Pushing Buttons: Is the Olympics getting video games all wrong? | Games

Pushing Buttons: Is the Olympics getting video games all wrong? | Games

The Olympics announced its second-ever esports series last week, which means that in 2023, video games will be part of the world’s most revered sporting event. Players can sign up for qualifying rounds, some of which are already underway. The series will culminate in a live event in Singapore in June, part of the first Olympics esports week, where qualifiers will compete across nine virtual sports.

This should be a huge moment that the gaming and esports worlds would both be celebrating. Instead, esports professionals have been despairing over the games that have been included. Instead of selecting well-established esports titles – the kind played in stadiums and whose top players earn six- or seven-figure prizes – the Olympics esports series has picked ones based, sometimes loosely, on real-world sports. Instead of Dota 2, Counter-Strike, Hearthstone, Valorant or Overwatch, there will be a free-to-play archery game called Tic Tac Bow, Just Dance, the VR motion-tracking game Virtual Taekwondo, and Gran Turismo.

“For the average esports fan, its inclusion in the Olympics should have been a triumphant moment representing a step forward for the community, which has grown from a few hundred gamers in the early 1980s to over half a billion this year,” says Matt Woods of the esports marketing and talent agency AFK. “Unfortunately, last week’s announcement left us feeling disappointed and, honestly, a little embarrassed. Instead of working with existing game publishers or well-established tournaments, it seems that the Olympic committee has instead decided to use this event as a marketing vehicle for brand-new, poorly thought out, unlicensed mobile games.”

I can see where Woods and his esports industry colleagues are coming from. People have been making a living playing games professionally for decades, and especially in the past 10 years, esports have grown enough to support

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IOC reinstates Jim Thorpe as sole winner of two golds from 1912 Olympics

IOC reinstates Jim Thorpe as sole winner of two golds from 1912 Olympics

Remark

Right after a long time of lobbying from relatives and supporters, Jim Thorpe, broadly considered 1 of America’s biggest athletes, will at last be acknowledged as the sole winner of the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.

The announcement, manufactured Friday by the Intercontinental Olympic Committee, 110 years to the day of Thorpe’s decathlon victory, reverses what many think about to be amongst the wonderful injustices in sporting activities. The IOC stripped Thorpe of his gold medals and erased him as the winner of the two occasions a calendar year after the Stockholm Game titles because he violated the Olympics’ amateurism regulations by being paid out to engage in insignificant league baseball game titles in the summers ahead of the Olympics.

The severity of his violation has extended been debated for the reason that college or university athletes in people times usually performed baseball for funds but did so less than assumed names. Thorpe, a Native American of the Sac and Fox Nation, was not common with the practice of making use of a different name and utilized his own, creating it effortless for newspapers to keep track of down the violation.

The choice arrives following years of community strain and advocacy, most a short while ago by the Dazzling Path Sturdy firm and Anita DeFrantz, a longtime IOC member. It also arrives with the support of the surviving family members of Hugo K. Wieslander, who was named the decathlon champion when Thorpe was stripped of his title, and the Swedish Olympic Committee.

“We welcome the reality that, thanks to the terrific engagement of Dazzling Route Powerful, a alternative could be uncovered,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a statement. “This is a most outstanding and exceptional problem, which has been

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China’s challenge: Can sports triumph over the controversy of Winter Olympics?

China’s challenge: Can sports triumph over the controversy of Winter Olympics?

Sealed off from its host city by a labyrinth of large fences, thermal gates and facial-recognition cameras, this is sure to be an Olympics like no other.

Politics, protests and Covid protocols have come to be an unavoidable portion of the build-up to these Game titles, and if anything at all, activities having spot outside the house the sporting arena throughout the up coming two weeks will obtain as a great deal awareness as steps on the ice and snow.

How China responds will be a important take a look at for the country’s leader Xi Jinping, who is gearing up for an unparalleled 3rd phrase in electricity this tumble.

“The globe is turning its eyes to China, and China is completely ready,” Xi said Thursday ahead of the opening ceremony.

For China’s ruling Communist Party, the Games will give a moment of national triumph, as Beijing gets the first town to host each the Summer time and Wintertime Olympics. It is also the very first major worldwide celebration inside of of China due to the fact the country shut its borders two decades ago in the wake of the first coronavirus outbreak.

But between the Chinese community, enthusiasm for the Wintertime Games pales in comparison with 2008, when inhabitants gathered in their hundreds throughout Beijing to enjoy the Summer months Olympics opening ceremony on significant community screens, keen to be a element of history. This calendar year, couple viewing functions took put in a money subdued by weighty-handed snap lockdowns and other pandemic limits.

“I think the Game titles are going to be declared a good accomplishment by the Communist Social gathering — no matter whether it truly is gonna be perceived as these by other nations is one more problem,” stated Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a professor of political science

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