To protect the integrity of the esports industry, we must first look within ourselves. All stakeholders and community members need to be integrous when no one is looking. Game publishers need to care enough about gameplay integrity to invest sufficient resources towards innovating anti-cheat software and empowering their QA departments so that games are not overrun with cheaters and exploits. Tournament organizers should set clear rules and be swift, fair, and congruent in their enforcement. Everyone in the industry, from the game developers to the event staff, to the coaches and the players should be compensated fairly and treated with respect so that there is more to lose from cheating than there is to gain.
For an example, we need only look back on the ‘Black Sox’ baseball scandal of the 1919 World Series. There is something to be said about what can motivate a perfectly reasonable professional athlete to resort to cheating. In his testimony before the grand jury, Eddie Cicotte tearfully admitted involvement in the scandal, which was to throw the World Series, saying, “I don’t know why I did it…I needed the money. I had the wife and kids.” (Andrews, 2014)
We have come a long way from the early 1900s when some of the best professional sports players also worked in coal mines to pay the bills (“Jake Daubert: A miner in the majors,” n.d.). The esports industry can afford to pay all stakeholders more than enough to make a living.
Put simply, if the esports industry continues to promote gameplay and financial integrity, cheating will become increasingly risky and less attractive to everyone. It isn’t enough to make penalties harsher. We need to make the sustained rewards of maintaining integrity outweigh the short-term benefits of cheating and corruption.
REFERENCES
Andrews, E. (2014, October 9). What was the 1919 ‘Black Sox’ baseball scandal? HISTORY.
https://www.history.com/news/black-sox-baseball-scandal-1919-world-series-chicago
Jake Daubert: A miner in the majors. (n.d.). Baseball Hall of Fame.
https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/short-stops/jake-daubert-miner-in-majors