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