When I was in England I was asked why we yanks didn’t like soccer (football.) I said we already had several professional sports that shot the ball/puck up and down the field, back and forth trying to get a goal - hockey and basketball to name two. I was told I didn’t know what I was talking about and soccer (football) was *nothing *like hockey or basketball.
So I said I didn’t know and changed the subject.
I’d add dodgeball.
That would be an equally logical way to do it, but might be quite difficult; a lot of sports have murky beginnings.
I realized later that getting 4 or 6 and just scoring it is just a shortcut for runs (interesting that baseball requires the bases to be run). I also would expect that a cricket game with no ‘running’ is slightly more likely than a baseball game where nobody ever hits the ball at all, but both are out of the realm of realistically happening.
Still, there’s gilli danda. If score is kept at all, it doesn’t involve any running, just hitting. How close it comes to being a ‘sport’ or just a ‘game’ may be a worthy topic of debate. I recall a philosophy professor who was most likely being facetious trying to get us to define a game (in a Platonic sense), and claimed that he made his nieces & nephews play Ring-a-Round-the-Rosie competitively.
I think some of the exceptions can be instructive.
For example, Sumo.
It could be considered a territory game or a goal game or it could be considered a fighting game. As the primary purpose is to move your opponent to a certain boundary and not attrition I think I might steer away from the fighting game aspect.
Also Paintball.
This seems like a combat game as it simulates combat, but it also has elements of territory and goals. It also has elements of shooting/accuracy. Which element takes first precedence?
What about Chess?
Strategy is it’s most talked about aspect, but it also is a representation of combat in which elimination is key.
Motor sports is a bit of an odd duck.
It’s easy to simply lump it in with speed games but there are a handful of motor sports that don’t involve racing much at all. What about tractor pulls? There’s a speed element but the primary aspect is strength which makes it more similar to weightlifting than racing. Rock climbing and motorcycle acrobatics are grace games more than racing games.
In the case of motor sports which difference is more instructive? Should we classify by “motor sport” first therefore grouping all the above examples together or should we classify by goal first which would fragment motor vehicles into “speed”, “strength” and “grace”?
Snow sports could be grouped similarly. Is the fact that it occurs on the snow more instructive than the fact that it’s a race or that it’s a acrobatic event? One might argue that the ski jumping has more in common with downhill skiing than it does with the long jump.
What about water sports? Do you want to group wakeboarding and jet ski racing together? Is jet ski racing more like motorcycle racing than it is water ski jumping?
Is billiards more similar to curling than it is to say chess?
How the heck do you categorize lumberjack races? Tree cutting races are about speed and accuracy but I can’t say that are very much like the hurdles, I might say they are more similar to shooting.
One might make all “tool games” a top level category, grouping shooting games, lumberjack games, paintball and darts into one group.
Do you put snowmobile racing closer to skiing or closer to motorcycle racing?
Very tricky, perhaps focusing on the object or the objective aren’t the right way to think.
But imagine that you hit a target, and your teammate hits a target, and so on – and none of it winds up mattering because me and mine, who never launch a projectile that hits some target, get the win by dint of athletic skill (namely, via dodging and catching and nothing else besides). I can’t really say that about a bowling competition or a contest of pistol marksmanship, or anything else from archery to curling; dodgeball seems fundamentally different.
There are variations within the groups. In some accuracy games like bowling, each player is completely independant in his attempts and his opponents can do nothing to influence his game. In others like shuffleboard, it’s still a game where you have to be as accurate as possible but the opposing players have opportunities to interfere with your attempts at accuracy. I’d see dodgeball as the latter sub-group.
I’d like to rename the “Grace games” category as “panel judged games”.
Gymnastics, figure skating, diving, freestyle skiing, snowboard half-pipe, etc.
I thought a better name for “speed games” would be “timed games” however not all races are timed. You just have to be faster than your opponent to win.
And rather than “distance games” maybe “measurement games”. That would cover any game where the winner themselves goes (or moves an object) highest, furthest, longest, etc. Would cover things like ski jumping, long jump, high jump, pole vault, shot put, etc.
Again, though: my team can interfere with your shots in shuffleboard or curling, but – as with archery or bowling – we simply can’t win unless one of us accurately launches a projectile to hit some target. In dodgeball, my team can beat your team without ever doing that; forget whether it’s a sport where the shooters compete independently, it’s a sport where we don’t need to shoot.
I think this is very clearly the case, isn’t it?
Billiards is a contest that involves accurately moving projectiles, as is curling. Chess isn’t at all similar to either.
Curling is basically an on-ice version of the older game of bowls, which is arguably a bigger sport (at least in this country, where bowls championships are covered much more often than curling). The ice does add something to it, the sweeping and all that, but it’s essentially the same game.