The Best of Kotaku, This Week

Regarding chess and stupid things like dressage as a sport, I don’t consider them to be, they’re more just entertaining pastimes. Just because something contains competitiveness doesn’t automatically mean it’s a sport. There’s competitiveness in almost every aspect of life, doesn’t mean everything is a sport.

And a major downfall of chess being a sport is that it’s not a level playing field, one person goes first and one person goes second, which results in the first turn advantage inherent in most turn based games. There’s no way to get rid of this either. Yet if you look at proper sports everyone is equal in starting conditions – track events, water sports, even in team based games you swap sides half way through to balance out any advantage there may have been.

Furthermore, as for video games being regarded as a sport – no. At its most basic level it boils down to who can press a button faster. And everyone presses a button in the same way, the only difference is speed, the technique in which you do it has no effect on the outcome at all, it’s a digital response. Of course this is an incredibly dumbed down version of gaming, but I hope the idea behind it shines through – technique is an integral part of any sport. This counter-argument can be applied to chess as well, every person can ultimately make the same move once a move has been decided, and I guess this is something that is a positive for supporting something like shooting as a sport – everyone cannot execute the exact same shot.