It begins in Asia: Video games will soon be a medal sport in the 2022 Asian Games
To all you non-Asians, the Asian Games are kind of like a mini-Olympics, but exclusive to, you guessed it, Asia. There are all sorts of athletic competitions performed at the Asian Games, from baseball, judo, wrestling, weightlifting to gymnastics and ping pong, much like the Olympics. It’s a very big deal, because it’s not as exclusive as the Olympics can be, so it really gives smaller, lesser-heralded Asian countries opportunities to represent themselves, and it’s where some of the larger countries like Korea and Japan can flex their advancement without competition from the Western world.
But anyway, news comes from the East that by the 2022 Asian Games, eSports might be a category in which countries can participate in. As in video games; teenagers playing video games featuring characters that are usually athletic to compete against other teenagers playing as athletic characters. But video games, for actual medals and actual national honors and prestige nonetheless.
Naturally, this move heavily, heavily favors South Korea, which reigns supreme when it comes to eSports in general, since they rule the world in League of Legends, Overwatch, and Counterstrike. Japan is no slouch either since they basically invented Street Fighter, and then there’s China that’s pretty much second rate at all of the above, and will probably cheat to succeed like they always do. But then there’s dark horses like Turkey and Vietnam, who also have robust, but lesser-heralded gaming scenes.
What I think is funny about this though, aside from the fact that non-athletically scrawny, or non-athletically fat dumpy teenagers will be on national stages with people with actual athletic capabilities, all classified as “athletes,” despite the fact that holding a controller is vastly different than doing a clean and jerk or shooting archery, is that there will be competitors who could very well be playing video games of sports that will actually be played in the very same Asian Games. For medals, just like they are.
But like, FIFA is one of the games being considered for the eSports category, despite the fact that soccer is typically played in most Asian Games. Sure most of the best players in the world are usually from South America or somewhere in Europe, but imagine being a soccer player from like Korea, Japan, Turkey or Iran, or some of the more recently successful Asian soccer programs, and knowing that while you are playing actual soccer and trying to win a medal for your country, there’s some teenager playing video game soccer and trying to do the exact same thing. Then imagine if the teenager wins and the actual player doesn’t?
Imagine if the Korean teenager wins while playing as like a Premiere League team instead of an Asian club? Imagine if a Turkish teenager wins while playing as a Turkish club, while the actual Turkish club themselves lose?? Or if a Chinese teenager uses a broken player on the Iranian team to win a medal while that actual Iranian player gets shut down in the actual soccer tournament?
Or if Korea medals in baseball, weight lifting, tae kwon do and judo, but nobody in Korea cares, because a Korean dream team of Faker, Smeb, Peanut, Deft and Mata shit on China, and takes all the glory because video games are so vastly popular in their culture.
All sorts of fucked up outcomes are possible when putting video games on the same stage as actual sports.
In other words, 2022 is going to be a fascinating time to start tuning into the Asian Games, and see how it changes things in the spectator sport world.
