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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.


lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

it is genuinely dire to think about what the intersection of computers and IP law has done to culture

"games" used to be things you could adapt, could play in the dirt with rocks and sticks if you had to. now they're vastly more interactive, sure, but the vast majority of them only work on one platform, degrade over time, and come in an inscrutable format that's illegal to tamper with. because that's the default state of software


lifning
@lifning

i was riffing on this idea earlier this year, the difference between games and video games.

i suppose in the non-video gaming space we've in recent years seen the debacle where D&D tried to IP-enclose a game about using your imagination with your friends.

but a decade ago, around when "eSports" started to become a topic of greater interest, we saw (for example) Nintendo abuse their copyright to block Melee tournaments, since players continuing to popularize an older, less-lucrative-to-Nintendo ruleset for the game "Smash Bros." wasn't in their interest.

imagine if Major League Baseball banned cleats, and minor leagues and various local kids' athletics leagues were like "that's asinine, we don't want our players randomly slipping and falling on their asses" and didn't follow suit, and then MLB sent their lawyers after them all?

if elected, i will require that all games wishing to be promoted to the public as sport must be Free and Open-Source Software. tune in next week for Tux Racer top 8


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

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

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

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

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 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?

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.

in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

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!

in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

I don't think they can't be adapted in principle right? isn't it already the case that game rules cannot be copyrighted, only things like level design can? the main difficulty is just that it's devilishly hard to actually implement the rules, and that the precise rules may not be known since source code is kept secret... like if a sport required an incredibly complex contraption, and they didn't make public its specifications.

And I think it's kinda been done, I'm thinking of Project M, the Smash Brawl mod, which was cease and desisted, but it's creators made Icons, a game which I think had nearly identical mechanisms (I'm not sure how identical though), but it wasn't as appealing as Project M, so it didn't take off.

Wonder how something like a Tetris clone would do legally though, given how minimal that game is already, that they may be able to claim infringement more easily

mentioned elsewhere in the thread but tetrio is basically THE standard for competitive "familiar stacker" games, and in that context I think it's better than anything with a tetris logo on it right now.