The Press Box - Ep. 283: 'Achievement Oriented' on Gaming Drugs and eSports Injuries

Episode Date: March 17, 2017

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion talk to Compete writer Maddy Myers about experimenting with supplements that promise gaming benefits, covering competitive gaming's growing pains, and gender imbalance in eSports. For a full version of this episode subscribe to Achievement Oriented on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All this month, we're asking you to tell a friend about a podcast they'll love. Right now, think of a friend, your mom, anyone you care about, what podcast would they really love? I'm sure you've already recommended achievement-oriented, so try to think of something else. Got it? Now do it. Tell them about it in real life, or on the simulacrum of life that is social media. If they don't know how to subscribe to podcasts, show them how. Then tell us what you recommended with the hashtag tripod. That's T-R-Y-Pod. Thanks for spreading the word. Hello, and welcome to Achievement-oriented, the ringer's official gaming podcast. I am Jason Consumcion. I'm a staff writer at The Ringer.

And deep in the throes of pain resulting from 12 hours straight of Breath of the Wild playing in a really bad position. It's Ben Lindberg. Hi, not only that, but buried under an avalanche of snow. Well, it's not that bad. Well, I wouldn't know. I haven't been outside, but it looks bad from my window. Well, there's so much to talk about. So much. Today we're going to talk to Maddie Myers, who wrote a great story on gaming drugs.

TLDR don't take them. And Dr. Kate McGee on e-sports injuries. Yes. And we should remind everyone, since we're still on our old feed for the moment as well as our new one, if you haven't subscribed to the achievement-oriented only feed yet, you should do so. Just look it up on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts. And thanks to everyone who has rated and reviewed. P.S., we're the number.

one rated podcast and hobbies and games. As far as I know, and the last time I checked, which was several days ago. Hopefully, that's still true. Definitely iTunes ranking recancy bias, but we will take it as long as it lasts. There are a lot of hobbies out there, and we're still number one. So thanks to all of you. All right. Well, we have a lot of action to get to.

So let's skip the rest of this cutscene. Our first guest took something called Ambratos Complex and live to tell and write about the tale. She is a staff writer, I suppose, for Compete, the new e-sports venture from Kotaku and Deadspin. So I guess she's helping us extend our streak of having someone affiliated with Kataku on for four straight weeks now. It's a good website. What can we say? It's Maddie Myers.

Hey, Maddie. Hello. Yeah, it's very suspicious. Why do you keep inviting my colleagues onto your show? I noticed the pattern. But I'm a new staffer. So, you know, I had to get in on the ground floor on my guest appearance. Kataku doesn't have enough podcasts of its own.

So we are just exploiting an inefficiency here. It's true. It's true. We could stand to have several more. Yes. Yeah, I did drugs and I wrote about it on the internet. And that's how you found me. Yeah.

Let's talk about drugs. Let's talk about drugs, shall we? Yeah. Have you taken any shady, illicit compounds to enhance your performance? for this interview or is this all natural? I haven't. This is just just water and mac and cheese. That's the Maddie Myers you're getting today. But I'm really surprised that people like this story. People really enjoyed this story and I'm glad because compete is a new, it's a new vertical. And so we're trying a lot of new things there. It's only been around for about three weeks. I'm happy. I'm not dead. And I have always seen

advertisements out there for gaming supplements. I'm sure you guys have seen the occasional product that has, you know, green tea extract or other forms of caffeine is obviously popular. Different stimulants are popular. But these products, I'd never taken any of them. I didn't think they would really do anything. But I saw them and I was like, that would be funny if I took some of these weird drugs and wrote an article about it, right? And then, shockingly, my new bosses agreed to let me do that. And I did that. And I played a bunch of Street Fighter 5 and tried to figure out, tried to compare my performance to when I was sober with taking gaming supplements. That's what I did. So you took something called Amber Toes, you took something called Stimpack, which just

sounds healthy. You just know that you're... name on Stimp Act. Yeah, these are great drugs. Just kidding. No one should take these. Ah, yeah. You know, it's kind of funny. The Amber Toast Complex people, they sent me like a great email, very nice tweets, great

PR team, and their company, I was like kind of hard on them in this article because I, there's very little evidence to back up whether or not their products do anything. Like scientists are backing me up on that claim. So please don't, don't see me, Manatech. You're all very kind. But the PR guy for Manatech tweeted a link to my article and was like, this is so funny. And I'm like, well, at least you guys are good sports about this. Because I tried your product and experienced no change.

