to jump from Starcraft to Mortal Kombat. The scene itself is very international, so nomenclature doesn't get hashed out as easily as when things start in one country and expand to others. East Asians tend to gravitate towards "Pro-gamer" or "professional game player" while Americans and Europeans lean more towards "esports player."
There are some curious implications about including esports titles on the Olympics roster. Modern competitive games are constantly updated with new content and rebalancing existing mechanics. How...
There are some curious implications about including esports titles on the Olympics roster. Modern competitive games are constantly updated with new content and rebalancing existing mechanics. How would that fare in a traditional athletics event where rules don't change very much for a long time and a lot of the challenge stems from the way our universe works? There's a lot of national pride riding on the line here, after all. Would there have to be an officially sanctioned feature-frozen version, or would it follow the update cycle like the current esports tournaments do? Also, would the developers have to support their title for years, potentially decades beyond its expected commercial lifespan? Even mainstay titles like Counter Strike have gone through multiple iterations in the past ~25 years.
The oldest titles have kind of gotten into a "steady state." Brood War, for instance, has only received very minor balance patches for the past 20 years and most of the "balancing" now is actually...
The oldest titles have kind of gotten into a "steady state." Brood War, for instance, has only received very minor balance patches for the past 20 years and most of the "balancing" now is actually accomplished through map design now. They're not going to change it unless someone surfaces a major bug at this point, and even then players tend to view the bugs as techniques to master and work around first before reaching for fixing it in code.
This is somewhat at odds with the economic cycle of games as a service, where the publishers need to keep the content mill spinning for people to keep paying. But that's currently partly because the esports scene is so reliant on those same publishers to bankroll it. If there were more avenues for players, organizers, and talent to establish careers without needing to have everything organized through the big game publishers you'd probably see the game design itself adapt for more longevity and long-tail monetization strategies (like hats!) instead of sequels and content drops.
So this is a debate about which video games deserves to be included under the label e-sport? Would be fun if they included some actual physical games, like Blaston, The Thrill of the Fight and...
So this is a debate about which video games deserves to be included under the label e-sport? Would be fun if they included some actual physical games, like Blaston, The Thrill of the Fight and Beat Saber.
tldr; Ignore me, I'm rambling. How games become esports is different when you are talking about game companies or players. Players want to group together and beat or compete. Honey, race me on...
tldr; Ignore me, I'm rambling.
How games become esports is different when you are talking about game companies or players.
Players want to group together and beat or compete. Honey, race me on Rainbow road to decide who has to do the dishes. If this was streamed online ... it would be an esport. Dinner Races. People compete locally, often mutating the rules to allow for the underdog to still compete. Because it is lonely at the top with long arse queue times. I'm surprised we don't have a way to have steam play chat roulet with owned multiplayer games. SteamUserBob, meat SteamUserJohanna, together: earn achievement X in Splatoon. You have 4 hours once started and must start within 12 hours, here is your chat window. There are 10 other squads, with the top place getting $steambucks.
But I digress. Simply put historically the business modivations around supporting Esports (or pre-esports) was seeing Esports as advertising.
Capcom sent Street Fighter 2 arcade cabinets to Milpitas, CA where a mini-golf outfit (Golfland) held tournaments. It was advertising, a lost leader. It likely broke even but the community spread this information across all of Silicon Valley. They perhaps even sold more arcade cabinets. But it was "community organized." People had to go pre-internet to a physical location, put a coin on a machine, to get their butts kicked.
Lan parties dominated the early university dorms of the late 90s. Quake, Unreal Tournament, Descent, player made maps, hacks, all for the ability to talk smack down the hall.
Comic book stores caught on with Magic the Gathering tournaments, all local, often making up arbitrary rules about how many packs you needed to buy for entry, their own system of trading. The rules of the game were not always clear and the tournament rules often even more unclear.
Then it changed. DOTA made a big company think (in my opinion): We are leaving money on the table. It wasn't enough for box sales of Warcraft 3. They were losing money when the korean people were hosting Starcraft 2 tournaments. Look at how much more money we'd make .... we invented these ips! We are the special ones. Absolutely warcraft was not a rip off of Warhammer and Starcraft the name of a recreational vehical parked outside. Let me finish my coffee at Point Diablo as I work on a game doc for Diablo.
But now we live in a Darkest Timeline where companies are afraid of user control and user contribution. It is a meme that people would draw Dicks with a shovel in Apple's Mythic Quest (but this is what they did with the Wii). Companies have to control everything to control the narrative.
