Pro Gamers To Be Tested For Doping

An anonymous reader writes: The Electronic Sports League is the biggest organization for running video game competitions. The league has now announced that they will begin testing professional video gamers for performance-enhancing drugs. The league is getting help in making policies from anti-doping agencies that help regulate athletes in traditional sports. They say, "[W]e will be administering the first PED skin tests at ESL One Cologne this August, with a view to performing these tests at every Intel Extreme Masters, ESL One and ESL ESEA Pro League event thereafter as soon as the official PED policy is established and tournament rules updated accordingly." This announcement comes after a high-profile Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player admitted last week that he and many other players used Adderall to gain an advantage in tournaments.

Comments

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

Football, basketball, soccer, hockey... all those are games. The day professional basketball/soccer players stop bouncing/kicking balls and get "real jobs", that day you can ask the same from professional videogame players.

Re:What's performance enhancing?

[Nidi62]

Does caffeine count? What about marijuana? It seems like it would dull your reaction time, but it might make you more calm, so it's hard to say. How about coke or meth? Seems like those would make you too jittery.

IWANCAACA (I Was An NCAA College Athlete-I also just wanted to make up a new acronym). The NCAA considers caffeine a banned substance. If you have a certain amount in your system when tested it is no different than if you had traces of marijuana or steroids in your system. Of course, a couple cans of Coke wouldn't be enough to trigger it. You would have to go to Jessie Spannow levels for it to trigger.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[SvnLyrBrto]

Why bother in the first place? Seriously.

I think it's well past time to stop pretending that there's some special purity in these competitions, "athletic" or gaming or whatever, and acknowledge them as what they are: entertainment. And the competitors are entertainers. Their job is not so much to win the race or Starcraft match, or to put the ball through the hoop or into the end zone or whatever. Their job is to put butts in stadium seats and eyeballs on the TV.

We don't drug test Lady Gaga, and take away her Grammy when she tests positive for pot. Robin Williams gets to keep his Golden Globe awards for Mork & Mindy, despite being hopped up on cocaine half the time. And we don't drug test the Rolling Stones before they go on tour and suspend Keith Richards from the first 10 shows when he tests positive for... probably just about everything.

So really... What's do special about Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds or some Adderall-popping gamer that makes their brand of entertainment any more "pure" than any other?