7 ms·

The next Olympics should include Fortnite

34 points by melvinroest 6y ago

marvelm 6y ago
"The idea that an activity, rather than a substance, can be addictive is contentious among doctors" As a person who has been struggling with video game addiction, especially in order to combat the loneliness I have been experiencing during the pandemic, I would disagree. While it is unlikely one would get an addiction in terms of physical dependency, psychological addiction is a whole other question. That being said, one can also get addicted to exercise, so I guess its not a reason to keep it out of the Olympics!
- chirau 6y ago
  I wonder whether watching porn is an activity or substance.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    Activity. Substance means imbibing a chemical (e.g. eating, injecting, breathing).
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  There is a great article out there about the difference between the strength of compulsion and the strength of physical side effects. The two are not linked. That is, one drug may have horrible withdrawal effects, but cause relatively weak compulsion to continue using. Another drug may cause extremely strong compulsion to use and have no withdrawal symptoms at all. The idea that addiction only actually exists when there are physical withdrawal symptoms is just wrong, and it is a very harmful wrong belief.
- have_faith 6y ago
  It's all substance eventually right? the activity causes your body to produce excessive amounts of something addictive.
  - snet0 6y ago
    But the substance is not the videogame itself, but rather is some complex neurochemistry. By this logic, basically all "drug" addictions are actually instantiations of a more primitive addiction to neurochemicals. Operating at this level of abstraction is useless, because there's no actionable decision points.
- kleer001 6y ago
  From my understanding of addiction is the essential terms are "compulsive engagement" and "adverse consequences".
- Jetroid 6y ago
  Have you tried Gamequitters [1] for helping you with your addiction? I met the guy who runs that site a few years ago, and he's been able to help a lot of people with that. He was an ex-gaming addict himself and seemed really passionate about the subject. [1] https://gamequitters.com/ https://gamequitters.com/
- chongli 6y ago
  This highlights something that's made me uncomfortable for a while. In discussions around addiction, suicide, and other mental health outcomes, the focus is almost always placed on stopping the undesirable outcome. They'll put timers that kick people off games, they'll put barriers and nets around bridges people commonly jump from, etc. What they aren't doing is treating the root cause of the problem: loneliness, listlessness, depression. These are problems of our society and they seem to be getting worse over time. We need to change this. We need to build real communities where people belong. We need to build relationships. We're not doing that though. We're becoming more and more atomized.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    You can hire a contractor to build a net, but you can't hire a contractor to make people have more friends.
- Someone 6y ago
  It is hard to strictly define the term “addiction”, and experts will disagree about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction has a seemingly clear definition “Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.”. Labeling it a brain disorder implies it must involve a biological process, and that, to some, implies it must include some physical or chemical stimulus. However, that page also says “many scholars who study addiction argue that the brain disease model is incomplete and misleading”. That Wikipedia page also says “The term addiction is misused frequently to refer to other compulsive behaviors or disorders, particularly dependence, in news media.“ So, the mainstream opinion seems to be that not all compulsive behaviors are addictions.
  - snet0 6y ago
    I think this runs into an important problem of trying to overly formalise categories, which makes sense for medical usage, but just leads to pedantry in most cases. If some one feels "addicted" to some thing, and almost anyone would agree that they at least seem to be so, it's of no use to say "well technically, addiction requires these conditions and must be verified by this test". There's a similar thing with depression, where people will try discredit others by implying their depression isn't real because it hasn't been diagnosed and confirmed by a doctor. If you're really damn sad for a really long time, our word for that is depression. If medicine wants to use the same word to describe a similar-but-more-precise condition, they can feel free. But most of the time we're not talking in a medical context.
bathtub365 6y ago
The Olympics doesn't currently include any competition fully controlled by a corporation. Why would you want to introduce this?
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  At the very least, the client and server code would have to be open to inspection by experts from any competing country. Ideally the code would actually be Free Software, and countries could vote on pull requests for features and balance patches.
  - bathtub365 6y ago
    Let esports have their own competitions, as they've done for years now. The Olympics is not esports.
  - zapnuk 6y ago
    Bad idea and completely unnecessary.
    - boogies 6y ago
      > Bad idea Why? The source code forms the authoritative rules of the game, and the Four Freedoms¹ apply to those in all Olympic sports, right? 1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
      - bathtub365 6y ago
        Are the athletes also expected to be software developers? Are the viewers? Are the judges, broadcasters, and commentators? This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket just in case they disagree with a referee.
        dane-pgp 6y ago
        > This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket That's as ridiculous a strawman as saying "The Olympics mustn't have any rules about performance enhancing drugs, otherwise athletes would have to carry bio-chemistry textbooks in their pockets".
