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'Counter Strike', 'Call of Duty' will never enter Olympic Esports, IOC says
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided not to include several first-person shooting games, citing concerns over content that depicted violence.
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Athletes at each others' throats in final showdown for cycling at the Olympic Esports Week 2023 held on June 23, 2023, in Singapore. (The Jakarta Post/Deni Ghifari)
D
espite making a breakthrough in organizing its first e-sports event this month, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) stood firm on barring certain games from being competed in the event forever, which received a mixed response from fans and gaming communities.
IOC head of Esports Vincent Pereira told The Jakarta Post on Friday that first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Counter-Strike, Call of Duty and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege are among those that will “never be part of the Olympic Esports series”, despite having large player bases.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the most played game of the past 24 hours period as of Monday, according to Steam Database, while the latest in the Call of Duty franchise was seventh.
“First-person shooting, for us, will never be part of Olympic Esports because it’s not reflecting the values that we have,” Pereira said at a sideline event of Olympic Esports Week (OEW) 2023.
He added that these values comprised friendship, respect and excellence. From there, he explained, there was a “clear limitation” of what could be included in the Olympics.
The typical FPS games normally involve the objective for players to kill enemies using weapons such as firearms, explosives or melees to win, and therein lies the limitation of “visible violence”, said Pereira.
In some countries, games are often blamed for inciting violence, such as mass shootings in the United States. In 2015, the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (KPAI) issued a warning that several FPS games were dangerous to children for containing violence.
