University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository
Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations
2019-01-18 The Argonauts of esports Practice: Zooming in on the practice-networks of everyday gamers
Buckland, Aiden
Buckland, A. (2019). The Argonauts of esports Practice: Zooming in on the practice-networks of everyday gamers (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/109506 doctoral thesis
University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY
The Argonauts of esports Practice:
Zooming in on the practice-networks of everyday gamers
by
Aiden Buckland
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE
CALGARY, ALBERTA
JANUARY, 2019
© Aiden Buckland 2019 Abstract
Should people be concerned about everyday gamers’ participation in esports practices?
This dissertation will address the question by exploring how everyday gamers’ practices are informed by professional gaming (esports). The rise of professional competitive video gaming has exploded in the past two decades. Billions of dollars of prize money have been awarded to thousands of people around the globe since the turn of the century. While a valorized few players have been able to professionalize their gaming, millions of everyday gamers spend countless hours participating in these same practices with no hope of ever being professionals.
Who benefits from the perpetuation of the instrumental in-game practices? Who shapes the practices of groups attempting to organize their esports gaming? How do the affordances of nonhuman actors shape the practices of everyday gamers participating in esports gaming? Can the creation of esports media really empower everyday gamers?
Using a micro-ethnographic approach this project will trace practice-networks of a student gaming club at the University of Calgary. The approach draws from the theoretical perspectives of practice theory and actor-network theory. Assessing whether the practices elucidated through this framework should be of concern will be accomplished primarily through the concept of participatory culture. Many scholars have weighed in on the value of participatory culture in contemporary society and those positions will be used in the evaluation of the practice-networks of the gaming group.
Through this perspective the study will zoom in on the in-game practices of everyday gamers. Through a series of interviews, event observations and time spent in the game I will examine what resources esports practices require and what benefits players receive for their
ii execution. Through engaging with the concept of gamer capital, and expanding it, I will trace the different pressures placed on everyday gamers in relation to in-game practices. I will then zoom out to examine two of the actants, the Students’ Union and Riot Games, which shaped the organization of the student club. The esports game explored in this study forces everyday gamers to seek out others to form teams to play the game. In their efforts to organize their gaming on campus two main actants exerted influence over the organization of the group. I will trace how this influence was exercise. The group drew on various nonhuman actors, from social media to university lecture halls, in their participation in esports practice. I will then zoom in on how the affordances of these actors shaped the practice of the club. Finally, I will explore a competitive series produced by the group and streamed on YouTube, to assess whether this kind of participation is empowering everyday gamers.
Keywords: esports, practice-networks, participatory culture
iii Acknowledgements
There are too many people to properly acknowledge in this space for the completion of this project. Dr. Maria Bakardjieva, my supervisor, who was always patient, insightful and supportive of my work. My internal committee members Dr. David Mitchell and Dr. Barbara
Schneider, whom I’ve had the privilege of working for and learning from during my time in
Calgary. I want to thank Dr. Charles Tepperman and Dr. Florence Chee, my external committee members, for agreeing to read this work and for guiding the project through this final phase.
My peers in the Department of Communication Media and Film, at the University of Calgary from whom I’ve learned so much also deserve to be acknowledged. Of course, the gamers of the U of C LoL club and anyone else who I have had the pleasure of interacting with in the execution of this project. Lastly I want to thank my family for always supporting me, even when
I told them I was going to study video gaming.
iv Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iv Table of Contents ...... v List of Figures and Illustrations ...... viii Epigraph ...... x
Chapter 1 The Practice-networks of Professionalized Play ...... 1 Game Studies and the State of Play ...... 8 Gaming as Participatory Culture ...... 10 Chapter Outline ...... 11
Chapter 2 Video Gaming Paratexts and Participation ...... 16 Markets, makers and immaterial labour ...... 17 Video games and technological rationalization ...... 18 Esports, paratext and gaming capital ...... 19 The study of esports ...... 20 Concept of Paratext in Gaming ...... 24 The Doing of Paratext ...... 25 Streaming Video as Paratext ...... 27 Gaming Capital ...... 28 Media participation ...... 31 From audiences to fans ...... 32 Participatory culture as audience empowerment ...... 33 Critical approaches to media participation ...... 35 What does participation have to do with esports? ...... 39
Chapter 3 Zooming in and out with practice-networks ...... 41 The Media Turn in Practice Theory ...... 42 eSports & Gaming as Practice ...... 43 Contemporary Theories of Practice ...... 45 The Practice Theory of Schatzki and Reckwitz ...... 47 Practice-networks ...... 50 Theoretical movement: Zooming in-Zooming out ...... 51 Actor-network Theory ...... 54 ANT a selected vocabulary ...... 55 The moments of translation ...... 58 Potential Pitfalls ...... 60 Out of focus ...... 62 Conclusions ...... 65
Chapter 4 Approaching audiences and gaming with ethnography ...... 67 Ethnography as an approach to play, practice and networks ...... 67
v Virtual world ethnography ...... 69 Multi-sited and Connective ethnography ...... 71 Making ethnograhpy managible ...... 74 Data collection ...... 75 The Many field sites of LoL club gaming ...... 76 Introducing the Summoner’s Rift ...... 79 Meeting the LoL Club ...... 82 The live events of the LoL club ...... 84 esports in their own words ...... 85 eSports and paratext ...... 88 Practice-networks pulling it all together ...... 89 Challenges, surprises and shortcomings ...... 90 Situatedness ...... 91 Reciprocation ...... 92 In a League Over My Head...... 93 Conclusion ...... 94
Chapter 5 Exploring the Gaming Capital of the LoL Club ...... 96 What it makes sense to do at the time ...... 96 Networks at play ...... 100 Prefigured picks and choices ...... 104 Surveillance as paratext ...... 107 Knowing what to buy without wasting time ...... 110 Paragaming capital and integrative practice ...... 114 What you can see is what you can get ...... 115 Knowing your role ...... 116 Performed gaming capital ...... 119 Rationalized play practices ...... 121 Inscribed capital in networked environments ...... 123 Aesthetic displays as inscribed capital ...... 123 The impact of player ranking ...... 125 Conclusion ...... 129
Chapter 6 Visions controlled by others ...... 132 Obligatory practices ...... 134 From fandom to student clubs ...... 137 SU and the practices of student organization ...... 138 Managing Gamer Capital ...... 141 The influence of the SU ...... 143 Riot and the practices of compliance ...... 144 Small incentive, serious competition ...... 145 Prizes of interessement ...... 149 Networks in competition ...... 150 Conclusion ...... 152
vi Chapter 7 The missing masses of the LoL club ...... 155 The spaces of play ...... 157 The affordances of streaming platforms ...... 161 Streaming and ownership ...... 163 Streaming Toxicity ...... 164 Facebook as an organizational actor ...... 166 Facebook and enabling leadership ...... 169 Dynamic and Dylan Klebold ...... 174 Participation in dangerous time ...... 177
Chapter 8 Calling the shots, esports and the practices of machinima production ...... 181 Machinima production and esports gaming ...... 183 A brief history of machinima practices ...... 186 The promise of machinima ...... 188 The consideration of machinima ...... 191 WLL and the Practices of Sports Broadcasting ...... 193 Looking the part ...... 196 Casting and the practices of public speaking ...... 199 Cashing in on gamer capital in the practices of casting ...... 201 Learning literacy through making machinima ...... 204 Conclusion ...... 206
References ...... 222
Appendix 1 ...... 239
vii List of Figures and Illustrations
Figure 1 Theorycrafting paratext for League of Legends. The website presents information about the ranks of playable characters in the game. Retrieved from https://champion.gg/ ...... 26
Figure 2. Screen capture of draft before LoL club match. The image includes the drafting screen from LoL with additional graphical elements added by the club including their crest in the center. Retreived from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIn1Eng387c&t=2128s ...... 80
Figure 3. Players’ view of avatar in LoL. Camera oriented above Seth73’s champion, while he attacks some minions. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CimwtwEZfsw&t=619s ...... 81
Figure 4. Diagram of basic network that is common to all online matches of LoL...... 101
Figure 5. Co-constituative elements of esports practice. Adapted from Jazabkowski et al, 2007, ...... 103
Figure 6. Diagram of the tiers in the League ranking system. Retrieved from http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/League_system ...... 125
Figure 7. Facebook post advertising raffle prizes for watch party on the LoL Clubs’ newsfeed. Retrieved from Facebook...... 150
Figure 8. LoL World Championship set piece. Seated at the computers is the professional team, with their coach pacing behind them and alternate team members with arms folded in the left of the frame...... 160
Figure 9. Removed LoL club content. Message displayed in the place where the LoL club’s Day 4 video should be. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDldWNu2Rw&index=8&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmk LGgNBK-h9OXjHu5pT&t=0s ...... 163
Figure 10. Facebook poll on the U of C Lol club’s page assessing interest in weekly competitive play. Retrieved from Facebook...... 170
Figure 11. League of Legends in-game team member portrait for Dylan Klebold ...... 175
Figure 12. Onscreen graphics used to display match-up information between games...... 194
Figure 13. Casting team from the LoL World Championship broadcast on Oct 29, 2016...... 197
viii Figure 14. Picture of casting team from inaugural WLL stream in formal dress. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h- j9hP7W9LE&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK-h9OXjHu5pT ...... 198
ix Epigraph
Play keeps us sane in our daily lives. Play keeps us curious, imaginative and directed. It teaches us to learn from our mistakes, to constantly improve, and to stride forward – battling through failures on our road to success.
Play develops relationships and communities. We have fond memories of growing up playing games with our friends and siblings. The gaming experience bonds us together now, as it bonded us then. We discover friends, partners, and spouses while gaming. We game with our children. We transcend international borders when we play. (Sean Plott, n.d.)
x Chapter 1 The practice-networks of professionalized play
There amidst the sea of computer stations, on the fourth floor of the Taylor Family
Digital Library, sat a skinny young man next to a small bank of computer stations specifically designated for video gaming. It was registration day for the University of Calgary League of
Legends (LoL) Club’s fall solo-queue tournament. I had spent the past year searching for them in the urban confines of Calgary, Alberta. Spending hours at local community centers talking to
LAN gamers, endlessly scrolling through social media and grabbing coffee with local gaming entrepreneurs, but I had yet to find what I was searching for. Was I finally going to meet one of the argonauts of esports practice?
Like the mythological crew in the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, the people I was looking for were themselves bound to an object that transported them daily to a virtual environment, known as the Summoner’s Rift. In League of Legends, published by Riot Games, the Rift is one of three virtual environments (maps) offered to plays by the popular video game.
The players begin each match at opposite corners of the rectangular map behind friendly towers that extend off into three pathways that lead to their opponents’ corner. In the Rift two teams of five players each compete over controlling the virtual space. To win a team must ultimately eliminate their opponents by destroying their nexus, located in the corner where the team starts the match. The towers that dot these pathways are designed to fire deadly projectiles at members of the opposing team when they step too close. At the midpoint of each of the three paths there is a space with delineates where friendly towers end and the opponents’ towers begin.
1 From the beginning of a match small groups of non-player characters (NPCs), called minions, are dispatched from each teams’ nexus to mindlessly march towards their opponents’ base. Left unchecked, these minions eventually overwhelm their opponents’ towers. To contend with the minions, towers and ultimately destroy the nexus each player enters the Rift with an avatar called a champion. Each of these champions has been designed with specific in- game roles in mind and all one hundred and forty-one, and counting, have unique abilities that the player controls throughout the match. Controlling these champions is not as simple as just mashing a few keys on a keyboard and jiggling a mouse. Understanding the intricacies of how a chosen champion fits on their team, matches up against their opponents and has been used by other players are just three of the many considerations a player must balance while playing the game.
League of Legends is one of a growing number of titles that have associated themselves with what is now more commonly refer to as esports. A subculture within networked video gaming, esports encompasses an array of practices. Most notable among these practices is the ability to compete and earn money for play. In the professional sphere of esports gaming, over
$519 million dollars has been awarded to 54,333 players from the 350 different video games tracked by the esportsearnings.com. Professionals who play LoL have taken home over fifty-six million dollars in prize money in the 2,157 tournaments that have taken place in the past eight years (esportsearnings.com).
The vast majority of this prize pool has been awarded to a relatively small number of players, but if you follow the long tail of these phenomena to the point at which the prize money is null you find the everyday LoL gamer. These gamers will not bring home big prizes for
2 their competitive efforts. Yet, they regularly partake in an array of practices in their regular gaming that are set it apart as something different than the other games they may play. By design esports games have no ending and remain perpetually beyond completion. This dissertation will address the question of: How professional esports informs everyday gamers’ participation in the practices of esports gaming?
As both a way to label particular gaming product lines and sets of practices, esports represents a particular approach to the activities of gaming. Not all titles can be esports games.
Esports games generally have a professional sphere where players compete for prizes, what I will refer to as professional gaming. This would exclude many competitive video games that have no formal competitive sphere organized by their developers or fans. Professional gamers, for the purposes of this project, will be those people who earn money in this professional sphere by successfully competing or by participating in a set of institutionalized practices like broadcasting or coaching. Everyday gamers are those gamers who are not participating within this professional sphere. That is not to say they are not participating in esports practices, just that they do not earn money from that participation.
I will argue that the participation in esports gaming practices could provide a framework for productive media engagement for LoL gamers. I will describe how the professionalized approaches to playing LoL make their way into the everyday play of LoL gamers. I will explain how the organization of esports events exposes interested gamers to the influence of other organizations, like Students’ Unions or game developers and expands their capacity for cooperation with others and leadership. I will also demonstrate how the tools they used to organize their gaming enabled, regulated and restricted their activities. Finally I will introduce
3 the club’s Weekly League of Legends series, which highlighted the educational potential of esports participation.
Understanding esports in the everyday context
T. L. Taylor’s (2012) Raising the Stakes presented the most thorough description of this latest incarnation of professional esports gaming. She explained how, “contracted players, team owners, league operators, tournament organizers, and some parts of the broadcast/journalist domain have managed to create full-time occupations out of supporting, and growing, professional computer game play” (Taylor, 2012, p. 246). Although I have found the work of
Taylor and others (Nicholas Taylor, 2009, Witkowski 2012, Carter, Gibbs and Harrop, 2012) on the subject of professional gaming scene to be fascinating, I have been left to wonder what impact this subculture was having on gamers who had no hope of ever going pro.
Situated as the latest incarnation, in a much longer history of competitive video gaming, dating back at least to the arcades of the late 1970s and 1980s (Chasing Ghosts, King of Kong),
T. L. Taylor describes a world where people’s play looks more like work and the stakes of a simple game could not be higher. What drew her to this gaming subculture was that; “it wasn’t simply about informal norms and ways of acting, but also about emerging modes of institutionalization and the formalization of those practices.” (2012, p. 248). Professional teams have sponsors, cultivate amateur players to be future members and earn prize money from competing. While they work to develop practices for successfully competing, their approaches are being taken up within the practice-networks of everyday gamers.
While the valorized few professional gamers lead the institutionalization and formalization that has pervaded esports, what intrigues me is the impact that this is having on
4 the activities of the everyday gamers. Between the professional and everyday gamer there exists a network of actors that are dedicated to understanding and disseminating how those professionals play. Whether through commentary during a match or aggregation and analysis of in-game choices on websites, these practices are made accessible to anyone who has enough interest to seek them out.
What practices are being formalized? How are these practices making their way into the play of everyday gamers? What does the professionalization of esports mean to them? The professionalization of esports and the uptake of professionalized competitive practices within everyday gamer communities raise serious questions about our understanding of the distinction between work and play and what we are doing when we play our games. What are the implications of everyday play being modeled after professional competitive esports?
Although answering this question comprehensively would be difficult for a project of this magnitude, I will attempt to address it through four more circumscribed questions related to my interactions with a student gaming club dedicated to esports play in the game League of
Legends. We will first address who benefits from the perpetuation of the instrumental in-game practices? Who shapes the practices of groups attempting to organize their esports gaming?
How do the affordances of nonhuman actors shape the practices of everyday gamers participating in esports? Can the creation of esports media really empower everyday gamers?
Through a vast array of online resources, esports video gaming stretches far beyond the upper echelons of competitive circuits. From the work of Jin and Chee (2008) on the emergence of online gaming culture in South Korea it became clear that esports subculture is a globalized phenomenon. One of the primary concerns of foundational play scholar Johan Huizinga was
5 that players were forced to, “operate inside visions controlled by others” (Hendricks, 2010, p.
16). When players engage with esports resources within whose visions are they operating?
Unlike other kinds of competitive endeavors, esports video games, like League of Legends, have the unique characteristic of being owned by someone. With the emergence of a number of esports stakeholders, from computer equipment manufacturers to esports media personalities, there are many people who have a vested interest in the continued enrollment of gamers into this subculture.
Evaluating whether esports practices should be a cause for concern will be accomplished by drawing on the ongoing academic debate surrounding the concept of participatory culture. Are the gamers in this subculture contributing to a new “knowledge space” (Jenkins, 2006a) or “collective intelligence” (Levy, 1997)? Do online resources allow them to leverage and refine important in-game practices or trap them into a cycle of perpetual apprenticeship? Are esports gamers presented with a model for media participation designed to homogenize a new articulation of the same old audience-as-consumer logic (Carpentier,
2011)? There are real disagreements about what makes an aspect of culture participatory and what the value of that participation is.
To understand the connections between esports professionals and the activities of the average gamer I spent the Fall and Winter school terms of 2015-2016 following the activities of the University of Calgary LoL Club. I observed their on campus events, interviewed several members, watched replays of their LoL gaming, observed the over eleven hours of a YouTube content created from the competitive series called Weekly League of Legends(WLL) and spent hundreds of hours personally learning to play the game. Through these data sources and the
6 theoretical perspective of practice-networks (Nicolini, 2009) I will explore the connections between the professionalized sphere of esports and everyday gaming. Practice-networks have been productively employed in organization studies (Nicolini, 2009) with an approach that is informed by the perspectives of actor-network theory (Latour, 2005) and theories of practice
(Schatzki, 1996, Reckwitz, 2002). Each of these theoretical traditions have also already been productively used within the field of game studies.
Nicholas Taylor (2009) demonstrated that ANT could provide a useful tool for understanding gaming for, “its capacity to unite considerations of player competence and subjectivity with accounts of a game’s formal characteristics and technical constraints” (p. 101).
Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy (2008) presented a model for how ANT can be deployed to explain how games work to train their players in certain dispositions and forms of action. The work of Roig, San Cornelio, Ardevol, Alsina and Pages (2009) has been key to the development of an approach to gaming as a nexus of media practice. In this study I will seek to build on the strengths of each of these theoretical perspectives for the study of gaming.
Both perspectives were advantageous for addressing the research questions at hand.
Observing how particular esports practices, like the production of gaming videos, are distributed amongst LoL club members was key to understanding the how esports is informing the play of the everyday gamer. The use of an actor-network informed perspective provided a useful vocabulary for describing the relationships between actors within the club’s practice- networks.
