The following is an excerpt from The Most Dangerous Fantasy Game, a staple in the imaginary short story canon:

For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said slowly, "No. You are wrong, sir. The Giant Mudcrab is not the most dangerous big game." He sipped his mead. "Here in my preserve on this island," he said in the same slow tone, "I hunt more dangerous game."

Oh, so dragons.

Yes! Dragons! I was going to fake you out and say 'Man' but you caught on. Well done. Weird.

The dragon in the mirror

Short fiction in the Elder Scrolls universe would likely reflect less of man s existential concern with the self, and more of man s existential concern with being incinerated by an ancient, winged lizard-beast.

Through hours and hours of leveling up, finding gear, and building relationships, you can even the odds, somewhat. But, gosh dang, I am sick of dragons. They re always getting into my garden, pulverizing my cabbages (and also my house). It s time for an open season.

So, let s go dragon hunting! First, though, you ll need a gun. Spells and arrows won t do here.

Lock and load

Check out Project Flintlock, a mod that adds a few guns to Skyrim. Install is fairly simple. Just extract the meshes, textures, and sound folders, plus the Project Flintlock.esp file to your Skyrim/data install directory. After that, you just need to make sure the mod is checked in the Skyrim launcher under Data Files.

The total feature set includes:

• authentic flintlock rifle, blunderbuss, and grenade launcher, animated and rigid
• ammo with different damage values
• three different bayonets (short, long, sword) for the flintlock rifle
• new location with new models and items
• custom sounds and new effects for each weapon type
• the weapons are craftable, enchantable, upgradeable, follower friendly
• an optional ammo add-on with 15 new bullet types

The animations aren t perfect, and it becomes fairly obvious that they re just reskinned, stat-modified bows and arrows, but I m willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of dragon population control. Here s a quick look at all three:

Dragons for dinner

Alright, it's time to head out. Bring your jacket? License? Good, good. First, we ll need to find some kind of evidence that a dragon has been nearby. You see, the key to dragon hunting is—

Never mind! 

Let s see how it takes to the musket.

Well, shoot, for lack of a better term. That's not much damage at all. The big dog hardly flinched. And I got breathed on by cold stuff! And it smelled really bad, not like those gum commercials would make you think. Caught a whiff of dead goat, corrupt jarl, and—what's that? Cabbages! It's time to end this.

Let's not waste any more time. 

Oh god. What have I done?

Save the dragons

Ah, dang. I'm reflecting on my actions, feeling consequence, guilt, and all that jazz. I thought this was about extrinsic danger, but now I m all worried about who I am and becoming a monster . I mean, the dragons are sentient, yeah? And when I was just using the powers and gear I earned, we were sort of duking it out on fair terms. Turns out Skyrim might also have its fair share of folks thinking about how messed up humanity might be, looking in the mirror, gaunt-eyed, crying and whatnot. Going to liberal arts schools. Can t escape short fiction in Skyrim. So, without further adieu, the revelation:

Maybe dragons aren t the most dangerous game.

Maybe, we re the most dangerous game.

Or maybe, Project Flintlock is just dumb fun, especially in a game that you might have already explored, head to toe.

Despite drop-in drop-out co-op becoming more common, such as in recent games like Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed Unity, the upcoming Doom won't allow friends to join for a cooperative experience in the campaign mode. The lack of campaign co-op was confirmed when I spoke with Marty Stratton, Doom's Executive Producer, at QuakeCon on Saturday. But that's not quite the end of the story.

For co-op experiences, players will have to stick to maps created in SnapMap, Doom's modding utility.

Speaking of both SnapMap and campaigns, I also asked Stratton if SnapMap could be used to create custom single-player campaigns. "Yes," he said. Then added: "In a sense. You create a level experience, and then to create a campaign-type thing you would link those [levels] together in, like, a playlist."

"You wouldn't necessarily carry weapons from one level to the next," said Stratton. "The author could set it up knowing you have this set of weapons as you go into this next component. It's little bit more like a playlist."

