OlymPicks: Sorry Couch Potatoes, IOC Prez Says You Can’t Get a Gold Medal By Gaming

Brace yourself for some tragic news, video game addicts: The years you’ve dedicating to sitting at a console and mastering a controller aren’t yet enough to help you become Olympian. No, not even if you have carpal tunnel or other romanticized injuries from those bouts of digital competition.

Those dreams are at least dashed for now, because International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach has said: “We are not yet 100 percent clear whether eSports is really sport, with regard to physical activity and what it needs to be considered sport.”

Nerds around had the world had surely been hoping for more favourable results, given that the 2022 Asian Games, to be held in Hangzhou, will include eSports as a medal sport.

Defined by a team of top gaming academics as “multiplayer video games played competitively for spectators, typically by professional gamers” eSports are an increasingly gaining legitimacy at a host of venues and competitions around the world. Competitors even win huge prizes and major salaries by vying for tournament titles by playing games like Dota and League of Legends, along with a host of others. Red Bull’s arts and culture site even detailed how, in 2013, eSports attracted 71.5 million spectators.

That growing popularity of competitive gaming even lead Casey Wasserman, the chairman for Los Angeles’ 2024 Olympic bid, to say late last year: “We view eSports’ immense global popularity and continued advances in digital technologies as tremendous tools for reconnecting millennials with the Olympic movement … L.A. 2024 will work to ensure technology enhances young people’s sports experiences, instead of replacing them, and becomes a platform for further popularizing Olympic and Paralympic sports.”

And while Bach is not yet convinced about the merits of professional button bashing, he at least hasn’t declared “game over” either. It seems his biggest gripe isn’t the lack of strength of physical strength, speed, or skill required to excel at eSports (though that is part of the issue), but rather that such competitive gaming lacks the conventional structure already secured by more established sports.

“We do not see an organization or a structure that will give us confidence, or guarantee, that in this area the Olympic rules and values of sport are respected and in place, and that the implementation of these rules are monitored and secured,” the IOC president said, before ending on a more optimistic note: “We are watching it, we see the differences, we see the lack of organisation. But we also see the high engagement of youth in eSports. Therefore, we have to carefully consider how this could be consolidated.”

As gamers wait impatiently for such Olympic gratification, they can at least take solace in the Games’ other tech breakthroughs, including a growing amount of VR coverage in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, and what is likely to be more at Pyeongchang in 2018, Tokyo in 2020, and, of course, Beijing in 2022. Nikkei Asian Review recently ran an essay about how “300 hours of virtual reality coverage” was available for Rio, and that “The Olympic Games is the kind of visually compelling, exclusive event that is perfect for VR.”

So, if you can’t get a gold medal for playing geeky games, at least you’ll be able to hopefully don a pair of VR goggles and live vicariously through the athletes in a more technologically immersive experience than ever before.

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Email: kylemullin@thebeijinger.com
Twitter: @MulKyle

Photos: Polygun.com, NBC Sports, Nikkei