Keeping eSports on the straight and narrow

With a few ethical missteps by mainly young eSports personalities recently flagging the dangers of unguided and unregulated activity, a group of eSports folks representing UK companies involved in everything from hardware manufacture and game development to competition organisation has come together to form a not-for-profit organisation titled Esports Integrity Coalition, which has the goal of being accepted as “the guardian of the integrity of eSports.”

The new organisation is distinct from the recently launched British eSports Association (see previous reports), which is a trade body representing the interests of eSports members and players, whilst the ESIC concentrates on rules for eSports and ethical guidelines.

The founders of the new body say that it aims to regulate professional eSports and wants to take responsibility for the “disruption, prevention, investigation and prosecution of all forms of cheating, including, but not limited to, match manipulation and doping.“

At present the means the organisation can or will deploy to achieve this is not clear, because unlike the British eSports Association there does not appear to be a direct association with the UK government.

Nevertheless, some impressive firms have signed up, including Intel, Plantronics, Sportradar, and the eSports League as efforts continue to bring more interested parties on board.

The organisation is headed by a lawyer, Ian Smith, who has wide and lengthy experience in ethical standards and regulations across a range of popular sports.

In a statement issued this week Smith said that there were many challenges ahead, but that he was encouraged by the fact that eSports was taking steps “in anticipation of a foreseeable problem, rather than in reaction to a crisis, which is the route taken by most traditional sports to date.”

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