While that doesn't really sound like a true campaign experience as much as it does a group of individual maps played in a certain order, Stratton indicated that it may change in the time before the game's release. "This is probably something we'll think about for future iterations."

At Quakecon's Doom panel on Saturday, the leaders of the development team at id Software took the stage to talk about their experience with creating the new Doom over the last several years. The focus for the entire team has been movement—the better the movement was working, they said, the better the game was shaping up. The action should be so smooth and so fast, art director Hugo Martin said, that players should "feel like Bruce Lee with a shotgun on a skateboard."

"We wanted to focus on these traditional id roots," multiplayer producer Brad Bramlett said. When the game is fast and fluid, "it's exactly what we wanted it to be, so there's no better feeling than that."

Robert Duffy, chief technology officer at id, mentioned that Doom's development began when they took the player movement framework from RAGE and doubled it. This dedication to speed also drove the adoption of the glory kills, the brutal hand-to-hand finishing moves that drew a lot of attention during Quakecon last year. The core loop of gameplay is known by id as "push-forward combat," so anything that makes players slow down and pause is immediately removed. This ethos also led to abandoning regenerative health. "Not having regnerative health isn't a random choice, it stems from movement," executive producer Marty Stratton said. "Movement is king and you don't want players stopping to regenerate health, you want them moving forward to see the resources of the game. That also leads to needing a lot of skill for players to get through the game."

Glory kills also give the player health and ammo pickups in greater volumes than players would see for simply shooting an enemy. "Speed is also the key of the glory kill. It was part of that seamless movement, you never want to have the action interrupted. We figured out a while ago that 600-700 miliseconds is the right amount of time to start and finish it." The game's speed is so dialed up that major parts of it are taking place in fractions of a second. For fans of old-school shooters, this focus on speed and mayhem will be a defining aspect of the return of Doom.

Doom will be available for alpha and beta testing over the next nine months as it heads toward a final release in spring 2016. For more details, check out all of our news from Quakecon.

Guillermo Del Toro hasn't had the best of luck with game development. The acclaimed horror/fantasy/giant mech suits director has been involved with a few projects over the years, and not one has escaped the might of the cancelhammer. The latest was Silent Hills, where he was working with Metal Gear Solid auteur and sausage fan Hideo Kojima. That's not happening anymore because, well, we don't know why—but Del Toro has said that the pair still plan to work on a new project.

Speaking to IGN, Del Toro said that "I love working with Kojima-san. We are still in touch. We are still friends and working into doing something together, but that s not going to be [Silent Hills]".

We obviously don't know what that something is going to be, but I've fed both names into the PC Gamer Speculotron and it's come up with three firm suggestions. 1: a game adaptation of Del Toro's enjoyably weird, not entirely shit vampire drama The Strain. 2: Not-Silent Not-Hills. A new horror game starring The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus that bears absolutely no relation to Konami's spooky series. 3: A conservatory. The pair's new project is to build a conservatory.

In the interview, Del Toro also hinted at the kind of game Silent Hills could have been. Sniff.

"We were in the planning stages, and it s a shame it s not going to happen. We were talking about really pushing the boundaries of the new consoles, and making the game really mess with your head. One of the great moments in Metal Gear [Solid] was Psycho Mantis. The idea that a game can actually interact with you, and stuff like that."

A reminder: Del Toro was a bit annoyed at Konami's cancellation of Silent Hills.

This diary was originally published back in 2007, when this site was just a cosy corner of CVG. We're republishing it here a few entries at a time, every Saturday. You can find the rest of the entries here.

Tom has since switched careers to game development, and is now making a space game of his own, Heat Signature.

Day 22: The year of hell

The only thing that mitigated the damage of Plan Omega was that I'd planned it so badly in other ways too: I hadn't saved enough money to buy that many research centers, so my week-on-week losses weren't as bad as I'd intended them to be. And because it had completely nullified all my research centers, rendering even the new ones useless, the main drain on my finances was gone, and I was eventually able to crawl all the way back up to the lofty heights of negative five hundred billion credits. Nice plan, Paul Davies, Mutilator of Worldsblood. Real masterstroke.

