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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday July 25 2015, @03:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-competitors-are-disqualified dept.

Der Spiegel [in German], supported by Sky News [in English], report:

[translation mine]Ever since young people started earning money playing computer games, a discussion has arisen within Gamer circles: is E-sport, professional computer game playing, really sport? Is mouse-clicking and button pressing at high tempo easier, more challenging, or just as sophisticated as kicking a ball or swimming faster than others?

To put it plainly, whoever games professionally needs exactly as much training, passion, and talent as professionals in classical sports. And that good gamers compete in front of tens of thousands of spectators makes the world hardly better or worse than a football/soccer world championship or the Tour de France.

In any event Gamers may have to think about the issue more than they'd like. The E-Sports League (ESL), in which players of games like "Counter-Strike: Global Offensive," "Fifa," and "League of Legends" compete, has announced that they will be cooperating with the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA). It is supposed to not only prevent doping, but institute concrete testing. ESL has announced that the Counter-Strike competition on August 22-23 in Cologne's Lanxess Arena that skin tests will be conducted.

Additional reporting here and here.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by RobotMonster on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:31PM

    by RobotMonster (130) on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:31PM (#213514) Journal

    Why not two leagues -- one with testing; unmodified humans only; not even caffeine -- second league where anything goes; drugs, brain implants, artificial limbs?

    I've often thought this for the Olympics, Tour De France, etc.

    But, I've also thought that football, cricket, etc, would be more fun to watch if they included land-mines, so I'm probably not the best person to ask :-)

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:35PM (#213515)

    Because all the sponsors would want to be associated with the PED-free league, so the cat-and-mouse game between the athletes and the drug testers would continue.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RobotMonster on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:43PM

      by RobotMonster (130) on Saturday July 25 2015, @04:43PM (#213519) Journal

      PED manufacturers would be happy to sponsor the PED league, methinks.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:06PM (#213525)

      Maybe not: what if, in lieu of a secular PED-free league, you had an explicitly Mormon league? Sponsors would be wary.

      The Mormons would probably welcome it. They've made huge forays into music via YouTube; many of the "viral" stars (Lindsey Stirling, The Piano Guys, etc) are well-funded Mormons. The LDS church is making a push to demonstrate that its members are talented and relevant individuals rather than puppets of some cult. A Mormon video game league wouldn't be out of the question. On the other hand, advertisers might not flock to them because of the culty-side of things.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:09PM (#213526)

        Do you have any information about the LDS church bankrolling those acts?

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:21PM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday July 25 2015, @05:21PM (#213529) Homepage Journal

      Possibly, but if there were two leagues, it would be possible to be much harsher with doping. If you are competing in the naturalist league, and are caught doping, then you have doped, and can be immediately and permanently moved to the "modified" league.

      This would be much fairer than the current system. Currently, the judges are often reluctant to be really harsh, because it can be career ending. When someone has build up a super musculature (using, say, HGH), it's really unfair to ever let them back into competition, because continued training can preserve the advantage that they achieved through doping. Which means that everyone else must dope, in order to have a chance. It's only a question of who has been caught, and who hasn't.

      Giving dopers a place to go, and sending them there, would open a real chance for drug-free sports. Really, an excellent idea.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:37PM

        by tynin (2013) on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:37PM (#213564) Journal

        Meanwhile the body count continues to rise in the drug using camp, but hot damn they can play while so long as they still notice they are in a chair and that thing in front of them is a monitor.

        You can almost see it now, some CS match with half the team looking at the patterns in the walls while the other slightly more sober team goes on a knife only kill spree.

        I think, and this would be a first, that I'd love to here the commentators talk about such a game with the same zeal they normally have for other games with balls.

        • (Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:41PM

          by tynin (2013) on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:41PM (#213566) Journal

          Replying to myself... I say all that as someone who knows that the Ballmer Peak [xkcd.com] also applies to things like gaming, and not just with the use of booze.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25 2015, @06:27PM (#213557)

    Anything goes? In gaming all that means is "assisted gamers" i.e. bots competing against other bots.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tathra on Saturday July 25 2015, @07:29PM

      by tathra (3367) on Saturday July 25 2015, @07:29PM (#213595)

      that takes the human element out of it though. i don't care for any sports, but the appeal in split leagues would be "to see just how far the human body can be pushed naturally" and "to see just how far the human body can be pushed, period". brain-computer implants would basically put it into a bot vs bot situation which would be pretty boring so there would probably be limits against that, but artificial muscles, artificial limbs, doping, etc, should all be fine. increasing focus with stimulants is nowhere near the same league as increasing number of calculations and operations done per second via computer implants. so maybe 3 leagues then, normal, doping, and computer.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday July 26 2015, @12:03PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @12:03PM (#213801)

        maybe 3 leagues then, normal, doping, and computer.

