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 normally need to get permission from the organization in charge of the competition, which includes a checkup by a physician of their choice. Just having a prescription is often not enough.

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.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[ArcadeMan]

If you go to your medic with mild to moderate stress symptoms, chances are s/he'll diagnose you with ADD

Depends on your doctor. I went to see mine, and he diagnosed me with SUB.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[Shinobi]

Actually, there are a whole lot of tests other than just the questionnaire, when performed by serious testers: Impulse control tests, memory tests, reaction tests etc etc.

Re: What about "legitimate" use?

[Shinobi]

Unless you belong to a group that is less than a percent of the population, catching someone pretending is pretty easy for a serious tester, since a serious test battery includes memory, reaction and impulse control tests for example, interviews with family, blood tests etc. Here in Sweden, EEG etc are slowly getting used for testing too.

Now, if you just go to an average US clinic, on the other hand, yeah, then it gets easier, since they earn more the more patients they prescribe to etc, but that's a completely different issue altogether than what you alluded to.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[Shinobi]

"Again, those tests give the same results for ADD and stress. If you weren't diagnosed with ADD/ADHD when you were 6, as an adult is an "undiagnosable" condition."

And you are wrong on both counts, once again. Some types of stress have some symptoms that overlap with ADD(far less for ADHD). However, with the battery of tests I mentioned, as well as blood tests etc, you get completely different aggregate profiles. Also, various neurological disorders can appear or disappear with major metabolism changes associated with age, and if you couple that with an unhealthy living style, of course the risks are increased.

Also, EEG has been used for decades, and CAT or similar scans have been used for the really difficult cases for at least a decade, so you are not as up-to-date as you like to believe.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[AmiMoJo]

Even cold medicine can be performance enhancing and people have been banned for taking it in the weeks before a competition.

Re: What about "legitimate" use?

[Shinobi]

And then the family must have constructed a very watertight background, all the way down to age 2. In reality, as opposed to your simple thoughts, those stories end up with all kinds of discrepancies. Point in case, one of the players talked about in this story was busted several years ago, precisely because of all the inconsistencies. He tried to fake a lot of symptoms etc on stream. Yet when he took his Adderall, he was displaying symptoms to the medicine utterly inconsistent with what someone with ADD or ADHD would get. In fact, he got, on stream, symptoms that someone without ADD or ADHD would get from Adderall or amphetamine.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[amicusNYCL]

Am I mistaken in believing that a large portion of the gaming population suffers from ADD/ADHD

I wouldn't say I "suffer" from it, Bob.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You can always it's a part of the treatment for your testicular cancer.

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?

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[Dutch Gun]

In a sports competition, the entertainment is devalued if the competition is rigged in any way. Competition-based entertainment is the idea that, with enough skill, any of the contenders can win the prize. Doping, cheating, or any other rigging of the competition destroys that sense of possibility, and thus, the core entertainment. It makes the win feel cheaper, and diminishes the audience experience, as there's an expectation of fair play.

For performers, their only job is to provide an entertaining show for the masses, whether by music or acting, but there's still an expectation of "fair play". If a singer was caught lip-syncing in all their performances and recordings (e.g. Milli Vanilli), then yes, their Grammy should be revoked.

If you had spent an intimate and passionate night with your significant other, but later learned he/she had taken a lover to bed just prior to your rendezvous, it would probably diminish your perspective on the night, even though it may have been fantastic at the time. Same principle, I think.

Re:What about "legitimate" use?

[KGIII]

I have been saying that I would watch a second 'Olympics' where it was known that the participants were taking performance enhancing drugs. It would be awesome. They could have their own records and everything so they would not be competing against those who remained stimulant-free. Obviously we would have to stick to strictly legal drugs, a drawback in my opinion, so we would not be having folks snorting a gram of high-quality coke before going out for a dead-lift competition. At the other end of the spectrum there would be weed smokers doing the triple jump and people on PCP doing shot puts. Even more amusing would be the psilocybin users trying to do free-style swim events. I would be all for that.

It would be even more amusing if they had the same sort of competition at the Special Olympics. What could be more glorious than Down's Syndrome kids who have willfully ingested high-grade LSD and are now trying to run track? Before you say that they can not make such a choice I would like to remind you that we are already coercing them to engage in the Special Olympics anyways so either they have a choice or they do not. Is it no more "cruel" to allow some of them to participate after ingesting a cocktail of drugs? I say it is not... You're already capitalizing on their behavior, you might as well allow them the freedom to participate in my fictional competition too.

It is not likely that any of this is ever going to happen. Still, I really would like to see a bunch of meth-heads playing American football and marijuana smoking golfers. Feed a soccer team a bunch of cocaine and watch the ensuing fun! I would go back to watching television just to help pay for such events. I submit that there is no rational person on the planet who would not watch such events. No, not one rational person would be anywhere other than glued to the spectacle. The official sponsorship and advertisements are sure to be an added bonus.

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:What's performance enhancing?

[lq_x_pl]

Vice ran an interesting article where the author ran some tests to see what the effect of pot on video gaming was. Not particularly scientific, but the anecdotal results are interesting enough.
I expect that for each for those, there's a point where the benefits of consumption are overwhelmed by the intensifying effect of the drug. AKA, a little helps, a lot hurts. The same holds true for alcohol's impact on one's ability to solve problems creatively (anecdotally, at least).

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's performance enhancing?

[QilessQi]

Technically, caffeine is not a drug: it's a major food group.

Adderall?... Complicted.

[Carewolf]

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.

Drug use should be mandatory

[meta-monkey]

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?

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.

End of "professional" gaming?

[Nidi62]

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.

Re:Please Stop

[DroolTwist]

A sport doesn't have to involve 6'8" men who weigh 285 lbs with 8% bodyfat. And given the fact that it is 'e'Sport, how physical can it get? These guys spend 1000s of hours honing skills and reaction times, so in reference to training, for what they do they put in just as much time and effort as the 'athletes' you speak of.

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.

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:Please Stop

[Fire_Wraith]

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.

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.

Re:Seriously?

[Austerity Empowers]

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.