It had blown my ETA out of the water, my entire civilisation loathed me, and all three enemy races had stepped up their invasions in the meantime. I lost at least one planet every turn, including two major research worlds. The only thing that saved me from total annihilation was a minor plan I executed in the first thirty weeks of the onslaught: building extra farms on my most valuable planets. We couldn't make war, but dammit we could make love, and the booming population on those worlds saved several from the repeated invasions of the Terrans. One even survived the Drengin ultra-transports for a time.

Worlds fell, billions died, the last of the Ultraprawns exploded, and the ETA ticked down with an agonising slowness. It almost looked like it might be close. But now that I was out of debt and researching away, my academic expenses stacked on top of my debt repayments, and I had to scale back my research efforts to save money. This was more or less the opposite of the idea behind Plan Omega, so you can imagine the bitterness with which I dragged that slider down and watched the ETA climb week-by-week until my colonies would just about be making a profit.

I was at a standstill. It was agonising. Plan Omega had cost me almost exactly as much as it had gained me, and the unrest, instability and steady hemorrhaging of major planets was increasing my ETA as fast as the passage of time was reducing it. In the ebb and flow of those two factors grinding against each other, my destruction was constantly getting closer, even as my ascendance to godhood was slipping away.

But in the end it wasn't close. I won by miles.

Day 23: Rising above it all

Before I explain what ultimately tipped the balance, I would like to pen an open letter to the Drengin Empire, just to demonstrate that with Godhood comes understanding, and with understanding comes peace.

Dear Drengin Empire,

HA! HOW D'YOU LIKE THEM TRANSCENDENT SPACE-APPLES? HOW DO THEY TASTE IN YOUR STUPID FAT GERBIL FACES? DIVINE?! THAT'S BECAUSE I'M A GOD.

Sincerely,

Paul Davies Mutilator of Worldsblood

The key was in the fact that I'd already lost most of my best research planets. I'd assumed that because I was losing planets at a steady or increasing rate, my research ability would go down at a steady or increasing rate. But after losing a few good planets, that rate-of-being-screwed was artificially high. It actually leveled out after that: my ETA ticked down week-by-week for the last fifteen turns.

But it was a mega-event that gave me my final break, and saved at least one of my last remaining major knowledge-factories. Because the mega-event was this: sex.

Some kind of miasma spread across the galaxy and made everyone ultra-fertile. We Spectres were already the most reproductive society in the galaxy by a factor of two, so we benefited from this twice as much as anyone else at exactly the time we needed it. The Terrans, who rely on successive small invasions to wear a planet down, never conquered another world. We just screwed the losses away before they could get another ship to us, even at warp 9. Once the ETA got to single digits, it was clear no-one could stop me. I don't even know if they realised I was going for a tech victory—the furious onslaught they inflicted on me may have actually been them biding their time.

The other myth about tech victories is that they're anti-climactic. This was excruciatingly tense, and GalCiv is great at letting you enjoy the moment of victory. It gives you one turn after you've technically won in which to put your affairs in order. I dropped my tax-rate to zero, making everyone 100% happy, and ceased all production and research. Our work was done, forever.

But it still didn't seem like enough. So I opened up a dialog with the Drengin, and gave them everything I had. All my influence, trade goods, technology and all planets except my homeworld. In return I asked for 1bc, and I very nearly clicked Offer. But then I looked at their sneering Gerbil-jerk faces one more time, and switched my comms channel to the Vegans, and gave it all to them.

The Vegans can deal with the invasions now, we don't need planets where we're going.

Four different minor races were discovered in the course of that game, and mysteriously all of them were called The Vegans. The Drengin destroyed two of them, I destroyed one. I didn't know about this fourth one until they came up in my comm menu, and had no idea what they were like—one race of Vegans had been utterly evil, the other two had been lovely (I think I even extorted money out of them once). But I gave them everything anyway, and took my 1bc coin gratefully.

I finally renamed my last remaining world to Bongolia, clicked the Turn button for the last time, sat back and watched a really rather wonderful cut-scene showing our people transcending into pure energy, lifting off our world in a soft white inverted rain.

