Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same for decades, or forever.
Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.
Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.
But why?
> You can't have records when the game constantly changes.
Many olypmic games have no records. There’s no records in fencing, for example, as all matches are against an opponent not an absolute like a time or distance. Nobody considers this a problem. Why do you think it matters if there are records or not?
Also, you don't have to use the IP of Epic Games Inc to play any variant of football, or even a stereotypical rich person sport like dressage, so performance improvements aren't contingent on enhancing a specific corporation's bottom line
When auto racing, chess, or any other number of long-lived competitive not-primarily-physical activities are in the Olympics then we can start thinking about video games. And then we ought to think about the games which have lasted a long time as competitive activities on their own while consistently bringing in new blood. Fortnite is a flash in the pan compared to, say, CounterStrike. I think, maybe 50 years from now, after some very physical VR game takes the world by storm in the next couple of decades and demonstrates staying power, we’ll have a serious contender.
We JUST got skateboarding...
If we want a sport to be extant for a hundred years before it's considered (seems pretty reasonable to me), why not explicitly say that rather than looking for proxies?
Yeah, why not?
I'm sure competitive eating genuinely does involve training, skill and determination. What are the criteria of the olypmic games, anyway?
That NGO must have a proven history of enforcing the Olympic Movement Anti-Doping rules, including out-of-competition testing of athletes. Imagine if top fortnite players had to submit to random year-round drug testing to be allowed to compete.
It's comparable to how tools for other sports changed over the year. No one would want to play with tennis balls or rackets from 50 years ago. It just happens that change happens much more rapidly in esport games.
Starcraft broodwar is also still played competitively with a few hundred thousand in prizes per year [2], at 22 years old (and I don't think there have been any changes apart from a recent graphics refresh) it's probably a better contender for the olympics than cs.
22 years is still nothing compared to most sports, and it's clearly reaching the end of its life.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130214014350/http://steamcommu...
[2] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Leagues/Recent_Tournaments
Starcraft broodwar is basically nonexistent besides south korea. Other titels are orders of magnitude more popular.
And while 22 years very little compared to the rich history of other sports, I'd like to remind you that the olympics already contains many 'odd' disciplines. Many of which have a small competitive history.
So the question is really if it matters how long the discipline will be around. And I'm not quite sure it would matter. There are many disciplines that were retired after only a few competitions. And it not like additional change would hurt the olympics much. It's already quite different compared to the original concept. Why not adjust it for the digital sports?
Going by Wikipedia it was released in 2000:
Counter Strike has been played competitively since 2000, for about 20 years.
But I agree, it's more comparable to chess and could be played as a tabletop game with little if any adjustments.