In fact I did do a Google search, but couldn’t find anything relevant. It’s possible my search terms were inadequate. I only found stuff on how playing or watching sports improves brain function.
I read post 40 and it doesn’t make any sense. You said:
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, in sports, athletes behave in ways that are absolutely believable. Their reactions are actually real reactions to things happening to them real persons. They are real people engaged in real competition, which in many cases can have a significant impact on their lives. Their reactions aren’t “believable” in the sense that you can suspend disbelief; they are believable in that you needn’t suspend disbelief at all. They are actually behaving like humans in real time in an unscripted manner. What you are witnessing is not acting, it’s truth.
Of course they’re well staged at the highest levels in the sense the stadia are very nice and the TV production values are high, but there’s nothing about it not to believe.
But why are they playing at all? Why the competition? Of course the simple answer is that they’re earning a paycheck, but the same can be said for actors.
When a protagonist is fighting some baddie in a movie, there’s a backstory to explain the conflict. Maybe the bad guys are evil. Maybe they harmed the protagonist in the past. Maybe the protagonist is just trying to survive. Regardless, there’s actually a context for the conflict to exist within.
I’m not a fan of pro wrestling, but I find it interesting that they actually do try to set up a backstory. They’re always fighting to avenge some past slight or previous loss. It’s pretty cheesy but it’s at least understandable what let up to the current events in a fictional sense.
There’s no similar backstory in most sports. The contestants don’t hate each other. Neither team is evil. No one’s family was murdered by the other guys. Sometimes the color commentators try to imply that one team is getting revenge for some previous loss, but it seems to be a kind of knowing exaggeration. Once you take money out of it, they’re just playing for no apparent reason.
Imagine watching a movie where there was some kind of conflict, but that conflict was subject to strange and artificial rules. There was no explanation why the conflict is there in the first place. There are clearly two sides to the conflict, but no indication whether there was a “good” or “bad” side, and in fact no way to tell the two sides apart aside from some superficial distinctions. One side eventually wins and the movie ends.
I dunno, but that doesn’t seem like a compelling movie to me. I think I’d leave the theater very confused as to what I just watched.
Do you not understand sports being played without money? College football. Club soccer. The Olympics. None of those count because … why?
It sounds like you don’t understand why people would even play sports, let alone be a fan of a sport.
You do realize that sports is, usually, real and movies are, usually, not. Whatever conflict exists in movies only exists because you’re willing to let it exist in your mind. In sport, the conflict is, usually, real. They’re playing whatever sport to win. And, again, if you don’t understand why people strive to win or play sports, I don’t think I can help you. But it seems to me that you’re actually happier with made up stories than you are real athletic conflict. Which is fine. Good for you. But I don’t think that supports the air of smugness you seemingly have in this thread.
There are lots of reasons why someone might play sports:
- exercise
- having a personal goal to be the best at something
- socializing
- wanting to be a part of something “bigger”
- fame
To me, these don’t work all that well as something to root for on the sidelines. If I had some personal connection to the participants, it would be different–I’d definitely root for a family member running a marathon, say, especially if it’s the culmination of a hard fight against obesity or something. But rooting for some random guy to get fit is a little weird.
Fame perhaps makes the most sense, but it’s still kinda circular. The fame comes from the sport being popular. And it’s popular because the teams are competing to be famous. I don’t really understand the attraction of fame, anyway.
Which is why it needs some kind of context or explanation. Fiction would be much less compelling if the conflict happened in a complete vacuum.
They’re both made up. Neither one is real. The rules of sports are totally artificial, made up to make the conflict interesting. The difference, to me, is that the rules of sports have no explanation for their existence: we just have to accept them as part of our fictional universe.
If smugness were an Olympic sport, I’d win gold. I regret nothing.
Also, I should point out that for the Olympics, they do actually try to put in backstory. They’re always giving some kind of story of personal hardship that the participants had to overcome.
I’m not entirely sure why this is–maybe because the Olympics is so infrequent that we need something extra to form an attachment to the players (i.e., it’s not something that can just be developed through repetition). People become attached to football teams just by paying attention to them over a number of years. In the Olympics, you need something that grabs people immediately.
So when you said: “Once you take money out of it, they’re just playing for no apparent reason”, you didn’t really mean it? So now you do understand that people play sports for other reasons than money. And one of those is competition
Yet you have no apparent problem rooting for or becoming emotionally invested in some imaginary person fighting an imaginary battle against an imaginary foe for imaginary stakes like they show in movies. But rooting for some random REAL person is unfathomable to you. Go figure.