So Ambrato's Complex is the drug that does basically nothing. Spoilers for my article, I guess. They come from the no negative publicity school, I suppose. I mean, maybe that's good for them. for me to write about taking it at all. It's potentially good PR for them. I don't know. Yeah.

So what do they claim to do for you? They claim to increase concentration. A lot of these drugs claim to increase sort of your concentration and like hand-eye coordination, you know, the stuff you would want for video games, the limitless drug is how I referred to it. Like, you know, everybody wants to believe that there's a drug that you can take that will suddenly make you stronger, faster, better. But in practice, I don't know that that's really the case. I mean, there's also a lot of stimulant use and abuse in competitive gaming communities.

And that's sort of the serious sad side to covering the topic. There have been controversies where some Counterstrike pros in particular admitted that their coach had been pressuring them to take Adderall. And like, you know, joking around like, oh, we were all on Adderall during such and such tournament, that kind of thing. And there's a lot of comments on that article where people were talking about like riddlein and Adderall and Concerta and just sort of other like amphetamines and methylfinidate and basically like do those things really help you play games better. And that's that's sort of the elephant in the room if I'm talking about taking herbal not stimulants that don't do anything, which Amber Toes Complex doesn't have anything like that in it. But that's what all the verbiage says it will do is increase your concentration. Could you talk about the sensation of what did you feel when you took amortose complex? Well, the first, I felt nauseated for an hour and a half the first time I took it because I was so nervous.

And I took it three days in a row. And the other two days, I felt completely fine. I did not experience any side effects at all. But that first day, I was like, what am I doing? What have I chosen as my path in life? Why did I make these life choices? Who am I? and why am I putting this strange thing inside my body?

So I think that anxiety caused me to feel nauseated. But yeah, other than that, I was fine. I don't think Amber Toast Complex does anything. That's been my experience. But Stimpack has caffeine in it, and it has a couple other ingredients that are the kind of thing that you might see in Red Bull or, like, other energy drinks, like, you know, B-12 and D-A-Mene and things like that.

That drug made me feel really crappy. So I don't recommend that. But I think if I think if you drink a lot of caffeine, then you might be able to take a stim pack and it won't even feel like anything to you. But yeah, I mean, doing the article may be really question like, does taking stimulants or does taking some sort of herbal remedy that might be more of a placebo, does that, does either of those things really affect my gaming? And I think taking the, taking a placebo or like sort of creating a best situation,

for playing competitive games can help you because you can kind of trick your brain into thinking it's helping. And in my experience, a lot of competitive games. It's psychological, right? I mean, how well you do. So you just want to create

the best possible scenario for performing well and feeling relaxed. So for me, extra caffeine doesn't do the trick, but like taking an herbal supplement, it didn't make me game worse. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So maybe a stim pack would be performance enhancing if you were doing like an all-day training marathon or something and you had to stay awake, but in any other context, it seems like it would be counterproductive. Yeah, I do know that like some pros play that way. And I find that very unusual. And it's something that I'd like to cover at compete at some point in the future, just sort of the different methods that pros have for trying to play games for an extremely long time or whether or not they choose to, how many hours they practice, how long they practice,

whether they think that it's effective because I've, you know, seen League of Legends pros said that they only sleep six hours a night because they're practicing so often. And I don't know whether that's really effective or not, but I can understand the pressure to do that. There's a lot of external pressure. So I don't know. I'm curious. For me, having a good night's sleep and ideally not being on, not being high or drunk is a good way to play games well. But I'm not sleeping six hours in the night and playing League of Legends 15 to 20 hours a day. So that's just me. And just to get your hands on these things, you had to order them online.

One of them required registration and talking to people on the phone. You're probably going to be getting calls from this shady manatech company for the rest of your life because of this one purchase, I'm guessing. Yeah, I'm going to have to figure out how to cancel that. That's a hoop I still need to jump through, actually. But yeah, yeah, I had to actually call toll three membership number to set up a member. to set up a membership to get Ambratoast Complex, which is really of debatable efficacy. But you know what? It was a fun life experience.

And I did it so that you don't have to. Right. Citizen journalism. Yeah. Citizen journalism in the comfort of my own home. The dubious comfort, given how you're wrecking it, is to take these things. Yeah. And obviously, this sort of supplement is not regulated in any way by the FDA. So you read about dietary supplements where,

not only does it not do what it says it will do, but the ingredients on the label are not actually in the product or they're in different quantities. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have no way to know. You have no idea what you took, basically. Because from what I understand, the word supplement means that it's not regulated by the FDA. That's the word they're allowed to use because of that. So really, I could have been taking anything.

