The world of esports was bound to be a natural breeding ground for labor abuse and other issues. It’s not because of the culture of gamers, it’s because of the wild west nature of an emerging market. After all, while gaming culture can get caustic and intense, abuse circulates in every part of every culture.



Abuse and social issues really thrive in areas where oversight fails, in the parts of societies that cast long shadows which can cover whole histories of trauma and damage. When a market emerges, it tends to lack oversight because the internal rules of that market aren’t fully formed yet. Sometimes, a collapse needs to happen to create regulation. We can see this in a lot of markets of different sizes and styles.

A modern, mostly depoliticized example is the literal wild west. Many Americans know that unregulated and abused Chinese laborers built a lot of the railroad of the country. What a lot of people don’t know is that the pool of Chinese labor caused the US government to ban Chinese migration into the country.

The ban was partially motivated by racism, partially motivated by local laborers disliking competition, and partially motivated by an open humanitarian crisis that the US government was not equipped to handle. Great economic suffering, political chaos, and an opioid crisis in China caused a lot of Chinese workers to migrate to the west to find work. These Chinese workers, tricked by foreigners and other Chinese people trying to make money, would sign bogus contracts that amounted to slave labor and then travel to Cuba and the US.

Bosses looking for cheap labor took advantage of porous borders and a US government struggling to deal with its own growth to import Chinese laborers. The laborers were kept at such a power imbalance in their new country that they were often slaves in all but name. Conditions in the Cuban sugar industry got so bad that Chinese workers semi-regularly threw themselves into industrial machinery. In both Cuba and the US, racism served as a convenient way to morally justify abusing people to get cheap labor.

As a wild west of sorts, esports can be another area where abuse hides. Obviously, the abuses that happen in esports pale in comparison to the abuses happening in eras like the wild west and turn of the century. The scale is totally different, but the root of the problem is similar: murky waters and naive travelers.

In the world of esports, justice can be slow moving because information is slow moving. We don’t know the full story and we don’t want to act on half of it. We want to believe victims but we also don’t want to reduce careers and years of work to rubble off a snap decision. In esports, sometimes the full situation takes years to develop and happens over randomly revealed Discord and Skype logs. Other times, the full story never gets revealed (and that’s often for the sake of the victim’s mental health).

To make matters worse, esports is full of naive travelers. Esports has tons of young talent who aren’t totally ready to make rash career decisions that they often have to make in order to become competitive. Their parents struggle to help them navigate waters they’ve never seen in their entire lives. Gaming houses? Sponsors? Tournaments? Travel? It’s a life that only the new generations could possibly know.

For as long as we’ve had roads, we’ve had naive travelers and the highwaymen who rob them. As we build roads out into a new realm of sports we get new questions on how to deal with the murky waters, the naive travelers, and the highwaymen. Currently, I think there are two big models for how to deal with the trouble: grassroots and developer. Basically, the way the Smash community does it or the way League and Hearthstone does.

Snakes in the grassroots

When I went to my first few locals in Minneapolis, I never felt in danger. I definitely felt awkward, nervous, and sometimes like I didn’t quite fit in but that wasn’t the Minnesota scene’s fault. Even if I never integrated fully into the scene there, I saw other people who did and who benefited from it – including several prodigies still in their teens.

Smash is a beautiful thing and for all the open flaws its community has, there are many more strengths worth fighting for. In the last few years, the community has started to fight some of the social issues it sees and make sure everyone within it is safe from the dangers that happen all over esports. This fight happens at the grassroots because in Smash, organizationally you don’t go much higher than a shrub.

In esports, the biggest power is almost always the developer. In the case of esports, the developers own the rights to the ball and the hoop and if they get fed up enough they can cut access to both. Nintendo tried to do just that at EVO and backed down when they saw just how large the field of competitive smashers was. However, most developers love when a game develops into an esport and they wield their power to try and keep that esport healthy – which naturally means cutting abusive people out. When a conflict gets intense enough, Riot, Valve, etc. will (often) step in.

