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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.
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?
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.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Well, there go the Mountain Dew and Monster sponsorships...
I was thinking it would be some ritalin based medicin, and adderall is particularly abused, and maybe shouldn't even be used the way it is. But this is important: It still requires a prescription to get, so in the end by banning it, they would be forbidding people from taking their prescribed medication. Even if it is widely abused, there are a some that needs it.
Even in cycling they allow drugs that are otherwise banned, if a doctor prescribes it and documents the athlete needs it.
I am taking course of Complex Analysis. To understand the subject, textbook should be sold with pack of drugs.
What, RedBull and Hot Pockets?
Ya Ok.....
I would find sports in general much more exciting if drug use were mandatory. Imagine how entertaining football would be if one team were pumped full of PCP and the other was tripping balls on bath salts?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
U mad bro? Because people are doing what they love and getting paid extremely well for it?
Caffeine (at least above a certain level) is regulated in epretty much every sport that does PED testing. Since gamers essentially live on a diet solely of energy drinks and Mountain Dew, I see dark times ahead.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
"Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son"
I can't believe there is such a thing as "professional gamer". That's why our society has gone to shit.
Hey loser, get off the couch, grow up and get a real job!
I'd hate to live in a world that meets your approval.
What about pro sports? What about singers? Actors? Any and all types of entertainment?
Because the only reason there are professionals in any of those is because people are willing to pay to be entertained.
Like it or not, gaming is big business that you can actually make lots of money with. Heck, my wife and I used to level up chars in EverQuest 2 and sell them on Sony's marketplace. We got in early, and made over $2000/mo selling chars with end game gear on them. We stopped once the market was flooded, but you get the idea. I wish Twitch TV was around back then, as some of the top people there pull in $50k/yr+ from their streams.
Queue up the flame throwers in 3....2....1...
You are crushing the dreams of all those 30 something gamers who live in their mother's basement so they can spend every last dime on the latest game and hardware to run it on. These guys don't go down without putting up a really big flame war fight, well at least until their mom turns off the cable modem at their 9:30 bedtime... Good luck Mr. Bunker... You will need it.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I find the 'esport' label irksome, mostly because I've never understood the big deal about watching sports; but if the defining characteristic of 'sport-ness' were physical rigor; coal mining and working in a sweatshop would be major athletic events and they'd force golfers to walk the entire course and carry their own bags.
Gaming is obviously pretty low intensity for most muscles, though the rigor of the mental drill is considerable; and the amount of carpal tunnel and similar injuries are actually alarmingly high.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4090
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Or Cheetos?
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.
Imagine competitive Rubik's Cube solving to make it more understandable. That clearly involves intense physical dexterity, but also extremely rapid situational analysis and execution. It might not look as entertaining as football because it's way harder to know where the athlete is going with their cube (in football, you can see what's intended from the outside) but it's more or less the same type of thing.
Same with competitive gaming, with the advantage that if you know the game you can (like football) follow along and imagine how things might be executed, and see whether the players execute them. It's not 'can he run faster than the linebacker chasing him' but 'can he dodge this attack or pull off this complicated move'.
E-games are going to have to become more 'readable' to outsiders to go properly mainstream, but there's no conceptual problem with it. It's purely a matter of how audience-friendly you can make the concept of 'challenge' when it's a matter of situational analysis, threat and reaction. One awkward bit is that videogames can move too fast for the layman: but in the Michael Bay era, that's being steadily reinterpreted, people expect more demanding visual data.
..and there goes my big chance in the pro leagues.
Time to return to my mom's basement and balance meth for reflexes against some bong hits for total focus and crank up my three thousand dollar gaming system -- for nothing.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
This is a very silly objection, and I'll tell you why.
I routinely start watching a set of Minecraft youtubers for a thing called 'Mindcrack UHC'. I know the playstyles of many of the players, what can be expected of them, even some of the unusual team-ups worthy of a pro wrestling storyline (hi, Vechs/BTC/Nebs!).
They are BOXES running around. I have no idea what they actually look like, nor am I really interested.
Video games have the capacity to become the athletics version of Asian avatar popstars: it helps if there's character customization, but even so, if you want musclebound superheroes doing superhuman feats, reality can't possibly live up to computer generation. You'll find in movies now the big stars and their action scenes are largely videogames, and nobody complains and that's not even interactive. How much cooler is it, if the superhuman avatars are actually being controlled by dedicated human athletes straining their abilities to the limit to prevail? If it's not pre-scripted?
If your benchmark for what constitutes a 'sport' and what isn't is the amount of time spent training, then Pro Gaming is absolutely a sport. Actual "pro" gamers on various teams spend ridiculous amounts of time living together and training.
Just a few samples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Pro Gamers don't just screw off and do whatever all day. They do have to train and compete at an insane level. Sure, you or I can hop on and play games of Starcraft II, just like we can go play baseball at the park or in a company league, but it's absolutely nothing like even the guys who play on the MLB farm teams, nevermind the Major Leagues themselves. They face the possibility of injury too, even if less so than a full contact sport, but since when has that been a requirement? I'm pretty sure that pro golfers don't face the same risk of injury as NFL players, but golf is still considered a sport.
Are you suggesting that they don't actually have asthma? A significant percentage of the population has asthma, it's not unexpected that a significant number of pro cyclists would have it as well.
As for those deriding the term esport, I think you are displaying your own ignorance and falling into typical typecasting. First, go read the definition of sport: http://www.merriam-webster.com... - You will notice that while there is significant talk of physical activity, it is not exclusively physical. Second, while I have played and enjoy watching baseball, I know that I will never reach the skill or compensation levels of professional baseball players, just like I'm never going to acquire the skill or compensation of the best Starcraft players, some of whom earn in the neighborhood of 100k and 170K a year "playing". Maybe you could once have made generalizations like this and be taken seriously, but the world turns and things change. Get used to it.
