The Anxious Anti-Politics of Counter-Strike
Real-world warfare continues to disrupt the internet’s biggest first-person shooter.
IF YOU ARE A MILLENNIAL LIKE ME, or you’re a person of any generation even slightly familiar with esports, you’re probably aware of Counter-Strike, the longstanding tactical first-person shooter (FPS) franchise. CS, as it’s frequently abbreviated, pits a squad of terrorists trying to plant and detonate a bomb against a squad of counter-terrorists trying to stop them. (If you would like a fuller introduction to the game or a reminder of what it’s like, check out this delightfully entertaining video from Girlfriend Reviews on YouTube.) Counter-Strike’s premise was first developed in 1999 as a mod for one of the foundational FPS titles, Half-Life, and since then, CS has grown to become the world’s preeminent competitive shooter. More recently, it also has gained many unfortunate real-world interfaces with the ongoing war in Ukraine.
The game’s bomb-planting premise is purely functional; there’s no context to provide meaning or value to the actions of either side, and teams switch sides at halftime to make sure everyone gets a shot at both offense and defense. The primary game mode has remained essentially the same for a quarter century, as have the basic mechanics and tactics. Rounds are typically less than two minutes long, with thirteen needed to win without going to overtime. Professional competitors have played an almost unthinkable number of rounds. (I’m a casual player, and I must have played tens of thousands of rounds at this point myself.) All that repetition has a way of abstracting the game away from its local accidental details and clarifying the core experience. In one way of looking at it, CS presents a classic person-vs.-nature scenario. The game sets you up to fight not against other players so much as the very intelligible structure of the universe: geometry made hostile. You are constantly seeking perfect angles with correct timing, and if you fail to finesse the moment, math itself will kill you. Counter-Strike!
It’s a punishing experience, not least because of the game’s toxic online player base, which is not only full of cheaters but can be fairly characterized as a kind of collective white teenage male id: misogynist, racist, homophobic, and generally, unaccountably belligerent.1 (One of my games last week began with a teammate I’d just met telling me I ought to put my dog down. Canine-Strike!) But sometimes you’ll hit a round-winning shot as your teammates shout acclamations, and the sun will come up in your brain, and you will understand for a moment why the game has more than 28 million monthly players, a billion-dollar-a-year microtransaction business, and a thriving, globe-spanning professional scene.
Counter-Strike’s logo evokes that of the Bundesliga more clearly than it does those of other FPS games, and its professional matches are broadcast with sophisticated, fast-paced, and entertaining real-time analysis that compares favorably with what you might hear tuning in to an MLB game. Professional CS teams often provide their players with specialized skill trainers and sports psychologists. Prospects are identified based on an Elo rating system—the same formula used to assign world rankings in chess. And, as perhaps befits this level of competition, there are large volumes of money sloshing around, with almost $12 million made available in the past year’s tournament prize pools and many millions more being put at stake through a host of bookmaking sites.2
The world of professional Counter-Strike has always had a Nordic center of gravity—Americans comprised only around 10.5 percent of the international player base in an analysis from 2021—but the current national juggernaut is Russia, whose competitors have taken home the largest share of the past year’s winnings. And Russia’s predominance has created new political problems within the world of professional CS following the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
IN RESPONSE TO THE WAR, the International Esports Federation (IESF) initially banned Russians from competing in IESF-sanctioned tournaments. It reversed course and readmitted them in 2023, but the organization is now moving to ban Russian teams and players from competing under the Russian flag following reports that the Russian Esports Federation (RESF) has opened offices in occupied Ukrainian territory. Russian players have struggled to obtain visas to travel for competitions in Europe, and at least one Russian team has relocated to Serbia to mitigate some of the logistical problems resulting from the invasion. In March, during the game’s most prestigious tournament—the major championship, which took place this year in Copenhagen with support from the game’s publisher, Valve—Denmark’s culture minister created a stir when he said that he didn’t think Russian players should be allowed to participate in the event.
