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

What about "legitimate" use?

[InfiniteBlaze]

Am I mistaken in believing that a large portion of the gaming population suffers from ADD/ADHD and is medicated? Will gamers who are medicated be disqualified from play?

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to apply for the exemption and get it approved before hand, you can't just go ahead and use the banned substance and then claim exemption afterwards; prescription or not, you'll get banned if you do that.

I take your point on ADD being overdiagnosed. I don't live in the USA, but I have heard that that is the case there, and maybe in other places as well.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The alternative would obviously be untenable(either forcing athletes to do without medical care 'for their own protection' or just banning every sickie who needs a drug that might be performance enhancing); but a therapeutic use exemption for psychostimulants is going to make the rule more or less a joke(not that I have a problem with that, personally). Getting a diagnosis for which one of the stimulants is the usual treatment is pretty trivial; and they are cheap, have lots of safety data available, and generally don't raise any red flags among doctors. It depends on where you are, of course; but they might actually be among the few drugs that are easier to get legally than illegally.

What's performance enhancing?

[XxtraLarGe]

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.

Re:Just get diagnosed with ADHD and be done.

[Chris Johnson]

At that point it becomes a prerequisite: you gotta be a great gamer, know your stuff, practice AND have ADHD. So much of it that you function normally on bucketloads of Adderall. You're the twitchy equivalent of a Kenyan long-distance runner with the toothpicks for legs, you've reached your final form ;)

It's horrible but it's also interesting. I've studied this stuff a bit. It doesn't bother me when you have categorical advantage but it gets more worrying when part of the 'qualification' is a dark history that leaves the hapless 'competer' human wreckage with nothing to live for but the will to win, forever unsatisfied unless they are crushing their opponents. Yet that's part of the formula, and a surprising amount of sports and entertainment is the wrangling of these freakish entities and trying to keep them from wrecking their teams, their bands, their lives etc.

You can't get away from this in any competitive sphere including life itself: when it comes down to the cult of the individual, it is ALWAYS possible to guarantee victory if you're okay with it being Pyrhhic. A sense of self-preservation or honoring the sport/context/environment is a handicap, and so you get Lance Armstrong every time, to a greater or lesser extent. That's what winning IS.

Interesting expressing these thoughts for the first time on a site where (a) there's huge respect for the cult of the winner and (b) there's also an entire subculture of shared cooperating, open source, and truly free software that is literally the opposite approach: trying to tear down all barriers to produce a context where anything is possible to anyone, without obstacle.

Re:They should have a parallel dope league

[Opportunist]

And make people display what they take, so we'd finally know what crap actually works.

I see a huge possibility for advertising in the pharma sector.