It really seemed like a no-brainer, didn’t it? If racing can’t happen in real life, you can just go over to video games about racing, right? Except it turns out that even if the skill set largely transfers laterally, some people will opt to be pretty unscrupulous or awful in this format. The latest example is Formula E drive Daniel Abt, who finished third in a race on Saturday… only to be disqualified and have his performance expunged when it was discovered that he wasn’t actually racing, instead paying another gamer to pretend to be him while driving.
Abt has been fined £8,900 for his actions as well as having his points for previous races removed, and issued an apology for his actions… although considering his apology included the phrase “it was never meant with any bad intention” one can question the sincerity of his remorse for the cheating itself. So it seems that moving all of these contests to a digital space with less accountability increases the number of people willing to cheat at them. We’re sure everyone is shocked.
