Doping in eSports: Need for a Techno Legal Synchrony

Abstract

Mankind has taken its due course of time to evolve to what we are today biologically, but technologically, we have advanced at a pace that cannot be matched. There is an ongoing debate as to whether eSports should even be considered as sports (Todt et al. in J Hum Sport Exerc, 2020, https://doi.org/10.14198/jhse.2020.15.Proc1.10) but with the increase in number of professional tournaments being held and investments flowing, eSports are practically similar to physical sports. Recently Intel even announced a professional tournament for Street fighter V and Rocket league, in collaboration with the International Olympic association, called Intel World Open, which was supposed to be a pre-Olympic event for Tokyo 2020 (The tournament has now been shifted to 2021 due to the ongoing pandemic COVID-19). The field of eSports also suffer from problems that physical sports do, and one of the major problems is cheating by doping. Since there is a difference in physical sports and eSports in the way they are played, the doping methods are very different as in the former more strength and/or agility enhancing doping agents are used to cheat, while in the latter its mostly mental ability enhancing dopants. Along with such traditional doping, eSports also suffers from the problem of mechanical doping, as a participant in eSports is a combination of a machine and the human, thus, unlike physical sports, anti-doping regulations of WADA or NADA are not adequately efficient in eSports. Although there exists multinational organisations such as ESIC or the IeSF, there is a lack of uniformity that most physical sports enjoy. IeSF, the body with the greatest number of national federations as members, applies WADA regulations as a whole, even though many of those regulations can have zero effect on the performance of a player in eSports. There is a need for a single International eSports Regulatory authority/federation for which inspiration can be drawn from other regulatory authorities like FIDE or FIFA. The paper seeks to understand the impact of doping in eSports and suggest some solution(s) for the same.