Welcome to the Best of Kotaku, where I round up all of this week's best content.
My, my, Mario. You're looking quite dapper. That look is really working for you. Big thanks to Adam Marton, aka chaos13, for coming up with it. And to Corey for finding it.
Moving on to our Best Of content this week, we kick things off as usual with a comment from the community.
The Best Comment From The Community
Our favorite comment of this week comes to you from Xaif for an opinion on that whole "can video games be considered a sport" thing:
I've often had this discussion of what actually constitutes an activity as a sport with friends, and the best conclusion we came to was "if you have to change to a specific type of footwear, then it's a sport." By that I mean wearing something such as high heels or dress shoes will severely disadvantage you compared to those wearing specialised footwear. If you think about it, every physical sport in existence does require you to wear some style of footwear (or none in the case of water sports and gymnastics).
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.
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