Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

I find it really fascinating how sports seem just at the boundary of game design. The invention of sports is often so much slower than "designed" games, like video games and tabletop games. Now tabletop games were like this for a long time too. The rules of chess, and casino card games, moved and changed slowly. I wonder if there will be a similar move for more "designer" sports in the future. But sports certainly seem the most resistant. High player count, physically embodied gameplay, needs for non player referees outside the most casual levels of play, and high costs for equipment all certainly slow things down. It seems anything becoming a sport has to come from something else. Activities like mountain biking and skateboarding were activities adapted from intrinsic fun on new hardware innovations. I played Quadball in college, a sport adapted from the fictional sport of quidditch, with the core idea of the game ready formed outside the realm of game design. I wrote for the rulebook for a few seasons as well and applied game design to aspects of the rules that were becoming problems in actual play. But do other sports hire game designers? Do the people that change the rules in the NFL or MLB consider themselves game designers? Is there really a gap here I don't see that separates sports from games? Or is the field of sports design simply underdeveloped? Is SASUKE/Ninja Warrior a sport, and do it's course builders consider themselves game designers?