Breakdance in Paris 2024 Olympics: Can An Art Become a Game?
If you are wondering how Breakdance is a part of Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, be rest assured you are not alone. This highlights the distinction between art and sports that is blurring with each passing day. Curious, I searched for a conceptual model that differentiates an art from a sport to understand how it was included in Olympics. Luckly, I found a model that separates not only art from games but identifies the distinctive features that separates a toy from puzzle, and the more subtle difference between competition and contest. Armed with five categories that the conceptual model threw up of art, toys, puzzles, competition and contest, I now had a framework to explore this interesting puzzle.
Chris Crawford, the pioneering computer game designer laid out a conceptual construct to distil games from the art in designing computer games. The purest of sports like soccer, tennis, wrestling or boxing have the key elements of an interactive conflict between two players or teams where there can be only one winner. The winner in these games not only has to reach their defined objective but has to prevent their opponent from reaching it first, off-course within the laws of their game. In these games, there are two elements of skill on display, the offensive and the defensive skills.
In contrast to the games described in the earlier para, most of the track and field events like a 100 meters sprint, archery, shotput or the javelin throw is an activity with a defined target but without any interference from other contestants. Here the winner has to reach their target without their rivals crossing their path in any form. For the purist, these are not contests but competitions, like what we saw between Arshad Nadeem and Neeraj Chopra, where each strive for their best without hampering their rival’s performance.
In addition to contests and competitions, which are part of Olympics, there are activities that can be classified as games with a defined end goal but without an opponent, like sudoku, crosswords, and Rubix cube to name a few. These are categorized as puzzles. In the absence of a defined end goal, there is only activity, and the object used is a toy like a doll or model cars or animal used to satisfy the desires of the “player” to use it any which way they can.
Given these key components we can construct a contest from a ball, the basic toy. A boy aimlessly kicking the ball around can be converted into a puzzle by setting a goal, of say kicking the ball up in the air and catching it on his foot one hundred times. This can be converted into a competition by having two or more boys with a defined goal of kicking the ball 100 times in the quickest time or kicking it the maximum number in a given time of say two minutes. The same competition can be made a contest by having the two boys kicking the ball at the same time from a defined area by giving them the option to knock their opponents ball out of play while achieving their goal.
Given this framework, any art can be converted into a competition of speed or completion, like painting a given scenery the fastest, which is a speed competition, or performing a dance that meets certain aesthetic standard a completion contest. Like with any modified substitute, the break-dance introduced in 2024 Olympics also had a short life as it is not a part of the 2028 Olympics.
