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Will E-sports be part of the Olympic Games?

Organizers of the Olympic Games in Paris are in deep talks about including esports at the Games of 2024. “It won’t be possible to be an official discipline yet, but to be a demonstration within the Paris Olympics”, said IeSF acting secretary general Leopold Chung (BBC, 2018). Although it won’t be an official discipline, this statement emphasizes the potential of E-sports, being included to the Games.

E-sports

Electronic sports (E-sports) refer to competitive video gaming watched by spectators. E-sports are not as popular as traditional sports in the world, but the number of fans of sports worldwide is still significant. According to the BBC, the world’s Esports audience exceeded 400 million in 2017, and will rise to almost 600 million in 2020. Consequently, the E-sports sponsorship market is growing (Pike, 2019), and companies like Intel and Alibaba already have a strong interest in this space (Segarra, 2019).

Millennials

In contrast, the number of viewers of the Olympics of Rio dropped with 15% compared to London the prior year (Tran, 2018). Mostly led by Millennials, whose viewership decreased with 31% (Tran, 2018). According to Michal Blicharz, VP of one of the world’s largest and oldest E-sports organizations, the audience of E-sports is between 16 and 28 years of age. Therefore, E-sports might have a crucial role, to help reverse the number of viewers of the Olympics.

Future

Although E-sports will become a medal event at the Asian Games of 2022 (BBC, 2017), “it’s unlikely to happen any time soon at the Olympics”, according to Kit McConnell, sports director for the IOC (Segarra, 2019). Very different governing structures, licensing problems, chargeability questions, and violence in video games are just some of the problems (Bloom, 2018).

Given these structural challenges, the introduction of E-sports at the Olympic Games won’t happen overnight. But as, E-sports has become a universal sport across global communities, with a large commercial potential, it will happen eventually.

 

References

BBC. (2017). Esports: International Olympic Committee considering esports for future Games [online]. Available at https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/41790148 [Accessed 16 October 2019].

BBC. (2017). E-sports to become a medal event in 2022 Asian Games [online]. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39629099 [Accessed 16 October 2019].

BBC. (2018). Paris 2024 Olympics: Esports ‘in talks’ to be included as demonstration sport [online]. Available at https://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/43893891 [Accessed 16 October 2019].

Bloom, D. (2018). What Olympic Recognition Could Mean For Esports, And Vice Versa [online]. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2018/10/18/esports-olympics-recognition-ioc-esl-advertising-sponsors/#324cf68d3b05 [Accessed 16 October 2019].

Pike, N. (2019). No Crystal Ball Required: What Data Tells Us About the Future of Esports [online]. Available at https://esportsobserver.com/nielsen-2019-esports/ [Accessed 16 October 2019].

Segarra, L.M. (2019). Why the Olympic Games Are Steering Clear of E-Sports [online]. Available at https://fortune.com/2019/03/22/esports-olympic-future/ [Accessed 16 October 2019].

Tran, K. (2018). Why the esorts audience is set to surge – and how brands can take advantage of increased fans and viewership [online]. Available at https://www.businessinsider.com/the-esports-audience-report-2018-11?international=true&r=US&IR=T [Accessed 16 October 2019].

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Artificial Intelligence: The Downside

Enriching computers with human-like intelligence has been a fantasy of computer experts since the beginning of electronic computing. Since there have been made huge advancements in Artificial Intelligence, the technology tends to outperform humans in very defined tasks, such as playing strategic games, language translation, self-driving vehicles and image recognition.

ImageNet Roulette

Consequently, everyone is talking positively about Artificial Intellegence these days. In contrast, the application ImageNet Roulette shows the drawbacks of this phenomenon. This viral app examines photos and uses AI to allocate personality traits to people. The application’s designers have trained the algorithm on almost three thousand subcategories that can be found on ImageNet. These personality traits are mostly described with relatively harmless terminology. But many assigned descriptions, for instance, “hypocrite”, “loser”, “drug addict” and “racist”, are deeply disturbing. As ImageNet is free to use for everyone, it is one of the most important and complete datasets within Artificial Intelligence. Therefore, it is very important to cope with the technology appropriately.

Computers can’t act like human

While using ImageNet Roulette it is a fun activity for most people, the application also shows the limitations of using Artificial Intelligence. When a company is using machine learning to build a neural network, the network with different layers is modeled on how we might think the brain works. As we give input to the system, we enable the machine to learn, for example to identify images. But since, the machine is relying on the input we gave it, the neural network is not as smart as it looks. The machine is just learning how to better perform a certain task, depending on our input.

Machine learning, and thus Artificial Intelligence, can be used for lots of different task, from virtual personal assistants to the filtering of spam in your mail. But, neural networks don’t truly understand anything. Therefore, we should be very careful in the application of this fast-moving technology.

 

Sources:

Hamilton, I.A. (2019) Deze selfie-tool die viral gaat, zegt wat voor persoon je bent – en geeft opmerkelijke resultaten. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.nl/imagenet-roulette-selfie/

Schwab, K. (2019) Who does AI think you are? This groundbreaking new exhibit will show you. Available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/90400613/who-does-ai-think-you-are-this-groundbreaking-new-exhibit-will-show-you

Hoffman, C. (2019) The Problem With AI: Machines Are Learning Things, But Can’t Understand Them. Available at: https://www.howtogeek.com/394546/the-problem-with-ai-machines-are-learning-things-but-cant-understand-them/

Oberoi A. (2017) 9 Machine Learning Examples from Day-to-Day Life. Available at: https://insights.daffodilsw.com/blog/9-machine-learning-examples-from-day-to-day-life

Wong, J.C. (2019) The viral selfie app ImageNet Roulette seemed fun – until it called me a racist slur. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/imagenet-roulette-asian-racist-slur-selfie