About – Virtual Sports Association https://virtualsportsassociation.com Building the Future of Sport Sun, 11 Feb 2024 13:38:14 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.6 154711898 Democratic Sport… Intentional Family https://virtualsportsassociation.com/intentional-family/ https://virtualsportsassociation.com/intentional-family/#respond Sun, 11 Feb 2024 00:25:51 +0000 https://virtualsportsassociation.com/what-we-believe-copy/

There is another, deeper, way to describe Democratic Sport: Intentional Family [IF].

That term has been used in the past to describe groups of people who are not traditionally “related,” but decide to come together with social bonds like what we ideally think of as “family.”

We say ideally because the modern family is less like that ideal today than ever.

The family unit has long been imagined – and for many for a long time lived – as the ideal, supportive, integrated social unit. It had only birth as its entrance requirement and death as its cancellation. And it was the core element of individual meaning in society. When all other relationships or affiliations failed, one was always a father, a mother, a husband, a wife, a daughter, or a son… and those roles meant something important.

Those things are no longer true for more and more people every day. The family is disintegrating,  and social data confirm that disintegration.

More important, family has been the most powerful integrative element in society.

Every other integrative element has always been less so, including work, school, faith, sports affiliation, and now, in the modern world, media and information sources and technology-driven social networks.

They are also disintegrating, and at faster rates than family.

These integrative social elements are falling apart because of the dissolution of entrance and cancellation requirements, like birth and death for families. 

Those requirements have been dissolving for years because their common foundations have eroded.

Just as we once got our information about and confirmation of reality from common sources, we also defined our roles in society around our long-term work. Neither of those social integrations are functional now.

Just as our faiths once united us in at least a shared sense of the divine [even if those “divines” differed], we also shared common emotional cause through affiliations with sports teams [on which we never remotely had a chance to play ourselves]. These affiliations too are falling apart.

And the tech-based social networking that was supposed to unite us in universal connection has blown us all apart into a million social fragments.

It is no surprise, then, that the rising malaise of the times is the ironic epidemic of loneliness in our hyper-connected society.

The good news is that all of these disintegrations are about to be melted away by the annealing fire of AI.

It will make superfluous most of the divisions that support our fragmentation today.

Work, of course, will itself become superfluous for most people as AI replaces human ingenuity and operational skill.

The same will apply for schools, which will no longer be preparations for vocational combat, but human gymnasiums of the mind.

And conventional sport, which has always been occupied by the tiniest of human minorities, will remain as spectacle but will fade beside the active participation of the world’s majority in their own teams, leagues, and families of athletic accomplishment [and income]: Democratic Sport.

People will still want and need something uniquely and avowedly human to share, to relate individuals to each other and to groups that have a common purpose.

We believe that common purpose will, for most people, be athletic competition: the joint, shared effort to accomplish a goal, arrayed against other humans in a kind of physical recreation with meaning: competitive victory.

However…

The focus of traditional and conventional competition has always been on the result: winning or losing. First and longest ago, because the winner won the spoils of victory, whether it was land or food or money or whatever was in sufficiently short supply to engender conflict. Some method was needed to rationally distribute the “spoils.”

The first competitions, in this light, were wars… battles over limited resources. When “sport’ emerged, it was a metaphor for war: a battle over the spoils.

It was no coincidence that the spoils of war were replicated in sports as the gold medals of victory. How many have actually wondered why the reward for winning a social, non-violent competition needed to be another metaphor for the spoils of war?

None of these results will be necessary in the not-distant future, when “spoils” themselves become superfluous in a society of plenty.

History’s sport was necessarily focused on the RESULT of the competition: who won and took the spoils.

Future’s sport – Democratic Sport – will be focused not on the result but on the PROCESS of competition: the marshaling of resources and cooperation to compete effectively: the making and management of teams… teams that are fundamentally differently constituted and managed than those of yore.

Our teams will be more like FAMILIES… with no entrance requirements and no dismissals.

In traditional families, the new entrant – the baby – has no choice. In our teams/families, the new entrant will have total and arbitrary choice, to join any team/family in the world and to join multiple families if they are not competitive opponents.

Those teams will span the globe, and cross every boundary of what today is difference and social fragmentation.

The social need for conflict – in work, in school, in families – will be low, but the natural human need for engagement in common causes will still be high.

Democratic Sport, and our global Intentional Family, will serve that need… for everyone.


The Future is Now.

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SPREAD THE WORD. https://virtualsportsassociation.com/spread-the-word/ https://virtualsportsassociation.com/spread-the-word/#respond Mon, 23 Jan 2023 17:35:22 +0000 https://virtualsportsassociation.com/what-we-believe-copy/

We are creating a whole new world of sport. To do this properly, we must build on old things and create many new things.

Which means that there is plenty of room for confusion and misunderstanding.

In our old world, even the word “sport” itself has become confused and confusing.

We recently heard an “esport” player asked: “Is esports really sport?”

His response: “No… of course not… that’s why we call it esport!”

And he was completely sincere.

In a world like this, we need to make everything that we can as clear as we can, even if takes time and lots of words and images.

We have done this for “sport” HERE.

This is what we have begun to do for everything else on our SPREAD THE WORD page, which is posted on our Racket:Next website, because that’s where it all began.

If you want to be a part of this revolution… go there and DIG IN.

And to help others… SPREAD THE WORD.


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What We Believe https://virtualsportsassociation.com/what-we-believe/ https://virtualsportsassociation.com/what-we-believe/#respond Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:45:18 +0000 https://virtualsportsassociation.com/what-is-real-virtual-sport-copy/

We do this work because it’s fun, and we do it because we believe that it matters.

It matters because we deeply believe that sport is one of the adhesives that helps hold society together.

Further, we believe that the AI Metaverse is going to play a role far larger than most think in the future of our global society.

Decisions made now and attitudes held now, at the beginning of this new human development, are going to make an enormous difference in time.

And not a lot of time.

The impact that the AI Metaverse has is already being felt, in the massive investments that are being made in its name and in the fevered efforts that every major social and commercial player is making to figure out what role they can play, and what place they will occupy as this all comes to pass.

No one can predict the full form that this will take. But we believe that we are on the verge of defining a New Society, inside of and massively affecting the one in which we we live today.

We are committed to making a difference in everything from the nature of competition to the nature of cooperation and the ways that we help each other, in a world that will have very different constraints than we can even imagine.

We love virtual games, and we love sports, but the path that we are on now leads to a place that is bigger than either.

It leads to another country, and we are its pioneers.


The Future is Now.

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