Comment on Did the western world just suddenly go back to pretending wrestling is "real" for some reason?
hobovision@lemm.ee 3 days agoWhy track and field events not games? They have rules, can be won or lost, and can be played casually if you think that is a requirment.
Take shot put, hammer throw, and javelin, for example. The game is who can throw the object in a certain way the furtherest. I could play a shot put game with some friends at a river bank by drawing a line in the sand and seeing who can huck the heaviest rock on the shore the furthest.
There’s a reason they call them Olympic Games.
Really any activity with some structure is a game if it is play and not “real”, even better if it can help practice a skill useful in life. There is a difference between a running race (a game) and running for your life from a bear (not a game). Between MMA and a street fight. Between war games and a shooting war.
ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Nah. Those aren’t games. The rules are often quite loose. You’re often not even directly competing with anyone else. Like, one person acts, and later another person acts and the results are compared. Your opponent’s actions don’t affect your results. Those field events don’t even necessarily have a set order to act on… people just wander in and out making their attempts, it’s mostly them competing with themselves.
You could run a race asynchronously as well, but time constraints prevent that.
Games have action, AND reaction. They have strategy. Throw things harder isn’t a strategy. Run faster longer isn’t a strategy.
hobovision@lemm.ee 3 days ago
The rules are quite loose? Why else would they have eagle eyed officials watching closely to disqualify athletes for infractions.
Games can absolutely be played asynchronously. Games can have scoring systems instead of head-to-head.
Would you say pinball is not a game?
I didn’t think I needed to get out the dictionary definition of game, but I hope this clears it up… Definitions from Oxford Languages: “noun, a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.”
ExtantHuman@lemm.ee 3 days ago
The existence of officials looking for infractions in the few rules that they do have does not mean that overall they don’t have a looser set of rules compared to head to head competitive games. Like I said before, there often isn’t even a turn order for these events. You make your number of attempts over a long period of time and then are done.
I wouldn’t call those events “play” either. No one is really having fun riding a heavy stone multiple times. They might feel accomplished afterwards. But they aren’t engaging in play. And I still say it’s not a sport. You busting out a tautological oxford definition doesn’t really help anything.