Then the game crashed.

Post-script: What the Drengin were doing

Rather appropriately, I finally understood the Drengin's bizarre behaviour just as I was about to acquire total understanding of the universe itself. They did three mysterious things in the course of this six-week game, but there's actually a pretty good explanation for them all. This is fictionalising—it's probably not how GalCiv's AI actually thinks - but it makes a surprising amount of sense.

1. Why did they destroy my ships, but almost never invade?It sure as hell wasn't the Bongolian Ultraprawns—towards the end they smashed right through them and rained troops down on me. But again, still not as fiercely as you might expect. And shortly before I would have been wiped out, they stopped entirely.

2. Why did they declare war, then vote for peace?They threatened, extorted, attacked and bullied me the whole game, then voted to end all wars—all of which were against me. Then they were the first to declare war on me in the new peace. What the hell were they playing at?

3. Why did they stay in an alliance with the Terrans for so long?The Yor seem fairly logical partners for the Drengin, but the Terran are simpering diplomats. Why did the Drengin stay pals with them?

It was mystery number 2 that turned out to be the key. They wanted galactic peace, but they were more than happy to be at war with me. So it wasn't our war they wanted to end: they wanted the Terrans and the Yor to stop attacking me. They couldn't persuade them to do that because the Terrans had all the diplomatic clout, but they dominated the United Planets vote with their vast population.

But why did they want to call the (human and robot) dogs off? It evidently wasn't to take my planets for themselves, because they still refused to invade me. The answer was actually in this screenshot, from Day 16, and I should have spotted it then. Everyone but me is in an alliance—an alliance formed by the Terrans. If I'm destroyed, the Terrans immediately win an alliance victory for having united all the remaining races. The Drengin would be part of the resulting alliance, but they're warmongers: they want a conquest victory, not to play second fiddle in someone else's alliance win. They had to win by crushing everyone. And that meant keeping me alive for the time being.

This was delicious. All those times I spat in their faces, threatened them with nothing to back it up, stole their best planets and refused their offers of peace, they must have been dying to crush me. I'd flattered myself to think that my bravado had spooked them into assuming I had some secret weapon, but in fact it's a testament to just how much I was irritating them that they attacked me at all. Their path to victory utterly depended on my survival, and they still couldn't resist slaughtering a few billion of my people. The whole game their aggressive nature and their strategic judgement had been in a heated conflict, and time and time again I'd tempted them to lose their patience.

The more I understood about what had been going on while I dicked around with ridiculous ship names and insulted everyone, the more I realised this had been the Drengin and Terran show all along. They were just using me as a pawn. The Terran's superb diplomatic ability had allowed them to inherit the empires of several races that surrendered early, and form an alliance with all the remaining ones except me. I became a crucial piece in their galactic chess game by being such an insufferable prick that even the gladhanding Terran leader wasn't prepared to offer me an alliance.

The Drengin probably signed on early, when their unison would allow them to be even more audacious in attacking the other superpowers, but soon found themselves in a sticky situation. As huge as they were, the one thing that could defeat the Drengin outright was an alliance of the Terrans and the Yor. The Federation and the Borg. And if they left the alliance, that's exactly what they'd be up against. They had the lion's share of the galaxy's planets, so they could build up their army faster than their allies combined, so they were just biding their time until they were strong enough to take both of them on. We might have been weeks from that happening.

The trouble was, the Terrans were smarter. They specialised in a weapons tech the Drengin had no defenses against, and focused their own defense research on the weapon type the Drengin used. They were preparing for the betrayal they knew was coming, and once they were ready for it, they hammered me. The Drengin saw the writing on the wall and followed suit, wanting to claim as much of my carcass as they could before they broke the alliance for the final confrontation.

Unfortunately for them, that was just as I was on the cusp of a technology that would render all this irrelevant. But you can't blame them for underestimating me—even I didn't think I was a threat to them for most of the game.

