UncreativeOpinions

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UncreativeOpinions
@UncreativeOpinions
MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE
lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

tired: esports aren't sports because they're video games

wired: esports aren't sports because they're proprietary artifacts tied to one specific manufacturer, rather than a set of rules anyone can make equipment for

MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

I think this post genuinely hits upon a big reason why games-as-sports will never be as ubquitous as physical sports, and also the only reason why game publishers pour so much money into trying to make it happen; Game companies want a sport that they have a monopoly on, and players don't. Monopolistic practices are antithetical to the kind of accessible universality that makes a sport something anyone can pick up at any time or start their own organization for. Game companies will never allow that, and so we'll never have it.

UncreativeOpinions
@UncreativeOpinions

I mostly agree with this. There are definitely sporting organisations that have grown into near, or actual, monopolies over time.

But most importantly, none of them started as monopolies. Which is the norm for esports.

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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

nullpat
@nullpat

yeah spec is the wrong word, I'm thinking of like "games that a high-level player could move between without having to relearn a whole new set of fundamentals", approaching it from the situation where a bunch of (attempted-)esports games already exist and have settled into fairly narrowly defined genres

although as far as I understand most of the big money in esports comes from companies trying to make their game the thing to watch so it's still the same problem. maybe what I'm circling around is that video games are already sports, and esports are not?

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olive20xx
@olive20xx

tbh, it's not really a distinction that's mattered to me ever since i saw the drive for mainstream legitimacy and profitability destroy a lot of what i enjoyed about pro League of Legends

like, great, it's a sport. now the whole thing is run by VCs and covered in car ads. yayyyyy

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

honestly who cares. "professional sports" is already kind of a joke; in practice it means playing for one of a tiny handful of specific organizations (possibly 1) that already have a monopoly on their claim to being "professional", at which point any concerns about the details of the particular game they play are kind of moot

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neral
@neral

while i'm far from a laser tag enthusiast, i get the impression that vendors not bothering to make a "standard laser tag" with interoperable kit is a big reason it's not considered a sport despite having championships and teams and stuff

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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

wasn't this originally conceived with like, those red plastic cups

a company can certainly attempt to claim that only their product can be used "seriously", but nothing about the concept of "stack cups" is specific to particular cups

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dosmeow
@dosmeow

I am perpetually thinking of Lockjaw, a Tetris training program and its author's decision to stop hosting the game:

“In fact, though Mr. Pajitnov and his partner Henk Rogers want Tetris to become an internationally competitive sport, as Mr. Pajitnov mentioned in earlier in the same interview, a policy against free software makes it that much harder. Imagine if there were a Basketball Company LLC that could sue a city or school district for copyright infringement for putting a basketball court with correct dimensions into a city park or school gymnasium. There are multiple competing suppliers of basketball and chess equipment, unlike software for playing Tetris. This is why Chess is a sport and Tetris is not: Chess has no owner.” — Damian Yerrick

https://web.archive.org/web/20160831204507/http://www.pineight.com/lj/

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dizzy-h-slightly-voided
@dizzy-h-slightly-voided

I mean.

Are you going to release it under a public-domain equivalent license, or at least one which explicitly allows other devs to reimplement the exact same base game in such a way that players can pick up different devs' implementations without needing to relearn fundamentals, and without being tied to your own official servers and matchmaking, in a manner precisely equivalent to (say) soccer not being tied to one manufacturer of soccer balls, uniforms, and goal nets?

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Nalathni
@Nalathni

If I were to do it I probably wouldn't even write an implementation, just an open design spec.

That said, I thought about it a bit and I'm pretty sure xpilot is already an esport. (With the amount of variance in maps/rules between servers it might be too diverse to count as a single sport, though.)

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NotMiki
@NotMiki

This makes a lot of sense but I can't help but feel that it's a distinction without a difference where the olympics are concerned. The IOC already decides its own rules, which events counts for qualifying for the olympics and which don't, and isn't afaik beholden to any neutral standard. If they can make those kinds of decisions, is that really different in a practical way from Capcom doing the same thing?

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DrMel
@DrMel

I dunno, my take on it has always been that yes they're not sports -- they're e-sports. It's in the name.

It comes out the gate calling itself not sports and people still can't stop tripping over themselves to call it not sports.

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Fyter
@Fyter

Would Tetris count as a sport and an esport? While Tetris does have very specific rules (thanks to the official Tetris guidelines) and has plenty of fan-made versions, it is commonly associated with the Tetris Company, which regulates all things Tetris.

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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Scampir
@Scampir

The idea of prize support in VGC (Pokémon) and hobby war gaming (Warhammer, Star Wars Legion etc) is also something I don’t see in sports as well. I think that’s a big difference in the culture between sports and competitive gaming!

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