        For an instructive display of how that's likely to pan out, at least in terms of popularity, you could look to competitive lumberjacking.

        You can never totally kill off a sport, look at those youtube videos of guys putting 80 horsepower snowmobile engines on chainsaws, but you can marginalize it to the point of it existing solely as youtube videos and staged and scripted county fair demonstration stage shows and maybe one meet nationwide in the back woods of Minnesota per year attended by dozens possibly hundreds.

        Or TLDR is you can make a league but that doesn't mean anyone will watch.

        • (Score: 2) by tathra on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:17PM

          by tathra (3367) on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:17PM (#213928)

          they'd show it on ESPN/ESPN2 for sure. i've seen competitive lumberjacking on ESPN. i've seen competitive jump-roping on ESPN, not to mention cheerleading, strong-man competitions, and all kinds of shit. ESPN will show just about anything.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by penguinoid on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:46PM

      by penguinoid (5331) on Sunday July 26 2015, @06:46PM (#213938)

      Anything goes? In gaming all that means is "assisted gamers" i.e. bots competing against other bots.

      It means the winner will be the one with the better coding skills -- which, I'd point out, is more valuable to encourage than mere reflexes.

      --
      RIP Slashdot. Killed by greedy bastards.
  • (Score: 2) by Francis on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:15PM

    by Francis (5544) on Saturday July 25 2015, @10:15PM (#213661)

    The pay would probably always be better for the PED league. Just look at basketball, women's basketball versus men's basketball. The pay differential there is rather sizable and a large part of that comes from the thing the men are doing that the women can't do, or can't do as well. There've been a small number of dunks in women's basketball, but you see it at least a few times in men's games. For better or for worse, the men have a splashier style of play at the present and people are willing to pay more for it.

    I would expect the same thing would happen here. The PED league would get all the money and attention and the PED-free league would wind up the backwaters where people barely scrape by, assuming it's ever popular enough to pay.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:55AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:55AM (#213799)

    We have tons of artificially enhanced humans playing sports, think of shoes, football safety gear like helmets, eyeglasses... What gets interesting is whole new competitions open up when you allow artificial enhancements like those poles for pole vaulters or automobiles for race car drivers.

    Likewise sports can "fail" if they can't handle modernity. Look at dying baseball for an example. It may be that 100 years from now people look at dead doper sports and wonder wtf anyone ever cared about them, not understanding that pre-doper they were pretty interesting sports. The most likely outcome of a sport that can't spontaneously internally automatically handle dopers is it'll die. You can have fascistic officials try to act like some kinda immune system, but lets face it, they're dead dead dead and just don't know it yet.

    Really all you need for a sport is a set of commonly agreed to rules, a set of skills that can be practiced, a ranking "winning" system. Thats how you end up with chess as a sport or ham radio contests as a sport or synchronized swimming or obviously all the common sports too.

    So... If doping gets socially acceptable, because new technology results in new sports, its going to result in new sports forming that don't currently exist. Meanwhile, as long as doping remains effective, regardless of if its acceptable or enforceable, it'll destroy existing sports that don't have a natural inherent immunity. Given that, the most likely outcome in neoPuritan areas is non-doper-immune sports will die out, and we'll get x-game tier "sports" that a microscopic minority of the population cares about that are dominated by dopers.

    My guess is if boring FPS sequels are dope-able, then something non-dope-able will actually succeed in videos. They might be really butt hurt about it, but their sport is dead man walking. For an example of something that will get both the jocks and the FPS clickers all wound up, Direwolf20's minecraft videos on youtube have more viewers than my local major league baseball team has on TV, and the age of the average baseball viewer is 55 and going up more than one year per year for a couple decades now. The last professional baseball game is likely to be played within my lifetime.