Yes, but all the context is also fictional. Again, I do understand why fictional conflict is fun to watch and enjoy, but I don’t understand why you can understand and appreciate taking sides in completely made up conflicts and competition, but you seemingly can’t understand taking sides in a real conflict or competition.
Do you really need to dive into the deep end of the metaphysical pool and debate what is “real”? The people playing the sport are real. The fact they are playing by a set of created rules does nothing to change that. And the people you see in movies are not real. And the fact that it was made by humans does nothing to change that.
It seems to me you think that is endearing. It’s not.
The difference is that these are largely internal motivations that we don’t have access to as a spectator. In fiction, that’s not a problem, because we have access to the thoughts of the characters. Not so much in sports, unless you know the people personally.
I suppose if I watched quite a few games, I could eventually glean some aspects of the players’ personalities, and thus their motivations. Seems like a lot of work compared to fictional works, which are largely self-contained, or historical works, where the motivations are more apparent (being the leader of a country, say).
Like all people, I have cognitive limits as to how many people I can keep track of at once. There are perhaps 150 people that I genuinely care about, and what makes it genuine is that I have a real two-way connection to them, and know what they think at more than a superficial level.
Everyone else might as well be fictional character as far as caring about their story goes. Of course I want real people to have their basic human needs met, such as freedom and food and health care, but beyond that it doesn’t matter if their story is real or not.
We’re still talking past each other a bit. It is the rules of the competition that bother me. If it turned out that all sports matches were predetermined, it wouldn’t lower my opinion at all, because that’s not the part that bothers me.
Say I watch Star Wars. It has nothing to do with reality. And yet it’s easy to figure out why the characters behave the way they do, since the “rules” are just the basic ones that humans operate on. The characters don’t want to die. They fall in love. They fight wars. And so on.
But when a player runs in a certain direction on the field, their actions are mostly incomprehensible to someone not already steeped in the rules. And those rules don’t hold up to further analysis, except in a meta sense (i.e., they’re designed to make the game exciting).
To illustrate their artificiality, you can tweak the rules in small ways and get entirely different outcomes. Suppose that unbeknownst to the players, you change the point value of a field goal in football to 5 points. Lots of games that would have been wins would now be losses. And yet it would take a highly trained eye to see that the players are now behaving suboptimally for the new ruleset.
That doesn’t happen in most creative works. You can’t make a small tweak to Star Wars where it turns out the rebels are unhappy about blowing up the Death Star. It’s totally fictional but the characters behave in mostly believable ways. Like most human things, it’s stable in the sense that small perturbations only make small change to the outcome.
As I said, it’s the rules I care about. It’s easier to relate to the rules in most fictional works than it is about those in most sports.
That said, some sports do have rules that are easier to relate to, like running. Wanting to run faster than the other guy is a pretty sensible thing. The problem there is that the universe of stories you get out of it is not very large.
Uh, I’m not here to win a popularity contest…
I don’t know, maybe they enjoy it?
Damn time limits!
Playing a game can be fun. And these guys are getting paid to do something they enjoy.
And the “motivation” is to win. The “rules” are there because well, that’s how a game works. Haven’t you ever played any type of game in your life? Board games, card games, tag, hide and go seek? What was the objective – to win, right? And how did you do that? By going through the rules, using different strategies that would help you get ahead. Same in sports.
And how are pro-sports different from the Olympics? You still have that championship. You’re still battling to win the Stanley Cup, or the Lombardi Trophy. That’s a personal triumph as well.
But in the end, they’re doing it because they love it, they like the thrill of the competition, and they want to win. Simple as that. Not everything has to be deep and meaningful. Granted, there are things in sports that mean a lot to these guys. But a lot of what you’re saying just does not make sense when it comes to sports. You’re completely over-analysing it.
Yo Strangy…it might surprise you that some rebels would be quite sad to blow up a death star full of innocents with families.
But I like overanalyzing stuff…
Different people have different interests. Sometimes these interests are for mysterious reasons, like why someone might like apples over oranges or vice versa. But generally I think there are deeper reasons why people prefer things and it says things about their personality. Not good or bad, just different. And interesting to figure out.
Now that you mention it, I greatly prefer games with a story. Video games are generally good about this, though tabletop RPGs are great as well, and even some board games manage it. In contrast, extremely abstract games like chess aren’t that compelling to me.