Understanding the reverberations of this emerging esports subculture is an important next step in understanding the activity of gaming. While others have provided analysis of the
7 size and scope of the professional sphere I would like to explore how play is changing for everyday gamers. Video gaming is still an activity in question in our society (Goldstein, 2003,
Anderson and Dill 2000, Anderson and Bushman, 2001). Has the emergence of esports provided a structure and goal orientation that would make video gaming a valued example of our participatory culture or is it just a clever means of co-opting people into a profit focused industry to be exploited?
Game Studies and the State of Play
Scholars within video game studies often reference the work of Johan Huizinga on the play element in culture as the genesis of the study of games. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga’s (2000) primary concern was the changing nature of play he witnessed in the transition between the
19th and 20th centuries. His concept of play was an activity that sat very clearly outside of normal activities, within a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 2000, p. 11). It was to be a voluntary act, which could be deferred or left alone. Since Huizinga’s first offering our understanding of play has changed and the stark divisions he draws between work and play have been significantly challenged (Taylor 2006, Consalvo, 2009). Gamers that engage with esports frequently demonstrate that the divisions between work and play are difficult to define. While gamers work, play, consume and produce in their everyday gaming, the connections between these practices emphasize the need to reevaluate these categories.
As studies have repeatedly shown the emergence of video and networked gaming has changed how people play. Studies of nomadic gamer communities (Pearce, 2009), online role- playing (Nardi, 2009), virtual worlds (Boellstorff, 2008) or even professionalized esports play
(Taylor, 2012) all demonstrate the ways that networked gaming is changing play. It is clear that
8 the current understanding of what it means to play video games is a contested terrain. These studies provide the groundwork for understanding how the notion of play has been changing, multiplying and incorporating new practices since the onset of video and networked gaming.
Now in this next phase of video gaming a highly valorized few are able to turn their leisure into a profession, whether that be through high-level competition or the creation of content for streaming platforms. In other studies these gaming elite impact the communities within which they play (Talyor, 2006, Malaby 2007).
These practice-networks force players to conform to a highly specialized form of play or face the frustration of repeatedly losing. The sophisticated multimedia infrastructure that tirelessly makes these instrumental ways of playing accessible to the wider LoL community resembles what Consalvo (2007) has called the “paratextual industry” (p. 8). She developed the concept, as a means of describing the torrent of resources that contribute to “shaping our experiences of gameplay” (p. 8). As she described this industry is a mix of gaming companies, gaming media content creators and player led efforts, which combine to produce a participatory environment. The role of the paratextual industry in distributing professionally derived practices allows for a situation whereby the need for these resources is reinforced by their uptake among esports gamers. In a networked environment when a segment of the population begins to utilize these resources it forces other players to seek their own connections to these paratexts or face the humiliation of being competitively crushed by the reproduction of professionally derived practices.
9 Gaming as participatory culture
The ongoing debate about the value of participatory culture provides a conceptual terrain capable of evaluating the practices of esports gaming. According to Carpentier (2011) participatory culture is the latest iteration of the long-standing mass communication tradition of audience research. This latest iteration has emerged from notions of an active audience as presented first by Stuart Hall. Although most scholars would agree upon this more active characterization of the audience, there are divisions between those who herald this latest shift in consumer-producer relations as a positive step for audience members (Jenkins, 2006b) and those who remain deeply suspicious of these developments (Carpentier, 2011).
Henry Jenkins, since the release of Textual Poachers, has become a spokesperson for those people in the debate that see something positive in the changing relationship between media producers and consumers. In his first study of what he called “fan culture”, Jenkins
(2013) attempted to challenge stereotypical depictions of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits or mindless consumers. Instead he positions fans as, “spectators who transform the experience of watching television into a rich and complex participatory culture” (p. 23). For Jenkins the fan is to be studied and celebrated.
Nico Carpentier (2011), who has taken a more critical approach to the issue, has call into question whether these emerging forms of mediated participation are genuinely beneficial. For him, participation is a term that is multifaceted and complex and is intrinsically connected back to our democratic ideals. Carpentier (2011) warns us of the, “homogenization of audience articulations and practices” (p. 113). He forces us to ask whether the participatory nature of esports culture is just another instance of this kind of audience homogenization and whether
10 the practices of the esports gamers are just being cultivated for the financial benefit of corporate stakeholders. There are serious questions about concepts like work versus play in these new consumer-producer relations. When gamers spend their time consuming paratexts dedicated to helping them improve their competitive standing are they working? If so, for whom? How will they be compensated for their efforts?
Many of the concerns about participatory culture’s benefits are deeply rooted in a suspicion of consumer culture that can be connected back to the concerns of Horkheimer and
Adorno (2002) in their initial critique of the culture industry. There are many actors who stand to benefit financially from the increased growth of the esports subculture. By observing and interviewing gamers who engage with the esports subculture I will be able to start to trace the associations between everyday gamers, professionals, esports media and other relevant stakeholders. Identifying and mapping the practices that exist within this subculture should provide a means to assess the implications of the impact that professionalized competitions have had on everyday gaming.
Chapter outline
The following chapters will explore the practice-networks of esports gaming through my interactions with the University of Calgary LoL Club, Riot Games’ League of Legends and the wider paratextual environment in which these practice-networks are situated. The first task will be to position this study within the field of game studies. In just a few decades the volume and sophistication of the work being produced in the academic pursuit of understanding video gaming has provided a field of study too broad to usefully review in this dissertation, so specific areas within field that will be relevant for the analysis will be the focus of the second chapter.
11 It has been long understood that media, including video games, serve a purpose within society that goes beyond their mere consumption. The works of Nico Carpentier and Henry
Jenkins will be reviewed in the final section of this second chapter to orient the reader to the current trends in the debate over media participation. Carpentier (2016) has a much more precise definition of what counts as participation and a more exclusive emphasis on how power is implicated and enacted (p. 72). Although these two agree with one another on many issues regarding participatory culture I will use them as opposite ends of a spectrum. Jenkins will be cast as an optimist about the onset of participatory culture and Carpentier will be positioned as a skeptic.
The third chapter will explore the theoretical framework of practice-networks. First by reviewing how the combination of these approaches has emerged within the works of scholars like Couldry (2012) and Nicolini (2009). Then the chapter will review some background for understanding my use of the concepts in the later chapters. I have drawn from many, but not all, of the theoretical assumptions found within these bodies of theory in my approach in this study. Providing some background on how these concepts have been used within each theory should orient the reader to my own usage of the terminology.
The fourth chapter will recount the methodological approach of the study. Since I have taken an ethnographic orientation towards the project it makes sense to begin with how the tools of ethnography are commonly deployed within audience and video gaming research.
Specifically, the use of connective ethnography (Fields and Kafai 2009, 2010) for multi-sited sources of data and the work of Seth Giddings and his use of a micro-ethnography for gaming research have been central to my design. During this project I conducted interviews with club
12 members, observed in-person and online events and spent a considerable amount of time within the virtual field site. How each of these sources of data was collected will be recounted in the fourth chapter. Unlike other gaming ethnographies this study was not conducted with the benefit of a stable community of gamers, so I will also address the challenges and shortcoming of my approach.
Chapter five will start our exploration of LoL club esports gaming with a close examination of the practices of LoL club play through the concept of gaming capital. We will explore data generated from my interviews with participants where they would talk me through a replay of their own LoL gaming and my own experiences within the game. This chapter should serve as an introduction to the most basic layer of LoL gaming’s practice- networks that connect the practices within the game to the instrumentalized practices of professionals. Gaming capital, will be used to conceptualize these resources as comprising stores of knowledge that gamers draws on in their interactions in the virtual environment.
Within game studies this kind of knowledge has been connected to the Bourdieusian concept of capital. First imported to game studies by Mia Consalvo (2007), the concept of gamer capital, much like social capital, acts as a reserve that individuals can draw on in the execution of their gaming practices. Gaming capital as a set of resources that gamers can draw on, or more simply put what it makes sense to do in a given context, shares a considerable amount of conceptual overlap with the concept of practical intelligibility. In this chapter I have proposed two additional layers to this concept of gaming capital to capture what I observed within the practice-networks of the club. By exploring the practices of LoL gaming through
13 these layers of gaming capital I will be able to begin to answer the question of how esports has changed the acquisition and execution of in-game practices.
To emulate what takes place in the professional scene of esports gaming, a player must seek out others to form teams and organize competitions. The sixth chapter will answer the question of how other actants sought to shape the practices of the club. Zooming out from the act of playing LoL, I will examine two of the most influential actants that sought to impose sets of practices on the organization of the club. In each case these actants performed as obligatory passage point for the club, imposing specific practices that often led to members taking on responsibilities outside of just improving their own in-game performance.
Shifting the perspective to the nonhuman actors who had an impact on shaping the practices of the group will be the focus of the seventh chapter. Turning first to the impact that on-campus live events had on the club I will address the challenges that esports gaming poses.
We will then turn to the affordances of streaming platforms to consider the opportunities and obstacles that these actors provided. Finally, this chapter will briefly examine the role that social media, particularly Facebook, played in the organization of the club’s activities. These three examples will serve to answer the question of how the affordances of nonhuman actors enabled, regulated and constrained the activities of the club.
The final analysis chapter will take a more concerted look at the club’s WLL series to answer the question of what the practices of machinima bring to everyday gaming. Machinima is the practice of creating audiovisual content that captures the act of playing video games.
There has been a substantial amount of work in the study of machinima in recent decades and in this chapter, I will address how the claims found in those studies hold up in the machinima
14 produced by the LoL club. To date, most machinima research has focused on the production of narrative based media, but I will argue that there could still be some value in the practices of producing esports machinima. Lastly, the chapter will examine how the practices of sports broadcasting played a part in every one of the club’s competitive events.
I have arranged these stories to progress from the practices of play in the game environment to move outwards to the practices of organizing at the level of the club, outward to the impact of the affordances of nonhuman actors on the club’s activities, to finally the production of machinima through their WLL series. Each layer in the analysis of the LoL club should include and build on the practice-networks outlined in the chapter that precedes it.
Throughout the study I have attempted to produce an even-handed assessment of these practice-networks using Carpentier’s (2016) concept of participatory intensities as a normative measure of their value. The result was a complex nexus of practice-networks that enabled some club members to develop competencies that will be valuable outside of the context of LoL gaming. There were also many pitfalls - from the exploitative nature of instrumentalized in- game practices to club members’ exposure to the toxic elements of some online cultures. Based on my exploration of the practice-networks of LoL club gamers I argue that the practices of esports fandom can provide supportive frameworks for empowering media participation under certain conditions. The kind of participation that can be beneficial for esports gamers is precarious and must be protected from actors who seek to shape these practice-networks for their own benefit.
15
Chapter 2 Video gaming, paratexts and participation
Clearly the subject of esports fits most comfortably within the field of game studies.
With many contributions from various disciplines and many contested concepts, it will be necessary to review both the area more broadly and the specific concepts that will be taken up in this study. It is also necessary to understand the value of video game research for society. It is in the pursuit of this goal that I suggest that understanding gaming culture can contribute to the debates over media participation. On the other hand, the debates over media participation can be used to unify common, but unconnected, areas of concern about gaming.
This is by no means the first attempt to link the study of gaming and the study of media participation. Henry Jenkins (2006a) has for many years looked to gaming communities to address the concepts of participatory culture he has championed. In the field of games studies authors, like Kurt Squire (2011), have drawn on the concept of participatory culture in their explorations of the utility of video games for pedagogical purposes. What I am suggesting here, is that there are various overlapping areas of concern that exist between the literature of participatory culture and game studies
This chapter will be divided into three main sections. The first section will explore various themes that have developed within game studies that are most relevant to the debates over media participation. Specifically, critical perspectives concerned with issues of markets and labour and concerns over video games being rationalizing engines will be addressed. The chapter will then shift to the specific concepts of esports, paratexts and gaming capital, as these are all fundamental concepts for the analysis in the current study. In the last section, will
16 broaden the perspective to situate the activities of gamers as a form of media participation.
Exploring the overlapping concerns of video game studies and media participation should provide a more nuanced set of concepts for engaging with the activities of gamers and a more robust metric for evaluating those activities.
Markets, makers and immaterial labour
The groundwork for how to critique the production of video games as an industry has been provided by scholars like Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter. As
Kline described, their approach attempted to, “get a better sense of how a particular cultural practice and cultural industry is linked up to, or intersects with, the general dynamics of profit accumulation” (Kline, Dyer-Witherford & dePeuter, 2003, 22). This pursuit would shape not only Kline’s own pursuit of digital play, but also the works of his co-authors Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter. Focusing their attention topics like the transnational character of the industry
(Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter, 2009), labour relations within the industry (Dyer-Witherford,
1999; Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter, 2006) and the dynamics and contradictions of the
Canadian gaming industry (Dyer-Witherford, 2004; Dyer-Witherford and Sharman, 2006) these studies provide a sober picture of industry coming into its maturity.
Drawing on Lazzarato’s concept of “immaterial labour” de Peuter (2005) notes that the playing of games shares many of the concept’s qualitative features like, “scientific know-how, hi-tech proficiency, cultural creativity, human sociability and cooperative interactivity” (p. 2).
He also emphasizes the blurring of the line between work and play that is constitutive of this kind of labour. Notice of this blurring has reverberated throughout games studies and has also
17 been taken up in the study of virtual worlds by Bonnie Nardi (2010) and T. L. Taylor (2006).
These works highlight the difficulty of making distinctions between concepts like work and play.
As the global video gaming industry has matured ancillary spheres of activity, like the practice of modding (Simon, 2007), have developed in parallel. Through altering the look and performance of their gaming equipment, modder’s engage in a form of self-expression seen within other similar collector communities. Simon’s (2007) study was an attempt to address,
“interesting questions about the cultural politics of personal computing” (p. 177). Drawing together the issues of game play and modding, Kucklich coined the term playbour to describe this blurring of work and play.
The comingling of industry practices, ancillary spheres of activity and the blurring of work and play serve as a foundation for understanding the relations that have emerged within esports culture. These critical approaches to game studies echo concerns of some of the critics of participatory culture, which will be explored in the final section of this chapter. Specifically, the concern over exploitation of gamers’ time resonates with the kinds of participatory frameworks that Carpentier is most critical of. They provide ways for understanding gamers’ practices and their relationship to the industries they support.
Video games and technological rationalization
Drawing on Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, Sara Grimes, has sought to develop a new approach to studying games that positions them as “sites of social rationalization” (Grimes and Feenberg, 2009, p. 105). Her approach addressed a gap in game studies that failed to relate the political, cultural, economic and technological features of games to the rationalization of play, leisure, and the lifeworld. The framework explored the processes
18 through which “rules become technically mediated, play practices become institutionalized and players become rationalized (and professionalized or commodified)” (Grimes and Feenberg,
2009, p. 116). An understanding of esports practice would be incomplete without consideration of the concerns raised through this approach.
The dynamics of institutionalization, professionalization and commodification should be central to an understanding of esports gaming. The rationalizing character of games then produces a social order, which can be accounted for in the technological and commercial strategies of the industries that support gaming as an activity. This increases the opportunity to commodify the activities of gamers. As the authors indicate the rise to the player-spectator is one example of the ways in which gaming culture has been further commodified.
The contributions of critical games studies, from both the materialist and Feenbergian perspectives, will provide a means for engaging with the practices of esports gaming in ways that draw attention to the power dynamics at play. To determine whether one should be concerned about esports gaming, these critical approaches draw attention to the specific aspects of gaming practice where attention should be paid. How gamers’ time and effort are conceptualized and what gaming practices are potentially doing to them are two of the strongest areas of concern from the broader area of game studies. The next section will more closely examine the concepts of esports, paratext and gaming capital.
Esports, paratext and gaming capital
One can see the maturation of an area of study through the literature reviews provided in the works of Bret Hutchins (2008), Nicholas Taylor (2009) and Emma Witkowski (2012).
While new technical assemblages were emerging in esports cultures, well-established concerns
19 emerged around the issues of gender (Taylor, 2009), professionalization (Taylor, 2012) and problematic use (Chee, 2006, Domahidi and Quandt, 2015). Although esports culture developed in parallel with massively multiplayer online role-playing games it has not attracted as much academic attention within the field of game studies. Understanding what has already been established in the literature about esports gaming will be crucial.
Likewise, it is valuable to take a closer look at two of the primary concepts used in the analysis, which have emerged from the works of Mia Consalvo (2007); paratext and gaming capital. These concepts provide the means to describe connective material between gamers’ actions within the virtual environment. Having adapted these concepts from Gerrard
Gennette’s work in literary studies and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on social capital, respectively, it will be useful to explore how these concepts relate to their previous uses, as well as how they shape our understanding of some of the work already completed within game studies.
The study of esports
Popular attention towards esports gaming has exploded in the past decade. Whether it is through your local movie theatre advertising their latest esports event (Cineplex), or through the current campaign to make esports part of the Olympics (The Associated Press, September
1st, 2018), one cannot deny its growth in gaming culture. Competing popular histories of esports may quibble over the relevance of specific games, but it is generally agreed that the latest emergence of competitive gaming began to accelerate in the 1990s. With much of the academic attention focused on the rapidly emerging professional scene, there have been few studies that examine esports in the everyday context.
20 Like most emerging areas, studies of esports could be traced back to a time before the term itself had become popularized. Starting in the late 1990s South Korea grew to become a
Mecca of competitive networked gaming through the first decade of this century (Chee, 2006,
Jin and Chee, 2008). In her study of Korea online gaming, Florence Chee (2006), was instrumental in revealing the complex social and institutional forces that were at play in the early days of this latest emergence of esports. It was in this environment that she noted the promotion and popularity of an “old” game such as Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft (p. 227).
What was odd about the game’s popularity was that it had been first released in 1998. Most video games do not have the longevity in the marketplace that esports titles have seemed to capture.
It was at that time that the practices of video game broadcasting were popularized through streaming services like GomTV, founded in 2008. The rise of cult celebrity like, Lim Yo
Hwan or BoxeR, considered to be one of the most successful people in esports history, also began in this context. Professional teams with sponsorship with major companies like SK
Telecom, in the case of LoL. The rise of national and international organizations like the Korean
Esports Association (KeSPA) and the International esports Federation (IeSF) also took place in the same decade. All this activity was organized largely around tournaments resembling something you would expect to see in professional racing or golf.
Appropriating the label sport for these competitive activities was not straightforward.
Hutchins (2008) and Witkowski (2012) provide compelling arguments for the sportiness of esports. Hutchins (2008) identifies a shift from structural integration between media and sport to material integration in the case of esports. He positions the development of esports as a
21 radical extension of the kinds of, “escalating commercialization and mediatization” (Hutchins,
2008, p. 852) that has taken place in the world of professional and amateur sports competitions. As he suggests esports gaming cannot be understood in terms of media, sports or computer gaming alone as the boundaries that normally separate these spheres of activity have imploded. Witkowski’s focus has been primarily on Counter Strike and its usage in LAN gaming events focusing primarily on the embodied experience of playing esports.
