Week 04 - *Sports, Games, and Air Racing*

From this week's material, I learned a decent amount about the relationship between sports and games, and I chose an interesting sport from Mr.Animate's YouTube channel to review called Air Racing. Essentially, Air Racing is a motorsport that uses acrobatic aircraft and big towers that act as obstacles but also gates that each participant needs to fly between. There are usually a couple of sets of these 'gates', and the objective is to fly through them without hitting them or flying above them, and then reach the finish line. If a participant breaks any rule, time is added to their score and if enough rules are broken, they are disqualified. The competitiveness of the game is based on time, as the winner is determined by who can complete the obstacle course the fastest.

I thought this topic was interesting and resonated with me as I am interested in aircraft and piloting, and I plan to attend flight school once I'm done with college. The fact that a game exists that utilizes aircraft, obstacles, and speed sounds dangerous, but extremely interesting and would most likely be exciting to watch.

This type of sport is a large-scale operation and is most likely quite expensive to plan, fund, and perform, so it goes to show that pretty much anything can be a sport if enough brainstorming and resources are put towards it. In class, it was interesting but difficult to try turning a sport into a game with whatever game pieces, cards, dice, etc. we had on hand. Yes, anything can be a sport with enough brainstorming, but it needs to be effective, and the game needs to be balanced/fair. We wrestled with those issues working on our game in class, but with enough tweaks, we'll have a balanced and fun game to play that resembles the sport we chose. (it was called Australian Capture the Spoon or something like that)

Overall, sports and board games are both interesting, are different, but are in some ways similar, and Air Racing is a sport on a whole different level from other typical sports.