i have pet chickens, i make drawings, and i write software of questionable usefulness. that's pretty much the extent of my personality. ask me about array programming, decker, or anything, really.
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
inspired: the 'e' in 'esport' stands for 'encumbered' (by intellectual property law) rather than 'electronic'
For a game to be considered an esport it should have a spec and at least two implementations
would "hero shooter" or "moba" or "battle royale" count as specs with multiple implementations?
none of those seem specific enough to call them "specs"
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?
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
that's such a high level category though, like "shooter" or "keyboard and mouse"
Arguably DOTA did that for a while. New ruleset changes were implemented both in Valve's DOTA 2 and in Warcraft mod.
now trying to think if there are any physical sports with a proprietary manufacturer like that
There are some sports suppliers with near-monopolies for professional games, like the manufacturers of proprietary baseball dirt.
and yeah, i've never seen a hockey stick for sale made by anyone but Mazon, but anyone can make a hockey stick. they don't own the concept and it's not in the rules you have to use their kit
or the official ball manufacturer for FIFA, or the company trying to push the new airless basketball
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
don't some of the contestants literally build their own versions of the obstacle course in their backyards to practice?
In motorsport there's the concept of "one-make" racing, such as Porsche Carrera Cup.
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
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
It was, but they got super litigious. The video I linked to explains a lot of the history.
yep, I think that's pretty indisputable. they even spruiked it at our school as a kid
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/
i think speedrunning does pretty well under these critera, which is rad
Would a game which supports community servers count? Making a custom server could be interpreted as making equipment for a set of rules (game client)
Or is the server the rules and the client the equipment, in which case a custom reimplementation of the client would be a third-party making equipment?
are you trying to nerdsnipe me into designing an esport because if so it's working
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?
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.)
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?
They should have huge cubic blocks to push around; a challenge for both the mind and body.
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.
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.
time for someone to make Generic Store Brand* Guilty Gear with Notbridget and Notnagoriyuki and public music
*not actually store brand but i had to say it