There have been approaches to understanding the gameplay of esports conceptually
(Dor, 2014) and technical assemblages that have emerged as a result (Taylor, 2009). Dor (2014) focused on a specific esports game, Starcraft: Broodwar, as an example of the cognitive and perceptive processes in what he calls the “heuristic circle of real-time strategy process” (p. 2), which builds on a concept first introduced by Bernard Perron (2006). Dor positions game- states, player execution and their strategic plans within this circle. Taylor (2009, 2011) examined how technical assemblages of Halo 3 competitive gaming were reproduced within a
Toronto-based gaming club as they prepared for an elite competitive event for Major League
Gaming in 2008. Taylor’s specific focus was on the emergence of hyper-masculinity within these assemblages.
The competitive infrastructure of esports has been a cornerstone topic within this area.
T. L. Taylor’s (2012) ethnography set the template suggesting that esports gaming covered a range of issues including, “being socialized into highly instrumental play by their peers to institutional influences, economics, relationships with technology, and larger cultural factors around things like gender and play.” (95). The issue of gender and play has also been taken up by scholars like Taylor and Chee and Jenson (2011) who studied how it was presented at
22 competitive events. Although gender is an area of interest within esports, and game studies more broadly, it was a topic that I could not address properly in my exploration of the LoL
Club’s practice-networks. That is not to say that there were no women involved. There were, it is just that I was not able to secure more than passing interactions with them.
Scholz (2012) presented an early analysis of the rise of streaming as a practice within esports culture. The author outlines how the confluence of easy access, passive content consummation, active interaction and community-based content generation had contributed to the Starcraft 2 broadcasting scene through Internet protocol television (IPTV) media. The study provided a detailed history of the transition from the original IPTV protocols for games sharing to the more easily accessible platforms of YouTube and Twitch. The case study considers the varying actors that comprise the assemblage of these Internet broadcasts including, esports organizers, professional players, casters and journalists as well as spectators.
Rambusch, Jakobsson and Pargman (2007) adapted a version of Kline et al’s three circuits of interactivity within gaming in general to the specific case of esports gaming in
Counter Strike. As they suggest this analytical tool was not ideal for the task since Kline et al,
“emphasize production and commodity over consumption and gameplay” (Rambusch,
Jakobsson and Pargman, 2007, p. 158). Their modification is to consider interactions between players’ individual activities, the game’s interface and the culture and business surrounding
Counter Strike. Through this approach they were able to examine how esports gameplay is structured by various actors into a, “…process of increasing professionalization that can be compared with similar process in other sports” (Rambusch, Jakobsson and Pargman, 2007, p.
15).
23 The primary focus of the work conducted so far has been directed towards the professionalized elements within esports culture. With the notable exception of the some of the earlier works, which were published before the latest emergence of esports stabilized, like
Chee (2006), Jin (2008) and Janz & Martens (2005), the literature is focused on professional players, organizations and events that currently define esports. What is missing from these studies is a return to the everyday gamer. With the professional sphere of esports gaming well established in the literature, what does this mean for gaming in the everyday context? To address how professionalized esports informs the play of everyday gamers the chapter will now explore two concepts adapted to game studies by Mia Consalvo, which will help to understand this mundane context.
Concept of paratext in gaming
The recent extension of the concept of paratext in video game studies (Consalvo, 2007) has provided a platform for an expanded perspective on the experience of playing video games.
Understanding video games through the paratexts and paratextual industries that surround them reveals how the local reproduction of video gaming practices are immersed in a complex network of actors who, “actively work to shape the gameplay experience” (Consalvo, 2007, p.
9). In her work on cheating within gaming culture Consalvo (2007) developed two interrelated concepts in order to capture, “how individuals interact with games, information about games and the game industry and other game players” (p. 4).
The first concept to examine more closely, paratext, refers to the things that surround games from which players can accumulate gaming capital. In her book Consalvo includes a range of standard texts from blog posts, screen shots and strategy guides that are all designed
24 to shape how people approach their games. She also includes a range of artifacts, like mod chips, which change the way a game is experienced. As she demonstrates, the relationship between gamers and game developers was fundamentally altered by the rise of the paratextual industries as these commercial actors placed themselves in between players and their games.
From her study, a range of actors emerged to meet gamers’ demand for these resources, including elements of the gaming and publishing industries. What her study was not able to include was the way that both paratexts and gaming capital have been further changed by the acceleration of gamers as paratextual producers. As she indicated in the final chapter, her focus on the commercial elements within gaming culture that are working on changing how gamers play was just one part of an evolving scene. As player-created content has grown through the use of technologies like streaming video sites, like YouTube, there are serious questions about how, “the more successful indie paratextual efforts are now being incorporated into the profit-making enterprises” (Consalvo, 2007, p. 177). Further to this point is that paratextual consumption and production fall within some peoples’ gaming activities.
The value of a concept like paratext is that it allows the grouping of many already studied gamer activities with one overarching descriptor.
The doing of paratext
The notion of playing better is a constitutive feature of what drives the production of many paratextual resources. Christopher Paul’s (2011) exploration of the development of
“theorycrafting”, in World of Warcraft provides and excellent example of how, “in mapping the procedures of the game by developing paratexts players have created a dynamic relationship that reshapes WoW’s ongoing design.” (p. 2). By pushing at the boundaries of gaming systems
25 in instrumental attempts to achieve better results from their play, theorycrafters have an impact on both players in the networked environments of online games, as well as for the designers of those games.
Theorycrafting paratexts often accumulate information about the game’s environment, as well as the practices that players perform within, as seen in figure 1. They provide a means for gamers to digest complex game mechanics and player practices with the use of ready-made websites, calculators, wikis and walkthrough documents. The practice of theory crafting is most commonly directed towards determining the best possible approaches to a game, but that does not have to be the case. There are many gamers who reject the instrumentalized approaches to games that theorycrafting consensus can produce and these gamers will actively attempt to resist in-game trends.
Figure 1 Theorycrafting paratext for League of Legends. The website presents information about the ranks of playable characters in the game. Retrieved from https://champion.gg/ Practices like theorycrafting would fit with what Carter, Gibbs and Harrop (2012) call metagaming, which refers to the activities, “perceived by players as being 'outside' or
'peripheral' to the game”(p. 1). I argue that this kind of engagement with paratext moves play outside the confines of virtual environments and exposes it as a set of practices immersed in
26 the wider activity flows of our mediated lives. One of the most important questions that must be explored is how gamers understand and make meaning from the resources they utilize in their play practices. As Bonnie Nardi (2010) has noted, in her ethnographic exploration of
WoW, players’, engagement with these paratextual resources is often framed as something other than work (p. 105). With a focus on how gamers use and understand their relationship to paratexts I can highlight the complexity of what gamers are really doing in their play.
Streaming video as paratext
The key development in games and paratexts has been the rise of player-generated content. The advancement of streaming video services, like Twitch.tv, a key development have significantly changed how people interface with their games. Henry Lowood (2006) has indicated, this practice began in the early days of networked gaming with ID software’s Doom 2.
For the first time, gamers were able to record their gameplay into small files that could be easily shared across dial-up networks and then replayed using the game’s software. This allowed gamers to share and replicate each other’s in-game actions, which led to the development of many of the practices seen in video paratexts today, like speed running. As I will explore in chapter eight, I will argue that the doing of paratext in esports can be productively framed as a kind of machinima.
Streaming video services have changed the amount of effort required to produce the kinds of paratextual resources that have always developed alongside the gaming industries. The shift from text-based guides to video-based materials for helping players solve puzzles, improve strategy or continue their progress in a game is changing the way people interact with them.
Like the spectacle that web-streamed broadcasting creates for esports events, they also
27 facilitate it around non-esports games who are featured in the machinima genres of, “let’s play” and instructional paratextual resources that are being posted online daily.
By engaging with the concept of paratext I will be able to continue Consalvo’s (2007) project of mapping the paratextual industries in the era of user-generated content. The inclusion of the literature regarding the practices of machinima will provide a more nuanced conceptual terrain for engaging with the process and product of paratextual production. It is also beneficial to have the lexical ability to describe those actors, which seek to shape how people play their games in a more concise fashion. In the next section, I will examine her use of the term gaming capital.
Gaming capital
What I would suggest is that there has been sufficient work done within game studies that the concept of gaming capital could benefit from a distinction between knowledge and actions. Gaming capital could be the knowledge that a gamer has acquired about a specific game mechanic or practice within a game, as Consalvo has explored. Alternatively, I propose that gaming capital could also be acquired by developing a reputation through actions conducted in moments of gameplay or inscribed in outwardly visible displays. To develop this distinction further this section will explore studies that address these elements of gaming capital.
Practices like theorycrafting (Paul, 2011) support my position that gaming capital can be conceived as stores of knowledge. The instrumental focus of gamers drives the creation of endless discussions, online texts, and videos, which explore this knowledge in depth. To put this in the terms outlined by Carter, Gibbs and Harrop (2012) this knowledge would be
28 metagaming capital. What makes it distinct is that it is limited by the game in question, as knowledge is generated specifically from/for that system. In this way metagaming capital is only transposable from one game to the next insofar as those games share similar mechanics.
In contrast, paragaming capital is focused on the continuously evolving area of player practices. Within esports culture this paragaming capital is acquired through spectatorship of a given video game, particularly of its professional scene. The dynamics between professional competitions and complimentary paratextual production make the paratextual environment of most esports games fleeting and rife with obsolescence. Gaming practices are consistently refined as game environments undergo continuous adjustment through updates and patches, often rendering older paragaming capital useless. Although player practices are performed in these virtual environments they are not tethered to them in the same way as meta-gaming knowledge. These are the practices that, in some cases, could be portable from one game to the next.
The reputation that a player has accumulated for their actions in the game would be an example of inscribed gaming capital. Arguably dating back to the high score boards of the golden age of coin operated arcade games, what I propose is that inscribed gaming capital is acquired through activities in the game’s environment and are somehow associated to a gamer whether voluntarily or not. In the current era of video games, socially networked environments where in-game achievements are tracked and shared are a common feature of many platforms.
This can also take the form of leagues or tiers in networked competitive games. These tiers are used for matchmaking purposes and as a symbol of a players’ status. What makes this kind of gamer capital unique is that it is based on past actions that can no longer be changed.
29 The final category that is the notion of performed gaming capital. Again, this form of gaming capital could date back to the spectatorship of the arcade era with crowds huddled around a machine to observe an elite player perform their mastery over the game environment. Whether you are a master player or cheater, to acquire this kind of gaming capital one must be observed performing actions within the game. It is notable that this kind of gamer capital often can become inscribed gamer capital but is still unique in that it requires a kind of relationship between performer and observer.
Distinguishing between the kinds of gaming capital that I could characterize as knowledge and those that are based on actions is a necessary step for a practice-based approach to esports gaming. As I will explore in the next chapter, the distinction between actions and intelligibility is integral to an understanding of practice. Being able to parse between these kinds of gamer capital will provide a means for understanding the ways in which gamer capital can be leveraged within gamer practices. It also severs the purpose of being able to address more precisely these very different means of acquiring gaming capital.
These three game studies concepts, esports, paratexts and gaming capital, were essential for describing the activities of the LoL Club. Through my exploration of the club I hope to be able to contribute to our understanding of each of these terms. Shifting the focus from professional esports gaming to the everyday context will broaden the perspective on this gaming subculture. Utilizing the concept of paratext will help to flesh out the relationship between LoL club gamers and the texts they consume and produce in their participation in esports practice. Finally, by distinguishing the concept of gaming capital between the matrices of knowledge and action, I can more thoroughly examine LoL club gamers’ participation in
30 esports practice. The final section of the chapter will now turn to the broader area of audience studies, to understand the connections between what has just been covered, in these first two sections, and participation.
Media participation
Although video game studies is robust as a field, it is important to situate the activities of gamers within the wider activity flows of our social world. There has been a long tradition of researching audiences, which has provided game studies projects with a rich tapestry of conceptual tools to draw from and to make a significant contribution to. In a world of technological convergence, where the roles of producers and consumers are largely merging, understanding the practices of esports can contribute to our understanding of participatory culture.
Positioning the activities of esports gamers as an instance of media participation provides a broader social context for an understanding of their gaming. The Internet, specifically the shift into web 2.0, has garnered much academic attention in the early decades of this century. Understanding the practices of this new online environment, and critiques of those practices, will provide a clearer picture of gamers’ activities. Taking into consideration the dynamic of empowerment and exploitation that pervades the debate around our mediated participation, this literature provides a tool set for not just critiquing the activities of esports gamers, but also providing a means for acknowledging their efforts and where participation can be improved.
This section will examine more closely the debate over what Jenkins (2016) has called participatory culture. Starting with the intellectual roots of this idea in the works of British
31 Cultural Studies and the birth of the active audience, the claims of proponents like Jenkins of the empowering nature of this cultural shift will be reviewed. The other side of this debate is best presented in the works of Nico Carpentier (2011) who has sought to reposition this debate back to the issue of the role of media in society. Although Carpentier agrees that media participation is a necessary part of life, he disagrees that the kind of participation largely available today is as valuable as it could be.
From audiences to fans
The introduction of Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication changed dramatically our understanding of who audiences are, and what they do with the content they consume. With foundational works from scholars like Morley (1980), Ang (1982) and Radway
(1984), the conception of audience members as passive receivers of content was shattered.
These works demonstrated how audiences deconstruct messages they receive from media differently, consume content for complicated and not entirely obvious reasons and are shaped by their own cultural milieu when consuming it. From these shifts in our understanding of audience activity arose competing visions.
The groundwork that was being laid in 1980s audience studies allowed Henry Jenkins
(2013) to begin his first foray into fan culture from the assertion that fans were not cultural dupes. For Jenkins the distinction between audience studies and his version of fan studies lies in the difference between spectatorship and participation (Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013, p. 2). In
Textual Poachers he demonstrated how fan engagement with cultural texts goes beyond just the notion of active spectatorship and extends into an array of fan practices. Including particular modes of reception, critical interpretive practices, consumer activism, cultural
32 production and community that exist within media fandoms. This distinction moves the active audience member from individual interpreter to media collaborator (Jenkins, 2012, pp. 331-
333). The blurring of the roles of producers and consumers became the focus of Convergence
Culture, where Jenkins updates his approach to the cultural logic of fandom to include the impact of various online platforms changing the practices of the fan.
By exploring the ways in which fans critically interpret and interact with the narratives being presented to them through television series, Jenkins has been the keystone proponent of a utopian description of fan culture. Directing his attention toward the creative activities of fan fiction, fan videos and composers, Jenkins highlights how fans not only actively decode texts, but how they take them up and use them as a platform for launching their own creative endeavors. As he suggests near the book’s conclusion, “fandom offers not so much an escape from reality as an alternative reality whose values may be more humane and democratic that those held by mundane society” (Jenkins, 2012, p. 333). Obviously, these alternate realities are still subject to the one we all share.
Participatory culture as audience empowerment
For Jenkins (2006b), participatory culture means that, “audiences are gaining greater power and autonomy as they enter into the new knowledge culture.” (p. 142). As Jenkins’ work on fandom has evolved into a theory of convergence culture he posits that the interactions that are constitutive of fandom are best understood through Pierre Levy’s (1997) notion of collective intelligence. Levy’s collective intelligence referred to, “a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills” (p. 130). Whether or not the paratextual activities of LoL club
33 gaming actually fit Levy’s definition of collective intelligence is an important question for understanding what gamers are doing. Certainly, the paratextual communities of spectators and analysts that surround most esports subcultures include these characteristics.
Jenkins’ use of Levy’s concept focused on the ways in which fan communities produce material about their favourite media texts. What concerns me about Jenkins’ use of collective intelligence is whether or not fan communities, especially in video gaming culture, would more comfortably fit with Levy’s concern about fetishized or hypostatized communities. In his description of these communities Levy (1997) offers us the example of an ant colony where individuals have, “no collective vision and no awareness of how their actions are integrated with those of other individuals” (p. 16). The question that arises from this perspective in regard to gamers and paratext is whether or not they understand their actions as a part of a collective vision and more importantly their power to shape that vision.
In Spreadable Media, Jenkins and his coauthors sought to provide an exploration of how the blurred boundaries of media production and consumption helped to shape the cultural and political agenda through their curation and circulation of media texts (Jenkins and Carpentier,
2013, p. 8). Working from culturally contextual case studies, Jenkins’ work in fandom has sought to link these disparate fan practices to a broader understanding of media and participation, which has led him now to participatory politics. By choosing temporary tactical
‘communities’ he has been able to successfully highlight fan practices of creation, appraisal and circulation of content. Although he admits that his earlier works were primarily descriptive, as he has developed his body of work others have accused him of being overly naïve about the emancipatory power of fan practices.
34 Critical approaches to media participation
As Jenkins indicated, “critical theory has offered us the best tool for understanding those forces that might deflect a more participatory culture” (Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013, p.
2). Particularly the works of Nico Carpentier have been instructive in addressing the repertoire of participatory intensities. Media plays a crucial role in the socialization of audience members, for Carpentier, which is why he calls for more horizontally participatory practices within media culture. Working more on the conceptual terrain of media and participation, he has provided many useful concepts for normatively judging the participation being provided both in and through media.
Carpentier’s work has focused primarily on refining the concepts used to describe people’s relationship with media. For him the concept of participation is a product of conflating participation in media and participation through media. The former deals with the extent to which individuals have input in, “the development of media output (content-related participation) and in media organizational decision-making (structural participation)”
(Carpentier, Dahlgren & Pasquali, 2013, p. 2). Participation through the media deals with the ways that media, serve, “as a location where citizens can voice their opinions and experiences and interact with others’ voices” (Carpentier, Dahlgren & Pasquali, 2013, p. 2). Carpentier’s parsing of the concepts comingles these more precise definitions with normative judgments of their capacity to enhance our democratic involvement.
Indeed, his critiques of the current forms of media participation today are based on the extent to which these platforms foster a radically democratic sensibility in their audience. This draws on a long-held justification for audience and popular cultural studies, which positions our
35 interactions with the popular media environment as one of many sources from which citizens are socialized in our society. The premise is that by critiquing media participation through this lens we might end up with a media environment that makes the values of democratic organization clear and accessible to the audience. It is from this pursuit that Carpentier presents us with his notions of minimalist versus maximalist forms of media participation.
Minimalist forms of media participation are present in platforms where professionals retain strong control over the processes and outcomes of user activities. His main critique is that these platforms lead to an articulation of participation that is disconnected and non- political. Seeing media as a site of ideological struggle, the problem for Carpentier is that the political is a dimension of social reality that is ever-present. Drawing on the works of Chantal
Mouffe, specifically her distinction between politics and the political, Carpentier resists the urge to hierarchize occurrences of the political (Jenkins and Carpentier, 2013, p. 5). His issue with hierarchy in our understanding of what is political is that it tends to skew our focus towards the institutions and processes where politics is most visible at the expense of other elements of politics in the social sphere.
