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A blood sport or bloodsport is a category of sport or entertainment that involves bleeding. Common examples of the former include combat sports such as and dog fighting, and some forms of hunting and fishing. Activities characterized as blood sports, but involving only human participants, include the ancient Rome games.
Later, the term seems to have been applied to various kinds of baiting and forced combat: bull-baiting, bear-baiting, , and later developments such as dog fighting and rat-baiting. The animals were specially bred for fighting. In the Victorian era, began a vocal opposition to such activities, claiming grounds of ethics, morality, and animal welfare.
Recreational fishing was once described as a blood sport by those within the recreation.
Blood sports are also a common setting for video games, going as far back as the early years of the medium itself. Games about blood sports attracted controversy from newspapers and civic organisations due to their graphic content, in particular the 1976 vehicular combat game Death Race whose game mechanic of scoring points by running over humanoid figures (marketed by Exidy as "gremlins" in their official literature) generated a moral panic. Contemporary examples such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tekken make up much of the fighting game genre, and first-person such as The Finals, Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, as well as vehicular combat games like Twisted Metal likewise depict some form of armed combat with firearms in a gladiatorial setting. Such games typically offer a laconic if not nominal plot or backstory to flesh out the characters and settings, which often take place in a large tournament attracting combatants from various locales. While Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena do portray the game's violent combat as a "real world" blood sport within the games' fictional settings, some, such as The Finals, attempt to downplay the games' violent themes by presenting the game as a virtual reality simulation within a fictional game show instead, devoid of any in-story human casualties. The film Battle Royale also notably inspired the battle royale genre, where players compete against each other for survival in a shrinking area, popularised by games such as (2017), Fortnite Battle Royale (2017), Apex Legends (2019) and (2020).
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