In Smash, you don’t have a figure like this that can step in and shut abuse down as it happens. You have community leaders like TOs, outspoken players, and people in the esports industry. However, these community leaders have to argue effectively to the community for a change to happen. Not to mention, these community leaders can be wildly at odds. The result is that people in the community can have a pretty clear idea of something going wrong and not be able to address the wrong for a while – sometimes “a while” is as long as five years.

That was the case with Jonathon “Alex Strife” Lugo, the man who used to run the APEX tournament series. In 2009, Alex Strife hit on and made sexual advances on a 14 year old girl and smash player, Kiwi. Strife knew Kiwi’s age very well. Kiwi posted a screencap of a chatlog where Strife said, “Ur the only girl I’d go pedo for. No tell ppl pl0x.”

According to Kiwi’s testimony, Strife continued to hit on her and other underage girls well after multiple people confronted him and told him to stop. Kiwi made a public statement about it then but Strife wasn’t removed from the community until 2015. At that point, he’d developed a laundry list of abusive and generally bad behavior, ranging from threatening colleagues to withholding prize pools to making creepy advances.



The importance of the APEX series kept Strife alive inside Smash when he should have been pushed out years earlier. The clemency that he did receive didn’t seem to teach him to better himself as much as let him know what he could get away with. Until eventually he couldn’t.

The evidence had to be such that it could overpower the public image Strife had as the main organizer behind one of Smash’s most important tournaments. Kiwi’s testimony made an early impact on people in her community and scene but the grassroots nature of Smash meant that it didn’t extend further than that. It didn’t travel and hit like it should have.

Smash lacks a central body that at least has the raw presence to get noticed when it makes a statement. In recent years, the rise of the Code of Conduct panel and – in some ways – Twitter have helped different parts of Smash interconnect more easily. Smash’s TOs and community leaders have also begun to react more quickly to things happening around them.

The popular Smash 4 player Cristian “Hyuga” Medina got a swift one-year ban and got dropped by his sponsor after making such clearly unwanted advances on commentator Victoria “VikkiKitty” Perez that he had to be removed from the hotel room. Hyuga still plays now but the ban at very least created a conversation between him and VikkiKitty and pushed Hyuga to address self-admitted issues with alcohol.



More recently and notably, one of Ultimate’s best players Elliot Bastien “Ally” Carroza-Oyarce, received a lifetime ban for entering into a relationship with the underaged player Zack “CaptainZack” Lauth. CaptainZack coerced Ally into throwing a major match at a large tournament, netting him a 5-year ban that some argue is essentially a lifetime ban in the fast moving world of esports.

These bans weren’t given by Nintendo, they were given by a group of TOs and community leaders, either in form anti-harassment groups, co-signed statements, or a conduct panel made up of community leaders. They aren’t binding and their reach is both wide and limited. Many of the TOs that sign on run major events.

Hey guys it's me, the SSB Code of Conduct Panel!



We've banned "Notable figure" for not flushing the toilet for 50 years. This gives our venues a cleaner and safer place from non toilet flushers.



We've also banned "Random who has no renown" for 1 weekly for MURDER.



Thank you — APE Goblin @ Hypothermia (@GoblinFL) January 16, 2020

However, these TOs don’t speak for everyone and their decisions have netted a lot of controversy before. Nor can these TOs enforce their rulings entirely across the board. TOs cannot touch locals or regionals and sure enough, Ally recently entered a Montreal local.

THE BEST SNAKE IN BRAWL

THE BEST MARIO IN SMASH 4

THE BEST SNAKE IN ULTIMATE



WILL BE BACK TOMORROW NIGHT @ FNS #57 ! pic.twitter.com/msQe0jzzQm — Montreal Gaming Centre (@MTLGamingCentre) January 24, 2020

THE BEST RUNNING BACK IN BILLS HISTORY

THE BEST RUNNING BACK IN 49ERS HISTORY

THE BEST RUNNING BACK IN PRISON HISTORY



WILL BE BACK TOMORROW NIGHT @ SUPERBOWL #55 ! pic.twitter.com/xH95eRruBp — Divergence Catalyst (@machosykologist) January 24, 2020

Whether or not the Montreal local made the wrong or right decision, the decision itself shows how difficult regulation is in such a grassroots community. In the larger world of League of Legends, we don’t see the same issue.