My big hope for The Elder Scrolls VI: Elsweyr (I also hope that it's called that, and it's set in cat-people land Elsweyr) is that it's more systemic, more reactive and even more sandboxy than previous games in the series. Bethesda could start by re-introducing hauntings and NPC mourning, two features that, as it turns out, were cut from Skyrim. Modder vagonumero12 has dug through the game files, discovered the relevant code, and modded them back into the game.

Here's how haunting and mourning were supposed to work, according to the modder, before Bethesda scrapped the embryonic features.

"Haunting: when a unique NPC with family dies, there will be a random chance that it will—after some time—"resurrect" as a ghost that will follow a relative for the rest of the game. Only NPCs with generic voice files (don't expect to see Ulfric as a ghost), and only a single NPC in the whole save. You won't be able to fill Skyrim with ghosts (it was left like that by Bethesda).

Mourning: when a unique NPC with family or friends dies, their relatives/friends will do some comment about their loss to you on their hello dialogues."

The features don't appear to have been developed very much before they were cut, but Bethesda did get their voice actors to record some of that "my relative died, I'm well sad" dialogue. All of the 'random NPC' voice actors appear to have been asked to record these lines, including, weirdly, the ones that supplied the voices for Skyrim's children. Hear some kids lament the loss of their husbands and daughters here.

You can download vagonumero12's Haunting and Mourning mod here. (Thanks, Kotaku.)

Popular YouTuber Dave Bennett recently published instructions on how to make Half-Life run on Android Wear. While a smartwatch screen is rather small for such an epic game, the idea of getting Valve s sacred shooter running on a wearable device just sounds really cool.

Trying to play a game on Android wear is a nightmare within itself, Bennett admits. The app offers touchscreen controls, but on a 1.65 inch screen, they are almost impossible to use. Also, swiping to the left causes the screen to go back to the previous window.

Despite the small frame, he admitted that Half-Life runs better than expected. The frame count ranges from 30 FPS to a mere 2 FPS, the latter of which is due to graphics-heavy affects like special lightening and lava. Honestly, that should be expected with today s wearables hardware.

To get Half-Life up and running, gamers need to original Half-Life game, the SDLash Apk and Extras.7z. The steps include enabling USB debugging, installing SDLash3D and creating the Xash and Valve folders. Bennett said that transferring the Half-Life files over to the Android Wear device will take around two hours.

In addition to Android Wear, Bennett said in his blog that he s currently working on a port of Half-Life for Android. Take note that Valve and Nvidia have already published Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One and Portal. Like the unofficial Doom and Quake games on Android, Bennett will likely provide the ported engine and customers will provide the data files from the retail version of the games.

Valve Software s original Half-Life game launched on November 1998 using a modified version of the Quake engine called GoldSrc. The game follows Gordon Freeman, a theoretical physicist, as he escapes a research facility and discovers what his teleportation experiment has unleashed in the real world. The game has spawned an even more popular sequel along with Episodes One and Two.  

I m hiding under my baseball cap as I walk into the theater inside the Metreon, a blue block of a building that Sony dropped on San Francisco in the late 90s. It s an appropriate setting. The Metreon once housed a big, unpopular arcade I frequented in college, but under Westfield s ownership it s now just a theater, a Target, and some restaurants. And I m here to see Pixels, the Adam Sandler film about arcade classics come to destroy Earth. This is their revenge.

I use a machine to buy my ticket, waving it on as it hangs on the screen displaying my order. I grab the ticket and lower my cap. This is fun. I feel like a spy. I even brought a notebook. Do people take notes while reviewing movies? I don t know. This is my first movie review.

I put on my 3D glasses. Why did I think I d be able to take notes in a dark theater with 3D glasses on? I tear up a little at the trailer for The Good Dinosaur. And then, Pixels. Spoilers ahead, if you care.

15 minutes into Pixels

The early-'80s opening sees young versions of all the characters go to an arcade tournament, which is apparently the only one that was ever held, and they set all the records there are to set. Young Peter Dinklage (Eddie) beats young Adam Sandler (who cares), and mocks him, as he should. We jump to present day.

