Over one hundred athletes from all over the world are competing in Singapore’s Olympic Esports Week. They will be competing across ten different virtual sports for the world to see. It is a four day event and many have referred to it as the first step into being the electronic sports community together.

The International Olympic Committee has partnered with Singapore to “test bed and launch novel … events,” as stated by Alvin Tan, Singapore’s minister of state for culture, community and youth. This event will be the first live, in-person edition of virtual sports created by the International Olympic Committee. The competitions included in the event are mobile archery game based on tic-tac-toe, a Taekwondo match using a motion-tracking avatars, and virtual cycling where athletes race across the Scottish countryside using interactive platform Zwift. Also, there will be other virtual events like baseball, chess, autosports, boat sailing, shooting, tennis, and even dance. The Olympics Esports Week builds on the success of the Olympic Virtual Series that occurred before the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021 that had 250,000 attendants.

Olympic Esports Week began on Thursday with the convention center at Suntec City Mall housing the opening ceremony. Athletes partook in sparring matches on two competition stages while attendees had the chance to try out multiple video games available at zones. In addition, Halimah Yacob, the President of Singapore, made an appearance via hologram to deliver his opening speech. Competitors emerge onstage as projections after image backdrops showcased the sport announced. The Oympics Esports Weeks is heralded as an opportunity to meet with peers after years of competing in virtually. “It’s really special for me because it’s the Olympics… it’s really cool to be here,” said Kaj de Bruin, an 18-year-old finalist from the Netherlands in the Gran Turismo racing event. The event has been seeing great success as over 20,000 tickets have been issued, and 131 players from sixty-four countries are coming to participate.

Singapore did launch the Singapore Games Association in order to develop the foundations of the country’s esports ecosystem already in place, so they are familiar with the concept of virtual esports. In fact, the Singapore Tourism Board stated the country has the potential to become a “top-of-mind destination for electronic sports fans globally.” Furthermore, the first independent Mobile Legends: Bang Bang professional league was held 2021 in Singapore while hosting the finals of one of the largest electronic sports tournaments, The International, in 2022.

In 2017, the International Olympic Committee officially recognized electronic sports as a sport in 2017 and discussions with industry players about its inclusion have been underway for quite some time. However, there are no current plans for video games to be included in the Olympics as most of the electronic sports will be digitized versions of physical sports. The inclusion of first-person shooter games in future events has been ruled out as it is currently deemed as promotion of violence goes against Olympic values. A source stated, “For us, there is the clear limitation that the first people shooting will never be integrated into our competition. We can understand that the perception can be different but we cannot have these games promoting Olympic values.”