Why esports and the Olympics still have a complicated relationship

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has been reluctant to embrace an Olympic future for esports, despite its growing popularity among Generation Z and millennials - groups that are also seeing the Games as less relevant to them.

The IOC supported an esports tournament that paralleled the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, and esports was an official medal event at the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, China, but there is yet no public timetable for an Olympic video gaming event.

The problem, the organisation has made clear, is concerns over violence in video games. "We have a clear red line, a very clear red line that we do not want to deal with any game which is contrary to the Olympic values," IOC president Thomas Bach said at a meeting in March. "Any game where there is violence glorified or accepted, where you have any kind of discrimination, they have nothing to do with the Olympic values."

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This hard line, however, goes against the reality that video games involving various forms of violence are overwhelmingly popular. The esports scene is dominated by first-person shooters and battle arena games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Dota 2, League of Legends and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, while non-violent games such as Hearthstone constitute only a minor, albeit substantial, part.

But there is some support for video games from within the IOC. Yelena Isinbaeva, a member of the committee and a two-time Olympic pole vault gold medallist, said games such as CS:GO and Dota 2 should at least be considered in the Olympic programme.

"In the future, it will be a huge challenge to the Olympic movement and traditional sports, this computer sport, which is not less [interesting] than the Olympic Games," she said at the March meeting.

Dr Juanita Cheung Sin-ting, a senior lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who researches physical education, also doubted whether esports would get gamers to exercise more.

She said Hong Kong's "electronic physical education" classes, in which pupils exercised with motion-sensing gaming consoles on rainy days, did not make students more enthusiastic about the sports the games emulated.

"Esports, though they are sports, are of low physical intensity. Whether you walk 8,000 or 10,000 steps sitting down, the physical intensity is still low," she said.

The Tokyo Olympics this year will provide some insight into whether esports can espouse Olympic values. The "Olympic Virtual Series", which will be held before the Games' opening ceremony, is set to feature four sports video games that emulate baseball, cycling, sailing and motor racing.

"The IOC's clear preference for video games that emulate real-world sports competitions is an attempt to leverage the popularity of esports without taking on any unnecessary baggage that comes with more popular, but perhaps more broadly problematic, games like CS:GO or Fortnite," said Matthew Payne, an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame's film, television and theatre department who specialises in video game studies.

"If the IOC wants to test the waters with esports, it makes sense that they would begin with titles that have real-world equivalences to appease sceptics, even if those titles aren't those that attract most professional gamers and fans."

In an emailed response, the IOC said it expected a "mass-participation turnout" for the virtual series.

Payne said the IOC might also feel a backlash from viewers and advertisers if the organisation thought that including esports in the world's most prestigious sporting competition would grant it undeserved cultural legitimacy.

Its association with gaming live-streaming platform Twitch, with which US Olympics broadcaster NBC partnered to produce interactive content, could also backfire, he said. The "nbcolympics" Twitch channel bans "excessive use of caps" in the chat room of streams, but that mode of communication forms part of the platform's subculture.

Payne said Olympics accounts should avoid being seen as legitimising gamers' hobbies through their sanitised version. "There's a delicate balance between wanting to grow your hobby and gaming community versus having it co-opted by an outside interest that may strip away the things that make that an authentic gaming experience for a community of players."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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