Carpentier’s concerns about minimalist participatory forms is that contributions, like those found in gaming cultures, mainly serve, “the needs and interests of the mainstream media system itself, instrumentalizing and incorporating the activities of participating non- professionals” (Carpentier, Dahlgren & Pasquali, 2013, p. 3). It is here that the debate over participatory culture is most resonant with the concerns of critical games scholarship. These concerns are also echoed in works of other critics of web 2.0, like Petersen’s characterization of, “loser generated content” and what he calls, “an architecture of exploitation” (Petersen,
36 2008, p. 7). Using the example of Google’s adsense program, which allows targeted personal advertising space on blogs and other websites, Peterson demonstrates how a program that seems to be designed to empower individuals like bloggers is really for web-based surveillance of consumer behaviour.
Maximalist media participation explicitly seeks a balance between professional control of the platform and popular participation. The concept is drawn from the works of Anthony
Giddens, Pateman and Mouffe. Pateman provided the concept of the ladder of participation from which Carpentier’s polls of minimalist versus maximalist were based. From Giddens and
Mouffe, he drew his expanded notion of politics and the political. His incorporation of Giddens serves as a means for justifying his interest in the kinds of participation available to citizens. He interprets Giddens as suggesting symmetry between the democratizing of a personal life with the possibilities in the global political order (Carpentier, Dahlgren & Pasquali, 2013, p. 18). The influence of Mouffe on these concepts was described earlier in her recasting of the political.
Although he provides a much more exhaustive history of the use of participatory practices in art, theatre and policy he distils the notion of maximalist participation into three spheres of media praxis: alternative, mainstream and digital. In each of these spheres of media praxis there is an operative definition of participation at play. These spheres present very different versions of the notion of participation. Community and alternative media’s focus on providing access to the creation of media, participation being offered through talk shows and reality television in the mainstream media and the conflation of community and organization found in newer Internet platforms are all emblematic examples of these spheres.
37 To ground these concepts in a concrete example, Carpentier analyzes the organizational subculture of the Community Programming Unit (CPU) of the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) and specifically the show Video Nation as an example of a more maximalist participatory framework. The CPU, according to Carpentier, was developed in the wake of growing concerns at the BBC that there needed to be a platform for people who were misrepresented or missing entirely from the regular broadcast schedule. Started in 1992, Video Nation served as a multiplatform program where audience members could send in representations of their daily lives, “to signify the multi-layered culture of ordinary people and the cultural diversity within the British nation” (Carpentier, 2013, p. 232). As Carpentier recounts, what was proposed was to provide camcorders, and the requisite training to use them, to about fifty people who were considered representative of the network’s audience. During its six-year run on television,
Video Nation’s more than 300 participants had created more than 60 hours of broadcast time for BBC2.
After the show’s broadcast cancellation, the short films were moved online for the launch of the Video Nation website. The online version of Video Nation continued to expand with thousands of additional contributions until the announcement of its closure in 2011. As the program moved from television to the Internet it became more connected to other BBC productions and contributions ballooned from the initial small group of BBC trained audience members to people who had access to their own cameras and training. Carpentier emphasized in his analysis, that there were three domains in which participants were given higher levels of power reflecting the program’s participatory ethos. Through providing recording equipment,
38 training participants in video production and allowing them input into the editorial process the people who took part in this project were lifted into more egalitarian power relations.
The Video Nation case provides an excellent example of the kinds of tensions that are required for maximalist participatory frameworks to work. As he suggests the, “power equilibrium between participants and professionals has from the beginning of Video Nation been under constant pressure from the institutional context of a mainstream broadcaster”
(Carpentier, 2013, p. 247). Balancing the needs of a public broadcaster, and later web archive, with the interests and power of ordinary people creates a constant pressure on the possibility of full participation. It is these pressures that enrich Carpentier’s analysis and provides a glimpse into what a maximalist participatory platform might look like.
What does participation have to do with esports?
As is the case in many developing fields, it is common for a game studies project to reach beyond the confines of the area of study to make a connection to a broader field of a study. By incorporating these perspectives on media participation into the analysis of the esports practice, I intend to make such a connection. The value of connecting my project to the larger areas of audience studies comes from the contextualization that this tradition provides.
As new media, like video games, garner a following that audience should be considered in the longer audience to be able to identify how practices like esports gaming are reconfiguring audience practices.
By grounding an approach to gamers and paratext within this wider discussion about media participation I can begin to explore whether gamers are empowered media consumers contributing to a collective intelligence or whether they are exploited losers freely providing the
39 content and participation necessary for enhancing the profits of commercial actors in the game industry. Specifically, by zooming in on esports practices I can start to illuminate which elements of these practices contribute to a more maximalist form of participation in and through this new medium. How does the creation and use of paratext shape gamers’ participation in esports? By drawing on these two scholars in particular I will aim to highlight the ways in which esports practices are participatory and critique to what extent they are not.
Situating game studies, and therefore this project, within a broader area of study is useful for making sense of the concerns and benefits of esports gaming. Examining esports gaming through the lens of media participation will provide a conceptual field of studies that foreground some of the supposed benefits and areas of concern that have been previously explored. By exploring the activities of esports gamers I will examine behaviours that lead to the consumption and production of media texts. This case study will explore yet another model of the relationship between media audiences and their activities and the myriad of companies and professional organizations that produce platforms for and benefit from those activities.
There are many concerning things about everyday gamers’ participation in esports. The next chapter will review the theoretical framework of practice-networks used in the project.
40 Chapter 3 Zooming in and out with practice-networks
For this project it was necessary to grapple with the wide variety of related activities that comprise esports practice in the everyday context. In order to accomplish this task I have adopted a theoretical approach that combines theories of practice with actor-network theory, in what Davide Nicolini (2010) has called the zoom in-zoom out approach (zizo). Providing a means to break down the constitutive elements of an individuals’ gaming practices and map the network of actors that have contributed to them, practice-networks provide a framework for grappling with nexus of doings and sayings that comprise esports gaming.
Variations of this practice-network approach have been employed fruitfully in the field of organization studies and studies of consumer behavior (Nicolini and Roe, 2014). Importing this approach into the study of video gamers will provide an approach for addressing the complex networks of media practices involved in the playing of esports games. Gaming scholars have already utilized the theory of practice (Roig et al., 2009) and actor-network theory (Taylor, 2009) individually in their study of gaming culture, but I have yet to find a study where they have been productively combined. This chapter will explore the practice-network approach and its intellectual heritage to provide a better understanding of how the concepts will be used in subsequent chapters.
We will first start with what I have called the media turn in practice theory. Practice theories have been used to study all manner of social activity. Unpacking Nicholas Couldry’s
(2004) concept of media practice and how it has been used within game studies should provide an introduction to the concept. The chapter will then turn to the intellectual heritage of practice theories, reviewing variations that have emerged with the sociology of scientific
41 knowledge (Pickering, 1993) and through the works of Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2005) and
Andreas Reckwitz (2002). Turning to Nicolini’s zizo approach the chapter will then review what it was meant to capture and how this theoretical movement functions analytically. To ground the understanding of the network vocabulary required for these theoretical moves the chapter will then turn to actor-network theory to identify which elements were most relevant for the current study. The chapter will conclude with a brief examination of the limitations of this approach and some of the difficulties that arise from combining these two bodies of theory.
The media turn in practice theory
Just as Schatzki and Knorr-Cetina (2011) have proposed that there has been a practice turn in contemporary theory, I would propose that in the last two decades that there has been a media turn within practice theory. To make this claim is to build on Nick Couldry’s (2004) call to, “formulate a new paradigm of media research that can draw together some of the more interesting recent work, but at the same time achieve a decisive break with the unprofitable disputes of the past” (p. 115). For Couldry, the emergence of practice-focused theories represents a new hope for media-based research in their ability to decentre the traditional subjects and objects of media research to grasp how they are interrelated and mutually constitutive. Decentering media through the concept of practice places emphasis on the connection between users, texts and the things they do and say about them.
His purpose in suggesting a practice approach to media is not to, “abandon the interests of previous media research, but to displace and broaden its focus from questions based in the consideration of texts (and how texts are interpreted) to questions based in media practices’ role in the ordering of social life more generally.” (Couldry, 2004, p. 128). As I will explain
42 further in subsequent chapters, participation in LoL esports involved play, spectatorship, organization and media production practices during the time of my observation. The connections between these bundles of practice will be the primary focus of this approach.
In his follow up text Couldry (2012) further elaborates his perspective on media as practice. A practice approach, as he states, “…frames its questions by reference, not to media considered as objects, texts, apparatuses of perception or production processes, but to what people are doing in relation to media in the contexts in which they act (loc 15% 1281 of 9182).
For Couldry practice theory is important for a better understanding of media because it is concerned with the regularity of action. A practice approach is social, it points to things that people do because they relate to human needs (coordination, interaction, community, trust and freedom), and because it provides a distinctive basis for thinking normatively about how we live with media (Couldry, 2012, loc 1268 of 9182).
As I mentioned in the introduction, Roig et al (2009) have already made the suggestion that the practice approach could be particularly valuable for looking at video games. The authors outlined how a turn to practice in the study of video games allows for locating video games in the context of other media practices (p. 100). Instead of choosing to isolate games, players or actions, the practice approach enables a framework for accounting for all three. As it has done in other areas practice presents the opportunity to draw together the multifaceted activities of gaming and situate them into the broader context of media practices.
eSports & gaming as practice
Between players, paratexts, video games and commercial actors are a nexus of practices. These practices require materials and knowledge for their execution, practitioners to
43 carry them out and wider activity flows to be situated within (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007). From the micro-level analysis of what esports gamers are doing, I can ask how is that activity was informed by the professionalized esports practice. A gaming-as-practice approach would have to start with the practitioner, who is the carrier of particular practices. As Jarzabkowski et al
(2007) suggest, practitioners share the construction of practice through who they are, how they act and what resources they draw upon (p. 11). The last two elements are observable features of a research participant. We can empirically being to engage how gamers behave. By retroactively reconstructing the play act, through interviews and observation, what resources a gamer has drawn upon in their play can start to be traced. Understanding who they are is a much more difficult proposition, but to recognize that their practices link up with larger activity flows within their daily lives provides us one window into answering this question.
Positioning gamers’ practices then requires focusing on, “the behavioural, cognitive, procedural, discursive and physical resources through which multiple actors are able to interact” (Jarzabkowski et al, 2007, p. 9). This is compatible with the embodied understanding of play that has developed within game studies. As Gee (2008) has suggested, video game problem solving is an activity that draws on affective, technological, interactive, and sociocultural experience. Drawing on literature he characterized as “situated cognition studies”
(Gee, 2008, p. 255) he suggested that the mind is constantly producing experiential models on the spot for a given context or purpose. His connectionist (p. 253) view of game thinking presents the sheer complexity involved in unpacking the video game play. Through the practice-network perspective, by drawing together what few traces can be identified an incomplete, but hopefully useful, story of esports gaming can be told.
44 Some of these resources become empirically accessible through the act of observation and others, can be retroactively reconstructed through how participants describe what they have done. It is important to recognize that the embodied nature of video gaming as an activity makes it impossible to capture a complete account; regardless how many sources of data are combined. Treating video gaming as a type of media practice can open the exploration of gaming by decentering the human and technical subjects at the heart of these practices to focus on the connections. The next section will now turn to the intellectual heritage of this approach to media, by examining the most recent strains of practice theories.
Contemporary theories of practice
Although there are many differing approaches to practice within the social sciences and humanities they all tend to subscribe to a few basic principles. The ideas that actions are situated and consequential in the production of social life, dualisms are rejected as a way of theorizing, and that these relations are mutually constitutive are the central tenants of many practice approaches (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011). This section, will first examine the development of practice as it emerged within the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), through Andrew Pickering’s (1993) concept of the mangle of practice. Then a second strain of practice theory, which emerged in the later 1990s, primarily associated with the work of
Theodore Schatzki (1996) and Andreas Reckwitcz (2002) will be reviewed. Within organization studies these two authors are foundational references in the use of practice theory.
Andrew Pickering (1993) considers the incorporation of a practice approach in SSK, to be the key advance made in the 1980s. The innovation that practice introduced was a shift toward studying, “scientific culture, meaning the field of resources that practice operates in and on”
45 (Pickering, 1993, p. 2). Pickering’s version of practice has a strong focus on temporality and emergence, directly bound up in the activities of the scientific process. What is unique about the SSK strain of practice theory is an accounting for the material agency bound up in scientific practice. Pickering (1993) refers to the mix of human and material agency within scientific practice as “the mangle” (p. 562).
Practice represented a solution to two main problems perceived in the field of SSK, for
Pickering. The first was the “temporally emergent” character of scientific practice. Emphasizing the temporally emergent character of scientific practice draws on a long held critique of the presumption of teleological development within the sciences. Pickering’s retelling of Donald
Glaser’s development of the bubble chamber highlights the emergent nature of practice. The bubble chamber was, as Pickering (1993) described, “the principle tool of experimental elementary particle physics in the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 568), but its development was the result of what he called, “a dialectic of resistance and accommodation” (p. 569).
Without diving too deeply into particle physics, it would be valuable to understand
Glaser’s story, at least though Pickering’s retelling, in the abstract. Glaser’s goal was to create a new instrument for the detection of strange particles. As Pickering (1993) recounts, factors from the uptake of his early prototypes, to the failure of specific technical elements of the machine and even Glaser’s own aversion to working in the factory-like environment of the “big” science all serve as examples of this mangle. Pickering’s intention was to highlight the elements that lead to the development of Glaser’s bubble chamber that challenged the teleological understanding of scientific development. Glaser’s goals, like wanting to work in a small lab, were not pre-determined factors in his scientific practice. Nor were they teleologically
46 apparent at the outset of the project. The bubble chamber story is also used to highlight the role of nonhuman agency as it stands in the mangle.
The intermingling of human and nonhuman agency forms dialectic of “resistance and accommodation” (Pickering, 1993, p. 581). How scientists’ goal-oriented interests are open to emergent redefinition and how they are transformed into practice have not been sufficiently answered with humanist approaches to the SSK (Pickering, 1993, p. 582). Through the mangle he recognized the intrinsically temporal character of a practice-based approach, as well as opening the possibility of contending with the influence of nonhuman actors. Pickering’s version of practice, particularly his sensitivity to material agency, provides the strongest position from which to argue for the anchoring of practice theory with that of actor-network theory, which I will explore later in this chapter.
The practice theory of Schatzki and Reckwitz
Andreas Reckwitz (2002a) and Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2005) have become common touchstones for developing practice-based approaches for studying social life. These two scholars have provided the most robust description of practice theory. Situating it within and against prominent theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Although they use different labels for the commonly held positions in the agency versus structure debates in social theory
(Reckwitz, 2002, p. 245, Schatzki, 2005, p. 469) the way that they described these two sides is conceptually similar. For both scholars, practice theory represented a way forward intended to circumvent this dialectic.
Schatzki (2005) positions the debate between what he labels as the individualist and societist camps, which he sees as incomplete perspectives on social life. His contention was
47 that the individualist camp seemed to lack the immersion of individuals into the relevant social settings, “in the absence of which people with these features would not exist” (p. 469). The societist camp lacks the understanding that the, “properties of individuals are ontologically continuous with the distinct social contexts in which they exist.” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 469).
Instead of choosing a side in this dialectic his solution is to reposition these poles of social theory into co-constitutive elements of his practice theory. He refers to this approach as site ontology and asserts that it is central to analyzing and explaining social phenomena (Schatzki,
2005, p. 467). It is through these site ontologies that the study of particular practices becomes possible.
Reckwitz divides social theory into those that focus on individual actions versus those that focus on social order. He proposes a third strain, which he contends has emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. For him “cultural theories” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 245) hold the middle ground. His argument is that both classic strains of social theory are focusing on singular constitutive elements of an interconnected social whole. As he describes it, theories of practice, “highlight the significance of shared or collective symbolic structures of knowledge in order to grasp both action and social order.” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 246). Like Schatzki, Reckwitz have emphasized the co-constitutive nature of practice in his own approach.
Schatzki (1996, 2005) has, on numerous occasions, referred to practice as a nexus of human activities. This nexus is organized by three phenomena: rules, teleoaffectivities and practical intelligibility (Schatzki, 2005, p. 472). He presents practice as a temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings. The act of brushing one’s teeth could be considered an example of a temporally unfolding spatially dispersed nexus of human activity.
48 He also suggested that actions collect through causality into spatiotemporal networks that must be captured in terms other than practice. Getting back to the example of brushing, how that practice fits within the flows of a morning routine would be an example of what he called teleoaffectivities.
Schatzki (1996) further divided his spatiotemporal notion of practice into what he referred to as distributed and integrative practices (p. 98). As he indicated, “A dispersed practice of X-ing is a set of doings and sayings primarily linked, usually exclusively by the understanding of X-ing.” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 91). The example of the practice of brushing one’s teeth in the morning could be considered a distributed practice. There is nothing to formally link the millions of people who brush their teeth, but a person can identify the activity by their understanding of it. We can participate in the practice ourselves with the knowledge of how one brushes their teeth and I can describe it as the practice of brushing your teeth when prompted.
The notion of integrative practice (Schatzki, 1996, p. 98) is more intimately tied to the teleoaffective structures identified in Schatzki’s notion of practice. Integrative practices are,
“constitutive of particular domains of social life”(Schatzki, 1996, p. 98). What items a character buys throughout a match in LoL could be considered an integrative practice, as will be explore in chapter five. The instrumentality of high-level competitive play makes it necessary for players to familiarize themselves with these choices before ever entering the virtual environment. It is only those practices, which are a necessary element of the domain that can be considered to be integrative. The significance of this distinction lies in the ability to distinguish between those practices that are necessary for the persistence of a particular social formation.
49 The signs of the impact of practice theory, on areas like organization studies, is easy to see. Greiger’s (2009) characterization of the “practice turn”, as a critique of existing conceptions of organizations, or Raelin’s (2011) use of practice theory to open new avenues for the study of leadership there are many scholars who have embraced the approach. As Chia and
MacKay (2007) observed, the insistence of the primacy of practice over individualities allows us to consider strategy-as-practice in a way that evades the trappings of methodological individualism. In these studies, practice theory was used to shift the object of analysis to the practices found within the various contexts analyzed. With this brief sketch of practice theory I will now turn to the practice-network framework and Nicolini’s (2010) zizo approach.
Practice-networks
Although Ann Swidler(2001) and Nicholas Coudry(2012) have suggested anchoring the concept of practice with a theoretical approach like actor-network theory, Davide Nicolini
(2010) has proposed the most workable framework for the study of esports gaming. To understand complex social assemblages, there is a need to be able to shift theoretical lenses.
Nicolini’s approach was designed to capture the relationships between the micro-level of individual practices and the wider activity flows within which those practices are immersed. His zooming in-zooming out approach proposes that shifting between practice and actor-network theory would better explain these relationships.
The utility of a practice-network approach to esports participation lies in the ability of these theories to granularly address the elements of gaming and map the networks emerge as a result. The relationship between professionalized esports and everyday gaming requires the tools of both bodies of theory. With a practice only approach, the connections between
50 professionals and the everyday would largely remained uncovered or worse amorphous. With an ANT only approach, the importance of understanding and intelligibility, which are fundamental elements of esports play, would remain largely beyond the scope. Combining these theories makes it possible to address both of these deficits in a way that should paint a nuanced picture of everyday esports gaming. For a better grasp of the zizo approach the next section will review how it has been used in organization studies.
