As discussions proceed regarding how esports might one day be included in the Olympics, it has become clear that a solution won’t be so cut-and-dry. While hundreds of thousands attend competitions in person and millions watch online, there are still significant barriers to Olympic inclusion.
“That is not on our radar just yet,” IOC Sports Director Kit McConnell said of esports being considered as as medal event on the Leaders Podcast last week.
But there certainly interest in involving esports in some way in the Olympics. Intel is one of the companies that is doing esports events leading up to PyeongChang in 2018. Olympic stakeholders recently recognized that esports can be considered a sporting activity.
McConnell said that after PyeongChang, the Olympics will further discuss esports and be “pretty excited” to see what engaging with esports leads to.
“The discussion and the declaration that came out of the Olympic Summit recently for us was a really important step forward,” McConnell said. “It’s been a question we’ve gotten a lot in recent months and in fact recent years, but more so recent months, and one that we haven’t really had a clear position on other than saying we were looking at it, and we certainly were.”
McConnell continued to touch on a pair of important factors that are hurdles to esports becoming an Olympic event. The first, and something that has been mentioned previously, is the lack of a singular international federation to represent esports. Given the different players involved (game developers, sponsors, platforms on which games are played), it’s difficult to work things out given the varying intentions of each group.
The second factor mentioned by McConnell is the need for esports to promote “Olympic values.”
“We know a number of the games have particular aspects which maybe don’t align with the Olympic values,” explained McConnell. “We’re also very conscious that in terms of what you would call the traditional sport games, this is less than 5 percent of the overall level of games sold and played in what we call esport.”
In other words, the most popular games — some involving first person shooter games — have nothing to do with traditional sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, etc. This presents another road block for staunch esports supporters to maneuver around.
The most logical suggestion yet may have come from Jan Pommer, the Director of Team and Federation Relations for ESL. Speaking to Reuters, Pommer proposed that esports do something similar to what the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) has done.
“We can build bridges. We do not demand … the industry does not demand anything from traditional sports. What we would like is a dialogue.
“In a way it could be like the International Paralympic Committee which has an extended role to the Olympics.”
By giving esports a role similar to that of the IPC, some sort of relationship can be built between the two. The gaming world’s popularity is undeniable, but it must learn to walk before it can run.