Competitive online videogame competitions, commonly referred to as eSports, has been exploding in popularity over the last decade. Most notably, Epic Games hosted their first World Cup for Fortnite, which had an astounding prize pool of $30,000,000 USD. As mentioned in another blog post, the event’s winner, Kyle “Bugha” Giersdorf, a 16-year old (at the time of winning) American Fortnite player, took home $3,000,000 USD. The infographic below gives a comparison of Bugha’s winnings over other major sports tournaments winners' prize money.
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| Courtesy of Statista |
With prize pools the size of Fortnite’s World cup, cheating is inevitable. Explicit forms of cheating include using software and doping. However, game developers have made numerous efforts and have been quite successful at catching cheaters.
Over time, players found more creative ways to “cheat” in online competitions. Notably, prior to the Fortnite World Cup, players had to qualify in a span of 10 weeks in order to attend the main event. Qualifying for the World Cup was no small feat: you were guaranteed $50,000 USD in prize money. In week 3, the Fortnite community found an unusual occurrence between two players: XXiF and Ronaldo where they seemed to be feeding off of kills in an attempt to boost their points. Fortnite’s publisher, Epic Games, investigated the issue, concluded that there was collusion. Both players were banned for two weeks.
As Thomas Carson writes in Lying, Deception, and Related Concepts, deception is “intentionally causing someone to have false beliefs” while also stating that “in order to lie, one must make a false statement”. Looking at XXiF and Ronaldo’s case, neither of them was a bullshitter: they weren’t spreading false information, but they were both deceiving the Fortnite community. After being exposed, neither one of them claimed that they were “boosting”. Unfortunately, they are the only ones who truly know the integrity of their statements and it is unlikely that we will ever know if they were lying.
"Deception is intentionally causing someone to have false beliefs"
With this in mind, I wondered if deceivers ‘evolve’ into liars after being exposed, assuming that they will lie in order to keep their name clean and to avoid further drama. If you knowingly were deceiving someone and were exposed for it, would you reject the claim (and thus be lying in the process) in order to minimize the consequences or would you be willing to expose yourself and possibly stir more drama and problems?
Hi William,
ReplyDeleteYour use of graphics, videos, and bolded quotes helped break up the article. I also liked how you ended the article by asking the reader to think about the topic. To make it stronger, I think you can introduce the concept of bullshitter to the reader before referencing it. Outside readers might be familiar with the terminology and what we mean when we use this word in this course.
Great formatting and an interesting, unique topic! I liked the ending and how it was an open question for the audience. Some questions I have after reading the article are: were they actually lying? You mentioned they deceived the Fortnite community so I'm kind of confused as to what happened. Also, I think clarifying on a lot of the terminology used would be helpful - for example, "boosting." It was kind of hard to follow the flow of the article sometimes due to this and a lack of context.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this post. The topic is interesting and the visual aids were effective. I would find a way to mention Carson's reading earlier--perhaps in the introduction? I think the bolded quote is powerful; it could be used earlier. Video games are a hard topic considering the word limit; you need a lot of background information. I'm not sure what "feeding off of kills" means in this context, for example. I would pay particular attention to this.
ReplyDeleteYou did a good job with readability! I appreciated the short paragraphs and succinct writing.
As someone who very loosely follows eSports, I found your post very interesting and I learned some things that I had not known about. One thing that I would change would be to introduce Carson earlier and try to make a stronger connection / argument with him. There is a strong relation between your topic and Carson's thoughts but I wish you would have expanded on it farther.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting article. It was fascinating to me that you opined how there might exist a slippery slope between deceiving and lying, which lead to my own internal dialogue on how one such behavior would lead to the other and what motivational factors might be involved. While the video you included was an interesting look into the game of Fortnite, one that included more information on how the players were found out rather than one exploring their style of play would be more insightful. The introduction of Carson's work earlier in your post might also help cohesion.
ReplyDeleteHi William,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your post and your choice of visuals and videos were helpful in understanding the situation. Personally I do not follow the eSports scene for Fortnite but I follow other games like League of Legends. It was cool looking at another side of eSports that I am not familiar with. I especially like the title and the first paragraph as it hooks the audience with the huge prize pool. Most people don't realize how big eSports scene actually is and you not only showed that but related it to our class material as well.