Theoretical movement: Zooming in-zooming out
Building on the actor-network informed approach to organization developed by
Czarniawska (2004), Davide Nicolini has proposed shifting between the theoretical lens of practice and actor-network theory to better understand the connections between locally accomplished actions and their connections to the wider activity flows of practice. To better understand Nicolini’s approach this section will first explore the importation of actor-network approach in organizational studies through Czarniawska’s work. Her turn towards actor- network theory and its use for organization studies provides a specific emphasis on how the depiction and understanding of the temporal orientation. The section will then review Nicolini’s zizo approach, and how others have utilized it in organization studies. Finally, it will turn to how the approach will be adapted for the study of gameplay.
Czarniawska’s works incorporate an actor-network approach to challenge the procession of terminology in organization studies that dealt with the creation and dissemination of processes. Through a kairotic approach to constructing time, a person can follow the traces left by a network of actors that have led up to the accomplishment of a particular action. The punctualization of a network provides a key moment, from which a
51 researcher can build their account of a particular action. While presenting a study based on this approach it is notable that the subject of the authors’ network-based analysis was the use of management accounting practices (Pipan and Czarniawska, 2010).
Nicolini’s (2009) approach requires first the zooming in on practice, which he describes as a study of its discursive and material accomplishment. It is at this point that he suggests the second step of zooming out in order to provide a link between, “the here-and-now of the situated practicing and the elsewhere-and-then of other practices” (p. 1392). It is worth noting that for Nicolini, like Czarniawska, ANT serves the purpose of situating the actions of practice within a kairotic temporal orientation. That is to say that the temporal description of practice- networks starts at the accomplishment of practice and extends backwards in time through the traces left behind by other practices and actors that form the network that brought it into fruition.
In an application of this zizo approach Loeb (2016) and Leroy, Cova and Salle (2012) were able to examine phenomena as diverse as team teaching in Swedish schools and the black boxing of the concept of value co-creation in marketing research. Loeb’s use of the process of zooming in on teamwork in the Swedish education system highlighted the interconnectivity of the series of moments that took place over a four-year period. Leroy, Cova and Salle used the concept to prevent the black boxing of the marketing concepts surrounding the notion of value co-creation. By zooming in the researchers were able to highlight the diversity of the actors and practices that are bound up in their respective subjects.
Zooming in and out on gaming practices will draw heavily on the concepts outlined above. By zooming in to specific moments of gameplay it will be possible to explore in some
52 detail the constitutive elements of practice that are evident in their accomplishment. Not all actions that are taken in a virtual environment would be considered to comprise practice, which is what makes this theoretical approach particularly useful. Sifting through the myriad actions that comprise a regular match of LoL, into those that emulating professional esports and those that are just random actions, is still an impossible task to finish.
Identifying those moments where practices do become evident will be driven by the intelligibility of the actions being analyzed and the capacity of the study participants to say things about them. Their account should not be considered complete, as I will address in the next chapter. To address the partial perspective, I have committed to understanding these practices through my own first hand experience. Searching for traces like the use of particular terminology when addressing in-game actions. Or whether they identify what they are doing by comparing it to something someone else has done in the game can be used as jumping off points in the exploration of what lead up to that action. It is at this point that zooming out becomes necessary.
Zooming out also requires a subtle shift from the materiality and specificity that make the local accomplishment of practice possible, to the networks that support the proliferation of a particular practice. The landscape of omnipresent and ephemeral paratexts in esports gaming will require the kinds of nonhuman sensitivities afforded by an actor-network approach. From the surveillance-based websites that track player behaviour en mass, to the spectator driven live events and broadcasts, there are many connections that can be mapped between what everyday gamers do in LoL and what is being done within the professional sphere. To describe
53 the relationships between actors in the practice-networks of the LoL I will briefly review actor- network theory to draw specific concepts from the vocabulary.
Actor-network theory
As Nicholas Taylor (2009) has indicated the, “notion of assemblage is one way to help us understand the range of actors (system, technologies, player, body, community, company, legal structures, etc.), concepts, practices, and relations that make up the play moment” (p. 2).
Understanding which actors in these network assemblages represent spokespersons, actants, and how these entities contribute to the act of game play could provide a fertile ground for a simultaneously more granular and broader approach. The obligatory passage point in esports gaming, the virtual environment, facilitates the punctualization of gamer actor-networks that can be mapped by probing actors about their usage of paratextual materials.
These networks contribute to longer than usual product longevity. They also require a sustained effort on the part of player, to compete at a self-satisfying level in the virtual arena.
As players develop and refine their paratextual practice-networks they reinforce the need for others to consume these paratexts. For this study, ANT provides a means for mapping these gamer networks through interviews, gameplay data and observation. What ANT has to offer for the current study is a more precise vocabulary for describing the relationships between the actors found within the practice-networks of the LoL club? By taking seriously the role of technology in the process of social formation the impact that various communication technologies have on those formations can be placed more clearly in focus.
54 ANT a selected vocabulary
The roots of ANT can be traced back to the work of Michel Callon, John Law and Bruno
Latour in Paris in the late seventies. Utilizing the term for the first time in 1982 (Law, 2007, p.
3), the first major contribution of the tradition came from Callon in his 1986 study of the scallop fishery of Brieuc Bay. As Law (2007) has indicated Callon’s ‘generalized symmetry’ applied “the different kinds of actors in the world”(p. 5). Leveraging this symmetrical approach, Callon was able to trace the connections; from research shared at an academic conference, to the use of horsehair or rope to provide material for young scallops to anchor. This section will address some of the concepts utilized from these actor-network sources in the exploration of the LoL club.
Although it seems somewhat counterintuitive, what Latour wants us to understand is that just because something has the appearance of a network it does not mean that it actually is an actor-network. As he has contended,
…you can provide an actor-network account of topics which have in no way the shape of a network— a symphony, a piece of legislation, a rock from the moon, an engraving. Conversely, you may well write about technical networks— television, e-mails, satellites, salesforce— without at any point providing an actor-network account. (Latour, 2005, p. 131)
The distinction he draws here is defined by the presence of a specific subject. Symphonies, pieces of legislation and rocks from space are all instances of specific things. Using the kairotic orientation of ANT you can explore what actors contributed to its becoming. He says in a later publication that, “…if worknet or action net had any chance to hold, I would offer it as a substitute so as to make the contrast between technical networks and worknets” (Latour, 2005,
55 p. 132). The emphasis here is placed on the actors associated in the network accomplishing actions.
The insistence on a heterogeneous understanding of actors forces us as researchers to take seriously the role played by technologies in the formation of social collectives. In his earlier work, Latour (1992) offers items like a door groom, steel bars or Berliner keys as examples of non-human actors, which are doing something. The groom makes a hole in the wall reversible, the steel bar keeps a child in place in a car and the key reminds its user to lock the door (Latour, 1992). Recognizing the role of nonhuman agents in the assemblages of the social inevitably requires a reconceptualization of our human centric notions of agency.
For ANT scholars agency is delegated or translated to these nonhuman actors in ways that play an integral role in the cohesion of the social world. The agency of nonhuman actors is by far the most controversial. In his review of ANT Nimmo (2011) suggests that this move is,
“designed to highlight the work of ontological purification that underpins notions of agency as the exclusive property of human beings” (p. 111). By resisting this need to purify data into human and nonhuman subjects ANT allows a researcher to consider seriously the role of nonhumans like scallops, predators, door grooms in our understanding of the social world. As I will explore later in chapter seven, Parchoma and Wright have provided a useful review of the concept of affordances, which is meant to address the role that nonhuman actors play within networks.
Punctualization refers simultaneously to the moments at which an actor-network can be observed, as well as the destinations at which all of the traces of the network must inevitable arrive. By focusing on the moment of punctualization an ANT theorist seeks to trace all of the
56 associations, actions and actors that have contributed to the punctualization of the network.
The social world then, from the ANT perspective, is just a cacophony of punctualizing and depunctualizing actor-networks. The inability to define networks without describing their actors and actors without describing them in terms of their networks leads to the emergence of the concept of the actant.
Actants often represent an already punctualized network. That is a collection of networked actors, which have been spurred into action by some shared purpose. Lisa Potts
(2009) suggests that actants are, “neither an actor nor a system—that is made whole and propelled forward by a spokesperson that can aid and lead translation” (p. 288). The concept of actant provides a way to blackbox a network to describe the connections between punctualized networks. In the case of esports gaming this concept provides utility for describing entities like Riot Games, who are the developers and providers of League of Legends through their technical infrastructure.
This leads to another role that actors can play in the network as spokespersons. These kinds of actors, “seek to become indispensable” to other actors in the network by defining for them their nature and problems, as suggested by Callon (1986, p. 196). As Latour (2005) indicated, “no matter if it has to be created from scratch or simply refreshed, you have to have spokespersons, which ‘speak for’ the group existence.” (p. 31). The concept seeks to identify emblematic actors within networks that speak to the networks reason for being. Translation, the process through which actors join networks, is suggested to proceed through four stages or moments: problematization, interessement, enrollment and mobilization (Callon, 1986, Potts,
2009).
57 The moments of translation
Problematization, the beginning of the translation process, is when actors begin to articulate a concern. It is this concern, which draws the actors together to form the network.
The declaration of the problem forms the purpose for the network, whether actors agree or disagree with its definition. In an application of an actor-network approach to understanding the work of nation building in Canada and Quebec, Abramson (1998) told us that the Canadian federal government in 1973 aggregated an actor-network with the Royal Commission on
Bilingualism and Biculturalism (p. 9). In this case it was the existence of networks of French
Canadian nationalism, which arose during the Quiet Revolution, which provided the problematization for the Canadian Federal government.
With the articulation of the problem explicit translation moves into its second moment called interessement. Callon (1986) describes this moment by actor’s attempts, “ to impose and stabilize the identity of the other actors it defines through its problematization (p. 208). The use of rope as an anchoring item for scallops would be an example of the human scientists in
Brueic Bay imposing and stabilizing an identity through this device of interessement. For
Abramson’s (1998) application of ANT in the Canadian context of Canada-Quebec relations in the decades leading up to the 1995 referendum the moments of interessement could include,
“everything from the various governmental programs and monies allocated to promoting
Canadian or Quebecois identity, to the private conversations of individuals who are themselves enrolled in the national network that they both speak and are spoken by.”(p. 10). It is at this moment that spokespersons use various devices to capitalize on the articulation of the problem by various actors.
58 Following the moment of interessement, Potts’ (2009), indicates that the moment of enrollment, is recognized by the actors’ acceptance of the definition of the network. This agreed-to definition, created during the problematization stage and made cogent during interessement, further strengthens around an obligatory passage point as actors strengthen the central network by accepting the focal actors’ definition (Potts, 2009, p. 290). Again turning back to Abramson’s (1998) nation building example the moment of enrollment took place, when non-nationalist Quebeckers took the actions that took place during interessement, to heart (p. 10). The formation of the Royal Commission and the Quebec nationalist organizations serve as evidence of the obligatory passage points created during this phase.
Mobilization is the final moment of translation where actors seek to mobilize their fellow actors into action (Potts, 2009, p. 290). In the Canadian context, “the campaign leading up to the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty-association was filled with mobilizations of allies, in which various organizations and individuals declared public support for the “oui” or
“non” sides (Abramson, 1998, p. 10). Although I am not convinced that all network formation would fit the discrete step-by-step process of translation, as it is depicted here, I am confident that it provides a vocabulary for addressing the associations between actors as they interact with various networks.
For a practice-network approach, actor-network theory provides a repository of terminology to describe the associations between actors within a network and the associations between networks. Anne Marie Mol (2010) has suggested that actor-network theory helps to,
“tell cases, draw contrasts, articulate silent layers, turn questions upside down, focus on the unexpected, add to one’s sensitivities, propose new terms and shift stories from one context to
59 another” (p. 253). It is the flexibility of actor-network vocabulary that makes it an attractive framework for describing the associations found in esports practice.
Potential pitfalls
One of the more precarious aspects of using a practice-network approach is the tension that is contained in the hyphen. The zizo approach allows for the shifting of contexts between practices and networks, but the two theoretical approaches that it draws on developed separately. Although this approach has been utilized already within organization studies it is worth exploring the objections of each theories main proponents. Both Schatzki (1996, 2005) and Latour (2005) would likely reject the combination of their theories. This section will briefly address what these objections mean and argue for the benefit of the combined theoretical framework.
Schatzki would reject the union on the grounds that he is uncomfortable with ANT’s positioning of nonhuman agency. Of course, he would not be the only critic who has expressed such discomfort. For Latour separating out and privileging practices over other actions that comprise the social world would likely violate his commitment to generalized symmetry. While
I would not be so bold to suggest that these theorists misunderstand their own theories, I would suggest that they have more in common conceptually than stark divisions. We will now look at how each theory can be used to strengthen the claims of the other then I will look at some of the benefits of the conceptual overlap between these two approaches.
As Reckwitz so eloquently stated, “social theories are vocabularies necessarily underdetermined by empirical ‘facts’. As vocabularies they never reach the bedrock of a real social world, but offer contingent systems of interpretation, which enable us to make certain
60 empirical statements” (Reckwitz, 2002, 257). What I think the author was trying to communicate is the idea that the reification of particular approaches to the social often strips theoretical language of its innate ability to describe. Even when the terminology of practice theory or ANT is misapplied, it can draw us one step closer to understanding that aspect of the theory. I propose that the combination of these vocabularies can provide a flexible theoretical framework that could be applied to variety of social formations emerging in today’s networked world.
Seeing practice as a combination of routinized mind and bodily actions, knowledge and things, the theory presents a richer conceptual terrain for understanding the nexus of human activity, which comprise social order. Specifically, the ways that practices are interwoven in esports networks and how they order the experience of gamers will be in focus. By creating the conceptual space for integrating these diverse elements of practice there is a better opportunity to provide insight into the configuration of these social formations.
The complexity of practice as a unit of analysis is nicely complimented by the complexity brought to social formation via ANT. From Schatzki’s first works on the theory of practice he has always sought for a rendering of social formations that would provide him the tools to explain how collectives inform and impact individual practices. I believe that is why Schatzki has turned to, and has been taken up within, the literature of organization studies. The uptake of practice theory within organization studies has often been referred to as a “practice turn”
(Greiger, 2009).
Aside from what each theoretical lens has to offer the other there is also a great deal of conceptual overlap between the two bodies of theory. I would point first to the prominent role
61 that non-humans play in both theories. For practices referred to primarily as materials
(Schatzki, 2005) or things (Reckwitz, 2002), non-humans are considered to be a constitutive feature of a given practice. Take the practice of removing snow in winter for example.
Whatever tool an individual chooses to complete the task, no one would argue that the tool was not a constitutive element of the practice of snow removal.
Likewise, the role of a snow removal tool in the constellation of associations, which binds the network of actors involved in a collective like the City of Calgary’s Snow Angel’s campaign (www.calgary.ca), is also important. Without a snow removal tool an actor may not even be able to participate in this particular network, unless that actor’s inability to use a snow removal tool is what drew them into the network in the first place. In either case positioning the snow removal tools as an actor in this network enables one to take part in the campaign or necessitates that one must utilize it.
Despite the objections of prominent theorists from either body of theory, there is some value in their combination. The ability to break down the co-constitutive elements of a given practice and then shift contexts to the network of actors that contributed to their becoming provides a framework for telling stories about connections. Neither of these approaches is meant to provide kinds of enduring representation of social structures, but rather provide a provisional map of fleeting punctualization, which may recur, but are not expected to.
Out of focus
Aside from the objections of principal figures within each body of theory there has also been substantive critiques levelled at both ANT and theories of practice that should be taken into account. Moving beyond the humanist critiques of material agency, there have been more
62 significant critiques concerning ANT’s limitations and blind spots. Practice theory has also drawn critical attention for its seeming lack of a cogent explanation for its primary subject of analysis. I cannot claim to have solutions for the issues, which will be addressed in this section, but it is important that they are at least addressed.
The first criticism of ANT comes from the theory’s own proponents (Law, 1991 Latour,
1999). Their objections arose from uptake of ANT and the authors’ discomfort with the theory losing its flexibility. Ironically, the concern was that ANT was becoming a theoretical blackbox.
As Neyland (2006) described, “as ANT draws things together, it performs a kind of centering while suggesting that everyone and everything is heterogeneous” (p. 39). ANT was never meant to act as a catalyst remaining unchanged in its application. The essence of Latour’s
(2005) critique of the “sociology of the social” was that theoretical concepts had become too static and inflexible. Neyland (2006) suggested that by focussing on the messy and impure nature of strategy, ANT can remain a contingent research strategy.
A more substantive critique of ANT comes from positions taken by one of the theories main proponents, Bruno Latour, throughout his career. Although I have drawn from a variety of scholars who have engaged with the concepts of ANT it is important to address these critiques as they also speak to the intentions behind the creation of the approach. The crux of this critique is the descriptive nature of the actor-network approach, what Latour (2005) has characterized as a rededication to empiricism. The argument is that the emphasis on a value neutral approach neuters ANT’s ability for critique.
Mills (2018) has suggested that the perspective fails, “to attribute any essential nature to people or things independent of the actor-networks within which they are enrolled” (p. 298).
63 His contention was that the descriptive nature of ANT leaves little space for normative judgements or particular assemblages or outcomes. I can admit to encountering this problem in my own use of the concepts. As I hope the remainder of this dissertation will demonstrate,
ANT provided a useful vocabulary for describing the assemblages of various actors and the connections that existed between them. This description is not inherently a critique; it is a map. For this project I have chosen the normative debate about media participation to level a critique of the maps I was able to identify through my interactions with the club.
As the tendrils of the practice approach spread to additional areas of study, there has been expected critique. The most thorough critical assessment I have found comes from Kjeld
Schmidt (2017) in a chapter written to introduce the approach to the fields of computer- supported cooperative work, information systems and human computer interaction.
Identifying Schatzki (1996), Reckwitz (2002) and Nicolini (2009) as the vanguard of this so-called approach, Schmidt declared that there is, “no such a thing” (p. 1) as practice theory.
His contention was simply that the theoretical heritage (Giddens, Bourdieu and
Wittgenstein) in the approaches of these three main proponents was not as cohesive a foundation as assumed. The author provided a convincingly detailed discussion of this intellectual heritage and centered his critique on what he referred to as, “the challenge of normative regularity” (p. 8). His argument was that practice theorists have not provided a sufficient explanation for how to distinguish the regularity of practices from other forms of regularity found within society.
Schmidt was also critical of the similarities between the various concepts that deal with practical intelligibility and tacit knowledge. As a concept designed to explain how we know
64 what to do and what we say about what we know, the complexity that practical intelligibility encompasses makes it seem inaccessible. This critique could be boiled down to the author’s contention that the three main proponents of practice theory (Schatzki, Reckwitz and Nicolini) depicted the arguments posited by the theorists they have built their concepts on
(Wittgenstein, Giddens, Bourdieu) to be settled. For Schmidt (2017) practice theory is just another attempt to create a concept that can explain everything in the philosophy of social science.
