WCG Tournament Director Admits Drugs In E-Sports 448
SlappingOysters writes "In the lead up to the World Cyber Games finals in Germany, Gameplayer has an incredible interview with Tournament Director Alex Walker in which he freely admits knowledge of participants taking illegal drugs to enhance their performance. The interview came in response to a previous article by the site in which they examined whether there was a need to bring drug testing into professional gaming events to ensure a level playing field. Walker said, 'I've seen a number of players at national tournaments who came in "baked" (that's stoned for the uninformed) purely so they could play better. In most cases they did, although obviously they couldn't just pull out another joint midway through. In one WCG, a player I knew took amphetamines an hour before his match to boost his reflexes.'"
Effects of Cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
'I've seen a number of players at national tournaments who came in "baked" (that's stoned for the uninformed) purely so they could play better. In most cases they did ...
Um, I'm not a regular drug user but how are the effects of Cannabis [wikipedia.org] beneficial to gaming?
Acute effects while under the influence include euphoria, increased appetite, anxiety, short-term memory loss, and circulation effects which may increase risks of heart attacks.
I understand how drugs that affect your nervous system -- like uppers -- can increase your reaction time and muscle twitching for those games involving twitch skills. And nobody can shred on a guitar like an coked up hair band [youtube.com] ... but how does a drug that made my college roommate double up in laughter and fail at communication make someone better at video games?
Baked (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
Best guess? If you spend all your free time practicing the game while high, you're more accustomed to playing it that way. Playing it when you're not high entails a different playing experience to overcome. Not so much that smoking a joint helped them play better because of the effects of the drug, but it got them to a more "normal" state to play the game.
Re:To What End? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no 'should' about it. Illicit drugs are banned by definition - that's what 'illicit' means. Legalise all drugs and suddenly there's no such thing as an illicit drug.
why drugs in any sporting event are bad (Score:3, Insightful)
because now it is not a display of human mastery, now it is a display of biochemical mastery
this is not some subtle philosophical point, because the followup point is that the emotional connection with the competitors is what drives audience attention, and that emotional connection is lost as people will tune out when they think it is the drug performing, rather than the athlete
any sport that openly accept drug enhancement is a sport that will see its ratings drop.
of course there will always be cheating, of course this means we must wage constant war, constant arms race, forever, on drugs in sports. this is simply the price you pay to retain interest in the sport
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
Cannabis can certainly be beneficial in not only "gaming", but anything where there is undo pressure on you. The calming effect on your nerves, on your racing mind, on your anxiety can potentially be much more of a positive than the "bad side effects" are negative.
Don't believe the propaganda.
Re:Baked? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was more annoyed at the clumsy parenthetical aside explaining what it meant.
Re:Marijuana isn't a performance enhancer, jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a sweeping blanket statement that comes from uninformed bigotry. I've never had the munchies, I've never gotten paranoid, and I certainly don't giggle. Neither has anyone else that I have had a smoking experience with. These are horribly inaccurate stereotypes thrown out there to make it seem like Marijuana being illegal is less ridiculous than it really is.
Sure, it has its undesirable side effects. So does drinking too much coffee. And to say that there can't possibly be any good effects from pot are only spoken by the sheep. The problem ultimately is, only the people who smoke will know what they are... because people like you have your mind made up, and nothing in the world can change it.
Re:Marijuana isn't a performance enhancer, jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been smoking marijuana since I was 12, am now 36, and work for one of the top hardware/software companies in the world running other people's Wintel backends. Today in my home office I'm building several servers remotely, attending meetings, and taking emergency calls. For further reference, see the excellent Penn and Teller show Bullshit!, episode The War on Drugs, especially the sections on the stock trader who works on the NYSE floor. He smokes several joints daily, all of which are provided by the US Federal Government for his possibly fatal bone spurs. There really are professionals out in the world who smoke quite regularly, even as often as several times a day.
Jonah Hex
Drugs vs Mechanical diff. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is the "playing field" in any way "level"? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but the majority of us simply aren't built to compete in sports any more. How can I compete with Michael Phelps's body, that's designed for swimming [wikipedia.org]? Sure, training helps, but the current top-level competitions are accessible only to those genetically suited for them. The Olympics might have had some relevance back in the Greek days, when you could look at the athletes and say "well, if I trained hard, I could run as fast as these guys". These days, there is no amount of training that can let me swim as fast as Phelps or run as fast as Bolt. So what's the point? All these athletes are necessarily "freaks" now, and the only way to beat them is to become a bigger freak.
Re:To What End? (Score:2, Insightful)
While I think illicit drugs should definitely be banned
Why?
I think drugs should be outlawed
Why?
Re:To What End? (Score:3, Insightful)
Illicit drugs should be legalized, at which point the gamers association will have nothing to prohibit. Problem solved.
Re:Common knowledge for "pro-gamers" (Score:0, Insightful)
I hoping the pro-gaming won't "start getting some real ad dollars behind it" any time soon then. I love playing stoned and I love doing it at tournaments. And I don't even care what my opponents are taking. No drug is able to perform instead of you.
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds like a reasonable explanation if you're assuming that they really are trying to improve gameplay through the effects of the drug. I haven't toked up in ~7 years, but I used to game stoned a lot. I was convinced that it improved my focus and can't entirely throw that assessment away now - I would get lost in the game. Maybe being stoned helped, maybe not - I never did any kind of comparison 'cuz I'd toke up before playing every single time.
