Virtual domains for sports and games

Videogames present deep challenges for traditional concepts of sport and games. Cybersport in particular suggests that sport might be transposed into digital arenas, and videogames in general provide apparently striking counterexamples to the orthodox Suitsian theory of games, seeming to lack strictly prelusory goals and perhaps even also constitutive rules. I argue as follows: (1) if any cybersports count as genuine sports, it will be those most closely resembling uncontroversial core instances of sport, those that essentially involve gross motor skill. Even so, we might reject cybersports as sport by distinguishing physical skills’ domain of execution from their domain of application, sport implying the non-virtual status of both. (2) Although, like chess, videogames appear to lack prelusory goals, chess conventions and nominal descriptions of the object of any videogame suggest the possibility of Suitsian compliance, as does the inclusion of ‘cheat codes’ in videogame programming. Perhaps such sports and games are so ultimately only in a derivative sense, where the non-actual domains merely represent game-independent states of affairs. Still, the more virtual environments come to be seen as normal, the more such distinctions will appear arbitrary. If the world is already a text, it may soon become a digitized one.