Deja Vu or the Ascent of New Ethics…

This all happened a while ago, sometime in the early 2000s. On the tram, I heard two young men talking about their buddy who had just placed second in a gaming championship in the US. The game, I believe, was Quake, which is believed to have given the start to the term "esports." I introduced myself to these gentlemen and asked them for the contact details of their victorious friend, which they kindly shared.

Still from a video uploaded by iPlay4K aka iPlay8K. Credit: youtube,com

I was interested in that guy because back then ITMO was already quite successful in competitive programming, and I thought it would be cool to have a computer champion of a different kind. Back then, the foundation of the Russian eSports Federation was the matter of a distant future, just like the official recognition of esports at ITMO.

I talked to the champion’s mother — he himself was at another tournament and was thus unavailable. It turned out that he was a student at the now-defunct North-West Polytechnical University and that conversation made it clear that ITMO’s curriculum would be too challenging for him.

Giving up was not something I was used to — and this was not the time to change my habits. I talked to the person responsible for admissions at ITMO. After that, I heard him express an opinion in a conversation with two students that it was not a big deal to win in a dueling tournament. As an answer, he was treated to the opinion that "it's hard to become a world champion or win national tournaments in Russia, China, or the US, even if these are tournaments in dung throwing."

This strong argument notwithstanding, the head of admissions was resolute in his negative answer, and my interest had slowly started to fade. The initial push for it came when I saw the film Antikiller, where people shot other people, and the main character was simply insane…

I thought it strange that I tried to encourage activity connected to murders of virtual people, but people nonetheless. By the way, it is for the same reason that the International Olympic Committee still hesitates to include esports into their official program…

The second reason for my retreat was that I’d seen a recording of the finale in which my protégé lost. To my surprise, nicknames were the only things differentiating the participants — no names or surnames, no info on their clubs or countries, there was just nothing human about them. I think the human came about only when they got their prize money at the bank… The only human thing about the video was the indication to the artist whose music was used in the background — to be fair, that also was a nickname, but it referred to a world-famous rock band, which made it pretty clear who was being referenced.

Naturally, I think back then the name LeXer could tell you all you needed to know about the player - their full name, as well as the country and city they came from, but that video was still enough to kill my interest in the matter. Moreover, the ACM ICPC student championships in competitive programming never uses any nicknames, so you can always tell which university a team represents, while the names of all team members, including their coach, can easily be found online.

Lately, I have been under the impression that all this anonymisation was in the past, but this impression turned out to be wrong. The deja vu came about on April 25, 2021 at the closing ceremony of Hash Code, one of Google’s coding competitions. It’s a team competition in coding solutions to engineering problems and the unofficial world championship in its field. This year, over 9,000 teams (125,000 people) took part in the tournament, 39 of which passed into the finals. So, at the closing ceremony the teams that took places 4−10 had only their names and the country they allegedly represented called out…

When the third place was announced, four Chinese flags appeared on the screen — how very informative — and the spectators learned that out of 1.5 billion Chinese citizens, there were four of them on the team…

The team that came second was represented by one Belarusian, one Ukrainian, and two Russian flags. For those who were in the know, it was clear that this team consisted of ITMO graduates, the six-time world champions Gennady Korotkevich, Niyaz Nigmatullin, Artem Vasilyev, and Boris Minaev, who had already competed as a team numerous times.

Then, the winners were announced — there was one German and three Russian flags. Again, those familiar with the scene could easily tell that this was a team of the two-time ICPC champions and multiple-time ICPC runners-up Egor Kulikov, Pavel Mavrin, Pavel Kunyavskiy, and Andrey Stankevich, who had competed together at Hash Code before. It is also important to note that Andrey Stankevich and Pavel Mavrin are our graduates, too.

We are left to only try and guess who performed for the teams Hashcode fans and Bryansk North, who came in seventh and eighth respectively, and were both represented by four Russian flags…

One young woman involved in competitive programming said that the organizers were "dorks," who had already been informed about the problem I described here many times. I was pleased to know that I am not the only one who holds this opinion…

I thought I would end the text here, but then I suddenly asked myself: what's better — when major international competitions call out the winners by name and stay mum on their country of origin, or vice versa, just like in the case described above?

Well, as the saying goes, they are both worse. Maybe both of them are acceptable in the realm of new ethics, but is the new ethics itself and those who preach it acceptable in the first place?