It is actually a bit curious that you don’t see the slightest hint of remorse among the rebels.
Did we see all the rebels? Were we there when the euphoria wore off and they realized the extent of their crime?
And even that surface understanding is more than the person who doesn’t understand it at all. So, relative to that, you are the ignorant one.
My main point is just people aren’t ignorant because you can’t figure out why they like something. You’re the one with a knowledge deficiency. Someone who does like it can tries to explain it has at least a little more knowledge than you do.
I just don’t like the attitude that some people take of bragging about their ignorance, that’s all. If you truly don’t get it and want to know, fine. If you want to analyze the subject more deeply, fine. But if you just want to brag, STFU.
Well said
And if you are “overanalyzing,” you are, by the definition of the term, not figuring out those answers. The term means you’re missing the forest for the trees. It means you have made a mistake at a higher level, and thus your lower level of analysis is invalid.
Well, it can also just mean “I don’t find what you’re talking about to be interesting,” but that doesn’t seem to be the meaning here. People are arguing that your analysis is wrong.
The problem seems to be with you, that you have trouble actively choosing to identify with a group without some complex backstory. And you lack the ability to imagine yourself thinking like someone for whom this isn’t true.
You need a story to fill in those slots in you Dunbar number that regularly get swapped out. Most people don’t–if they find what they are watching to be interesting enough.
If you want an evolutionary psychology answer: we evolved both the desire to form tribal bonds and to enjoy competition at some level for the survival of the species. You group together to fight big enemies, but you compete because there is a limited supply of resources that you need to survive. Both of these aspects are used in these situations.
You seem to be more of the type that would just handle the community side. Most people have at least some desire for the competition side, too. Imagining that you are involved in the sports game helps with that desire. We use our natural tribal nature to get some of the fun of competition without the difficulties of actually competing.
You don’t think professional sports have backstories? There are players from your home town, players who went to the same college as you, players renowned for their charity work, players who defected from Cuba in a harrowing journey, etc. There are also players who do drugs and beat their wives and organize dog fights, or who are just, palpably, huge assholes on a personal level. But more to the point, unlike Olympic athletes where you’re with them for two weeks and then (in most cases) they’re gone forever, if you follow pro sports you’re going to watch a player’s backstory play out in real time over, sometimes, decades. Moreso for the teams themselves and their fanbases, which become characters.
Look, I get it: the central conflict in sports is contrived, and that makes the games not so fun for you to watch. That’s fine, but *that’s *the main difference here: you don’t enjoy watching the games, and other people do. I mean, the central conflict on Jeopardy! is no less contrived, but I bet there’s a good chance you enjoy watching that. And if, instead of bringing in new contestants every night, Jeopardy! was a league consisting of the same 32 nerds going against each other for years at a time, I guarantee you’d develop favorites and rooting interests. No?
I also dispute DrStrangelove’s assertion.
I’d like to see a breakdown of column inches and airtime devoted to Olympic athletes during the two-weeks of the event compared to soccer players during a similar period of, say, the UK soccer season.
Hell, I’d be willing to place a small bet against Olympic athletes vs soccer players’ girlfriends’ mothers’ handbags.
Your attempts to rationalize why sports don’t make sense but movies do are actually getting kind of comical. You’re now trying desperately to claim you can’t understand the motivations of real people whose motivations are actually quite obvious, but can understand the motivations of imaginary people in works of fiction. You aren’t even making a correct or accurate analogy, as you are comparing the secondary motivations of athletes with the motivation of movie characters; the correct comparison would be the primary motivation of the athlete (accomplish the task needed to win) with the primary motivations of movie characters, while one would properly compare the secondary motivations of athletes (earn a contract, make up for a past failure, etc) with the motivations of the ACTOR (earn money, win an Oscar, etc.).
Your position is indistinguishable from someone engaging in a holy war argument over which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars. Just admit it’s silly and that you like one form of visual entertainment and not another. I like Star Wars but I don’t like Broadway musicals; that’s fine, I don’t have to like everything, but I don’t tell other people it’s stupid and unimaginable why THEY like musicals.
Don’t feel bad; every time this comes up the sports-haters epically fail the test of explaining why their preferred entertainment is somehow more relevant.
I can’t tell if you’re being utterly sarcastic or referring to the theory that our large brain size, evolution-wise, is mostly useful for sexual competition (demonstrating that you have spare resources to dedicate to useless things, and also becoming more popular through language, arts, or sports.)