If eSports becomes really big..

[Shiny212]

I don't think the world will ever want e-sports in the olympics, or to be even a real sport. There are WAY too many people against it.

Gamers these days already have a bad reputation in the crowd. If e-sports become sports or be in the olympics, imagine all the extra shitstorms gamers will get.

Also its kinda insulting to real athletes or just sportsmen.

What's insulting is for the geniuses that get good at games to be put alongside the tools that become champions of one otherwise menial and useless task such as throwing a ball or spear just for the sake of seeing how long you can throw it.

I'd rather glorify great intellect than your prowess in said Olympic ventures.

[Exroyal]

Of all games, why Civ 5? :P

The game has historical characters (Ghandi, for example.) The game also tells something about these characters. In addition to that, theres this "mastery tree" which shows how the world evolved and stuff.

[Zigen]

Playing Starcraft and train your body is not the same if you ask me. With Starcraft you sit on your chair, rush your opponent and stuff, you don't train to get stronger, faster or anything. The only thing you use are your hands to smash buttons, I don't see how thats compareble with body training. Ofcourse you do need to know the strategies, but its just not the same. It does look pretty stupid for a game to be a sport, it'll never be accepted in this world.

I guess you've never played starcraft, then? The top players in the world are pushing over 350+ APM (actions per minute) with just their hands and wrists, that's a lot. Sc2 is about speed and counters. You do train to get faster, you will never see a pro player with less than say 200APM or even 250. You also have to have very flexible wrists and hands in general.
But please, don't try and say things about a game you know nothing about, you just embarrass yourself.

[Himora]

move to Korea, you'll see your fav starcraft players pictures plastered on buses. celeb mags & school girls walls

[Waaldo]

I definitely think that e-spots will become so big that it will have its own "olympics," but it will never be in the Olympics.

[Powerogue]

Would that inevitably lead to China abducting children from their classes and putting them into rigorous gaming training?

[Deleted]

Don't cherry-pick words out of context. I said "physical prowess and mental strength." Mental strength or mental toughness refers to using your mind to push your body harder, "mind over matter" in a way. It's a sports cliché, but there's not really a better word for it.

According to the very wikipedia article you linked, business leaders also use the term.

I think it could very well fit SC2 as an esport - tournaments are LONG, and people play a LOT of matches in some. Of course that's going to push their body and mind.

[Deleted]

I don't ever see it happening, unless there are significant advances in the technology behind Kinect and the Wii. The Olympics are focused on physical prowess and mental strength. I don't see gaming really fitting into that in our lifetimes.

How exactly does StarCraft 2, (not-even-arguably) the most fitting e-Sport to this scenario, not address physical stress and mental exhaustion? -More so than most sports at the Olympics. I am a swimmer and I swim 9 times a week. I have a say in this. Swimming requires an insane amount of training (much more than the average professional athlete at the Olympics), most of which is in the water actually listening to yourself think - a neverending monologue - whilst having waves of water crash into your skull emitting sounds unimaginable to non-swimmers.

StarCraft 2 requires about the same amount of time. You cannot really compare it since StarCraft 2 and the time you can spend training depends mostly on the mental exhaustion you oblige to undergo while training - in swimming that is mostly the physical exhaustion.
A StarCraft 2 tournament does not feature a single or very few great performances which take less than 10 seconds individually (all respect to these runners - no hate from me). You wouldn't come to think of it but StarCraft 2 tournaments have a lot to do with endurance and being able to consistently exercise the - mildly speaking - extremely advanced strategic elements while staying on top of scouting what the opponent is doing, not missing a beat on your production in accordance to your ever-evolving plan onwards, "micro-ing" (specifically moving units in battles in certain patterns according to the situation of the battle to maximize efficiency and often totally change the outcome of said battle) - all this while keeping in mind the things that make chess-players good - to foresee your opponents next move and acting in accordance - positioning. Professional StarCraft 2 players also have to innovate. Not many sports have this aspect to them. I'll leave this to you to imagine and ponder about.