The Olympic Esports may have failed based on their choice of games, but the reality is: No big company today will cede control of their IPs to allow money to exchange hands without them being in full legal control or have enough lawyer reviews for it to gain a blessing.
Imagine what Only UP would look like using Overwatch assets and skills. It wouldn't have been enough to be on the front page and be relevant due to a non-corpos contribution. They wouldn't have been happy with a 30% cut. They want it all.
Good luck getting people who aged out of competitiveness to want to care about a game when you don't allow those exact people to reimagine and reinvent what they loved.
Previous discussion about olympic e-sports in tildes
Sadly rather the perplexing choice of the IOC seems to be due to economic incentive (... and probably corruption + nepotism somewhere) rather than a philosophic choice.
At least they seems to have responded in part to that tone-deaf choices:
But taking the most popular videogame at the moment seems like a "how do you do fellow gamer" moment instead of a deliberate choice.
It was popular in the previous post so maybe it worth repeating1: Tetris should be at the e-Olympics. It's non-violent, accessible, deep, popular to the point it's an emblem to the medium, and specific to the medium as well (you cannot replicate it outside of videogame unlike chess).
We also have 3 established scenes with different aims (classic: like marathon; TGM: like sprint; modern versus: like boxing) whose ruleset haven't changed for decades2. We even had a fosbury moment recently in the classic Tetris scene (a new technique was discovered that revolutionize the scene; in that case it's a way to hold and press the button on the NES controller).
1And also I'm a Tetris nerd and love to making people discover the depth of this rabbit hole
2Modern VS: 16 since Tetris Online Japan, TGM: 21 years since TGM3, classic: 33 years since NES tetris
This also seems like a space where speedrunning could potentially make sense. It is already strongly competitive in nature, and since it focuses on single-player titles, there's fewer risks than onboarding a live-service title. If they picked games from older consoles, it could also give more credence to the emulator sphere as a means of ensuring longevity (although Nintendo would probably raise a big stink). But this is just me daydreaming anyway.
I'm not a gamer but I thought this was an interesting question. The inclusion of chess as an e-sport seems particularly bizarre.
Chess existing as an on paper Olympic sport has long been a justification for using the term e-sports at all.
From where I'm standing it's all marketing (bad marketing, at that -- the target audience mostly isn't into sports to begin with!) and none of them are sports in any meaningful sense. "Professional gaming" was a perfectly adequate term when we were using it 20 years ago. Even today, you don't really hear about e-sports players so much as you do pro-(insert game here) players. Because it's a dumb and blatantly manufactured category.
If you want a term for people who take it seriously enough to get into competitive leagues but don't get paid for it, there's an established term for that, too -- competitive gaming/competitive (insert game here). And again, these are how they're actually referred to outside of industry puff pieces.
20 years ago streaming wasn't an established career path in the gaming world. You can be a pro-gamer without being in anything near e-sports, which is why people started differentiating more. You can also be in an intramural/recreational league where you're not playing professionally but it's still more serious and done through sporting organizations. "Competitive gaming" refers to the class of games meant to be played competitively in contrast to cooperative or single-player games. Times change and language changes to suit it. I don't really know why whether the target demo is "into sports" matters either. Few people are into sports as a category. Your average football fan isn't going to be jazzed about going to the French Open or the Masters Tournament. Usually people are into the one or two sports they're into. In my experience, generic "sports" fans are usually actually gambling fans who prefer sports to horses or cards. (And I count Fantasy sports leagues as functionally gambling as well).
All categories are manufactured. That's how language and cultural evolution works. Whenever someone invents or develops something new, you create a new category for it. It's true you tend to hear more about pro-[game] rather than e-sports in general, but that's not because it's "fake" it's for other reasons. Firstly, e-sports itself encompasses a very broad umbrella, there's actually many sub-categories where skills don't readily transfer between them. In reality you'd probably need to differentiate RTS, fighting games, ARPG/MOBA, FPS, Arena Shooters, Turn-based strategy, and so-on in the same way you have tennis and golf and baseball. Tennis players might play singles or doubles, they're different games where the skills transfer well. They might even play pickleball. But they'll have a hard time playing rugby.
Secondly, game publishers have way too much say in the marketing and prize pools of the tournaments, and their primary interest is in boosting the popularity of the game rather than the scene. Hence all the promotion and word choice revolves around boosting the games and not around promoting the careers of the players or the associated talent/production teams like casters, announcers, event organizers, etc. The Fighting Game Community is, notably, the most established of the e-sports sub-categories and the least hitched to a specific publisher and you see this happen much less. The skills involved readily transfer across games, so FGC players do tend to get called "esports players" or "game players" instead of "Street Fighter" or "Mortal Kombat" pros. Because it's much easier to jump from Mortal Kombat to Injustice, or Street Fighter to Guilty Gear than it is to jump from Starcraft to Mortal Kombat. The scene itself is very international, so nomenclature doesn't get hashed out as easily as when things start in one country and expand to others. East Asians tend to gravitate towards "Pro-gamer" or "professional game player" while Americans and Europeans lean more towards "esports player."