I have no idea. I have absolutely no way of knowing. It's exciting. Yeah. Thank you for being our guinea pig. As e-sports gets more popular, kind of penetrates the wider culture, more and more and more money gets into it, you would imagine that it would follow the arc of traditional sports vis-a-vis performance enhancers where some kind of shady cutting-edge pharmacy somewhere would develop some sort of chemical that would actually work or maybe,

do you have any kind of sense of how developed that kind of market is now? I mean, there are various, quote unquote, smart drugs that are out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a ton. And I've gotten on all of those mailing lists as well now. They've already been contacting me since I wrote this article. And I've had to politely be like, I'm actually not planning to do this again. I'm really sorry that none of you got in on the ground floor for this one time when I did do it.

But I'm not doing it again. And there are so many. There are a lot. Yeah. But I, you know, I'm really skeptical. And there are so many comments on the article that are like, I've tried Adderall and it works. great for me. And I guess I just want to really caution your listeners and say, if that's your experience, might I recommend going to see a psychiatrist for real? Because if you take Adderall

and you don't need it, you might feel like you are experiencing a lot of nervousness, anxiety. Like there's a lot of side effects that can happen if you don't have any dopamine deficiency that you're, or whatever that you're trying to correct. But if it really helps you, Like if you're taking a drug and it's like changing your life in some way, then consider considering talking to somebody who's a professional. I don't think that drinking Red Bull or taking Stimpack or any of these similar sort of caffeine, B12, like a lot of these other drugs have those kinds of cocktails, like the stuff that you can take legally without talking to a psychiatrist, none of that stuff to me seems like a big deal breaker in gaming. I don't think

they're going to outlaw caffeine. But some League of Legends tournaments, at least, because League of Legends is a big enough deal that this is happening, have started to impose some drug testing regulations. Right. Wasn't the Electronic Sports League at least a couple of years ago talking about doing that? They may be. But I know I've read recently about Lull doing it. And they've even imposed rules about smoking pot, which you would really not think would

make you any better at playing league. But they have rules that you are not supposed to. do any drugs, including pot, during the tournament time. So you can actually smoke pot the day before and it might still be in effect potentially or you can have a really bad hangover. But as soon as the tournament day starts, that's when they start testing. And I mean, a lot of these things like, like Riot Games is going to have to figure out what kinds of regulations they want to do for their teams. And Blizzard is starting Overwatch teams and they're going to have to figure out if they want to do drug testing and if they want to do different kinds of regulations. I mean,

a lot of this stuff is super new, so they're still figuring out if that rule is necessary and what things should be allowed and what shouldn't be. And I mean, in researching this, I did find a bunch of competitive gamers who talked about wanting to take the opposite of stimulants, like wanting to take a Valium, like to play StarCraft or whatever, and how that would sort of relax them and that would improve their game. I'm assuming that would also be something that would potentially be outlawed. But it's just sort of interesting. Because I know. a lot of people and your listeners probably would assume that stimulants would be the go-to. I think actually that's the opposite of what you want, especially for like a really long match,

like a Starcraft match or League of Legends matches can be very long. You want something, you want to kind of stay focused somehow. Yeah. Or, you know, like a lot of esports athletes train in enclosed environments or private. They're just playing themselves or with their team. And then they get out into an arena and they're hundreds of thousands. thousands of people watching. Yeah. And so you would think that beta blockers at least would be useful. And that's, you know, that's been banned in some sports. I think like concentration sports like archery and shooting just because it can enhance your performance or at least help it not be degraded. So. Right. And so I think that is something that we might potentially see. And I know that other sports, even, you know, physical sports, the normal kind, have have some rules surrounding Ritalin and Adderall like you can take it if you have a prescription. because there's weird rules surrounding those drugs.

But I can imagine that esports will implement similar rules on that score. But everything else, I don't know. We'll have to see. But it's a weird world right now where some leagues have regulations, but not all e-sports have these regulations in place yet. Yeah. I mean, it's like every thorny question like this that has been negotiated in a, traditional sport or maybe is still being negotiated in traditional sports as kind of being

relitigated like you you just wrote about the esports team analyst who was caught betting on his own team's matches which is okay which is legal but is kind of questionable ethical I'm I'm working on a much longer follow up about that where I talked to a bunch of lawyers and it'll probably be out by the time this show is out so hopefully people can look for that but yeah the world of e-sports betting is another example of something that's very unregulated right now. And teams, these sports leagues don't really have rules in place to consider the fact that people are gambling on their matches. And like, what should they do about that? Should there be rules against players and pros participating in that?

