While politics and esports are two topics that rarely overlap, Echo Fox’s current entry-fragger Ryan “fREAKAZOiD” Abadir has given his take on which candidate in the upcoming election would be better for esports.
In an interview with PVPLive, fREAKAZOiD gave his thoughts on the election, as well as which candidate “would be more pro esports than the other?”
fREAKAZOiD, who previously competed with North American fan favorites Cloud9, stressed that he “wasn’t a fan of both candidates” and chose to forgo voting altogether. The 23-year old did, however, say that he imagined that the Republican nominee “would be pro esports I think, just cause he’s a business man and takes risks in his work, so I feel like he would be more for video games.”
Unfortunately, fREAKAZOiD and Counter Strike fans in general have little to celebrate in terms of either candidate. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have claimed in the past that violence depicted in video games causes violence in real life, a claim that has specifically been leveled at Counter-Strike in the past.
Trump voiced his belief that video games promoted gun violence in the aftermatch of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012.
As for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee has taken a stringent line against violence in video games, and at one point in 2005 claimed that “we need to treat violent video games the way we treat alcohol, tobacco, and pornography.”
In the aftermath of the Munich shooting earlier this year, Turner Sports’ Counter-Strike tournament ELEAGUE was pulled from German television. Germany has one of the strictest video game censorship regimes in the Western world.