There are some curious implications about including esports titles on the Olympics roster. Modern competitive games are constantly updated with new content and rebalancing existing mechanics. How would that fare in a traditional athletics event where rules don't change very much for a long time and a lot of the challenge stems from the way our universe works? There's a lot of national pride riding on the line here, after all. Would there have to be an officially sanctioned feature-frozen version, or would it follow the update cycle like the current esports tournaments do? Also, would the developers have to support their title for years, potentially decades beyond its expected commercial lifespan? Even mainstay titles like Counter Strike have gone through multiple iterations in the past ~25 years.
The oldest titles have kind of gotten into a "steady state." Brood War, for instance, has only received very minor balance patches for the past 20 years and most of the "balancing" now is actually accomplished through map design now. They're not going to change it unless someone surfaces a major bug at this point, and even then players tend to view the bugs as techniques to master and work around first before reaching for fixing it in code.
This is somewhat at odds with the economic cycle of games as a service, where the publishers need to keep the content mill spinning for people to keep paying. But that's currently partly because the esports scene is so reliant on those same publishers to bankroll it. If there were more avenues for players, organizers, and talent to establish careers without needing to have everything organized through the big game publishers you'd probably see the game design itself adapt for more longevity and long-tail monetization strategies (like hats!) instead of sequels and content drops.
So this is a debate about which video games deserves to be included under the label e-sport? Would be fun if they included some actual physical games, like Blaston, The Thrill of the Fight and Beat Saber.
tldr; Ignore me, I'm rambling.
How games become esports is different when you are talking about game companies or players.
Players want to group together and beat or compete. Honey, race me on Rainbow road to decide who has to do the dishes. If this was streamed online ... it would be an esport. Dinner Races. People compete locally, often mutating the rules to allow for the underdog to still compete. Because it is lonely at the top with long arse queue times. I'm surprised we don't have a way to have steam play chat roulet with owned multiplayer games. SteamUserBob, meat SteamUserJohanna, together: earn achievement X in Splatoon. You have 4 hours once started and must start within 12 hours, here is your chat window. There are 10 other squads, with the top place getting $steambucks.
But I digress. Simply put historically the business modivations around supporting Esports (or pre-esports) was seeing Esports as advertising.
Capcom sent Street Fighter 2 arcade cabinets to Milpitas, CA where a mini-golf outfit (Golfland) held tournaments. It was advertising, a lost leader. It likely broke even but the community spread this information across all of Silicon Valley. They perhaps even sold more arcade cabinets. But it was "community organized." People had to go pre-internet to a physical location, put a coin on a machine, to get their butts kicked.
Lan parties dominated the early university dorms of the late 90s. Quake, Unreal Tournament, Descent, player made maps, hacks, all for the ability to talk smack down the hall.
Comic book stores caught on with Magic the Gathering tournaments, all local, often making up arbitrary rules about how many packs you needed to buy for entry, their own system of trading. The rules of the game were not always clear and the tournament rules often even more unclear.
Then it changed. DOTA made a big company think (in my opinion): We are leaving money on the table. It wasn't enough for box sales of Warcraft 3. They were losing money when the korean people were hosting Starcraft 2 tournaments. Look at how much more money we'd make .... we invented these ips! We are the special ones. Absolutely warcraft was not a rip off of Warhammer and Starcraft the name of a recreational vehical parked outside. Let me finish my coffee at Point Diablo as I work on a game doc for Diablo.
But now we live in a Darkest Timeline where companies are afraid of user control and user contribution. It is a meme that people would draw Dicks with a shovel in Apple's Mythic Quest (but this is what they did with the Wii). Companies have to control everything to control the narrative.
The Olympic Esports may have failed based on their choice of games, but the reality is: No big company today will cede control of their IPs to allow money to exchange hands without them being in full legal control or have enough lawyer reviews for it to gain a blessing.
Imagine what Only UP would look like using Overwatch assets and skills. It wouldn't have been enough to be on the front page and be relevant due to a non-corpos contribution. They wouldn't have been happy with a 30% cut. They want it all.
Good luck getting people who aged out of competitiveness to want to care about a game when you don't allow those exact people to reimagine and reinvent what they loved.