IMSA
The International Mind Sports Association (slogan: “Smart Games for Smart People”) began in 2005 with the goal of offering a central focus for various “mind sports” organizations. Specifically, IMSA attempts to bring together the international associations promoting Chess, Draughts, Bridge, and Go.
IMSA’s strategy is to organize the World Mind Sports Games (“Intellympiads”) and conflate the events in various ways with the Olympics in the hope of persuading the Olympic Committee to include one or more “mind sports” among the Olympic events. To this end, IMSA is dedicated to holding the World Mind Sports Games as soon as possible after the close of either the Summer or Winter Games in each Olympic year.
As an important side benefit, utilizing some or all of the Olympic infrastructure and volunteer teams will make the logistics of the World Mind Sports Games more convenient (as opposed to dealing with the details of building a completely separate event from scratch, so to speak). The not insubstantial savings in time and money can be a significant encouragement, especially during a time of widespread economic distress.
Additionally, the IMSA website states “The Association intends to work towards the recognition of the quality of teaching these disciplines lavished on young people and which helps them considerably in their curriculum (career path).” After several re-readings, I’m still unsure what this means. I’ll given the the benefit of the doubt and simply suspect it to be the result of an awkward translation, but I assume that they’re saying that they’d like more people to see that these games help kids become more successful in school and work.
One may certainly question how much the intrinsic characteristics of the games will actually contribute to future successes, but there is little doubt that the mental skills and more general self-discipline that such games encourage can be far more valuable to personal development than, say, dressage (if you’re not catching the sarcasm, you may not know that dressage is an Olympic event in which people show off horses. I could have said “luge”, but that would just be insensitive after recent events).
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