The next Olympics should include Fortnite | Hacker News Reader

The next Olympics should include Fortnite

economist.com

34 pointsmelvinroest83 comments

Fortnite has way too many problems to even be anywhere near considered ready for an esport presented in the Olympics.

Fortnite still has a large amount of luck involved. Even the most skilled players have to rely on luck to be able to get the high leveled items they need to succeed in the long game. While current competitions have tried to lessen this by having multiple rounds over and over in attempt at giving all players a fairer chance, the luck aspect is still there.

All other games with a heavily established esports base uses games with much lower levels of luck, and are centered around the balance of skill and strategy. CS:GO, League of Legends, Rocket League, Valorant, Super Smash Bros, etc. are all centered around the player or team's skill and/or strategy. Luck is either minimal or non existent.

The Olympics should be about skill, never about luck.

There is still a fair amount of luck in the Olympics. For example, in the winter Olympics, snow conditions are only somewhat in the control of the organisers and can have a huge impact on someone's performance. All you can do, as an athlete, is train in a variety of conditions to try to be ready

Sure, but snow differences aren't determined by programmers trying to make the game more interesting by ensuring different skiiers have different amounts of snow to work with. If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow.

> If e-skiing were to become an Olympic sport you'd expect everyone to start with the same amount of snow.

Since competitive skiing is based on athleticism in the face of uncertain conditions, that sounds dreadfully boring.

From a consume-on-TV perspective it's the athleticism which makes it compelling, not random misfortunes with the snow conditions.

Appreciate experienced skiiers might see more nuance to how skiiers approach subtle changes to the piste, but still doubt they'd find button clicking in the face of uncertain conditions equally compelling (or even more compelling than watching real skiiers on a suitably large raked and climate-controlled slope)

Even in that case, every athlete has nearly the same conditions. Yes, over the course of a day, those conditions can change, but the organizers can control for that as best as possible. In your snow sport example:

> "The start order in the first run is determined by a combination of a draw and your standing in World Cup rankings. For the second, the top 30 skiers start in reverse order (so the 30th person goes first) to even out their chances. The later on you start, the worse your course conditions will be, sometimes with gnarly ruts, holes and bumps." [1]

While yes, a better athlete would start later, and therefore be at a disadvantage, it evens out the field so that they can close the gap in the effects of the course conditions.

[1]: https://qz.com/1202352/a-short-guide-to-understanding-alpine...

Can you provide more some examples beyond item drops? It's easy enough to design a level with certain items laying around...

In Fortnite, item drops and the glowing chests very game by game. If you drop in the same place twice in a row, the chances of getting the same quality of items is vastly different. Yes, they could control that in competitive games, but Fortnite has not done so even in competitive games as they rely on running a best of X instead using a point system in attempt to minimize the effects of the randomization.

Plus, because you can drop anywhere, it's possible that some players fight sooner than others, creating yet another source of luck that can not be controlled. And yes, this could be controlled too, but again, Fortnite has not done so as it could result in removing one of the core aspects of the game.

Weapon bloom; moving storm zone; endgame rotation terrain.

Smash Bros and CS:GO can be great!

Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same for decades, or forever.

Fortnite, or any eSport game out today, will not be a thing 40 years from now, let alone 4. You can't have records when the game constantly changes.

> Olympic games should be activities that will remain largely the same

But why?

> You can't have records when the game constantly changes.

Many olypmic games have no records. There’s no records in fencing, for example, as all matches are against an opponent not an absolute like a time or distance. Nobody considers this a problem. Why do you think it matters if there are records or not?

When the rules stay the same, it pushes people to improve their performance within the rules (or, sometimes, unfortunately, outside of the rules). When the rules are constantly changing, the focus shifts from the competitors to the game itself and the corporation promoting it.

The rules in sports change pretty frequently. Little changes to the rules have a massive impact on the way the game is played at a high-level. See fencing, or goal-line tech in football (soccer).

The rules in sports don't change nearly as much as they do in competitive video games. In the sports where the rules do change often, the focus ends up on the governing body for the league for changing the rules. This is one of the reasons the Olympics often has different rules for their sports than the professional leagues that feed competitors into the Olympics.

I'm the first to sneer at the merchandising elements of [association] football, but the rare substantive changes to the game aren't driven by sales cycles. Ensuring the game isn't significantly different at grassroots level has always been a sticking point for tech adoption in football, and this is a sport so contrary to the original amateur ethos of the modern Olympics that the top players earn millions every month, clubs have official tractor sponsors and manufacturer sponsors promise the official World Cup ball will curve differently from the last one.

Also, you don't have to use the IP of Epic Games Inc to play any variant of football, or even a stereotypical rich person sport like dressage, so performance improvements aren't contingent on enhancing a specific corporation's bottom line

I think that’s not seeing the forest for the trees. There’s nothing special about Fortnite. It’s in fashion and it will pass out of fashion.