StarCraft 2 is amazing. No one will ever master it. There will always be holes in anyone's play. It is the next level of human performance... There are so many aspects to the game. Most people can not imagine what it takes to practice this game for just a few hours. Imagine doing complicated maths for 3 hours straight - do that math for sometimes 15+ hours a day and you get a day of training in terms of the mental aspects for some professionals.

I can not imagine how hard it must be to just KEEP ON GOING playing. Even though I play the game at what's called High Master's League-level on the European server (top 600 Europe). The complexity of the game baffles me every time I just play one of the frequent 30-minute games. I have so much to improve on and I just can't keep going on without a massive drop in execution and therefore my level of play. It's extraordinary to think about when you've experienced yourself - that some people just can keep on thinking clear and sorting out so much complex stuff on and on - which also makes them the best.

I just do not see how you can say "gaming" does not fit in the Olympics scene. Saying "gaming" in itself is wrong. Gaming is a whole variety of things. Proposing that the only gaming-category that would maybe fit into the Olympics being Kinect or Wii just proves you have no idea what it is you're talking about. Why would you ever use gaming at olympics to simulate what's being done in the "real world"? It makes absolutely no sense.

"Gaming" at the Olympics should be taken in use to showcase those human beings who excel greatly at games, for example StarCraft 2, which no other activity in the "real world" is even close to in terms of mental and physical strength, endurance, speed, innovation, accuracy and strategic understanding.

I don't think it will be in the olympics ever. Simply due to it not being a "physical" sport.

Think again. Stop talking in a general sense about things you do not know of.

But I do think it will get bigger and that we will see more of it on tv.

One can hope, so that more people will be able to join the people for, simply because their faulty prejudices may be reduced or non-existent at some point!

And McNeil. You do not even have a slight catch on even the odor of what it is you're talking about. Just stop talking. Your posts are filled with faulty prejudices that are simply NOT TRUE. How much worse can it get? You've been arguing all the way through this topic based on faulty, untrue prejudices.

[Deleted]

move to Korea, you'll see your fav starcraft players pictures plastered on buses. celeb mags & school girls walls

Pretty much yes! They take the whole e-sports thing a lot more seriously than the west. It has a bigger audience and it much more widespread and integrated. It's kind of interesting, I'd like to watch a documentary about e-sports in Korea.

I don't suppose one exists, right?

[Deleted]

I'm sure eSports will be as big in the west as it is in korea eventually, considering how much the Dreamhack, MLG, IPL and ESL and things like that has grown

[Meledelion]

I don't think it will be in the olympics ever. Simply due to it not being a "physical" sport. But I do think it will get bigger and that we will see more of it on tv.

Don't cherry-pick words out of context. I said "physical prowess and mental strength." Mental strength or mental toughness refers to using your mind to push your body harder, "mind over matter" in a way. It's a sports cliché, but there's not really a better word for it.

There are many sports in the olympics that don't rely on physique or using your mind to push your body harder some examples:

jumping, eventing and dressage (all sports where horses are doing most of the work), shooting (really hard to pull a trigger right), archery, golf.
If you add the winter olympics you get an even bigger list: nordic combined, curling, luge, bosleigh, ski jumping.

There are 35 types of sports atm (with subdevisions like 100m sprint etc...) of which 9 don't meat the criteria mentioned, that's 25.7%
What's so different about those sports and esports?

[vizzle]

A lot more people are arguing for eSports here than I'd have thought... Let's get this straight.

*The problem with eSports is that games are passing trends. As timeless as you may think Starcraft was and Starcraft 2 will be, in the bigger picture, it's not. Starcraft has already been pretty much replaced by SC2, and if it hasn't been completely wiped off yet it will be in just a few more years, and it hasn't even been out 20 years. 20 years is 5 Olympics. Does that mean we'll be replacing the "Olympic video game" every 20 years, and probably much less so, probably every 8 years? Who's going to be the judge of what game gets to be played at the eSports Olympics? Why X game and not X game? Sports have to be consistent. Sports have to be the same for more than 10 years, which is really just 2 Olympics. eSports come and fade away every several years, they can't last hundreds of years like Swimming or Soccer or Basketball.