But I mean, that's something that other professional sports leagues have had to contend with for many generations. And it's like very quaint for us to be like, oh, right, how do we, how do we make a sports league? How do we? What kinds of drugs should we ban? Should we be? telling people not to bet on matches. Like, how do we, how do we do any of this? But I think that if ESports leagues want to be taken seriously, and in theory they do, then that means sort of taking in some of these painful regulations that other sports leagues have already implemented. And it will be annoying. It will feel annoying to be having to implement those things when we're used to living in a world where video games don't really have any a regulated institutionalized league space.

It's all just like amateur leagues and fun, but it's starting to get, there's too much money in it. And that means that we have to think about things like match fixing and stuff like that. This is, I did a story recently where I talked about a little bit about some of the gambling that goes on and like the rare weapons trading on various marketplaces. And skin betting, which is like a whole other thing that is, we'll go into one day. but it's like one of those things where if you're not involved in video games at all, you're absolutely perplexed by this idea. You're like, what is everyone talking about? Yeah.

But don't you think that this is kind of the way that e-sports gets pulled out of like this Wild West gambling, kind of like absolutely wild racism, like all the dark side stuff that goes on in gaming, the way it really gets cleaned up is corporate money and some kind of, institution that regulates stuff. I mean, it kind of seems like that's the way it's going. And drug testing certainly will be a part of that. Do you think? Yeah, I think so. But I also understand why some players find that pathway unattractive. I mean, like, you just listed the advantages, which is like, okay, great. So if we have corporate sponsors, then that means we need to have, like, anti-harassment policies at tournaments. Wouldn't that be nice? Maybe we even have

HR for e-sports league so that we can deal with, like, inter-player harassment. And you know, HR problems and also maybe those players start making actual salaries. Those are the great things about institutionalizing anything and having more regulations for player safety. Like that's that's my that's my socialist pitch. But I also recognize that there are a lot of esports players who are really against those things because they do fundamentally change the sort accessibility of the sport in a way that is fundamental and will be there will be no walking back from it once it starts to happen. Like fighting games are in a very different spot because they're one-on-one games, they're not team-based and the entire culture behind them is different. And it feels a

lot more like pro wrestling in terms of the culture than, you know, like Starcraft and League of Legends and those games have been trying a bid for social legitimacy for many years. And fighting games are cool with being underground and being underregulated and having sort of an amateur spirit where anybody can participate. But I think that they will probably be the last to change. But that's also like the area where I've seen the most people be like, I don't want so many corporate sponsors to be getting interested in fighting games and to be like corporatizing fighting games because then it's going to lose what makes it special and what makes it feel amateurish accessible to anyone, but also like having these incredible pro players who are like at the top.

And it's just, it's a different vibe. And I think as soon as you add corporate sponsors to anything, there is the sense that like, oh, it's getting ruined. We're selling out. You know, it's like bands worrying about, you know, losing their indie scene. I think, I think that, you know, fighting games in particular still kind of have that sense of like, we're this cool underground thing that no one understands and we don't even really want people to cover us because we feel like it's so special that that will be lost as soon as people try to say how cool we are. There's a lot of that resistance with gamers anyway, like distrust of the press and distrust of corporate sponsors. But it's kind of understandable. I mean, I can see both sides of it. And esports is in a really weird

spot, but that means it's a really fun time to cover it. I mean, there's a lot of really weird stories that we can tell about that journey and like what, which types of leagues are going to embrace corporate sponsorships and like rise to the top and which types of leagues are going to push against that and why and what will happen to them. Yeah. Well, one of the happy byproducts of ESports becoming a bigger business is that big sites want to cover it, which means more jobs for writers who write about esports, such as yourself. I got this cool job. So can you tell us a little bit about compete, which has been around for a few weeks now, what the sort of mandate for the site is, what sort of things you want to cover, and just what your background is, or if there is

such a thing as a typical background for an ESports writer in 2017, what it would look like. God, yeah, I don't know what it would look like. Well, I guess. I'll answer the questions in order. Okay, compete. What is it? So Deadspin is the sports site at Gizmodo Media Group, and Kotaku is the video game one. And Tim Marchman and Stephen Totilo kind of joined hands, and we're like, let's make a site together, a vertical that combines our powers, Voltron style.

