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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, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday July 26 2015, @11:55AM
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.