It is the first time esports have been included as a medal discipline at a major sports competition. Seven gaming events have been taking place at the Games this week, almost all of them arranged around shooting your enemies and trying to capture their bases .
On Friday there was the potential of a gold medal for the legendary South Korean Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, AKA the Lionel Messi of esports, AKA the Michael Jordan of esports. Faker is 27 years old now and an advocate against ageism in the industry. His official nickname is “Unkillable Demon King”.
It would probably be cooler to say that this is all great, that antipathy towards esports is boomer-ish, culturally regressive and so on. But not all new things are good. Unmapped modernity also gave us hyper-processed food, drone warfare and the sedentary lifestyle. Generally the hope is that this is one of those new things that will simply stay on the fringes until such time, way down the line, that it simply becomes the actual thing.