And so when we publish stories at compete, we've got Deadspin editors looking at them, and we've got Kotaku editors looking at them. And it's a really unique situation. It's not something that either of these sites have really tried to do before that I know of. We're all working together to figure out what a deadspilling slash Kotaku. We've been calling it dead taco voice looks like, sounds like. So that's been really fun. And like compete, obviously, we're covering competitive gaming, but we want to do it with the sort of irreverent, funny, swear-filled voice of a dead spin article.

but also, you know, the gamers guide of Kotaku, the core gaming audience as well. And that line is very hard to walk because we're already seeing in our comment sections, like on my betting story, the deadspin readers are all like, how the heck is e-sports betting not outlawed for anyone who is a staffer on an e-sports team? That's crazy. What the heck? And all of our gamers are commenting and being like, I don't see why this is a big deal. Why would it be outlawed and they're all arguing with each other because they're coming from completely different cultural settings and they all read different websites and now they're all in the same website.

And that's an interesting challenge in and of itself. So there's that, but also background. So it's for the moment, compete is me and my coworker, Eric Van Allen, are both the two staff writers. And we have some great freelancers who have helped us. We have a freelance budget. If people want to pitch to compete, they can. And we're covering a lot of different kinds of things. So Eric comes from more of, I guess,

what you would consider a traditional esports reporting background compared to me. He did a lot of like, you know, daily beat coverage news items. And he's still doing that. And I do, I have a background of writing really long, weird stories like this drug story, which is why I'm here today.

And I used to work for the Boston Phoenix for seven years until they went out of business and then I worked for the Mary Sue for a couple years and I've freelanced for MIT's technology review and just other random places, but mostly I've written about a lot of different things, but I really like writing long features and obviously I think competitive gaming is very compelling. I've covered many games over the years, but this is my first time only having a staff writing job where I really, really focus on competitive gaming. So that is new for me, but I've covered games a lot. So I feel comfortable in that space. but I think I was hired because I have a really long feature reporting background.

So they just wanted somebody who could take a lot of drugs and write it out of that. I guess that's why they hired me. So yeah, I don't know if I answered all your questions. Yeah. I can't remember what the other, what the middle one was. One question I've been pondering over for a while that seems like super obvious, but I'll ask. It seems like in e-sports, e-sports should be the perfect competitive space for some kind of like general quality integrated teams and you don't see it.

You would think, right? And you don't see it, which doesn't make any, like, there's no physical advantage. Theoretically, there's no reflex advantage. Is it just, is it? Oh, you know what, though? You totally forgot that women are biologically. Well, no, but is it really just. That is your.

It seems like the most obvious answer is like structural gender bias. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's just it. That's what it is. That is what it is. And I mean, I, God, talk about unpopular opinions I have that are going to eventually be at compete.com. Is it so popular? This is like a really obvious. Like, it just seems like staring. It's really freaking obvious, isn't it? There is no greater and more obvious evidence for the fact that that structural sexism exists than the fact that there are no women competing in top tier earshports. And of course, people will tell you what I just jokingly said, which is like, oh, well, you know. know, women have trouble with spatial recognition and like women just like can't figure out how to play

games well and that's why they're so bad at games. But actually every study, every comprehensive study that has looked into that and has done long ranging, you know, studies of like women's behavior in World of Warcraft or like any other games that have been around for long enough that people can do really comprehensive studies on like who's, you know, good at games by whatever metrics you want to use. There's no evidence of that. There's no evidence of that. There's no that women are inherently worse at games. They're all signs point to all people being potentially equal. But, you know, we see these same studies in a lot of other areas like stereotype threat, which is basically if you tell somebody they're going to be bad at something, then they will be.

Like if you remind somebody before they take a math test, if you remind a group of people before they all take a math test, oh, by the way, women are bad at math, then the women in the room will perform worse on the test compared to a group of people where you just give them all the math test and you don't say anything ahead of time, which is really, really weird. And it's a subconscious thing that's, like, really hard to control for. And I mean, growing up, I've, you know, I've played games since I was like old enough to touch a keyboard. And I still remember people being like, well, women just aren't that good at games and they're not that good at math or science. Like, that's just going to be something that you'll have to struggle with. Women are better

at the arts. They're better at creative stuff. They're not good at puzzle solving. Like all of these things that you just hear growing up and you internalize. So it's like the biggest possible stereotype threat, right? Like eventually you're just like, oh, that must be true and you've internalized it. And like, how do you even get past that? But you have to take ambratose complex, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So that's why I recommend that women everywhere investigate performance enhancing drugs so that they can finally beat their opponents. Anyway, yeah, I don't know. It's weird. It's It's weird. And there's definitely a lot of, like, crappy arguments in, in esports spaces that are like, the reason why women aren't here is because they just can't, they can't do it. They're too sensitive or they aren't good enough at games for some made up biological reason. There's no actual. Or they'll use the market. You know, the kind of the marketing argument, which is we're trying to market, you know, the people that buy these games are boys from 13 to 28 and therefore, blah, blah, blah, blah, they won't buy because. Of course, of course.

