Poll of the Day > The 1st ESports Olympics will be in 2025 in Saudi Arabia.Is this cool or stupid?

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/sport/olympics-esports-2025-saudi-arabia-host-first-4475691

LAUSSANE, Switzerland: Saudi Arabia will host the inaugural E-sports Olympics in 2025 the International Olympic Committee said on Friday (Jul 12).

"The International Olympic Committee (IOC) today announced that it has partnered with the National Olympic Committee (NOC) of Saudi Arabia to host the inaugural Olympic E-sports Games 2025 in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," the body said.

"The proposal will be made to the IOC Session, which will be held on the eve of the Olympic Games Paris 2024.

"The duration of the partnership between the IOC and the Saudi NOC will be 12 years, with Olympic E-sports Games held regularly."

Riyadh is already to host the E-sports World Cup in July and August, when 2,500 gamers will battle for US$60 million in prize money.

The IOC, in its perpetual quest to reconcile Olympic tradition with attempts to attract a younger audience, held an initial "Olympic e-sport week" in Singapore in June 2023, consisting of "ten mixed-gender category events".

Last October, the IOC set up an "e-sport commission" chaired by Frenchman David Lappartient, the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), to consider a dedicated competition.

However, IOC president Thomas Bach has said in the past he does not see e-sports as part of the traditional Olympics.

"With respect to esports, our values are and remain the red line that we will never cross," he said.

Nevertheless, he expressed his delight that the E-sports Games had a natural home in Saudi Arabia.

"We are very fortunate to be able to work with the Saudi NOC on the Olympic E-sports Games, because it has great - if not unique - expertise in the field of esports with all its stakeholders," Bach said in a statement.

"The Olympic E-sports Games will greatly benefit from this experience.

"By partnering with the Saudi NOC (National Olympic Committee) we have also ensured that the Olympic values are respected.

"In particular, with regard to the game titles on the programme, the promotion of gender equality and engagement with the young audience, which is embracing e-sports."

Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal, Minister of Sport and President of the Saudi Arabian Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said he was happy his country was part of sporting history.

"Saudi Arabia is hugely excited by the prospect of partnering with the IOC and helping to welcome a completely new era for international sport," he said.

"We believe that to take part in the Olympic Games is one of the greatest honours any athlete can achieve.

"And we are proud to support the writing of a new chapter in Olympic history that has the potential to inspire new dreams and new ambitions for literally millions of athletes around the world."

Conservative Saudi Arabia's bid to become a sports powerhouse is part of a larger attempt to soften its austere image.

That rebranding is central to the success of its Vision 2030 economic and social reform agenda, designed to prepare the world's biggest crude exporter for a prosperous post-oil future.

Last year, the kingdom hosted its first ATP Tour event with the Next Gen Finals.

It has also hosted exhibition matches pitting Novak Djokovic against Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka against Ons Jabeur.

In early January, Saudi Arabia appointed Rafael Nadal as ambassador of the Saudi Tennis Federation.

The country, which hosts a Formula 1 and MotoGP Grand Prix, as well as the Dakar rally-raid, has recruited a large number of top football players to its national league in recent years.

The Kingdom has also hosted a series of headline-grabbing boxing matches including the heavyweight unification bout between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury earlier this year.

As with most people who accept that corrupt money, it just means there's another category of companies and people whose attempts at humanitarian statements can be safely discarded as hypocrisy.

Why do people insist on acting like video games are sports? I like sports and video games but they aren't the same thing. Even video games about actual sports aren't sports.

This sounds to me like the IOC is worried that its racket on the traditional Olympics is drying up (and not without reason - hosting the games has now become so expensive, the number of cities applying to host the games in a given year is now in the low single digits), they're trying to find the new "hot ticket" amongst young people to continue their graft.

I have nothing against competitive gaming, though it's not my cup of tea. If you enjoy watching people play a game at its highest level, fill your boots - that, to my eye, is not really any different than watching athletes do the same thing with physical sports. That being said, I feel like the Olympics should be for physical sports only; if you want to have some Olympics equivalent for eSports, that's all well and good, but call it something else.

It's basically all semantics at this point. Competitive e-sports already exist without the help from traditional physical sports organizations.

That said, it's been pretty much impossible for most competitive gaming scenes to grow in any significant manner without a steady feed of cooperate money and direct support from the game's publishers, so there is nothing inherently wrong with someone else forking over they money for it to happen.

Saudi money has been seen in competitive starcraft for the past year or so.
I've also very specifically not watched anything that's supported by them, but I'm happy the players are getting money.

Muscles posted...