When auto racing, chess, or any other number of long-lived competitive not-primarily-physical activities are in the Olympics then we can start thinking about video games. And then we ought to think about the games which have lasted a long time as competitive activities on their own while consistently bringing in new blood. Fortnite is a flash in the pan compared to, say, CounterStrike. I think, maybe 50 years from now, after some very physical VR game takes the world by storm in the next couple of decades and demonstrates staying power, we’ll have a serious contender.

We JUST got skateboarding...

I thought the problem was that there 'you can't have records'? When we point out many events have no records, now the problem is something else? Seems like you're just picking whatever out of the air to object to it.

If we want a sport to be extant for a hundred years before it's considered (seems pretty reasonable to me), why not explicitly say that rather than looking for proxies?

Why not eating fries or hot dogs? Even spectators could be doing mini competitions during breaks. Pure fun.

> Why not eating fries or hot dogs?

Yeah, why not?

I'm sure competitive eating genuinely does involve training, skill and determination. What are the criteria of the olypmic games, anyway?

The first step is to have a large, international NGO overseeing the sport. This is one reason why e.g. American Football isn't an Olympic sport.

That NGO must have a proven history of enforcing the Olympic Movement Anti-Doping rules, including out-of-competition testing of athletes. Imagine if top fortnite players had to submit to random year-round drug testing to be allowed to compete.

Ex-international fencer here - even if there were records, the rules have changed substantially in the past few years anyway. Sabre especially is a totally different sport than it was 30 years ago. The scoring box lockout timing has changed twice, which has made a huge difference. Lots of sports are in constant flux though. The reason I’m opposed to something like fortnite being in the olympics is actually because a single for-profit vendor (Epic) has a total stranglehold on everything about the game. In fencing, any manufacturer can make any of the equipment (if they can do so safely), and anyone can (theoretically) read the rulebook and try to give it a go. The same can’t be said about fortnite.

I agree about it being tied to a single for-profit company being a problem. I also don't think anything at such a big scale should be proprietary. (schools, government, especially anything international) It would be neat to see some free-as-in-freedom games made with high-level competition in mind. Xonotic comes to mind, but something made with things like the Olympics in mind would be good as well. You could have judges as part of the team talking to developers.

Does it have to have an athletic component? If not, why not Olympic chess?

I'd be ok with Olympic chess.

Esport has a physical component where every millisecond and mouse/keyboard action can decide the game. Chess doesn't, except maybe blitz.

Hearthstone is a popular esport where games are decided by strategy (and maybe luck) rather than physical reflexes. So that does not seem to be a differentiator.

Tbh Hearthstone would probably not be chosen considering the amount of RNG and the fact that it's not very popular compared to other games.

But I agree, it's more comparable to chess and could be played as a tabletop game with little if any adjustments.

My vote is for blitz chess + allowing competitors to kick the opponent under the table.

Just go all the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

I don't know, alternating doesn't seem like as much fun as doing both simultaneously.

Does Counter-Strike count? People still play Counter-Strike 1.6, although maybe the solution is merely to have an eSports olympics instead.

Yes, CS counts and Source can be considered a successor to 1.6. Similar with Dota2 and Dota. While the game changed in big parts, the concept and required athleticism remains the same.

It's comparable to how tools for other sports changed over the year. No one would want to play with tennis balls or rackets from 50 years ago. It just happens that change happens much more rapidly in esport games.

Counter-Strike 1.6 is... only 7 years old? [1]

Starcraft broodwar is also still played competitively with a few hundred thousand in prizes per year [2], at 22 years old (and I don't think there have been any changes apart from a recent graphics refresh) it's probably a better contender for the olympics than cs.

22 years is still nothing compared to most sports, and it's clearly reaching the end of its life.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130214014350/http://steamcommu...

[2] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Leagues/Recent_Tournaments

Counter-Strike was played as an esport well before 1.6

Starcraft broodwar is basically nonexistent besides south korea. Other titels are orders of magnitude more popular.

And while 22 years very little compared to the rich history of other sports, I'd like to remind you that the olympics already contains many 'odd' disciplines. Many of which have a small competitive history.

So the question is really if it matters how long the discipline will be around. And I'm not quite sure it would matter. There are many disciplines that were retired after only a few competitions. And it not like additional change would hurt the olympics much. It's already quite different compared to the original concept. Why not adjust it for the digital sports?

That's impossible, I've played Counter-Strike 1.6 since 2004 approximately. That's likely a beta for something else. I know Valve made a bunch of games playable on Linux overtime.

Going by Wikipedia it was released in 2000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Strike_(video_game)

Counter Strike 1.6 was released in 2003, before Counter Strike Source, which was released in 2004.

Counter Strike has been played competitively since 2000, for about 20 years.