Alupis 6y ago
Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same for decades, or forever. Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same But why? > You can't have records when the game constantly changes. Many olypmic games have no records. There’s no records in fencing, for example, as all matches are against an opponent not an absolute like a time or distance. Nobody considers this a problem. Why do you think it matters if there are records or not?
  - bathtub365 6y ago
    When the rules stay the same, it pushes people to improve their performance within the rules (or, sometimes, unfortunately, outside of the rules). When the rules are constantly changing, the focus shifts from the competitors to the game itself and the corporation promoting it.
    - noodlesUK 6y ago
      The rules in sports change pretty frequently. Little changes to the rules have a massive impact on the way the game is played at a high-level. See fencing, or goal-line tech in football (soccer).
      - bathtub365 6y ago
        The rules in sports don't change nearly as much as they do in competitive video games. In the sports where the rules do change often, the focus ends up on the governing body for the league for changing the rules. This is one of the reasons the Olympics often has different rules for their sports than the professional leagues that feed competitors into the Olympics.
      - 6y ago
enzanki_ars 6y ago
Fortnite has way too many problems to even be anywhere near considered ready for an esport presented in the Olympics. Fortnite still has a large amount of luck involved. Even the most skilled players have to rely on luck to be able to get the high leveled items they need to succeed in the long game. While current competitions have tried to lessen this by having multiple rounds over and over in attempt at giving all players a fairer chance, the luck aspect is still there. All other games with a heavily established esports base uses games with much lower levels of luck, and are centered around the balance of skill and strategy. CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League, Valorant, Super Smash Bros, etc. are all centered around the player or team's skill and/or strategy. Luck is either minimal or non existent. The Olympics should be about skill, never about luck.
- bathtub365 6y ago
  There is still a fair amount of luck in the Olympics. For example, in the winter Olympics, snow conditions are only somewhat in the control of the organisers and can have a huge impact on someone's performance. All you can do, as an athlete, is train in a variety of conditions to try to be ready
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Sure, but snow differences aren't determined by programmers trying to make the game more interesting by ensuring different skiiers have different amounts of snow to work with. If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow.
    - bathtub365 6y ago
      > If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow. Since competitive skiing is based on athleticism in the face of uncertain conditions, that sounds dreadfully boring.
      - notahacker 6y ago
coronadisaster 6y ago
Another Olympic discipline could be programming...
mrkramer 6y ago
"Why the next economist article should include name of an author or at least pseudonym" So I can know who writes this bs.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  John Doe, PR/Social Media, Epic Games?
iamwil 6y ago
I've always wanted Japanese style dodge ball (with inner and outer courts) to be an Olympic sport.
seattle_spring 6y ago
Please, any game except Fortnite or any of the DoTA variants. The last thing the Olympics needs is to be infiltrated by a half million 12 years older throwing hard Rs.
Mizza 6y ago
Clickbait, neeexxxxttttt.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scotty79 6y ago
Maybe 1000 years after it includes chess.
x87678r 6y ago
What about Beer Pong and Dodgeball?
- notahacker 6y ago
  Both of these are closer to the original Olympic ethos than Fortnite. As is [for better and for worse perceptions of the original Olympic ethos] naked Twister.
noobermin 6y ago
I'm on board if quake 3 will be in the olympics, and especially defrag.
derefr 6y ago
IMHO, Olympic sports should never have their playerbase entirely beholden to one corporation who makes all the “equipment” (in the case of a e-sport, the game itself.) An Olympic e-sport should probably have at least a FOSS reference implementation, if not multiple competing implementations all inter operating on the same network. It is also very important (much moreso than for conventional sports) for e-sports rules to be driven by a rules body external to the league owners—hopefully one with membership open to any interested organization.
loraa 6y ago
Only way to attract gen Z to anything.
hungryhobo 6y ago
League of Legends was introduced in the last Asian games, I think when they tried to get it included in the Olympics it was rejected on the basis of promotion of violence. So we'll see how it goes this time
lacker 6y ago
Obviously it would be a win for the Olympics to include Fortnite. After all, Fortnite makes more money than the Olympics and is more popular than almost all Olympic sports. It would provide inroads to the more valuable younger audiences that the Olympics are starting to lose. But why would Fortnite want to give up control of its product to the Olympics?
- notahacker 6y ago
  If Fortnite was really the entity holding the spectator sport aces here, broadcasters would already be paying them handsomely for broadcast rights to their competitions rather than Fortnite streaming being the preserve of Twitch amateurs collectively reaching as many people per quarter as an off-peak hour of the Olympics[1]. It's not like Epic aren't commercially savvy, after all. The reality is that there's little about a computer game that's less than an Olympiad old to appeal to the IOC and plenty of major issues with them granting Epic their patronage, and both entities will do fine without each other. [1]obviously many of the minor Olympic sports also aren't great as standalone TV and wouldn't get the viewers without the big umbrella event, but that's kind of the point