I have attempted to make the case in this dissertation that the practices of esports gaming are the focus because they are the connective tissue between everyday and professional gaming. This is an inherently contingent rationale for why practice is the fundamental focus of my approach. It is important to acknowledge that practice theory shaped the project in ways that illuminated and obfuscated aspects of esports gaming and my participants’ experience with it. Like all approaches, practice theory provides an incomplete picture of the social world. That is why I have recruited additional theoretical lenses and vocabularies to compensate for its deficiencies and distortions.
Conclusions
In an era when computer-mediated communication technologies make it easier than it has ever been for us to form collectives of similarly motivated actors it has never been more important for us as researchers to understand how these groups are formed and sustained.
Gamers have been forming mediated communities that sustain their activities since well before the invention of the Internet. Focusing on the connections between networks and practices I will start to map the foundations of esports participation.
65 A problem in video game studies today is that social formations are appearing and disappearing faster than they can be studied. Could an organizational studies lens be easily applied to the disparate collection of companies, competitors, fans, contributors and the various other groups of people who comprise the emerging professional esports culture? It may be possible, but much of the conceptual terrain would be ill fitting and likely dismissed for that reason. When actor-network terms are misused it creates opportunities to expand the lexical function of the theory by highlighting gaps in its ability to describe the associations of actors and networks.
Audiences or even subcultures are not organizations, so the question may be asked why an approach developed in the study of organizations would be appropriate for the study of esports gamers. As our understanding of audiences has evolved the relationship between audience members and texts, including video games, has changed dramatically. From active audiences to spreadable media the role of audience activity in proliferating and sustaining the media practices that comprise activities like esports gaming requires a more robust theoretical approach that is able to contend with the variety of actors and relationships that sustain them.
My contention is not that audiences are organizations; they still lack many of the formalizing and compulsory elements that are constitutive of organizations, but the organization of audiences is at the heart of what makes contemporary audiences seemingly more powerful than before. A practice-network approach provides a means for mapping those organizational practices, to shed light on the connections between professional esports gaming and everyday gamers. The next chapter will review methodological approach of this study.
66
Chapter 4 Approaching audiences and gaming with ethnography
In the past forty years, one of the most valuable approaches to understanding audiences, including in game studies, has been through ethnography. An ethnographic approach is focused on developing complex descriptions of culture. These works inevitably involve interaction with participants, drawing together multiple data sources, and framing human behaviour within a socio-political historical context in an explicit attempt to interpret the meanings and functions of human actions (LeCompte & Shensul, 2010, Creswell, 2013,
Denzin & Lincoln, 1998). It is these features that make an ethnographically informed methodology particularly well suited for the study of esports gaming in the everyday.
The current chapter will review the methodological toolbox as it has been deployed in the study of gaming, practices and networks. Then the specific tools utilized in this study will be addressed and the final section will present what was learned along the way. I will describe the various digital and physical spaces where I have observed esports gaming as a researcher and spectator. These include over one hundred hours of field time in the game myself, two on- campus events between September 2015 and May 2016, nine broadcasted events for weekly league play organized through the club’s Facebook page between February 24 to March 26th
2016, a survey of paratextual material produced and used by group members and six one-on- one interviews with LoL club members.
Ethnography as an approach to play, practice and networks
Ethnographic approaches to the study of media mean documenting, “the fragmented, invisible, marginal tactics by which media audiences symbolically appropriate a world not of their own making.” (Ang, 1990, p. 247). Ethnography has provided a means of grasping at the
67 concept of audience without reducing it to an overly simplistic unit like “people-watching- television” (Morely, 1992). Video gamers often constitute multiple modalities of audience from readers, to spectators and even sometimes analysts of esports. To fully grasp the impact of ethnography on the study of audiences, and what implications it has had for the study of video games, first a short review of the transition of the concept of the audience from active to participatory since the 1980s would be in order.
The ethnographic perspective on audiences was in many ways a direct response to the more reductive and quantitative approaches that provided the foundation for television ratings.
As Bird (2003) indicates, “a flurry of scholarly activity effectively dismantled the idea that there really can be an “audience” out there waiting to be studied” (p. 3). She elaborated that the very concept of audience reifies the transmission model of communication and serves to separate the audience “them” from “us” the researchers (Bird, 2003). Engaging in the practices of being an audience member is just one of many roles that a person may occupy in their daily lives. Understanding how people individually construct their practice-networks makes it possible to understand how these practices fit within their lives.
As Press and Livingstone (2006) have suggested, ethnography shifted the focus away from the moment of interpretation and towards contextualizing that moment in the culture of research participants’ everyday lives (p. 180). Emerging from Stuart Hall’s concept of encoding and decoding, the active audience captured the myriad of ways people understand messages being presented to them through media. In many ways this concept of an active audience has given rise to what Livingstone (1993) calls the participation paradigm in audience research.
68 It is not surprising that a methodology that privileges members’ meanings in its construction of authenticity would give rise to a concept of audience membership that would position members as powerful arbiters of what they get from media. Livingstone (2013) reminded us that the idea of the participatory audience is "more social" than that of the active audience” (p. 24). What makes the emergence of ethnography in audience studies significant for the study of games is that it forces us to recognize that audiences are an inherently constructed collection of people. Unpacking the "more social" nature of participatory audiences like the LoL club will be the focus of the current study. First the next section will briefly survey how ethnography has been deployed in the area of game studies.
Virtual world ethnography
Three main approaches within games studies to ethnographic research have informed my approach: virtual world ethnography (Taylor, 2006, Taylor, 2013, Boelstorf, 2008, Nardi,
2010) connective ethnography (Pearce, 2009, Kafai & Fields, 2010, Consalvo, 2007) and micro- ethnography (Giddings, 2008). These deployments of ethnographic methods have set the standard for games scholarship and provide a workable model for the deployment of these methods. Each of these approaches to game studies has influenced the research design choices of this study.
The ethnography of virtual worlds has four book-length works from T.L. Taylor (2006),
Bonnie Nardi (2010), Tom Boellstorff (2010), Celia Peace (2008) and a methodological handbook co-authored by all four published in 2012. Although each of these works involved heavy doses of time invested in their chosen virtual environments, both Nardi (2010) and Taylor
(2006) chose games with progression mechanics, which had a significant impact on their
69 studies. Progression mechanics are usually deployed in a series of levels a player unlocks through their in-game actions. There is a teleological element to progression-focused play that fosters an instrumental orientation to the virtual environment.
In both World of Warcraft (WoW) and Everquest (EQ), players have levels that determine what can be experienced in the virtual environment. Getting to the highest level and taking part in end-game raiding guilds formed a core part of both Taylor and Nardi’s studies. My impression was that taking up the teleological goal of these games was what provided many of their most valuable insights, which should be a powerful lesson for games scholars. It is not enough to just observe the virtual environment; to provide a nuanced understanding one must strive to be good at the game.
Taylor's concept of “power gamers” seemed to come from the reflexive comparison between the ways she played Everquest and the ways some of her participants did (Taylor,
2006, p. 68). As she noted, " [t]o outsiders it can look as if they are not playing for fun at all”
(2006, p. 71). For Nardi, the progression to end game also illuminated this theme of tension between work and play. As she described, often virtual world play can, “demand obligatory actions such as farming", which can be tedious and repetitive, but are also necessary for "the activity that players find pleasurable” (Nardi, 2010, p. 102). We can see in both cases that by dedicating themselves to end-game goals in their respective virtual worlds these authors were able to provide useful insights into the nature of online games.
Boellstorff conducted his research entirely within the virtual environment, as the avatar
Tom Bukowski, in Second Life. His insistence on not including sources from outside of Second
Life’s virtual environment was about staking an epistemological claim about how to understand
70 these environments. Boellstorff’s contention was that virtual worlds represent a context in their own right and that by including sources exterior to that context there is a potential to undermine the value of the data generated within the virtual environments. Boellstorff’s commitment to data generated within video games helps to establish it as a worthy subject of analysis. Even when virtual environments are chosen as a field site for research it is possible to produce an ethnographic product that says something beyond just what is happening in that environment.
These works set the standard for engagement in the virtual environment of video games. The hands-on experience of a researcher struggling through the mechanics of a virtual environment is a useful method for illuminating what is happening when people play games because it forces the researcher to experience for themselves the embodied complexity of video game problem solving. These perspectives on the role of gameplay in game scholarship were instrumental in how I chose to engage with the field in this project. By committing myself to specific in-game goals I was able to make salient for myself issues, which will be explored further in the next three chapters.
Multi-sited and connective ethnography
Pearce’s ethnography is, in many ways, the most interesting of these four virtual world projects since it did not follow a particular virtual world. Instead, she followed a transient gaming community called The Gathering of Uru. She therefore serves as a great pivoting point to the second collection of works that utilized a multi-sited or connective approach to ethnography. Formed in a virtual world called Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, Pearce followed a group of gamers who started in a single virtual environment that was sold with the promise of
71 multiplayer functionality that would be added to the game after launch. The online multiplayer component of the game opened and quickly closed within a year of its introduction. Pearce’s study was one of the first to examine a gaming community after a game had ended. Following the community of gamers from Uru as they moved from one virtual environment to another became the narrative of her ethnography.
This unique approach to a virtual world places the playing community at the forefront of the analysis as their migration from Uru to environments like Second Life and There.com illustrated. Focusing on a community of play enabled Pearce to highlight the kinds of emergent behaviour that develop in these virtual environments. In particular the nostalgia that was displayed by The Gathering of Uru as they recreated elements of their lost virtual environment illuminated the kind of connection that players form with these environments. Most importantly it highlights the embedded role games have in players lives. Methodologically
Pearce seamlessly weaves together the multiple sites of the Uru to tell a compelling story of a nomadic gaming community.
The connective and multi-sited ethnographies of Fields, Kafai and Searle have been conducted in a virtual environment called Whyville, which is targeted at children (Fields and
Kafai, 2009, Fields and Kafai, 2010, Kafai, 2010, Searle and Kafai, 2012). Unlike the previous ethnographies I have reviewed, they generated participants by starting an afterschool gaming group themselves (Fields and Kafai, 2009). After constituting the group, the researchers then followed their participants from within the multiple sites of the public club (virtual environment), the classroom, and the privacy of their homes (Fields and Kafai, 2009, p. 48).
Their multi-sited approach provided an informative model for piecing together the traces of
72 practice-networks, particularly the combination of data from in and outside of the virtual environment.
They referred to their approach as connective ethnography, which through the use of a,
“combination of tracking data, video records, field notes, and interviews” (Fields and Kafai,
2009, p. 48), allowed them to address the different times and spaces that would not have otherwise been accessible. Highlighting the connections between these ‘times and spaces’ enabled the authors to illustrate how community practices developed and how members learned them (Fields and Kafai, 2010). The essential innovation in their approach was to combine their observations of the virtual field site with technical data provided by the game’s server.
In her study of how cheating is constructed, Mia Consalvo (2007) drew from ethnography in her exploration of Final Fantasy 11 (the first in the series to be a Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game). Consalvo drew together a rich tapestry of sources that not only indicated how concepts like cheating are negotiated among players, but also placed it in a historical context. She highlighted how commercial actors have capitalized on the space between players and their games in her depiction of the paratextual industries. Although her book is not structured like other gaming ethnographies, her use of the methodology to bolster her exploration of cheating provided a rich look at practices like automating avatars in the game.
All of these approaches to gaming ethnography deftly weave together data from disparate contexts in order to provide interesting findings about gaming culture. The theoretical perspective of practice-networks necessarily involves connecting together various times and
73 spaces in order to unveil what is being accomplished in the moment of play. With field sites ranging from university classrooms to social media webpages, these approaches provided a useful precedent for pulling together data from these disparate sites to tell compelling stories about gaming.
Making ethnograhpy managible
In the same way that Consalvo was able to deploy an ethnographic approach to just one small part of her larger project, scholars like Seth Giddings, have been developing a more manageable approach to the ethnography of video gaming, which he called micro-ethnography.
His approach, presented first as it was implemented (Giddings and Kennedy, 2008) and then directly discussed as a method (Giddings, 2009), is to use ethnographic tools, like observation in very brief timeframes to produce data about the play experience. The focus of a microethnography of video game play is not, “a media-cultural practice, a human subject, or a set of technologies, but rather the event in which the three come together” (Giddings, 2009, p.
149). The emphasis on integrating these interrelated areas of gaming practice steers gaming research away from more reductive approaches that would seize on one or another of these domains.
In their microethnography of the pleasures of gaming he and Helen Kennedy were able to draw on a short play experience to illustrate the intertextuality of gaming environments with their study of Lego Star Wars. As the study’s proponents work their way through the act of avatar selection they illustrate the connection that the game had to other media texts, in particular Star Wars. Their study noted how they derived pleasure from the knowledge they had of Star Wars characters and how that text, which was external to the game, was
74 intrinsically bound up with the act of playing Lego Star Wars. These connections reinforce the notion that games are media texts that are inevitably immersed in a network of other related texts. In the present study I intend to push beyond gaming as a text to understand the imbrication of practices that are required for the play of the LoL club.
Although Giddings himself is willing to concede that his approach could be better characterized in terms other than ethnography there are clearly some benefits to treating gaming in the way he suggests. Without prolonged exposure to a field site and without the introduction of participants that are not also the authors of the study, at best, Giddings and
Kennedy’s approach represents a micro-autoethnography of the play experience. The epistemological move that Giddings (2009) makes to reject the, a priori asymmetry between,
“video game (as ‘‘text’’), video game play (as consumption or practice) and video game player
(as embodied media subject)” (p. 147) is important in that it further establishes the need for a methodological approach capable of dealing with a multifaceted activity like video gaming.
With the tumultuous landscape of esports fandom in Calgary I found this more circumscribed way of approaching gaming ethnography to be valuable for my approach.
Data collection
In an emerging and interdisciplinary field like game studies, the choice of methodology carries with it an increased importance. In the present study, I have attempted to build on the ethnographic approaches developed within the field over the last two decades with an eye towards expanding our focus beyond just the professional sphere of esports gaming. Only when video game researchers are able to contend with the imbricated range of activities that encompass gaming will it be possible to truly understand its impact. In the pursuit of my
75 research question I have gathered data from several different sources. This section will address the various methods used for data collection in this study.
Starting first with the use of participant observation in both virtual and real environments, the section will then explain my use of both structured and unstructured interviewing techniques to address the question of participation in esports gaming. By reviewing these data collection methods, I hope to make it possible to both understand the analysis presented in later chapters, as well as be able to reproduce these steps for the study of esports or other gaming cultures. Each of these data sources provided their own unique benefits and limitations, which will be addressed in the following sections.
The many field sites of LoL club gaming
Defining what comprises the field for ethnographies of game studies was the first real challenge for this study. Accepting that gamers spend time within virtual environments, at face-to-face events and watching or reading paratextual material meant having to somehow follow them through these multiple sites. Building on the tradition of multi-sited ethnography, which was designed to “crosscut dichotomies like local and global” (Marcus, 1995, p. 95) or in the case of this study the real, virtual and paratextual, I sought to combine data collected from all three of these sites in my approach. This approach to ethnography emphasizes the connections between them. It is my one of my contentions that only through combining observations from these three sites will a holistic understanding of esports gaming emerged.
Finding a comfortable position on the participant-observer spectrum was an issue that I was already sensitive to before the data collection began in earnest. Given that esports are highly competitive my ability to interact with participants in and outside of the virtual
76 environment would hinge on my own skills as a gamer. Having misgivings about the state of the esports community that inspired my interest in the topic I decided to open my recruitment to include two other games that I had little exposure to. After the initial recruitment was completed, much to my own chagrin, the game that had the most potential participants was one of those two games.
As many video games researchers have established, understanding the virtual environments that our participants are immersed in requires hands on experience. Further to this point as virtual world ethnographers have indicated it is not enough to just peruse these environments as researchers we must attempt to do the things that our participants are doing
(Taylor, 2009, Nardi, 2010). The danger of not spending time in the game risks the researcher placing emphasis on aspects that are not significant to the community that plays. This poses a specific challenge for esports researchers, as attaining a high competitive rank is a particularly difficult task and creates specific constraints on research. I knew after my first face-to-face observation that being able to play the game with my study participants would not be fruitful, given the disparity in our skill level. To ask them to play with me, as I had initially intended, would have revealed my status as a neophyte and potentially limited my ability to develop the necessary connections to conduct the study. In a similar fashion to Nardi and Taylor I set a goal of attaining ranked status in LoL.
In the early stages of interviewing I personally found my lack of exposure to the LoL environment to be a hindrance. I found myself trying to translate what I knew about the game I intended on studying to LoL, but the two gaming cultures were too distinct. For example, when probing participants about whom the equivalent within LoL gaming to Sean Plott, a retired
77 professional gamer and current paratextual producer in Starcraft fandom, a similar figure did not exist with LoL fandom. Although I had played a handful of games, and had researched the genre more broadly, I still did not know enough to know what to ask about their play. Luckily, two of the first three interview participants were also members of the club executive, so we were able to talk about the organization of their fall events and the club more generally.
Learning to play LoL was a difficult and time-consuming endeavour. Before engaging in ranked competition, a gamer must make their way through a progression mechanic comprised of 30 levels on their summoner account. Levels are gained as a result of completing matches, whether the player wins or loses. Players will be awarded experience points for progressing an individual champion, as well as points for their summoner account. Progressing individual champions within the game improves that specific in-game character and progressing a summoner account provides access to additional in-game features.
To reach ranked status I played through over 200 matches with a record of 83 wins and
117 losses. A loss can be as short as 20 minutes, the first point during a match where the ability to surrender becomes available to a team1, but wins on average took between 30-40 minutes each. Data for my engagement in the virtual environment was downloaded directly from my game account. Although I did try to maintain a consistent habit of taking field notes after my engagements in the field, this would prove to be one of the most challenging aspects of data collection. The viciously random and repetitive nature of unranked play created a sense of faux saturation for me as a participant observer. When a person joins a match alone in LoL they are
1 Although the surrender option becomes available after twenty minutes of play, it requires a majority of the five members of the team to vote to surrender. In many cases two or more team members would withhold this vote in order to continue the match. This could stretch the length of a loss to well over an hour. 78 agreeing to be a member of a randomly assigned team of five gamers to play against another randomly assigned team. It would make sense at this point to provide a more thorough introduction of one of the primarily actor’s in the practice-networks of the club, LoL.
Introducing the Summoner’s Rift
My attempt to recreate the ethnographic arrival trope in the introduction was meant to associate the study with that methodological tradition, as well as to provide as concise a description as possible of the game. Given the position of LoL in the practice-networks of the club it would be a good idea to provide a more robust explanation of the game before diving into the analysis. This section will address the aspects of League of Legends through two of the main features of Consalvo and Dutton’s (2006) methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games. From their approach I will focus on addressing the game’s interface (what a player sees in the game) and the interactions available to players within the virtual environment.