Adam Sandler is the lead, of course: a Geek Squad parody manchild who was super good at arcade games way back when but has no ambition now. He falls in love with Michelle Monaghan, who s like, a Lieutenant Colonel of something. And here we go: it s that godawful nerd approval plot, where the lifelong loserman tries to prove his worth so he can sleep with an attractive woman who s otherwise too snobby to be into him. Nerds are valuable too, and if they say you re sexy you should kiss them.

Of course, Sandler only has value in this movie because aliens are literally attacking earth with real versions of the arcade games he s good at. Also, he knows the President of the United States. Kevin James plays the President of the United States.

I drink half my medium Diet Coke, being sure to shake all the ice cubes around during quiet parts to express my displeasure.

30 minutes into Pixels

Two people leave the theater. Here s what they re missing: the footage from that '80s arcade tournament was misinterpreted by aliens as a threat. As a result, they ve challenged Earth to an arcade game tournament with a televised message that aired during a rerun of One Tree Hill. Josh Gad discovers this after first checking 4chan (for the sole purpose of mentioning 4chan).

So, if Earth loses at the life-sized arcade games (we invent magic light cannons to shoot the alien arcade guys with, by the way), the aliens will destroy us all. The games have no clear rules. No one cares. There s a robot man.

Losing track of time

Eddie (Peter Dinklage) is now a convict, and desperately wants to sleep with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart in the White House. This joke comes up more than once.

But even without the promise that he can have sex with these women, Eddie agrees to fight the aliens. He uses a Pac-Man cheat code while driving a Ghost Mini Cooper, teleporting himself around New York City. This all happens off-screen and is not explained. The aliens get mad.

But no one knows the aliens are pissed off yet, so they decide to have a ball. It s a weird as hell adult prom, and Adam Sandler asks Michelle Monaghan to go with him, and she shows up in a dress, looking all good. Then, Kevin James—who, I must protest, is The President of the United States—refers to her (a Lieutenant Colonel) as a ten while standing next to his wife. The First Lady is played by Jane Krakowski, who is the best person in the film even though she does nothing. Because she does nothing.

So, Monaghan falls in love with Sandler, I guess, even though he keeps telling her that nerds are good kissers because they appreciate it more. No one pities him. I'm blowing bubbles in my Diet Coke now.

I have to pee because I drank too much Diet Coke

Did I mention that Q*Bert was given to Earth as a trophy? He was. He becomes a traitor to the aliens for some reason, and mentions that his civilization used to be peaceful before all this crap with Earth. None of this matters and no one cares. No one cares about the plot of this movie at all.

So, Adam Sandler and crew go to the mothership to face his Achilles heel: Donkey Kong. To defeat Donkey Kong, Sandler has to take the advice of a kid: stop trying to find a pattern like in Galaga or whatever, and just try to survive like you do in modern games like The Last of Us. He jumps over some barrels (it s super easy) and the aliens are like, Ahh, oh nooo! (You never actually see the aliens.)

Meanwhile, Josh Gad is still fighting on the ground. His character is a basement-dweller who s in love with Lady Lisa, a sexy arcade character who coincidentally comes to life as one of the pixel creatures attacking Earth (except she's not pixelated, she's Ashley Benson) but joins our side when he proposes to her. She never speaks.

Sadly, Lisa is killed when Adam Sandler defeats the aliens. But it s OK! Q*Bert, who again, was a trophy given to Earth by the aliens, transforms into Ashley Benson. Thank goodness. The kid who cried when he thought Q*Bert was dead earlier is fine with this. Sandler is the only one to object, but we move on because the movie is almost over.

It s implied that Peter Dinklage has sex with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart in the White House.

Q*Bert (disguised as Lady Lisa) gives birth to a litter of Q*Berts, who we see Gad coming home to. He slept with Q*Bert, in the form of Ashley Benson, and they had Q*Bert babies. That s what happens. That s the last thing in this movie, Pixels.

I can finally pee out all this Diet Coke

I knew Pixels would be bad, but I thought, at least, that there might be some silly references—maybe even some PC game references—that I could say were fun. Pixels does not care about games. They re just there. Remember Galaga? Asteroids? They re here! Some guy screwed Q*Bert!