Well, some people still don't think Motorsport is a real sport, but that hasn't stopped series like F1 from becoming (at one point) the second most televised sport in the world. Similarly Nascar and Indy have pretty major followings and the World Rally Championship did too when the drivers were still crazy.
Personally I don't get the whole e-sport thing, but I also don't think the fact that the competitors aren't training like athletes is any reason it can't become a massive global industry, with hundreds of millions of viewers and megastars earning stupid amounts of money.
Interesting, Pro Gamers are now going to be subjected to the same scrutiny that Ice Fishers, Badmitton players, Critickers, Bowlers, Country Line Dancers and players in the NFL, MLB and NCAA are subjected to.
Obviously, players in the NFL are going to be subjected to different test panels than players in the NCAA or Olympics, but for your convenience, here is the WADA list of banned substances
You will find most of the usual things there, "street drugs", etc, and of course, gamers drug of choice, Amphetamines/Stimulants.
When I first saw the headline, I thought, like many here did, what about Adderall? Because we all know that Adderall, and other legal amphetamines like it, is the real question mark here.
Should pro gamers be worried?
Only if they need it to play a video game...
As we've seen from other sports, Adderall, aka, legal speed, use/abuse is rampant.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
You seem to be confusing sports with athletics. They are not the same. Fishing, for example, is a sport that average people perform while sitting around drinking beer, yet nobody complains about it being called a sport.
It sounds like they spend hours every day practicing and refining the skills that are important. Just because they're not utilizing the entire body or required to have ridiculous muscle mass to compete does not make it less of a sport.
Both billiards and baton twirling are considered sports, and they're no more physically demanding than gaming, but do require developing and refining skills in order to be competitive. Golf is another perfect example and it's really apt as for most people it is a leisure activity, much as games are.
Video games certainly do put a lot more emphasis on the mental side of the game and many share more in common with something like chess where strategic thinking and planning are highly important, but several also rely on fast reaction time and good hand-eye coordination. If you spend hours every day working to improve those things so that you can perform better in competitions, it's pretty clearly blurring the lines quite a lot. So what's your classification system for what does and does not constitute a sport?
You sound like one of those people, who had they been born 100 years earlier, would be arguing that film is not art.
If enough people do it, yes it will.
Anything that can be gamed will be gamed, hell I'm sure some of the lesser riders are told not to game the system so the percentages of "sufferers" doesn't become too obvious.
10% of MLB players have ADD/ADHD supposedly, yeah right.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The only way to 'lose' while gaming is to lose sight of the fact that it's supposed to be for fun.
lost friends and lovers don't count?
Fishing, for example, is a sport
If you put it that way, then tying your shoes or brushing your teeth is also a sport.
Athletes are to sport as dixie cups are to drinking. Use once, dispose, move on to the next.
Athletics is just another way to move money from poor people to rich people.
His mom is Kate Upton?
It could be, if you are doing so competitively. I just don't think it would be a very popular sport.
Again sports != athletics.
A name for old time gunslinger/gamblers in the Old West who played poker and bet on horses for a living was they were "sporting men". While you can certainly admire the reflexes of a gunfighter, they were actually called sporting men because of their livelihood as professional gamblers, and there is no need for any sort of athleticism for that job description.
How much Red Bull are they going to consider an illegal amount though? (but seriously, they considered in the past limiting mg of caffeine in the bloodstream to a certain amount)
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.
I hope this day comes. All of these "sports", while individually fun to play in to some degree, stop being fun when there's money and spectators involved. I don't know how anyone can watch so-and-so pratfall to draw a yellow card, or billy joe step in front of a ball to get on a base, etc. etc. just to "win". This same gamesmanship has turned video games of almost every variety into a circus show.
The only way to kill it all dead is not to watch, buy the merchandise or otherwise pay money into the system.
In pretty much every televised sport, the ball is the point of focus. If the ball goes to one person, the people on the other side of the field don't really matter. In CS:Go or a MOBA, you can have a lot of stuff going on simultaneously that is not easy to follow.
That goes double if you are trying to display it TV-style where it can be followed from a distance. It is one thing to watch a HOTS match fullscreen sitting in front of your computer: you can see the minimap, you can see the respawn timers, the objective timers, etc., and maybe you can look at talent pics and ability cooldowns. Compare that to when ESPN2 televised it. Losing the minimap and that meta information and having to rely on only what the "cameramen" showed you made it hard to follow as someone who has actually played the game a little bit. I imagine it was next to impossible to follow for someone with no familiarity.
If you took an american sports fan, sat them down in front of Australian rules football, and told them to root for the red team...they would be able to follow the action. Some rules wouldn't make sense, but they would know when their team made a good play or when they were getting hammered. Same would be true if you showed them many other rarely televised sport that they weren't already familiar with (lacrosse, field hockey, ultimate frisbee, etc). Hard to watch Dota, LOL, or HOTS without being an avid fan who is familiar with not only gameplay, but also the abilities and interactions of 30 different characters.
Bottles.
This is true, I tend to watch sports for the fit bodies.
Same reason I watch porn.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
I love watching people play video games but I have not found watching competitions all that fun. I do not even play games any more. I just like watching them. I actually have a PS3 and an X Box One set up for people to play when they stop over. I do not even know how to play any of the games except for a golf game and I do not even really play that. Ah well... I do like watching people play fighting games such as the Street Fighter line of games. I used to play Street Fighter a lot but, still, I do not play at all now though I could probably figure it out. I like watching driving games as well but not the GTA series. I also enjoy watching people play RPGs quite a bit. I think that is my favorite but it takes more time.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."