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What makes a game a game and a sport a sport?

Games are something that people can do for fun. Sports are not. Track and Field is generally a sport, because you don’t have people playing a pick-up game of pole vault.

They’re called the Olympic Games. There are a lot of games in there, but there are some real sports too. Swimming is mostly a sport – who swims the butterfly for fun? But diving could be considered game-ish.

Things that require subjective judging are usually games, as sports have clear and obvious scores. If you have the fastest time or longest distance or whatever, then you’re the winner. Watching some of the Olympic events, I wondered what would happen if we applied subjective scoring to other events. What prompted that was the interminable wait after some of the gymnastics events until the gymnast’s score was determined.

What if that same method was applied to something else, such as the 100-yard dash? Okay, officially it is known as the 100-meter dash, but we all know they just renamed the event to make it sound internationalish. Anyway, what if the race finished, but we had to wait until they added individual level-of-difficulty to everyone’s time, and then they subtracted some deductions for things like bad form? That would make for a very tedious competition and would not be very entertaining. Hmm… now that I think about it some more, that sounds a lot like the BCS formula.

But not all things that are objective are sports. Table tennis has obvious scoring, but it is a game. People play it for fun – the same with volleyball. Plus volleyball is too much fun to be a pure sport. Sports are things that are not fun in and of themselves, like marathons. Sure the event of the marathon may be fun, with live bands and people cheering. But the running part of the marathon, without those other things, is no fun.

“Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable.”
– 1 Corinthians 9:25