*Olympic sports need to be understandable to everyone. Admit it, we're all gamers here. Games are fucking retarded to watch if you don't know what's going on. Games are annoying if you don't know what's going on, and if you happen to see a screen of a pvp match of a game you've never played before, you're just going to go, "What the shit?" The Olympics is for everyone around the world of all demographics to watch. If someone throws a javelin the furthest, we know he's the winner. If someone scores a goal, you know they've scored a goal. The closest type of game that I can see that is most relatable to everyone is FPS, but even then, people who've never played FPSes (most people in the world) would be confused. We know that they're doing amazing things, gamers know what's going on, but other people, most people? They'll just be bored, they won't know when to cheer or what to say.

*It doesn't promote what we want to promote. Part of what makes the Olympics so inspiring is that it tells you that if you train hard everyday, if you run and jump and fight and train, you have a chance to be at the Olympics, and even if you don't make it to the Olympics, you'll have learned to stay fit and healthy. Sure, some Olympic athletes (shooters) are fat, but that's a tiny minority, and kids don't care about that anyway. If we were to put eSports in the Olympics, every kid out there would be like, "oh shit, I don't have to work out, I don't have to make myself healthy because if I sit at the computer all day and play video games, I get to go to the Olympics! That's amazing!" I wouldn't want kids to start thinking that, and really, no one else should either.

[Deleted]

Also its kinda insulting to real athletes or just sportsmen.

Sure if games like supermario, Minecraft or WoW would be introduced to the olympics it would be insulting but games like SC2, no not really

[Jakexe]

If South Korea gets to host the olympics there might be a push and then there's a chance to see it and if it goes well we might see it again but I'm not holding my breath. A few olympics ago it was thought insane to ever see extreme sports in the olympics and now BMX is a popular event. There have also been some weird arse sports introduced like solo synchronized swimming so who knows.

I'm not really sure where this "the sport needs to be physically demanding" mentality is coming from. Shooting is barely a physical sport and I'm not quite sure how horse dancing riders need to be in in peak physical condition.

[Drifted]

There are many sports in the olympics that don't rely on physique or using your mind to push your body harder some examples:

jumping, eventing and dressage (all sports where horses are doing most of the work), shooting (really hard to pull a trigger right), archery, golf.
If you add the winter olympics you get an even bigger list: nordic combined, curling, luge, bosleigh, ski jumping.

There are 35 types of sports atm (with subdevisions like 100m sprint etc...) of which 9 don't meat the criteria mentioned, that's 25.7%
What's so different about those sports and esports?

You might want to stop before making yourself look more foolish. Nordic combined doesn't rely on physique? Or ski jumping? Ye they just slide the slope and hope at the correct time. Doesn't take much physique. And you need pretty good physical condition to hold gun/bow steady while aiming. Not something a guy with arms like wet noodles can do. On few of those I might agree they require little to none physical training but mostly you were just spewing total nonsense.

On topic I would never say "never". Cause you really can't foresee 500 years forward. But seeing e-sports in Summer Olympics 2020? Yeah riiiiight... In best cases the main stream might equate it with chess. Do you happen to see chess in current olympics? No I didn't think so.

[Toxigen]

With 170,000 people watching the League euro finals on Sunday morning (US eastern time), I'd say eSports are big already.

[Deleted]

It won't beon the olympics but there will be TV channels dedicated for it in the future. Watch Video Game Highschool (web show by Freddie Wong) if you haven't already. It's pretty fun.

[Deleted]

I'm not sure about Olympics but it is growing fast.

[Hraklea]

Even if e-sports become popular, I doubt there will be schools, as most weak players are too arrogant to have a coach. That's why they're weak, after all.

[Deleted]

I cant see EGames ( lol esports ) being anything more than they already are- Most of them consist of killing things or beating the shit out of each other-
Yes there is boxing and other fighing sports, but they're not usually to the death..

Egames are games - And will never be a sport -

StarCraft II- killing things
LOL kicking the shit out of each other and you die
Halo - shooting each other
Quake- Shooting each other in the head
Counter-Strike - more head shooting
Streetfighter -kicking each others faces off