And I think in competitive gaming in particular, there's this pervasive notion that women are inherently not competitive, which is like really funny to me because I'm like, okay, what about all the socialization that women are all about competing with one another for male attention? What about that? Do you guys not count beauty pageants and stuff like that? I guess that doesn't count. That's a form of competition that isn't registered societally. So whatever. But yeah, of course, humans are competitive. Humans enjoy competing with one another.

And there's no reason why women wouldn't also be part of these scenes. But, you know, there's a lot of sexism. So that's one problem. So last question, it seems sort of as if when e-sports is in relative to other longer-established sports in a fledgling phase where it's still figuring out how everything works, it seems like to be a full-time e-sports writer. You kind of have to cover all the e-sports. Like you just write about e-sports and that encompasses everything or just like, just like, you know, it's not. looking at your archive at compete, you know, you've written about Dota 2 and League of Legends and Street Fighter and Harthstone.

Yeah. It's everything, right? And like, you know, Jason and I cover sports too. And I write a lot about baseball. Jason writes a lot about basketball. No one asks us to write about football because we don't know enough to write about football. I'm here, though. I could try.

I could try. Would anyone ask these two to write about football? Please, they're waiting. If like 11 other people at our site are unavailable, we're here. but no one asks us to do it, whereas you kind of have to cover almost everything. Theoretically, yes. I mean, this is something that we talked about in the job interviews. Like, how are we going to approach this?

Because anyone who's hired for this job isn't going to be an expert in every single e-sport. And also, fighting games, a lot of fighting game players don't even like the term e-sports. So that's why compete is a good name. I've just been saying competitive gaming to try to cover all my faces. But, yeah, e-sports. I mostly am familiar with fighting games and counter strike, which I used to play more when I was in high school and Overwatch. And Eric, my colleague, Eric Van Allen, is more familiar with Harstone and League of Legends and Dota 2. I did cover that Dota 2 betting story, but that's because I was already familiar with the topic.

So the way that we've been doing it, like I was already familiar with East Sports betting, I mean not Dota 2. I don't understand Dota 2. confession. I don't get it. But that's kind of how we're dividing up coverage for the moment is sort of like, okay, so I'm pretty familiar with fighting games. So I'm going to mostly cover that stuff, but sometimes Eric will cover it if I'm not available or whatever. But if there's a big heartstone story, I'm going to probably give it to Eric. Or if there's a big street fighter story, maybe I'll cover it or maybe a freelancer will come in. I mean, we're still dividing that stuff up. But for the moment, I'm not covering every single game because I'm not an expert on

every single game and I mean nobody can be right um but yeah I mean that's something we're figuring out and I I think you know that would be the case like no matter who they hired there's no one there's no one who who's played every single eastport unless someone yeah wants to call in I have no sorry all right you can replace me I'll it's me I will leave my throne in favor of Jason If you can just find the right shady supplement that will give you Dota 2 knowledge, you'll be able to cover everything. Yeah, I got to figure that out. That was definitely something when I started the job. I was like, all right, so I already know about team-based shooters and I know about fighting games, but I got to learn all these mobas, though.

I got to get good at these. It's not easy. I've tried to. All right. You can find Compete at compete.com. You'll see it everywhere when you go to Kotaku. and Deadspin posts are promoted all the time. You can find Maddie on Twitter at Middy Myers and also at middymiers.com, which will also give you access to all of her other non-esports projects, including music and an X-Men podcast and a movie podcast.

You're very busy. Are you sure you're doing this completely natural? I'll never tell my secret. Weapon X. We hope you experience no side effects. and we thank you for coming on. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Thanks for having me. In the rest of this episode, we talked to Dr. Caitlin McGee about gaming injuries and ergonomics and what e-sports athletes and regular gaming slubs like us can do to protect ourselves while playing. You can find the rest of that episode and all our other episodes by subscribing to Achievement-oriented on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, or wherever you get podcasts.