Chris Badawi, Remilia, and Renegades

A lot of League fans will remember the name Chris Badawi. Badawi founded the esports org Renegades and entered the scene with a bang. He formed a roster full of fan favorites and got early accusations of trying to poach players and use unsavory tactics to build his team.

Badawi rapidly came a persona non grata amongst team owners and Riot while simultaneously becoming generally well liked by fans. Not only had he built a fan favorite roster, he had also brought on popular caster and analyst Montecristo as a co-owner and done some of the better branding work at the time. Eventually, Riot banned Badawi and his org from competing in League of Legends – one of the largest esports in the world.

At the time, Montecristo and much of the community were furious. Riot did not release the full story either, which made a lot of people even angrier. The thing was, Riot was almost entirely in the right. As information about Badawi and his actions surfaced, it became clear Riot made the right decision.

Badawi had signed Maria “Remilia” Creviling to his roster. Remilia was not only talented, she was the only trans-woman competitor the game ever had. Badawi essentially coerced Remilia into playing for his team with the offer of an above-board, legitimate sex change operation. The operation was not above-board and went horribly wrong, giving Remilia medical complications and pains for years to come.

Richard Lewis details the full story on his Youtube channel and all the details add to the devastation. Remilia was entering into a poorly run gaming house where every player was overworked and pushed too hard. She entered into a team run by a man who had lied about being a lawyer, misrepresented the wealth he was bringing into the scene, and made nearly every other relevant team owner wash their hands of him within a year. In his video, Lewis doesn’t portray Badawi as morally bad as much as he portrays him as dangerously incompetent.



Acting under this information well before it was public, Riot pushed Badawi as far away as possible. The process was messy and in some ways unfair to co-owner Montechristo. Clean or not, the process was necessary. As the entity with unequivocal, final say, Riot could make the decision needed and take all the flak that came with it.

Even for as quickly as Riot moved (in comparison to the Strife case), the damage had been done. Remilia wrote openly about the medical complications and pain that came with her surgery.

Riot, Valve, and other big authority figures in games don’t always make the right calls but their ability to make them quickly is a meaningful advantage. So is their ability to make them quietly. For legal and mental purposes, it’s often best not to publish the full story behind a case. Even now, most of the Smash community doesn’t know the full story behind Ally and CaptainZack’s relationship.

This matters because it gives time for victims to heal in private rather than endure an even longer lasting, sometimes more damaging public dialogue. Had the full details behind Remilia’s situation been released right away, it could have swayed most of the community against Badawi. However, there would be a loud minority of people who would attack her for her transition and who she was. Even as details came to light, Remilia was open about how that loud minority was tough to deal with.



The damage here can be so real that we build a victim’s right to confidentiality and privacy into the law and social services. Many shelters do not have publicly listed addresses. Perpetrators of abuse regularly follow their victims and this is a way to protect them. In the case of Ally and CaptainZack it does not seem that they would gravitate to each other now. However, the ban lowers the chance of that happening and in this way builds a distance that could be healthy and crucial.

However, much of the Smash community will demand details. Given the severity of both their bans, it’s hard not to wonder what happened. Given how grassroots justice is and how he-said, she-said things are in Smash, that demand for the full story increases even more. Having an organizing figure like Riot can help protect confidentiality, privacy, and the people involved.

Unfortunately, having one great arbiter comes with its own unique downsides.

Politics, markets, and Hong Kong

Hearthstone and professional basketball both found themselves in the hot seat over the same unexpected issue: Hong Kong.



Hong Kong is currently embroiled in a large, complex political fight with mainland China. The issue is big enough to have its own articles and explainers. For the purposes of this article, what we need to know is that the police in Hong Kong were actively trying to suppress protests in the streets of the city in an effort to further the political interests of the mainland. The process led to violence, much of which came at the hands of the police.