Perhaps a more likely cause for smoking before playing tournament though:
* A lot of games (most?) are just more fun stoned.
* It's easy to game for endless hours while you're baked.
* If you play for a huge amount of time, you're going to get good (baked or not).
* If all of your experience with the game was spent stoned, you're going to want to be in the same state of mind while competing that you were when "practicing".
* So, you smoke before a tournament and achieve the same level of success that you've experienced at home.
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Effects of Cannabis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Marijuana isn't a performance enhancer, jackass (Score:1, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head my friend.
I have been smoking everyday from about age 19. I am now 27. I graduated from RPI with a degree in software engineering and now hold a 6 figure software development job.
I HATE it when I get grouped in with the "stoners" who have no direction and no ambition in life, who use weed as an excuse for their lifestyle. Face it people, these individuals would have turned out like this with or without weed.
Re:To What End? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why? Because that's all he's ever known. It's only natural that he can't imagine a world where free choice is tolerated, let alone respected and cherished as it should be -- regardless of whether that choice has a positive or negative effect on the chooser.
As an experiment, try explaining to an average person how drug prohibition causes the violent crime rate to skyrocket by creating lucrative black markets and all the reckless injustice they bring. He will look at you as if you're a nutcase, and for good reason: all his life he's been taught that it is the lack of drug prohibition that causes violence, and you just came along and told him he's fallen for a load of bullshit.
Re:Drugs vs Mechanical diff. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not necessarily mechanical vs. drugs, it's more about the intention. There's nothing wrong with taking a drug to get someone back to what would be considered "normal health." It's not a total ban on drugs. They're not going to suspend a football player for taking aspirin or anything like that. It's definitely not a clear-cut line, which makes the whole debate that much more complicated.
At the end of the day, there's very strong evidence that steroids and the like have some really significant and unhealthy side-effects. And while I generally believe that people should be free to mistreat their bodies in whatever way they wish, there's a lot of good reasons that we as a society frown upon that sort of drug-use in sports. Beyond the appeal to "fairness", there's also the reality that star athletes are often role models for younger athletes, and as such their behavior can change the behavior of children.
But I do think your comment leads towards an interesting questions. What would be the NFL's response if a quarterback with perfectly normal vision decided to get LASIK surgery to enhance their vision well beyond a normal human's sight? As our technological ability to manipulate our bodies in more mechanical ways increases, then this sort of thing will become an issue. Especially if it starts to move into modifications that have some serious side-effects or health risks.
Re:To What End? (Score:3, Insightful)
Effects of Cannabis! (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, this is analogous to a well known psychological effect known as state-dependent recall.
The effect specifically refers to the improved retrieval from long term memory experienced when the memory retrieval takes place in the same mind-state (in this example, of drug influence) that the memory was deposited in....
But my own experience of gaming while stoned will attest to a very similar (and strikingly simple) revelation, not strictly limited to memory retrieval: When you learn to play a game stoned, you play that game better while stoned.
Re:How is the "playing field" in any way "level"? (Score:4, Insightful)
> What if Phelps had his hands surgically altered so he had webbed fingers,
> and got fingertip extensions so he could hit the pool wall a split-second
> faster? It perverts the message that sports is supposed to be about.
Oh? But he does have these alterations! His feet are size 14, practically flippers, giving him much stronger kicks and making him faster. He has very long arms too, which are handy not only for touching the wall sooner, but for extending the length of his power stroke. Both of these are far more significant than a what a simple drug injection would give. So what were you saying about "perverting the message"?
> It's supposed to be about achievement, not competition.
Then why do we give out medals? The Olympics is very specifically a competition, with the winners getting the gold and the losers getting ignored.
> Any game needs firmly established rules so you know where to draw the line at cheating.
If it's about achievement and not competition, what do you care about cheating? You are not competing, are you?
> "trying hard will make anyone perform better than not trying."
> If you let the drugs in then that message gets distorted with
> "you can achieve the same results with less effort by finding things that make the problem easier to solve."
Why is that worse than "you can achieve the same results easier and get further than anyone else by having the right genese"? Does it really matter whether you are born with the enhancement, like Phelps was, or have to take one as a supplement? And compare this with a diabetic, who has to inject insulin to stay healthy. Is he an inferior person because he is "cheating" on his metabolism?
> most people will hear that message and think that sneaking notes
> into a test or copying an essay off the internet is the same thing.
Isn't it? Suppose one man passed all his tests honestly and got a 4.0 GPA, which got him a good job and a decent income. Another man cheated on all his tests, got the same 4.0 GPA, and then got himself the same job and income for a lot less effort. The cheater is obviously more efficient, since he got more with less effort. Sure, he didn't educate himself as much as the other guy, you might say, but if all you want is enough money, that is irrelevant. There will always be more hardworking suckers to exploit, who'll cry that these actions are unfair and immoral, but the cheater will get a management job, lots of money, and a trophy wife, while the hard worker will hang out on Slashdot and spend the rest of his childless life complaining bitterly. Darwin says the cheater wins.
Statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
In a skill based game, your chances of winning aren't 1/2... Unless WC3 is what you call flipping a coin... War Coin III!
Re:Effects of Cannabis! (Score:3, Insightful)
This obviously explains why I play pool better when drinking and I suck at it while sober.