Isn't CS like 20 years old and still the most popular e-sport shooter?

Age of Empires 2 is still strong after 20 years

The Olympics doesn't currently include any competition fully controlled by a corporation. Why would you want to introduce this?

At the very least, the client and server code would have to be open to inspection by experts from any competing country. Ideally the code would actually be Free Software, and countries could vote on pull requests for features and balance patches.

Let esports have their own competitions, as they've done for years now. The Olympics is not esports.

Bad idea and completely unnecessary.

> Bad idea

Why? The source code forms the authoritative rules of the game, and the Four Freedoms¹ apply to those in all Olympic sports, right?

1: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Are the athletes also expected to be software developers? Are the viewers? Are the judges, broadcasters, and commentators? This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket just in case they disagree with a referee.

> This is like telling a football player they should have a kinematics textbook in their pocket

That's as ridiculous a strawman as saying "The Olympics mustn't have any rules about performance enhancing drugs, otherwise athletes would have to carry bio-chemistry textbooks in their pockets".

There is no obvious solution to balance changes. Using an open source structure or a committee for this would probably be slow, or doesn't work at all as it prevents meaningful/drastic changes. Those are often very opinionated. However, those are necessary due to the nature of video games. Games need to evolve in some capacity to remain interesting.

As for the inspection, I guess it would be nice. But an esport Olympics would include multiple games so at some point it's too inconvenient. Also, all player play with the same client/server technology. So you'd have to think very cynical to think that there would be any tempering by the developers.

At some point there is a remaining risk. Same hold for traditional sports where there are judges who introduce their subjective opinions.

> They need to evolve in some capacity to remain interesting.

The meta or something has to evolve, but not the rules. The basic rules of soccer, etc. don't evolve.

And video games are in some respect a form of art, so any judgement like this is incredibly subjective. Just as many people prefer classic art to modern, some people prefer classic games (eg. old, harder Tetris to new, Super Smash Bros Melee to newer Smash).

(Edit) But to say "Using an open source structure or a committee for this would probably be slow, or doesn't work at all as it prevents meaningful/drastic changes." seems wrong. As an anecdote, I considered myself a "gamer" in middle school, and beat the highest rated game of all time (LoZ:Oot). As I've aged I've gamed less, but during the pandemic I've played a bit of NetHack, and found it a more interesting game, and its decades of history and evolution seem to show more dedication than any proprietary game has received to me.

> The basic rules of soccer, etc. don't evolve.

That's absolutely not true, unless by basic you mean things like "played with a vaguely round ball". FIFA change the actual rules every year. The new handball and wall rules are pretty big changes.

https://soccer.nbcsports.com/2019/06/02/new-handball-goal-ki...

By basic I meant the sort of things I as not a fan of soccer would have heard of, like the basic rule that player's generally shouldn't touch the ball with their hands. And I (who don't really follow sports in general) would assume that sports like running would have even less change (I think they've refined rules against starting too soon?).

I assumed you meant, given the context, if the rule changes appreciably affected the meta, i.e. the way the game is played. If you zoom out far enough, all sports have the same rules, contests between humans with a physical component.

The rules for swimming and running are similarly changing constantly. Google the controversy about the faster water in Beijing that was used to cause more records to be set, or the rules about shoes in running.

The fact that someone who doesn't know about a sport thinks it's not changing doesn't mean it isn't. Ignorance does not convey some kind of deeper insight.

> controversy about the faster water

Thanks for helping me make my point ;) : change in highly competitive sports is often viewed as a bad thing

Most sports are controlled by corporations - for example fencing by the FIE, football by the FIFA, etc.

I can play any of those sports without making an account with the FIE or FIFA. How do they have control? They have great influence, obviously, but not control.

You literally can't play fortnite without a license from epic or epic's servers. You can play soccer with a ball and a field, no FIFA involved.

Except you can't in any serious organised form, like the olympics would be, or they'll come after you / the payers.

There is a difference between commercial corporation creating a game with purpose of making money for shareholders and non-profit organization with elected president created by people doing an existing sport.

Too late AI will make it boring, unless it's AI vs AI?

"The idea that an activity, rather than a substance, can be addictive is contentious among doctors" As a person who has been struggling with video game addiction, especially in order to combat the loneliness I have been experiencing during the pandemic, I would disagree. While it is unlikely one would get an addiction in terms of physical dependency, psychological addiction is a whole other question. That being said, one can also get addicted to exercise, so I guess its not a reason to keep it out of the Olympics!

I wonder whether watching porn is an activity or substance.

Activity. Substance means imbibing a chemical (e.g. eating, injecting, breathing).

There is a great article out there about the difference between the strength of compulsion and the strength of physical side effects. The two are not linked. That is, one drug may have horrible withdrawal effects, but cause relatively weak compulsion to continue using. Another drug may cause extremely strong compulsion to use and have no withdrawal symptoms at all.