Why do people insist on acting like video games are sports? I like sports and video games but they aren't the same thing. Even video games about actual sports aren't sports.

The term "e-sports" indicates that it's an electronic variant of sports. Do you have a better idea for a term than that?

Saudi Arabia is trying to buy their way to cultural relevance despite being a backwards ass dystopia. This is no different than holding an event in communist China or Russia.

adjl posted...

The term "e-sports" indicates that it's an electronic variant of sports. Do you have a better idea for a term than that?

Video game/*x game* competition or video game/*x game* championship, competitive video gaming, or something along those lines. You can get the point across that it's a video game competition without calling it a sport

adjl posted...

The term "e-sports" indicates that it's an electronic variant of sports.

I prefer "pro-gaming", or "competitive gaming". The problem with "e-sports" is the "sport" part typically refers to physical activity, which these games don't have.

I mean, we don't call chess or ichigo competitions "b-sports" or something like that, so I'm not sure the "e-sports" moniker fits. I mean, it's kind of established now, so I don't expect it will go away, but the etymologist in me still dislikes it.

I think Saudi Arabia should put some of that oil money to a functional sewage system and stop building skyscrapers in the middle of the fucking desert.

Not a real country.

darkknight109 posted...

I prefer "pro-gaming", or "competitive gaming". The problem with "e-sports" is the "sport" part typically refers to physical activity, which these games don't have.

I mean, we don't call chess or ichigo competitions "b-sports" or something like that, so I'm not sure the "e-sports" moniker fits. I mean, it's kind of established now, so I don't expect it will go away, but the etymologist in me still dislikes it.

Yeah I just say competitive or professional.

Which, is fine, I don't care if someone says if it's a sport or not. Learning how something works, the back and forth of a build, learning players personality, that's great. Having the mechanical skill is also impressive, watching the literal best players have a Bo7, seeing how their planning goes, it's all amazing stuff.

It's also not for everyone.

Muscles posted...

Video game/*x game* competition or video game/*x game* championship, competitive video gaming, or something along those lines. You can get the point across that it's a video game competition without calling it a sport

See, here's the problem with those ideas:

"Video game competition" is 8 syllables.
"Video game championship" is 8 syllables.
"Competitive video gaming" is 9 syllables.
"E-sports" is 2 syllables.

People are lazy and want to get the point across quickly. In practice, specific tournaments will generally be referred to by name (in which case you will see something like "*Game* championship", or things like Evo or The International), since that's a case where you need to specify which game is being played and which competition you're looking at, but for a blanket term (which is what would be used to talk about something like an e-sports Olympics), "e-sports" flows a lot better.

darkknight109 posted...

I prefer "pro-gaming", or "competitive gaming".

Less wordy, but also fairly bland. "E-sports" is as much a marketing term as it is a descriptor, and for all the people who nitpick about "it's not sports!", it's generally a more interesting way to describe what's going on than "pro gaming." "Gaming" is also ambiguous in that it refers to more than just video games, such that you could see somebody lumping something like chess under the same moniker (though the term is well-enough established in colloquial speech that that's a pretty low risk).

darkknight109 posted...

The problem with "e-sports" is the "sport" part typically refers to physical activity, which these games don't have.

The "sport" part refers to a competitive physical activity. Tacking "E-" on the front replaces the word "physical" with "electronic" (like "e-mail" means you're dealing with electronic mail instead of physical mail) so you get a competitive electronic activity. Arguably, that could mean something like competitive soldering or PCB design, if taken literally, but it works well enough to describe competitive video games.

darkknight109 posted...

I mean, we don't call chess or ichigo competitions "b-sports" or something like that

Some of the traditional examples like chess would probably keep being specified because they're so deeply established as their own things (heck, half the time I don't even think of chess as a board game, in the sense that if you invite me over for board game night and you pull out a chess board, I'm going to do a double-take), but if competitive board gaming becomes as large and varied as competitive video gaming has, I could actually see that term being used. As it stands, though, there are very few board games that have a significant competitive scene and there's very little overlap in spectator interest between them, so an umbrella term like "b-sports" isn't really needed.

Granted, the issue of having little overlap in spectator interest between video games is also an issue with using "e-sports" as an umbrella term, but it's also not like people who like watching P-sports (*evil laughter*) like watching all sports, and we still get things like the Olympics trying to put all the sports together in one place. I don't really have anything definite to say on that bit.

darkknight109 posted...

I mean, it's kind of established now, so I don't expect it will go away, but the etymologist in me still dislikes it.

Maybe, but we're speaking English. Any hope for sensible etymology was lost long before any of us came into the picture.

The new Dragonball theme park is in Saudi Arabia too. So stupid.