34 points by melvinroest 6y ago

"The idea that an activity, rather than a substance, can be addictive is contentious among doctors" As a person who has been struggling with video game addiction, especially in order to combat the loneliness I have been experiencing during the pandemic, I would disagree. While it is unlikely one would get an addiction in terms of physical dependency, psychological addiction is a whole other question. That being said, one can also get addicted to exercise, so I guess its not a reason to keep it out of the Olympics!

chirau 6y ago
I wonder whether watching porn is an activity or substance.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  Activity. Substance means imbibing a chemical (e.g. eating, injecting, breathing).
gameswithgo 6y ago
There is a great article out there about the difference between the strength of compulsion and the strength of physical side effects. The two are not linked. That is, one drug may have horrible withdrawal effects, but cause relatively weak compulsion to continue using. Another drug may cause extremely strong compulsion to use and have no withdrawal symptoms at all. The idea that addiction only actually exists when there are physical withdrawal symptoms is just wrong, and it is a very harmful wrong belief.
have_faith 6y ago
It's all substance eventually right? the activity causes your body to produce excessive amounts of something addictive.
- snet0 6y ago
  But the substance is not the videogame itself, but rather is some complex neurochemistry. By this logic, basically all "drug" addictions are actually instantiations of a more primitive addiction to neurochemicals. Operating at this level of abstraction is useless, because there's no actionable decision points.
kleer001 6y ago
From my understanding of addiction is the essential terms are "compulsive engagement" and "adverse consequences".
Jetroid 6y ago
Have you tried Gamequitters [1] for helping you with your addiction? I met the guy who runs that site a few years ago, and he's been able to help a lot of people with that. He was an ex-gaming addict himself and seemed really passionate about the subject. [1] https://gamequitters.com/ https://gamequitters.com/
chongli 6y ago
This highlights something that's made me uncomfortable for a while. In discussions around addiction, suicide, and other mental health outcomes, the focus is almost always placed on stopping the undesirable outcome. They'll put timers that kick people off games, they'll put barriers and nets around bridges people commonly jump from, etc. What they aren't doing is treating the root cause of the problem: loneliness, listlessness, depression. These are problems of our society and they seem to be getting worse over time. We need to change this. We need to build real communities where people belong. We need to build relationships. We're not doing that though. We're becoming more and more atomized.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  You can hire a contractor to build a net, but you can't hire a contractor to make people have more friends.
Someone 6y ago
It is hard to strictly define the term “addiction”, and experts will disagree about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction has a seemingly clear definition “Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.”. Labeling it a brain disorder implies it must involve a biological process, and that, to some, implies it must include some physical or chemical stimulus. However, that page also says “many scholars who study addiction argue that the brain disease model is incomplete and misleading”. That Wikipedia page also says “The term addiction is misused frequently to refer to other compulsive behaviors or disorders, particularly dependence, in news media.“ So, the mainstream opinion seems to be that not all compulsive behaviors are addictions.
- snet0 6y ago
  I think this runs into an important problem of trying to overly formalise categories, which makes sense for medical usage, but just leads to pedantry in most cases. If some one feels "addicted" to some thing, and almost anyone would agree that they at least seem to be so, it's of no use to say "well technically, addiction requires these conditions and must be verified by this test". There's a similar thing with depression, where people will try discredit others by implying their depression isn't real because it hasn't been diagnosed and confirmed by a doctor. If you're really damn sad for a really long time, our word for that is depression. If medicine wants to use the same word to describe a similar-but-more-precise condition, they can feel free. But most of the time we're not talking in a medical context.

bathtub365 6y ago

The Olympics doesn't currently include any competition fully controlled by a corporation. Why would you want to introduce this?

dane-pgp 6y ago
At the very least, the client and server code would have to be open to inspection by experts from any competing country. Ideally the code would actually be Free Software, and countries could vote on pull requests for features and balance patches.
- bathtub365 6y ago
  Let esports have their own competitions, as they've done for years now. The Olympics is not esports.
- zapnuk 6y ago
  Bad idea and completely unnecessary.
  - boogies 6y ago
    > Bad idea Why? The source code forms the authoritative rules of the game, and the Four Freedoms¹ apply to those in all Olympic sports, right? 1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
    - bathtub365 6y ago
      Are the athletes also expected to be software developers? Are the viewers? Are the judges, broadcasters, and commentators? This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket just in case they disagree with a referee.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        > This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket That's as ridiculous a strawman as saying "The Olympics mustn't have any rules about performance enhancing drugs, otherwise athletes would have to carry bio-chemistry textbooks in their pockets".

