Summary
As is tradition, I’ve become obsessed with theOlympics. I never really care about it in the run-up, I don’t watch the opening ceremony, but I end up putting a weird sport on my second screen as I work each and every day for a few weeks. Yesterday I watched skateboarding, mountain biking, kayaking, and some kind of equestrian competition I didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t dressage, but it wasn’t a race either. The horse jumped over a number of barriers in a minute and Germany was given a gold medal for a reason that I can’t fathom.
This is what I love about the Olympics. The sports I don’t understand, but a crowd of ravenous fans know every rule and law inside out. They have favourite stars and cheer for them. I get whipped into a fervour, and that goes double for sports I’m trying my best to understand. I don’t really get into the track and field events, the marathons and high jumps. But give me a woman shooting a pistol, and I’m all in.
I get even more excited by the Winter Olympics, where I get far too into sports like curling and cross-country skiing.
Withan Assassin’s Creed reference in the opening ceremony, I got thinking about which video games would make great Olympic sports. I’m not thinking about which games would be great in the eOlympics, and neither am I going to pick sports games. This would be a pretty boring list if I just wrote League of Legends and Mario Golf. I want to see some weird and wonderful Olympic sports, and picking ideas from video games seems the obvious choice.
Mirror’s Edge
I find it somewhat surprising that parkour hasn’t been added as an Olympic sport yet. Many countries add their national pastimes to the events they host. The USA added Roque in 1904, a sport only they competed in, in order to inflate their medal count. Britain added BMXing in 2012, which has stood the test of time and is still being contested in Paris 12 years later in two forms; freestyle and racing.
Despite Paris forgoing the opportunity to add parkour to its list of sports this year (it opted for breakdancing instead), I think it would make a great addition. It could be similar to something like the high jump, where competitors tackle courses of increasing intensity, but I envisage it as being more akin to something like kayaking, where you have to complete a course as quickly as possible. Alternatively, it could be a gymnastics-style competition judged like floor or freestyle skateboarding, where you earn points for the complexity of your tricks as well as their execution.
However it’s judged,Mirror’s Edgewould be a great addition to the Olympics.
Titanfall 2
Regular parkour not enough for you? How about competitive wallrunning? While you could just set up the Gauntlet in the centre of Paris, I feel like it would be easier to judge wallrunning like the long jump: the longest wallrun wins. Titans optional.
Splatoon
Art was actually an Olympic sport between 1912 and 1948, before it was canned because too many competitors were considered professionals. But the Olympics has never had team-versus-teamcompetitivepainting. It’s time that changed.
Splatoonmay push the boundaries of my ‘no sports or esports’ rule, but it straddles the line perfectly for me. People enjoy watching football and badminton, so why don’t we add some artistic flair to proceedings? Olympic Splatoon would be a straight conversion of the video game, probably with paint rollers. I think the middle section would get pretty confusing as the two paints mixed together rather than neatly cover the latter, but some technical wizardry to create fast-drying paint would solve the issue.
Fortnite
Hear me out on this one. I’m not going to suggest we get Olympians to shoot each other, nor am I expecting some kind of laser tag situation. IRLFortnitein the Olympics would look like the biathlon or modern pentathlon: a combination of shooting and other skills.
In the modern pentathlon, competitors perform showjumping, fencing, swimming, and a final round that combines shooting and running. Fortnite would keep that target shooting element, but the other portion of the sport would be building. Make a dry stone wall, shoot some targets, build a wooden fence, shoot more targets, fashion some kind of steel structure, shoot your final targets. I think farmers would be very good at it.
Pokemon
After Olympic Fortnite,Pokemonseems pretty normal, no? It’s just monster catching. Competitors would have to capture animals in front of a live audience, kind of like a cowboy competition. Competitors could use lassos, lay humane traps, or just use the power of friendship to bring the animals home. They start with a rat (Rattata), move onto a bird (Pidgey), and end with a dragon (Dratini). Wait, dragons don’t exist. Fine, a turtle or something then.
It would be judged by time, whoever wrangles the animals quickest would win. Harming or distressing them in any way is instant disqualification, despite what the Pokemon games tell you. And no, we won’t make them fight.
Metal Gear Solid
Competitive tag is big business, and a great sport to watch. Competitive hide and seek could take that excitement and make it incredibly boring. Utilise your best stealth skills to secrete in some nook or cranny of an unfamiliar environment, and successfully evade your opponent for a certain length of time (to be decided) in order to win a point. Reverse the contest and find a winner. Tie breaks can come down to best-of-three or simply down to time. This is the message to take from the Metal Gear series, right?
I think a video game Olympics would be great fun, and I’m sure there are plenty more great games that would make fantastic sports. For now, though, I’ll have to make do with sport climbing and ribbon twirling.
