• Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      22 minutes ago

      My rule for considering it a sport is: anyone should be able to play it if they have everything needed. It’s impossible to be banned from a sport (banned from tournaments is not the same thing) - if you want to play, you play. If you want to make custom rules just for you and your friends, you make them and then play. Nobody can own the rights to a sport (again, not the same as that sport’s tournament). No company can ever stop others from making money with a specific sport.

      If you have any kind of ball you can play soccer. If you have anything that can represent chess pieces, you can play chess. If you have a kart you can have a race…

      So can videogames be considered sport? Perhaps some can, but anything that requires access to a specific company’s private servers is out of the question. I’m not even gonna argue that the game should be open source, but at the very least it should have a way for anyone to spin up their own server for it.

    • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
      24·
      21 hours ago

      I’ll bite. If you want to pick a singular thing to point at and say it’s ruined gaming you should be more upset about micro transactions, especially those in mobile gaming. We live in an era where so many people have a device that is physically more capable than the handheld gaming devices of the past but the entire mobile gaming market is just slop meant to be addictive and extract as much money from you as possible. Imagine a world where Nintendo was making mainline Pokémon games for phones. What if X, Y, Sun, and Moon weren’t made for the 3ds but for phones (or both).

      • DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world
        2·
        15 hours ago

        Honestly, in a way, (ubiquitous fast) internet ruined gaming. When you had to buy physical disks, there was no way to continuously monetize a game. Studios had to make new good games and they did.

        Back then, there were awesome games for phones as well. I still have an old phone with just to keep galaxy on fire 2. N.O.V.A. 2 was basically Halo game on phones. Before that, there was awesome java games for dumb phones.

      • TipsyMcGee@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        20 hours ago

        I think you’re right, but I’d say it goes wider. Things like Steam sales and Game Pass subscriptions also has favored a bunch of shovelware indie titles and AAAA games: either a game is cheap enough to make the cut/be catalog fodder or it has to be monstrous in scope

          • wavebeam@lemmy.world
            3·
            15 hours ago

            Balatro Hades & Hades II Dead Cells Astro Bot Hollow Knight & Silksong Stardew Valley

            Plenty of evidence of mid-budget games that are hugely successful. “Indie” is now a pretty large and unhelpful term. Supergiant is a fairly large company, not just “a single guy” like in the case of Stardew Valley. Even Concerned Ape hired on a team for ongoing support and ports for Stardew. And Team Cherry may be small, but also not actually just 2 people like is the common understanding. And Astro Bot may be made by a fairly large studio owned by the biggest console platform owner but you couldn’t seriously call last year’s GOTY a “quadruple A game”. Hell, even Triple is generous.

            I get the malaise and disappointment around the top 5 games all being like a decade old live service games that all make up ,ore than like 80% of the industry’s play time and revenue, but I’m pretty sure LocalThunk is feeling pretty good about their success right now. There are plenty of really great games that are not just bargain bin junk while also not being massive industry stompers like Fortnite.

            So yeah, that was a WILD take.

  • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.worldEnglish
    341·
    1 day ago

    I think esports are real sports not because I think video games are as meaningful as physical sports, but because I think physical sports are as meaningless as video games. It’s all just playing with toys.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sink a few more hours into that new Katamari hotness.

  • Stache_@lemmy.ml
    31·
    2 days ago

    I did a paper on this in college and if the Olympic committee deems chess as a “mental sport” then I sure and shit think esports can be considered a real sport too

    • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
      2·
      15 hours ago

      If chess can be a mental sport there’s no way in hell that Starcraft isn’t. The mindgames and insane amount of instant control and choice making is crazy. Sure professional chess players attempt to go as quickly as possible but they could take their time if they wanted in Starcraft a fraction of a second can be the difference between winning or losing in a battle that you are controlling hundreds of variables

    • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
      141·
      1 day ago

      Ok then mental sports need to have their own separate Olympics.

      Because Olympics originated as a competitive showcase of the world’s peak physical prowess.

      • MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip
        2·
        4 hours ago

        (tongue-in-cheeck devil’s advocate)

        And everyone knows the best way to do things is never change them. Like music, and bigoted voting rights.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
        9·
        21 hours ago

        There’s a lot of grey area in that distinction though. There’s a handful of Olympic sports that showcase fine motor control in ways that aren’t that different from esports. Fencing and shooting are in the same realm as an RTS or FPS.

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    You provide physical inputs, which are sensitive to timing and agility, to a rule-based competition. It’s at least as much a sport as golf or curling or bowling. And I say that as someone who doesn’t find eSports particularly compelling. It requires a sophisticated technal infrastructure and doesn’t require superhuman levels of strength or endurance (though the latter in particular could be helpful), but those are merely “sliders on the configuration screen” for whether a certain sport is to your interest.

    Michael probably agrees.

  • YappyMonotheist@lemmy.world
    1·
    1 day ago

    Meta comment: Why would a simple semantic disagreement/misunderstanding cause this much friction? Because it’s not about semantics, but about hurt feelings and pecking order.