Like most esports games, LoL’s primary interface consists of a “lobby” where a player is exposed to in-game marketing, esports news and a store where they can spend both real-world and in-game currencies. From this lobby a player can select a number of game modes. There are now three different maps with slightly different rules for play, options to play ranked (once unlocked) or unranked matches and the ability to create a practice match against champions controlled by the games artificial intelligence. Once a player chooses to play a ranked match, which is the main goal of esports play, you are thrown into a draft, as seen in figure 2.
79
Figure 2. Screen capture of draft before LoL club match. The image includes the drafting screen from LoL with additional graphical elements added by the club including their crest in the center. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIn1Eng387c&t=2128s Each of the ten players in a match chooses an avatar, called a champion, which they will use during a match through this interface. They do this by taking turns between the two teams.
Each team is also granted up to three champions that they can ban to prevent the other team from choosing them. The practices involved in this aspect of the game will be explored further in the next chapter. Once champions have been selected then the player will see their character appear in a small circle with their team members in the game’s main arena or map.
Players’ primary access to the virtual environment is through their champion, so the perspective of the camera is oriented over their head with the character generally at the center of the frame, as seen in figure 3. They move their champions around the map by using the mouse and right clicking an area on the map. The champion will then proceed to the location. If you right click on a target from the opposing team your champion will start to attack it with their basic attack. Aside from this automatic attack, players are presented with four abilities
80 mapped to the Q,W,E,and R keys on the keyboard. These four abilities are unique for each champion. There are many nuances left to explore in the game’s interface, but this should be enough to understand the analysis chapters.
Figure 3. Players’ view of avatar in LoL. Camera oriented above Seth73’s champion, while he attacks some minions. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CimwtwEZfsw&t=619s
The interactions a player is presented with come in three general forms: stationary towers that line the three pathways between the teams, non-player characters (NPC) of varying difficulty and human opponents controlling other champions. The first two forms of interaction within LoL operate much like the conditions of the match. Except for the two bosses located on the map, who provide team-wide attribute bonuses when defeated, most of the NPCs the player interacts with are little more than a nuisance. Within the first few minutes of a match a
81 player can dispatch a typical minion with one or two basic attacks, which take place within the span of a few seconds.
Interactions with other human-controlled champions within a match are the core of LoL gaming. Amongst the other four champions on your own team you can interact through a text- based chat window. Most players will tend to replace this communication channel with a voice- based system once they have found people to play the game with regularly. The other team’s champions can only be interacted with through the actions of the player’s champion until a match has ended. Players will work their way through one or more of the three pathways that connect the teams’ bases. To accomplish this, they must successfully assess and counter the actions of their opponents until one team has destroyed the nexus of the other. Matches are just one part of the interface of LoL but remain the primary driver within the game. The next section will review the approach taken towards live event observations.
Meeting the LoL Club
When I first became interested in this project it seemed as though organized esports fandom was on the rise. In the earliest iterations of my research proposal I had identified two local Starcraft fan groups who had begun to meet in local bars to watch professional competitions. They organized their activities through two Facebook groups. By the time I was ready to conduct the research, the activity in both of these groups had waned and they no longer had any scheduled viewings available. This was my first encounter with the tumultuous nature of esports fandom. Because I was not certain that I would actually find people who still regularly played esports games among these fans I sought out additional gaming groups for backup.
82 On the bulletin boards that line the hallways of the University of Calgary I found advertisements for two additional local gaming groups and I pursued both. LANified was a group organized around the practices of LAN gaming that held weekend long events in a community center in the south of Calgary. Having made contact with the founder and attended a couple of their weekend events this group seemed like that would be a good fit. Esports games featured prominently in their LAN events and organizing some gaming myself seemed like it would be easy to do through the group. As my data collection commenced they were forced to cancel their fall events and I was left with just one of the organized gaming fandoms that I had initially identified.
Finding the LoL club was not as easy as the other two fan groups I had identified. I could not find the club’s display during the Students’ Union clubs week event, a usual spot for clubs to recruit new members and make the student body aware of their existence. I knew they had existed, because I had encountered their promotional material on the same bulletin boards where I found LANified’s material. After contacting the SU to inquire about the existence of the
LoL club, I was directed to a Facebook group, which I promptly joined. In the newsfeed was an announcement about registration for their upcoming competition. I took this administrative event as an occasion to introduce my research intentions, and myself as I described in the opening of this dissertation. Before I move to analyze the practice-networks of the club it would make sense to take some time to introduce its members.
As I described in the opening I met Roman while registering for the club’s Fall Solo
Queue tournament. It was at this event that I first met Steven, who was one of the primary organizers for the event. Before the club broke for lunch I took the opportunity to introduce
83 this project, and myself before handing out a sign up sheet to ascertain how many gamers I could pull together for each of the three games I had identified. Although I collected email addresses and followed up, especially with those members who seemed most curious and enthusiastic, only the two executive members responded to this initial invitation.
Following up this initial contact I posted a notice in the club’s Facebook group introducing the project and asking for volunteers for interviews. From this first post on
Facebook I saw the first slow trickle of interest from club members. Over the next few months I posted additional calls for interview participants, which resulted in an additional three participants. With the exception of Roman and Steven, I refer to these participants using variations of their chosen names in the game. Since the focus of this project is to examine the practice-networks of these games I decided to avoid focusing on the subjects themselves.
The live events of the LoL club
During the fall term the LoL club held two face-to-face events that I was able to observe.
The first was a competition between club members and the second was a watch party for a professional competition that had taken place the previous July. In both cases I took on the role of observer. The first event was my first interaction with members of the club at large, so I did introduce myself to the entire group present in order to solicit volunteers for interviews in the future. The rest of the time spent at the competition I was walking around and observing the various groups of people spread out around the room, paying attention to the kinds of equipment they were using and reflecting on what I was seeing. I also was able to carry on informal conversations with the organizers of the event, which were also serving the role of casters during matches.
84 These kinds of face-to-face event observations are fairly common within the emerging area of esports studies (Witkowski, 2012, Taylor, 2011). The striking nature of the technical and social virtuosity that go into the coordination of these massive professional events has made in- person live observation a key resource for generating data. The first benefit comes from being able to observe the technical configuration of esports play. As others have observed, the assemblage of technologies can include laptops, desktop computer towers, mechanical keyboards, gaming mice, high definition monitors and headsets with microphones.
Face-to-face observations of LoL club events provided a reasonably low barrier for entry.
Although my knowledge of the game itself was rudimentary, the practice of organizing a student run event on campus was not. The executive member, whom I had met previously, was gracious, helpful and entertained my very basic questions about the event and the game.
Whether sitting alone in the centre of the room, behind the officiator for the event, or wandering around chatting with participants, these face-to-face events provided one of the best environments for generating field notes.
eSports in their own words
The second main source of data for this study was formal, informal, structured and unstructured interviewing. The reason for using these interviews was to attempt to elicit from participants descriptions of their particular approaches to play and to start to sketch what was included in the LoL practice-networks they drew on in their play. These data allowed me to start mapping the practice-networks of club members, as well as helped improve my own performance in the game. The status of data generated from interviews has been a continuous
85 discussion amongst ethnographic researchers understanding and that discussion will help to illuminate the limitations and drawbacks of this data set.
Interviews can be used to, “tell us something about the phenomena to which they refer”, or, “to analyse them in terms of the perspectives they imply, the discursive strategies they employ and even the psychosocial dynamics they suggest.” (Hammersly and Atkisson,
2007, Loc 2779 of 9380). For the purposes of this study I have chosen to focus on what these interviews could tell me about LoL gaming. Of course, this approach has its inherent shortcomings. As Hammersly and Atkisson (2007) indicated, these accounts, “should not be taken at face value”. To compensate I attempted to test what I was able to learn from my participants through my own interactions in the game. The validity of these data is further complicated by the way the interviews were conducted.
My approach to these interviews was to begin each one-on-one session with a short statement about the research project and explanation of the informed consent process as a means of establishing rapport. After the introduction of the project I would then move into the structured portion of the interview process. The questions I used in each case are attached in appendix 1. They were designed to produce general information about the participants’ involvement with LoL and gaming more broadly. After completing the structured portion of the interview, I would then instruct the participant to find a replay of their LoL gaming, which I would put on a large plasma screen so I could both observe, and then proceed to have them walk me through what was happening during the match. This second portion of the interviews was necessarily unstructured as it was driven by the interaction between the replay, participant and myself.
86 There are two major limitations with this approach to interviewing for the current project. The first is the issue of distortion in self-reporting research. The second is that these accounts are by their nature retroactively reconstructed interpretations of player actions. As
Kahn, Ratan and Williams (2014) found in their study of massively multiplayer role-playing gamers, people tend to distort information like their play time when asked. These kinds of distortions could be seemingly amplified when asking a participant to explain actions that have happened in the past. The assumption is that the distortion would come from a participant’s understandable desire to represent what they have done in the best possible light.
In order to address the first issue, I specifically broke up questions about play time and paratextual time in order to try to get closer to an accurate account of the investment my participants have made in LoL. Near the beginning of the interview script I asked participants how much time they spent playing LoL, further down I asked about how much time they spend watching videos and surfing LoL related websites. Near the very end I asked if they had included that paratextual time in their initial assessment of their LoL game time. With only one exception, participants had not considered this time spent on paratextual material as part of their gaming time.
In terms of the issues created by the retroactive approach to game play, I actually saw this as a peculiar advantage for my particular research question. As already discussed in order for actions to be considered as practices they must be identifiable. Even if my participants only focused on the things they did well in the replay I watched this would not negatively impact my search for LoL play practices. By probing participants throughout the replay I was able to
87 establish an understanding of the phases of a LoL match as well as identify several identifiable practices.
eSports and paratext
The primary challenge of approaching the paratextual field was the sheer volume of material being produced for most games. During structured interviews participants were asked what source they use for playing LoL. For LoL, instead of wikis and instructional videos, the most referenced paratextual resources were designed for theorycrafting rather than instruction. The primary vehicle for the dissemination of professional LoL in-game practices seemed to be through the spectatorship of the professional scene. In contrast to other esports communities, that had initially caught my interest, LoL seemed to lack a central figure that bridged these two kinds of paratextual resource. My own inexperience with the game increased the importance of these resources, as I would need them to both explain the practice-networks of LoL club members, as well as rely on them to inform my own in-game practices.
As it was covered in chapter two, theorycrafting is a gaming practice that pushes gamers to work out the mechanics of a game environment with the instrumental goal of bettering their in-game engagement. The resources that my participants pointed me towards were really good for understanding what the trends were for my regional server, but there was little to no explanation of why these trends existed or what practices they may be bound up with. By engaging with these paratexts I could start to discern why people would make certain choices within the game environment insofar as those choices supported or contradicted the trends outlined in these paratextual resources.
88 The professional scene provided a similarly complicated window into LoL play practices.
As T. L. Taylor (2012) has noted in her own esports work, when one is first confronted with a new competitive environment it can be incomprehensible and a little overwhelming. Finding the relevant competitions was easy, given Riot’s approach to esports, but making sense of what
I was seeing took some time. Through my observations of the club’s watch party and my own exploration of the competitive scene I was able to experience firsthand the role that spectatorship played in the club’s practice-networks.
To my surprise at my very first face-to-face observation a third source of paratextual content became a viable window into the practices of the club. Although I was aware of esports gamers creating their own paratextual content I underestimated the amount of content the club would produce. The majority of the club’s competitive events were live streamed using Twitch. The Weekly League of Legends series, organized in the winter term, was additionally archived to YouTube, which provided easy access for analysis. The role of
Facebook in the organization of the group’s activities also forced me to broaden my own definition of what a paratextual gaming resource was. With no common physical meeting place, the club’s group page on Facebook provided a place for me to observe them as well as recruit participants for my interviews.
Practice-networks pulling it all together
As Law has indicated, ANT sits somewhere between being a theory and a method and in my exploration of practice-networks it makes sense that this perspective would epistemologically inform my analysis of the project data. As Mol (2002) has suggested if people are able to keep the "practicalities of doing" at the forefront of our minds they can see how the
89 “singualirty” of objects often obfuscates their “accomplishment” (p. 119). How the local actions of everyday gamers are connected to and informed by actors outside of their local context can be explored through this perspective. The doing of a typical single match of LoL involves a myriad of high-speed network connections, eleven or more computers to play the game, ten people and all of the gaming capital each of them brings with them into the environment.
Studies like Fields, Kafai and Searle’s (2010, 2012) exploration of gamers are a great example of how to productively combine in-person observation of gamers in an afterschool club with data collected about those players from the game’s server directly. Through combining these two sites the research team was more easily able to identify emerging gamer practices and how they were disseminated among the students playing the game. In the case of
Giddings and Kennedy the exploration of how pleasure is derived through gameplay through the connection between specific video game content in the Lego Star Wars and its connection to the Star Wars fandom outside of the game. In bringing the multiple sites of LoL club play together my focus was primarily on how they interact to accomplish the activities that comprised the club.
Challenges, surprises and shortcomings
It is important to acknowledge at this point my own shortcomings as a researcher and the aspects of the project that presented the most challenge for me. My identity as both a gamer and a researcher proved to be less of a problem than I had initially anticipated. Early on in the research process I was forced to make changes to the research design that had a noticeable impact on what I was able to produce. This change opened opportunities that I had
90 not considered in the initial research design, as well as weaknesses that were difficult to overcome. In this final section I wanted to address some of these aspects of the work.
Situatedness
From the beginning of the project I anticipated that my situatedness would impact the end result. Having played video games for most of my life I was concerned that my identity as a gamer would encroach on my responsibilities as a researcher. This concern was compounded, as my initial intention was to study a gaming community that I had been a part, periodically, for the past twenty years. As the project unfolded my initial concern was soon replaced by the insecurities of being too much of an outsider as the community of gamers I chose to study shifted. The late stage change in game and community provided considerable challenges and surprising opportunities for the project.
When I first realized that esports was something that I would be interested and equipped to study, Blizzard Entertainment had just reinvigorated the professional scene with the launch of their long awaited sequel in the Starcraft series. My familiarity with the franchise combined with my experience of the online community gave me the impression that I would be well positioned to tell a story about how esports is accomplished in an everyday setting. After all I was an everyday gamer, or at least most weekends, and it was the rise of professional gaming in the early 2000s that pushed me out of Starcraft gaming.
When it became clear that the Starcraft community was contracting, at least in Calgary, the switch to League of Legends provided an insightful change in perspective. With Starcraft I was fairly confident that I understood the paratextual landscape and that knowledge would be crucial in the exploration of gamers’ practice-networks. Having to start from scratch with a
91 game that I had not played and a paratextual landscape that I had only a peripheral knowledge of helped me to think more broadly about the practice-networks of esports gaming. Firstly, the shift from a single player competitive game to a game with five person teams opened up a whole range of organizational practices, which will be explored further in chapter six.
On the other hand the late stage change also fed into my own insecurities about my role within the group. In my initial study design the gaming organization that I was targeting was a local LAN gaming group. Unlike the singular focus of the LoL club the LAN group was much less formal in their approach to games. It was not uncommon from what I observed for small groups of gamers at their events to play several different games throughout the course of one of their events. It was clear from my first meeting with the LoL club that their goals were more instrumentally focused. Their intention to take part in the ULoL Campus series was evident from my first conversations with executive members, which made me reconsider my research design.
Reciprocation
With the LAN group I had intended to both play and organize some play around the game I was targeting. Within the context of a LAN event this would not be intrusive. In the context of the LoL club, organizing matches would have not only been an overreach, but would have likely prevented what became one of the most interesting events during my observation and the subject of chapter eight. It was in the vacuum of organization in the winter school term that a regular member of the club was able to put himself forward as an organizer and put his own stamp on the club’s activities. If I had already been organizing weekly play sessions for my research this probably would not have happened.
92 Additionally, I was concerned about impacting the validity of my final research project.
Unlike the LAN group the LoL club’s focus on the play of one game meant that the club had a much larger role in the organization of that play. Seeing how they accomplished this organization is what chapters six and seven are focused on. Having now observed the group I would be more confident that I could find a role within the club that would serve them and also my research, but at the time I lacked such confidence. My initial concerns about being too much of a participant were supplanted by the insecurities brought on by becoming too much of an unobtrusive observer.
In a league over my head.
I also struggled with developing an appropriate level of gamer capital, a concept that will be explored in chapter five. I took some time to conduct a review of the other two games I had decided to include in the study when it became clear that I might have trouble finding enough Starcraft gamers. Both Dota 2 and League of Legends share many similarities with the control interface of Starcraft and the paratextual landscape that surrounds both games was robust enough that I assumed that I would be able to catch up to my participants within a reasonable amount of time. Not only was this not a realistic assumption, I had not considered how my lack of familiarity with the game would impact my interviews. It should be noted that typical gaming ethnographies usually take place over a number of years.
I also struggled throughout the project with my level of immersion. How much of a LoL gamer did I have to become to understand what was happening in the club? As I have mentioned I played the game for many hours and spent many more reading websites and reviewing video (both paratextual and from my data collection), but in all those hours I have
93 never felt comfortable being a LoL gamer. I have not played the game outside of a research context and since the completion of my data collection I have not watched any LoL gaming, aside from the video analyzed for this project. Although I am certain that I was immersed enough into the practice-networks of LoL to produce the analysis I have provided in the next four chapters, I never had that certainty while the data collection was ongoing. With a long- term project I may have been able to assuage this concern with a more agile approach to the research design, but for the purposes of this project it is important to at least address my discomfort with my level of immersion up front.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have provided a window into the contours of the methodological landscape that has most directly informed the construction of this project. Although the vast majority of sources I have reviewed in this chapter are ethnographic in nature I want to clarify that this project was not itself an ethnography. The time and relationships required to produce a proper ethnographic account were beyond the scope of my research design. The ephemeral nature of special interest student clubs and the tumultuous nature of esports fandom made a micro-ethnographic approach more appropriate. The disparate nature of the various field sites involved in the project also made the perspective of connective ethnography invaluable for pulling all together.
Aside from the concerns I have outlined about my own abilities as a researcher it is important to acknowledge that ethnography as a method has also faced criticism. The ability to produce a grand theory or esports gaming or a generalizable account lies beyond the grasp of an ethnographic approach, as Clifford (2005) has suggested with the concept of the “crisis of
94 representation”. There are also well-documented issues bound up in the politics of speaking on behalf of others in ethnographic work (Brettell, 1993). Finally there is the nature of the ethnographic product itself. In the end despite the rigor, careful placement of data and construction of arguments this dissertation will be a story about participation in esports gaming.
Despite these critiques I contend that the ethnographic perspective of privileging the meaning created and expressed by participants and packaging the results of research into stories that matter to someone were a solid foundation to build from. The next four chapters will explore how professional gaming informed the practices of LoL club gamers using the data sources and perspectives outlined in this chapter. The analysis begins with unbracketing the act of play through the concepts of gaming capital and practical intelligibility.