The idea that addiction only actually exists when there are physical withdrawal symptoms is just wrong, and it is a very harmful wrong belief.

It's all substance eventually right? the activity causes your body to produce excessive amounts of something addictive.

But the substance is not the videogame itself, but rather is some complex neurochemistry. By this logic, basically all "drug" addictions are actually instantiations of a more primitive addiction to neurochemicals. Operating at this level of abstraction is useless, because there's no actionable decision points.

From my understanding of addiction is the essential terms are "compulsive engagement" and "adverse consequences".

Have you tried Gamequitters [1] for helping you with your addiction?

I met the guy who runs that site a few years ago, and he's been able to help a lot of people with that. He was an ex-gaming addict himself and seemed really passionate about the subject.

[1] https://gamequitters.com/

This highlights something that's made me uncomfortable for a while. In discussions around addiction, suicide, and other mental health outcomes, the focus is almost always placed on stopping the undesirable outcome. They'll put timers that kick people off games, they'll put barriers and nets around bridges people commonly jump from, etc.

What they aren't doing is treating the root cause of the problem: loneliness, listlessness, depression. These are problems of our society and they seem to be getting worse over time. We need to change this. We need to build real communities where people belong. We need to build relationships. We're not doing that though. We're becoming more and more atomized.

You can hire a contractor to build a net, but you can't hire a contractor to make people have more friends.

It is hard to strictly define the term “addiction”, and experts will disagree about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction has a seemingly clear definition “Addiction is a brain disorder characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli despite adverse consequences.”. Labeling it a brain disorder implies it must involve a biological process, and that, to some, implies it must include some physical or chemical stimulus.

However, that page also says “many scholars who study addiction argue that the brain disease model is incomplete and misleading”.

That Wikipedia page also says “The term addiction is misused frequently to refer to other compulsive behaviors or disorders, particularly dependence, in news media.“

So, the mainstream opinion seems to be that not all compulsive behaviors are addictions.

I think this runs into an important problem of trying to overly formalise categories, which makes sense for medical usage, but just leads to pedantry in most cases. If some one feels "addicted" to some thing, and almost anyone would agree that they at least seem to be so, it's of no use to say "well technically, addiction requires these conditions and must be verified by this test".

There's a similar thing with depression, where people will try discredit others by implying their depression isn't real because it hasn't been diagnosed and confirmed by a doctor. If you're really damn sad for a really long time, our word for that is depression. If medicine wants to use the same word to describe a similar-but-more-precise condition, they can feel free. But most of the time we're not talking in a medical context.

"Why the next economist article should include name of an author or at least pseudonym" So I can know who writes this bs.

John Doe, PR/Social Media, Epic Games?

IMHO, Olympic sports should never have their playerbase entirely beholden to one corporation who makes all the “equipment” (in the case of a e-sport, the game itself.)

An Olympic e-sport should probably have at least a FOSS reference implementation, if not multiple competing implementations all inter operating on the same network.

It is also very important (much moreso than for conventional sports) for e-sports rules to be driven by a rules body external to the league owners—hopefully one with membership open to any interested organization.

Please, any game except Fortnite or any of the DoTA variants. The last thing the Olympics needs is to be infiltrated by a half million 12 years older throwing hard Rs.

Another Olympic discipline could be programming...

Obviously it would be a win for the Olympics to include Fortnite. After all, Fortnite makes more money than the Olympics and is more popular than almost all Olympic sports. It would provide inroads to the more valuable younger audiences that the Olympics are starting to lose. But why would Fortnite want to give up control of its product to the Olympics?

If Fortnite was really the entity holding the spectator sport aces here, broadcasters would already be paying them handsomely for broadcast rights to their competitions rather than Fortnite streaming being the preserve of Twitch amateurs collectively reaching as many people per quarter as an off-peak hour of the Olympics[1]. It's not like Epic aren't commercially savvy, after all.

The reality is that there's little about a computer game that's less than an Olympiad old to appeal to the IOC and plenty of major issues with them granting Epic their patronage, and both entities will do fine without each other.

[1]obviously many of the minor Olympic sports also aren't great as standalone TV and wouldn't get the viewers without the big umbrella event, but that's kind of the point

League of Legends was introduced in the last Asian games, I think when they tried to get it included in the Olympics it was rejected on the basis of promotion of violence. So we'll see how it goes this time

I've always wanted Japanese style dodge ball (with inner and outer courts) to be an Olympic sport.

What about Beer Pong and Dodgeball?

Both of these are closer to the original Olympic ethos than Fortnite.

As is [for better and for worse perceptions of the original Olympic ethos] naked Twister.

I'm on board if quake 3 will be in the olympics, and especially defrag.

Maybe 1000 years after it includes chess.

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