E-Sports in the Olympics?

The Game Room
1

Apparently one of my local news stations is doing a report on people pushing for E-Sports to be allowed in the Olympics, and I have several questions about this.

  1. Wouldn’t whatever official games are used have to be available in every country’s languages?
  2. Wouldn’t there have to be one official platform?
  3. If the platform happens to be PC(personal computer), for the interest of farness wouldn’t everyone have to train and compete on machines configured exactly the same?
    What am I missing here?
2

  1. The biggest esports are more or less language agnostic. You don’t have to be fluent in English to play Counterstrike or Overwatch or League of Legends or Street Fighter.

  2. Sure.

  3. In the interest of fairness, do all cyclists have to train and compete on bicycles that are exactly the same? There might be disparities in equipment quality, but that’s nothing new. Richer countries have always been able to field better trained and better equipped competitors.

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I think a bigger problem is that you can’t divorce an Olympic esport from its owner. The Olympics are supposed to be their own events, but you can’t (for example) broadcast Overwatch and not basically be a commercial for Blizzard.

3

I’m also not sure that any video game has yet achieved enough longevity to be a good Olympic event. Most of the time, a video game that’s big right now will be all but abandoned four or eight years later. You don’t want an Olympic event that’s that ephemeral.

4

No, maybe depending on what you mean, and no.

1 and 3 seem obvious. Interest of fairness? Does Togo have the same training facilities as the US? I doubt that’s true for any sport.

5

Olympic Pong would be a hoot until the first doping incident.

6

Why not?