In an effort to win the media battle, the Chinese government exerted strong pressure against anyone who voiced support for Hong Kong – even if they were outside of China. The General Manager of the Houston Rockets expressed support for Hong Kong’s protesters, which resulted in the Chinese government demanding he be reprimanded by the NBA and his team. Morey kept his job in the end and, while the NBA made partial appeals to China, they nor Morey never fully relented.



In the case of Hearthstone, a player from Hong Kong (Ng “Blitzchung” Wai Chung) ended a post-game interview with a direct, political statement. Blizzard immediately stopped working with both casters involved and banned Blitzchung for a year. They did this to avoid a fallout with their audience in mainland China – now probably the biggest market in all of esports.

Compared to the punishments we saw in Smash, there’s no question that Blizzard’s punishments are way too harsh and way too political. In the grassroots world of Smash, the community would respond by simply, plainly refusing to respect the ruling. In the world of big business, sometimes the bigger market gets the say.



This happened to a lesser extent with Riot Games and their team the Hong Kong Attitude where some thought that Riot was telling their casters not to even say the words “Hong Kong.” Riot came forward later to say this was just a miscommunication, but also came forward to say they focus on the game in their broadcasts, not the politics.

A message from John Needham, Global Head of League of Legends Esports pic.twitter.com/5Au9rE7T86 — lolesports (@lolesports) October 11, 2019

Blizzard’s case in particular showed how ugly the politics of punishment can be when a sole corporate entity controls the game. There is no room for politics if the politics hurt the feelings of the big forces with money. There is no room for fighting for the little guy if the big guy will cut you out of a billion dollars just for trying. After all, for these games there would be no sport at all without money. League and Hearthstone have servers to upkeep.

Meanwhile, in the world of Melee, Free Palestine isn’t just a political statement, it’s the tag of the sheik main ranked 72nd on the PGRM.

Clearing the water and protecting the travelers

Esports is another new frontier.

Like in a lot of new frontiers that have come before it we see a wide history of labor abuse and social issues. For League fans, we can recall moments as far back as MYM standing for Move Your Mothers when the manager of Meet Your Makers tried to intimidate a player by saying his mother could lose her home if he didn’t play. Or we have incidents as recent as Griffin, where Riot gave indefinite suspensions to the team director and coach for being physically and verbally abusive to players and pressuring them into contracts. In Smash, we have the collapse of team Zenma.



We have murky waters and naive travelers. The question is, how do you clear the water and protect the travelers? Should we do things communally where money isn’t an issue — but clout is? Or should we have a main arbitrating body (usually a game developer) that can always intervene quickly? The big, arbitrating body can look out for the values of the community and protect victims in unique and swift ways, but it can also be influenced and even bought. Communal justice can be sincere and swift too, but it can also turn into a mob or move too slowly.

I don’t think there’s a clear answer. There’s a certain freedom to the grassroots approach that is respectable. However, I’ve personally seen victims have to try very hard and leverage a lot of social media pressure just to make something happen. Large organizations can offer more protections and force organizations to do better, but they can and do fail at this too. After all, the Griffin controversy happened last year and I’m not sure there is a bigger esports organization than Riot.

Esports communities don’t face anything close to the disorder and dilemmas of the real wild west but they do face a similar question: how do we grow and get paid while getting rid of the thieves, cheats, and abusers? It’s hard to say but it’s good to see the Smash community try harder in recent years than it ever has.

Their recent efforts at a code of conduct panel even looks like a middle ground. It’s a major decision making body, like a developer would be, and it clearly wields some power – just not as much. Their ruling on Ally could not reach everywhere but it reaches enough places that Ally’s Smash career is still on an indefinite hold. Moving closer to that middle ground might just help Smash get rid of the bad actors that give it a bad reputation, while still keeping that unique freedom it (and a lot of the FGC) has. Or it might come with a whole new and unique set of problems.

One way or the other, there are plenty more Twitlongers, competitive rulings, and bans to come.