Microsoft and Special Olympics Partnership Focuses on Inclusion in E-Sports at Special Olympics 2018
July 03, 2018
The 2018 Special Olympics USA Games is being held this week in Seattle. More than 4,000 participants from across the country will compete in 14 events. Alongside, members of esports teams will be playing in a first-of-its-type video game tournament hosted by Special Olympics and Microsoft.
The Xbox Gaming Tournament marks the first time that Special Olympics will feature a video game tournament at a Games. It includes eight teams that qualified last month to play in the event, which will feature the “Forza Motorsport 7” title published by Microsoft. The tournament is an example of esports possessing a code that organizations of all types are often seeking: growth by inclusion.
Inclusion, of course, has been part of Special Olympics from the start.
In 1962, Eunice Kennedy Shriver received a telephone call from a woman trying to locate a summer camp that would welcome her child who was diagnosed with mental retardation. Shriver had been playing an active role in influencing her brothers—United States President John F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Senator Ted Kennedy—to fund federal research and educational programs aimed at improving the lives of people labelled “mentally retarded.” But her response to the phone call was to immediately open a no-fee summer camp at her family home for that child and others who wouldn't have otherwise had a place to go for seasonal recreation activities. The camp inspired Shriver and her husband, Sargent, to create Special Olympics, which held its first Games in 1968.
The various initiatives to help children with special needs that many members of the Kennedy family became active in helped lead to legislation such as the Americans with Disabilities Act. The sum of this activity can be traced, in part, to one of their sisters, Rosemary, having lived with intellectual and physical disabilities. Interestingly, Microsoft has charted a related course during the past several years.
As a recent Seattle Times article points out, the Washington-based global technology company has been focused on bringing more accessible products and services to the market. Within that product range are the Xbox adaptive controller, a device that Microsoft says is “designed primarily to meet the needs of gamers with limited mobility,” and Seeing AI, an app designed to harness “the power of AI [artificial intelligence] to describe people, text and objects” for the “low “vision community.” The encouragement toward accessible technology was initiated when Satya Nadella was named chief executive officer in 2014. Part of it owes to impressions that he has developed while raising a son who has body movement issues affected by cerebral palsy.
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Personal histories brought to business, however, are more than an interesting point along the way to perceiving the full effect of what Special Olympics and Microsoft are doing with esports. They do more than offer a nice story. As an announcement about the partnership that started in 2014 notes, the mission is to “create more effective systems that will ultimately enhance the lives of people with intellectual disabilities who are involved in Special Olympics.”
It would be easy to chalk-up the Special Olympics-Microsoft partnership as another example of organizations wanting to get in on the fast-growing esports market. For context, start by considering that Goldman Sachs estimates esports has a global monthly audience of 191 million and the phenomenal popularity of Fortnite alone is leading Epic Games to fund $100,000,000 in prize pools for competitions in the coming year. And, then, consider that the International Olympic Committee and its partners have been backing more and more videogame-related events, such as a Starcraft 2 tournament and esports summits.
But it would be wrong to see what Special Olympics and Microsoft are doing as purely commercial. Actually, it is a combination of business and social results that has their interests and attention. In fact, it is shows a characteristic of the sports industry in the 21st century: organizing partnerships that prioritize social pursuits to fuel economic performance.
In an interview with NPR held more than a decade ago, Tim Shriver, Special Olympics chairman and one of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver's children, said, “The great gift that we had as kids was never to be introduced to disability or intellectual disability as a cause but more as an activity.” At the opening of Special Olympics Games earlier this week, Microsoft chief Nadella told the crowd that what it had gathered for was “a model for building a more inclusive world. A world where everyone is celebrated for their unique abilities. A world where everyone is invited to participate.” That much—and the power of Special Olympics to inspire people in life-changing ways—may well be taken to a new level through esports.
Source: Forbes