Alupis 6y ago

Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same for decades, or forever. Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same But why? > You can't have records when the game constantly changes. Many olypmic games have no records. There’s no records in fencing, for example, as all matches are against an opponent not an absolute like a time or distance. Nobody considers this a problem. Why do you think it matters if there are records or not?
- bathtub365 6y ago
  When the rules stay the same, it pushes people to improve their performance within the rules (or, sometimes, unfortunately, outside of the rules). When the rules are constantly changing, the focus shifts from the competitors to the game itself and the corporation promoting it.
  - noodlesUK 6y ago
    The rules in sports change pretty frequently. Little changes to the rules have a massive impact on the way the game is played at a high-level. See fencing, or goal-line tech in football (soccer).
    - bathtub365 6y ago
      The rules in sports don't change nearly as much as they do in competitive video games. In the sports where the rules do change often, the focus ends up on the governing body for the league for changing the rules. This is one of the reasons the Olympics often has different rules for their sports than the professional leagues that feed competitors into the Olympics.
    - 6y ago

enzanki_ars 6y ago

Fortnite has way too many problems to even be anywhere near considered ready for an esport presented in the Olympics. Fortnite still has a large amount of luck involved. Even the most skilled players have to rely on luck to be able to get the high leveled items they need to succeed in the long game. While current competitions have tried to lessen this by having multiple rounds over and over in attempt at giving all players a fairer chance, the luck aspect is still there. All other games with a heavily established esports base uses games with much lower levels of luck, and are centered around the balance of skill and strategy. CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League, Valorant, Super Smash Bros, etc. are all centered around the player or team's skill and/or strategy. Luck is either minimal or non existent. The Olympics should be about skill, never about luck.

bathtub365 6y ago
There is still a fair amount of luck in the Olympics. For example, in the winter Olympics, snow conditions are only somewhat in the control of the organisers and can have a huge impact on someone's performance. All you can do, as an athlete, is train in a variety of conditions to try to be ready
- notahacker 6y ago
  Sure, but snow differences aren't determined by programmers trying to make the game more interesting by ensuring different skiiers have different amounts of snow to work with. If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow.
  - bathtub365 6y ago
    > If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow. Since competitive skiing is based on athleticism in the face of uncertain conditions, that sounds dreadfully boring.
    - notahacker 6y ago

coronadisaster 6y ago

Another Olympic discipline could be programming...

mrkramer 6y ago

"Why the next economist article should include name of an author or at least pseudonym" So I can know who writes this bs.

mirekrusin 6y ago
John Doe, PR/Social Media, Epic Games?

iamwil 6y ago

I've always wanted Japanese style dodge ball (with inner and outer courts) to be an Olympic sport.

seattle_spring 6y ago

Please, any game except Fortnite or any of the DoTA variants. The last thing the Olympics needs is to be infiltrated by a half million 12 years older throwing hard Rs.

Mizza 6y ago

Clickbait, neeexxxxttttt.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 6y ago

Maybe 1000 years after it includes chess.

x87678r 6y ago

What about Beer Pong and Dodgeball?

notahacker 6y ago
Both of these are closer to the original Olympic ethos than Fortnite. As is [for better and for worse perceptions of the original Olympic ethos] naked Twister.

noobermin 6y ago

I'm on board if quake 3 will be in the olympics, and especially defrag.

derefr 6y ago

IMHO, Olympic sports should never have their playerbase entirely beholden to one corporation who makes all the “equipment” (in the case of a e-sport, the game itself.) An Olympic e-sport should probably have at least a FOSS reference implementation, if not multiple competing implementations all inter operating on the same network. It is also very important (much moreso than for conventional sports) for e-sports rules to be driven by a rules body external to the league owners—hopefully one with membership open to any interested organization.

loraa 6y ago

Only way to attract gen Z to anything.

hungryhobo 6y ago

League of Legends was introduced in the last Asian games, I think when they tried to get it included in the Olympics it was rejected on the basis of promotion of violence. So we'll see how it goes this time

lacker 6y ago

Obviously it would be a win for the Olympics to include Fortnite. After all, Fortnite makes more money than the Olympics and is more popular than almost all Olympic sports. It would provide inroads to the more valuable younger audiences that the Olympics are starting to lose. But why would Fortnite want to give up control of its product to the Olympics?

notahacker 6y ago
If Fortnite was really the entity holding the spectator sport aces here, broadcasters would already be paying them handsomely for broadcast rights to their competitions rather than Fortnite streaming being the preserve of Twitch amateurs collectively reaching as many people per quarter as an off-peak hour of the Olympics[1]. It's not like Epic aren't commercially savvy, after all. The reality is that there's little about a computer game that's less than an Olympiad old to appeal to the IOC and plenty of major issues with them granting Epic their patronage, and both entities will do fine without each other. [1]obviously many of the minor Olympic sports also aren't great as standalone TV and wouldn't get the viewers without the big umbrella event, but that's kind of the point