On the interpersonal level, players initially made a show of solidarity with one another across the lines of national hostility. Russians and Ukrainians have often played for the same teams. As the Battle of Kyiv filled newscasts with images of black smoke and lines of tanks in February 2022, Counter-Strike’s then-undisputed GOAT, a Ukrainian who goes by the nom de guerre s1mple, gave a moving speech while receiving an award at an event in Katowice. “I want you to know that esports is outside of politics,” he said, standing on stage with teammates from both countries. “Right now, I stand with my real friends. . . . All of us want peace for Ukraine and for [the] whole world. All of us [are] scared.” But two years into the conflict, his stance has evolved. “I would never join [a team with] four Russian players,” he told an interviewer in mid-February this year. “I think every Ukrainian should understand this.” While he was discussing the rumored prospect of joining one such lineup himself, s1mple’s words implicated his young countryman, zont1x, who belongs to Team Spirit’s otherwise all-Russian roster.
Forum threads about the politics of Russia’s participation in the global Counter-Strike scene are regularly deleted from HLTV, the apolitical game’s primary hub for news and commentary, but the political pressure keeps making itself felt. A recent fracas involving an English player and a Russian organization reminded the community that the issue has not gone away.
Smooya is a talented but irascible freelance English CS player hoping to land a permanent spot on an established team. To advance his prospects, he agreed to join one such team as a stand-in for one tournament: Forze. A Russian organization based in Moscow, Forze is sponsored by Lukoil, the country’s second-largest oil producer. You might remember Lukoil’s executives making pro-forma-seeming anti-war statements at the onset of the full-scale invasion. Apparently, they didn’t get permission from the government to do so, and some of them appear to have been defenestrated for it. Today, Forze has a reputation for overtly supporting the Russian war effort, and Ukrainian influencers and commentators criticized smooya for his decision to temporarily join the squad.
The English sniper was a top performer in the team’s first games, but he could not stop Forze from losing a best-of-three to Monte—an anti-Russian team with several Ukrainians on its roster. (They refused to shake hands with the Forze squad after the conclusion of the match.) Smooya then cheekily tweeted “Slava Ukraini” in a now-deleted reply to a Monte post about their win, and Forze summarily replaced him in the tournament with an unpracticed coach. Smooya apologized for his comment and was reinstated, but during a live stream after the tournament concluded, he said he would not play for a Russian organization again and promised to donate his earnings from the tournament to Ukrainian charities. Neither player or team has commented publicly on the situation since then, but given the evolution of Russian law on the subject of support for Ukraine amid the invasion, Forze could conceivably use smooya’s comments as a pretext for refusing to pay him for his work.
It’s obvious that esports can’t be separated from their geopolitical contexts. (Any public discussion of Counter-Strike is incomplete without mentioning that the Saudi Public Investment Fund owns most of Counter-Strike’s online ecosystem, that Saudi Arabia is hosting a global tournament in Riyadh later this year, and that an organization with the fund’s backing hired a bunch of talented but aging European players to create a superteam to play under the Saudi flag, all to further the regime’s sportswashing campaign.) But CS exists most comfortably in that abstracted world of angles and timing, a place of escape on the computer. It is discomfiting to think about how many players have been sent to the actual front lines of the war in Ukraine, with some soldiers even allegedly decorating their real AKs to resemble the digital cosmetics that can be applied in Counter-Strike. When Russia withdraws its forces from Ukrainian territory, those adolescents will be able to pay stupid amounts of money for virtual upgrades to make-believe weapons again. It will be a big step up from paying for a delusional autocrat’s imperial dreams with their lives.
It is, of course, possible to find normal and chill people to queue with you for games, either through online communities or random matchups. Doing so is essential for anyone interested in playing the game more seriously without also developing a contemptuous hatred for humanity.
Are you the parent of a teenage CS player? Talk to them about cases, the virtual boxes players receive for free but that they can open only by purchasing a digital key from the game using real money in the form of Steam credits. Cases contain random skins—that is, cosmetics for the guns—that are nearly always worth less on the resale market than the player must pay to open the case. Low-key gambling of this kind hits adolescent brains right in their softest spots, and it’s led some young CS players down bad paths.