The lazy, drooling sexism isn t funny, and neither are the game references. Pixels is a stupid and bad movie and I feel bad for going. Watch Wreck-It Ralph instead, because it s infinitely better. Wreck-It Ralph cares about where it comes from, whereas Pixels does jokes like: Have you been playing Space Invaders recently? Because you re invading my space!

I m exhausted.

When a member of North American CS:GO team Cloud9 unapologetically admitted that he and his teammates used adderall during a tournament in March, esports league ESL reacted swiftly, announcing that it would enforce randomized drug testing at its next event before it pursues a larger policy in partnership with two organizations dedicated to anti-doping practices.

An incident with performance-enhancing drugs was inevitable for esports, which are growing more than ever alongside the popularity of competitive games and livestreaming. ESL s stopgap measure of implementing random tests for ESL Cologne in August is welcome, but how will drug testing be handled going forward? How will a league like ESL react during a tournament weekend when one of its players tests positive for a banned substance?

To get further clarity on the ESL s perspective on this issue I spoke with Michal Blicharz, Managing Director Pro Gaming at ESL.

PCG: Why is the implementation of player drug testing necessary to the ESL?

Michal Blicharz: We are a company with the word sports in the name. The integrity of our competitions is paramount to what we do. We have already invested enormous amounts of resources to combat online cheating with our ESL Wire Anti Cheat software and the time has come for us to do something about performance enhancing drugs. In the past 18 months the salaries of the best esports players have risen about ten fold and the prize money aggregates per game have gone into high millions. The temptation is there for players more so than ever and it s on us to educate gamers, preserve the integrity of our competitions and, if necessary, punish those who break the rules.

"The reaction from the video games and esports industry has been overwhelmingly positive."

Do you believe that other leagues will follow your example?

Blicharz: What other leagues do is really up to them. We are of course willing to share our experiences and best practices if they reach out for help.

Is there currently, or are you planning, any retroactive investigation into teams' activities?

Blicharz: We have considered it, but we do not think that it is realistic for us to gather enough conclusive proof retrospectively. We are currently focusing our efforts on establishing good procedures for future events.

Has the ESL spoken directly with Cloud9 about the admission that its players used adderall during ESL Katowice?

Blicharz: When we first heard about this issue, we focused our energy on what we can do moving forward. This is not to say that we are indifferent to what may or may not have happened in that specific case, but it was clear that a more urgent need was to find real ways to prevent those situations from happening in the future.

As for the player himself, or his team, we are unable to retrospectively test the team for PEDs, therefore any investigation would likely prove to be inconclusive.

How has the new policy been received by teams?

Blicharz: The reaction from the video games and esports industry has been overwhelmingly positive. At the core of it, teams are interested in being provided a fair playing field.

It's also on the teams to make sure gaming is clean and I hope they will actively play their role as well.

If a player is prescribed adderall, or another drug, by a doctor, would they be permitted to use it during an ESL competition?

Blicharz: We are currently consulting with NADA on how to handle it and to learn what the best practices are that we can apply to what we do. We certainly do not want to disqualify players who have legitimate medical conditions.

Section 2.13.3 of the current ESL rulebook reads, "If a participant gets disqualified from the ESL One during an ongoing stage, all it's members get banned until the end of main event." If a player tests positive for a banned substance at an ESL event, what will happen?

Blicharz: Our league operations and legal teams are working on updating the rules, and the exact terms of all sanctions are yet to be determined. We want to treat doping like any other form of cheating. This is something our Director of League Operations should speak to, but we will very likely punish illegal doping the same way we would punish cheating in a match. In essence, those things are not different from each other as far as the integrity of the competition is concerned.

Along with incidents like the betting scandal in Counter-Strike earlier this year, do you believe there's a need for the CS scene, or esports in general, to become more mature?

Blicharz: Of course esports has to mature. It's not even 20 years old! At the same time, in many ways it's outgrown some sports that have been around almost a century. It takes time but we will get there.

Thanks for speaking with us, Michal.