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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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Hah, this taps into the dichotomy that I think gets little commentary: the "purity" of the sport vs the "entertainment value."

Watching elite athletes going all out to defeat their opponent with strict, fair officiating is fun, but it becomes more of a chess match where the competitors' moves are predictable, and thus outcomes are less exciting because you can (usually) discern who is better early on.

It's why I prefer to watch college football to NFL, the relative inexperience of the athletes means they're more likely to screw up and create openings for big plays that lead to upsets and reversals of fortune and other "exciting" outcomes, versus a game where everyone plays close to optimally but thus the outcome is never in doubt if there is a talent differential.

Likewise, imagine if on-field injuries could be fully eliminated (a good thing!) which would remove the chance of a given team having to bench a star player and thus potentially losing to an "inferior" opponent on a given day. Likewise we could imagine eliminating off-field conduct and problems, like players getting arrested or injured in freak accidents.

I think what you may be touching on is the lack of "randomness" from the play. Computerized officiating would (ideally) make every call deterministic and accurate, and wouldn't miss occurrences that a human official might.

Good for fairness, but it means there are no more games decided by "close calls" where the refs use their discretion to make a call that "favors" one side or the other, and controversially may impact the outcome.

Of course, if it makes cheating much harder to pull off, that's probably an undeniable benefit.

If we say that maximum randomness is just pure gambling, maximum fairness is a completely computer-supervised match, maybe maximum "entertainment" or "fun" is between those extremes.

I'm sure there are purists who want the sport outcomes to be completely determined by skill, with injuries, bad officiating, off-field antics, and hell, even weather to have zero impact on the match. The "no items, Fox Only, Final Destination" types.

There's also things like Pro Wrestling, where the outcomes are fixed but the fun is in the spectacle itself and the CHANCE that something unexpected can still happen.