95 Chapter 5 Exploring the Gaming Capital of the LoL Club
In its most abstract form, video gaming is an activity that can be boiled down to the choices a player makes and the feedback they receive from a virtual environment. The complexity of the choices has grown significantly as technology and the skills of game developers have advanced. While in the beginning there may have been only one way of doing a game like Pong, as games have grown in complexity, the freedom for players to do things their own way has increased. Consequently, as the connections between gamers have become standard through online gaming, the development of specific, privileged ways of doing games have emerged in parallel (Taylor, 2011). By treating these specific routinized ways of doing LoL gaming as a kind a media practice, I can begin see how those practices are situated within a much larger network of practices.
Only through grappling with the scope of this wider network will it is possible to understand how the professionalization of esports gaming has informed how gamers are playing in the everyday context. This chapter will zoom in on in-game LoL practice to understand the wider active flows that comprise esports gaming in the everyday. By framing the work of esports practice through the categories of gamer capital (Consalvo, 2007, Carter,
Gibbs and Harrop, 2012b) described in chapter two, I will argue that the in-game practices of
LoL gaming are integrative for the viability of the virtual environment and provide a rigid minimalist framework for media participation.
What it makes sense to do at the time
The vocabulary provided by the practice-network approach provides a means for describing the connections between everyday play and the professional sphere. These
96 connections are ephemeral and situated in the background knowledge of the players in the game. Through the concept of practical intelligibility (Schatzki, 1996), the resources that players draw on in their execution of particular in-game LoL practice can be traced. As it was presented in the third chapter, practical intelligibility is largely made up of the mental resources that are required to both recognize and execute practices.
These resources comprise what is known about and what can be said about a particular practice. Moving from what a participant did in game, to what they know about what they did,
I was then able trace the connections between what they knew and the sources it likely came from. This chapter will draw on three main sources of data from the study. The first was my interviews with LoL club members, particularly the portion of the interview where we watched replays of their own play. The second source was what I could find within the paratextual environment based on what my participants told me in those interviews. The final source was my own experience working through the progression mechanic in the game. By triangulating these three sources, the intention is to provide for the reader a sense of the complexity of in- game LoL practices, as well as some of the drivers of the acquisition and execution of these practices.
The way participants spoke about their own actions in-game made many of the practices identifiable. Once these connections were mapped it became possible to start to evaluate the kind of media participation that was being offered through LoL gaming. Couldry
(2004) has suggested that practices shed light on, “the principles whereby, and the mechanisms through which, practices are ordered” (p. 123). In this exploration of LoL gaming I will suggest that the concepts of metagaming and paragaming capital best fit Couldry’s notion of the
97 principles whereby practices are ordered. The terms I am offering of inscribed and performed gaming capital best fit Couldry’s notion of the mechanisms whereby practices are ordered.
As Schatzki (1996) has illustrated, practices generally fall into two main categories; those that are necessary and intrinsic to the activity they belong to and those that are distributed and found in many different bundles of activity. For example, handling the puck is an integrative practice for the game of hockey, whereas skating is a distributed practice found in other winter activities. The difference is found in the necessity of the practice for the context to which it belongs. Without the integrative practice of handling the puck the game of hockey would be a fundamentally different activity. In the case of LoL gaming the integrative practices are found in the instrumentalized sphere of professional LoL gaming.
In this sphere of competition, the best and most innovative approaches to LoL gaming are created, performed and distributed through the regular broadcasting of competitions online. It is through this obligatory passage point of competition that esports practices are ordered. Distinguishing between integrative and distributed practices provides a means for evaluating the kind of participation that is fostered through these practice-networks. Drawing on Carpentier’s notion of participatory sensitivities (Jenkins & Carpentier, 2013) these practices can be used to evaluate the participation presented in the game. How are actors in the networks of LoL play defined by integrative esports practices? Do these practices empower or ensnare esports gamers?
I will make the case that instrumentalized and integrative practices of LoL gaming are a minimalist form of media participation that exploit gamers' time, interest and effort for the benefit of Riot Games. The practices that dedicated players bring into LoL are integral to make
98 the game attractive for a large player base. While there are no formal mechanisms to ensure that this will happen, the nature of a networked competitive environments force many players to seek guidance outside of the virtual environment of LoL. When gamers participate in LoL esports practice-networks they provide the core source of value for the virtual environment.
This is not dissimilar to other video games; virtual environments often present challenges that a gamer cannot overcome without some assistance. What is different here is that the development of ways to play LoL, combined with a virtual environment that is in perpetual flux, provides a game replete with impassable challenges in perpetuity. Games like
LoL are being endlessly adjusted to add new characters, rebalance game mechanics and account for the innovations of professional players. Having a certain level of competency is a necessary component of participating most activities involving other people, but constantly shifting environments like LoL create a dynamic where the acquisition of knowledge never ends.
To make your way in LoL there is a constant pressure to stay up to date on the latest software patches and professional practices that are constantly adding more to the virtual environment. Maintaining an adequate level of knowledge about the virtual environment, the instrumentalized competitive practices that are being innovated within it, and being able to draw upon them in your play to achieve a self-satisfying competitive rank are all aspects of LoL esports that allow us to map the practice-networks of everyday gamers. The concept of gaming capital will provide a framework for organizing the various resources and connections to paratextual actors that will be recounted in this chapter. This concept provides a means for understanding the kinds of resources that gamers bring into the games they play.
99 This chapter will focus on the networks at play in LoL esports gaming. In particular, it will zoom in on how the instrumentalized practices of professional esports gaming make their way into LoL through a close examination of the four kinds of gaming capital described in chapter two. First, I will establish how the ephemeral networks of LoL play were punctualized.
Then the chapter will illustrate the ways that meta, para, performed and inscribed-gaming capital are manifested in the play of LoL gamers. Each of these types of gamer capital provide a means for categorizing the kinds of resources that gamers bring into their play.
Exploring the knowledge they have of the virtual environment (meta), their knowledge of the kinds of practices that are commonly used within the game (para), to their ability to recognize and be recognized for doing the right thing at the right time (performed) and the kinds of visual markers of their investment in the game (inscribed) should provide an introduction into the practice-networks of LoL esports gaming. Understanding how a player accumulates and maintains these four kinds of gaming capital should illustrate how their practices are immersed in professionalized practice-networks..
Networks at play
Every time a match is created online in LoL an actor-network is punctualized, as seen in figure 4. At its most abstract the network comprises Riot's hosting servers, network infrastructure, and ten individual player actants. Each of these abstractions could be broken down into more granular networks themselves. If I were to zoom in further on the player actants an assemblage of networking infrastructure, computing equipment (potentially including specialized peripherals like mouse and keyboard), the virtual environment from the
100 game's interface, the avatar that a player chooses and the player themselves would all become visiable.
Figure 4. Diagram of basic network that is common to all online matches of LoL.
Zooming in even closer on the individual practices displayed in the game, one could observe the punctualization of LoL practice-networks that connect what a player does in the game to the various kinds of knowledge and skills they have been able to cultivate in their participation in esports gaming. These are, by far, the most granular practice-networks that I will explore in this study. One can assume that dozens of these networks could be punctualized within a single match of LoL. Although the practices themselves are observable within LoL play, the networks that inform those practices only become apparent through interacting directly with the player actants or in trying to recreate them within my own play.
101 A single match then in LoL represents the ephemeral and iteratively punctualizing and depunctualizing practice-networks at the heart of LoL esports gaming. As each new match is started a new network configuration is punctualized with a variable mix of gaming capital to support the actions of each player actant within the network. The fleeting nature of the practice-networks that emerge in esports gaming makes the observation of them part of the practices of spectatorship. Even with replays, casting and interviewing subjects about their play, these networks are in some part the product of rationalizing patterns of behaviour. As these players interact with one another in the virtual environment they bring with them their own practice-networks that inform their play. Through the execution of particular practices, I can infer the kinds of gaming capital required for their successful execution.
Practical intelligibility as Schatzki (1996) described, “governs action in a non-causal manner” (p. 120) and it becomes the window through which I can see the traces of the networks that inform LoL esports practices. What this means is that a player must know things about the game and the practices that are routinely recreated within the game in order to execute these practices. Just knowing things about these practices does not cause a player to perform a certain way in the game. As Jarzabkowski et al (2007) explain, the execution of practice requires a practitioner to draw on cognitive and procedural resources (p. 9). These resources allow us to execute practices, as well as identify them. As I have argued these resources can be explored through an examination of the expanded version of gaming capital.
A diagram adapted from Jarzabkowski’s depiction of the co-constitutive elements practice applied to the in-game practices of LoL can be seen in figure 5.
102
Figure 5. Co-constituative elements of esports practice. Adapted from Jazabkowski et al, 2007,
Although individual understanding and innovation are a part of a regular LoL match, the persistent performance of instrumentalized actions that have been developed and distributed outside of the match-network provide a means to explore players’ practical intelligibility. To recognize a practice requires the knowledge of what that practice entails. That knowledge provides the opportunity to trace the connection back to where that practice came from.
Identifying sources within the paratextual environment of LoL gaming, through interviewing participants and surveying the environment first hand, was the next step in identifying these networks.
103 Prefigured picks and choices
At first glance it might seem that a match of LoL could be broken down into a series of choices made by each player, but is a choice really a choice if the optimal approach has already been determined? This is the state of play in most video games, but especially so in esports titles. Choices in LoL, from which champion you choose to play to what items you acquire through a match, are all prefigured. That is to say that the assemblages of practice-networks that are brought to bear within a given match order the practices within.
What position each player is comfortable with and which champions the other team have chosen are just two of the many considerations that have been endlessly instrumentally analyzed through the theorycrafting found in many of the paratextual actors that my participants claimed to have engaged with as a part of their play. By far the most popular source among my interview participants was the spectatorship of professional competitions.
The importance of the prefiguration of the players’ choices became evident to me in the ways in which these choices became part of the commentary that preceded a match, both professionally and in the productions of the LoL club.
Much like a sports journalists’ speculating on the impact of which players a hockey team will choose to play together within a game, I realized that choosing which champion to play in the game was a choice that has been thoroughly considered long before a match began. These paratextual actors provided a short cut that allows gamers to skip the step of exhaustively experimenting within the virtual environment. Providing information and analysis in their commentary required making the instrumentally best choices, these paratextual actors ensure that these practices make it into the virtual environment.
104 Just like in regular sports, players must take a position within a match. The first choice a player must make is which lane they would like to play in. When playing with random people a players’ choice of position could be impacted by what the other members on their team want to do. While I was progressing to ranked status in the game it was customary to announce what lane you would like to play in, using the game’s chat feature when a player first joins a match. Although this kind of interaction can determine what lane and character a player will choose, I want to draw attention to the prefiguration that is tied to these instrumental game practices. As I covered in the introduction, the map is comprised of two player bases, found at opposite corners of the map. Between the two corners are three pathways, called lanes, with a constant stream of non-player characters (npc) that appear regularly and march toward the enemy team’s base and towers that attack the opposing team’s NPCs or players if they get too close.
In the top lane you will most often find the tank, typically reserved for champions, designed to have higher defense and abilities to help them withstand the attacks of the opposing team. In the middle lane you will most often find champions that are referred to as ability power carry (APC). These champions are well-balanced with offensive and defensive capabilities allowing them to hold the middle lane alone against the NPCs and opposing players.
These players are also expected to assist their team in the top or bottom lanes should any problems or opportunities arise.
The bottom lane usually contains two players who will likely have chosen an attack damage carry (ADC) and a support champion to work in tandem in this lane. The ADC is primarily an offensive character who often is too weak to survive without the support character
105 to assist in the early phase of a match. If they have been successful in the early and mid-game the ADC can easily become the most powerful member of a team with the ability to wipe out an entire opposing team. The support champions are designed to control the movement of opposing players through abilities that will impact how a player can move or use their abilities.
The support characters abilities provide an opportunity for an ADC to maximize their attack potential, by giving them an opportunity to prepare themselves for the later phases of the match.
The final player on the team will take on the role of the jungler. In between the three lanes in LoL is filled with a series of pathways and stronger NPC monsters that can be defeated for individual and team-based performance enhancement. Strategically the jungler must move from creature to creature, eliminating them in a specific order, in this in-between space in order to gain experience. They can also keep track of the other teams’ jungler to prevent surprise attacks, as well as contribute to surprise attacks being perpetrated by their own team.
The champions provided in LoL are designed with these specific in game roles in mind, so before a player decides which champion they want to play, they should first determine what role they would like to play on the five-person team.
With 141 playable champions currently available it is not uncommon for a player to focus on just one specific role on a team and a small number of champions who fit that role.
For most of my interview participants this was the case. They would name one or two characters that they focused on (often designed for the same role), much like an athlete in regular sports would be able to identify what position they play in their sport. For myself, I chose an ADC named Jinx who seemed to fit my own particular play style. By focusing in on just
106 a handful of champions a player is able to focus the amount of metagaming capital required to be successful in the game. To narrow this choice players will likely look to paratextual actors in order to determine which champions are viable for a given position based on what a plurality of other players are doing in the game.
Surveillance as paratext
With so many champions to choose from, five different in-match roles and the choices of the opposing team to consider there is a tremendous amount of metagaming capital to be consumed and digested by players who wish to involve themselves in this kind of gaming. As with most games there are a plethora of resources online to help players sort through this mountain of information and make some sense of the gaming world. These resources are designed with the goal of providing the most instrumentally relevant information to help players contribute effectively and win their matches.
Not surprisingly for my participants a small number of these kinds of actors were mentioned when they were asked what resources they drew on to improve their play. One of the many paratextual influences on the choice of which champion a player may pick, outside of their spectatorship of professional LoL play, can be found in a series of surveillance-based paratextual actors within the .gg domain, which has become a common repository of gaming specific resources. NAOP.gg and Champion.gg were both websites that provided databases of information that serve as repositories of the games current stores of metagaming and paragaming capital.
Through APIs these websites extract data from Riot's official servers and provide a means to access an aggregation of what everyone in your region is currently doing in the game.
107 By aggregating this data these sites present the prevailing trends in LoL play, which provide a concise summation of champion relevant metagaming information. By pulling data directly from Riot's servers, these databases maintain a record of how every champion in the game was used, how often, with what in-game choices and with what effectiveness (win rate), which provides a concise summation of champion specific paragaming information. These kinds of surveillance-based paratextual resources are not unique to esports gaming, as T.L. Taylor
(2006a) has identified in her work with the MMORPG World of Warcraft.
The double-edged sword of resources like these two instrumentalized paratextual actors is that they make these kinds of metagaming and paragaming capital easy to access. Having started my in-game exploration before interviews began, the lack of knowledge I entered the world with was readily apparent. More than anything else, these actors revealed trends in the gaming capital that one ought to be aware of before entering the virtual environment. Which champions are being used the most? Which have fallen out of favour? What you should do in what order with these champions in the Rift? Answers to these questions and more were all there, pre-analyzed and packaged as essential reading material for anyone who wanted to play
LoL effectively.
In her own exploration of these kinds of surveillance mods, Talyor (2006a) sought to juxtapose the “common language of emergence and productive engagement with game systems… with the development by players of tools that stratify, surveil, quantify, and regulate their fellow gamers” (p. 15). Her concern centered on the coerciveness of these kinds of emergent player behaviours. Indeed, in the arena of esports play I can elevate this concern given that game developers have since enrolled these surveillance-based paratexts. The data
108 required for these tools had to be provided by Riot Games in order for the tools to work, so even if Riot has not created these paratextual tools themselves they are complicit in their deployment.
Buried within a networked ideology of openness, the surveillance that is conducted in this virtual environment becomes a condition of entry. Conforming to an environment where every player action contributes to a vast database of trends and practices makes the case for surveillance attractive. Without these kinds of paratextual actors the amount of work that a player would have to do in order to understand the trends and interconnections between champions would be very difficult and tremendously time consuming. These paratextual actors do not just justify but make useful a state of universal surveillance for players by providing the opportunity to benefit from the data. Those who are aware of these paratextual actors are the only ones to experience this benefit. For those who are not, which best described me in the matches I played before I started interviewing participants, these benefits quickly become obstacles that make the virtual environment harsh and unforgiving.
It is certainly possible that a player could accumulate this information by painstakingly analyzing the various champions in the pre-match lobby or even through experiencing the interactions between champions in matches, but the volume of meta-gaming capital required to contribute effectively to a team makes these cases less likely. It would be like navigating a dark room after the furniture has been rearranged. You could use your hands outstretched and cautious exploratory steps to make your way through, but the frustration you would experience while fumbling in the dark would make you consider turning on the lights. After exploring these resources, I gained a much better understanding of the champion I had chosen and the role
109 that I was supposed to play throughout a match. This example should clarify how the choices that are made within a match in LoL, have been brought from the virtual environment of the game to these paratextual resources to be aggregated and analyzed.
The volume of the data and analysis available within these paratexts produce practice- networks that have the potential to turn players into products, to be sold to Internet-based advertisers who supply banner ads contained on these websites. Understanding the relationships, advantages and disadvantages of the roster of champions in the game provides a compelling device of interessement (Callon, 1986) enticing players to seek out these resources to fast track their understanding of the game. As is often the case, once driven to find this information a player becomes the target of advertisers. Depicted this way, the kinds of practices involved in choosing a champion are an exploitative form of minimalist participation that reduce gamers to their advertisement ready eyeballs.
Knowing what to buy without wasting time
In my first run of matches exploring the virtual environment the most bewildering experience in the frenetic pace of competitive play was the selection of items as a match progressed. As you eliminate enemy NPCs in a match you gather both experience and gold.
The former is used for the in-match progression system2, but gold has a much more complicated purpose. At any point during a match a player can return to their spawn area and access a shop where items can be purchased for a marginal improvement of a champion's attributes. Some items have particular prerequisites that must be purchased before they
2 When this system is successfully navigated a champion progresses from level 1 to 18. Each level allows the player to invest one point into their champion’s four abilities making them more effective. Although there is certainly some strategy involved in which abilities to level up at which time it is something that I could at least begin to figure out on my own as I played through matches. 110 become available. To simplify this mechanic there is a circumscribed palate of choices provided to players based on their chosen champion if they want a more manageable interface for the shop. To call this interface a shop though would mislead someone unfamiliar to the pace of a competitive esports match. There really is no time to actually shop, compare or actually make choices while engaging this interface. These choices have already been analyzed and documented within paratextual resources.
Whether you take advantage of the circumscribed pallet of choices provided in the game, which is often out of sync with current player practices in the game or consult resources like champion.gg it is assumed that you must have this metagaming capital secured before entering a match. These kinds of resources extend, through the existence of theorycrafting paratextual actors like these .gg websites, the volume of metagaming information a player is able to digest. Just knowing which items to purchase in the course of a match would be too simple. This information is layered on top of knowing when to purchase these items, when to leave your lane, how to be maximally efficient in gaining currency etc. Whether you look towards the choice of which champion to take into LoL, or the items that you inevitably have to collect throughout a match the practices that shape playtime will be qualitatively different.
Within the confines of a match-network there is a seemingly endless possibility of different ephemeral practice-networks that can emerge depending on the players who join, the champions they choose and the level of meta-gaming capital they take with them into the game.
With meta-gaming capital available outside of the gaming environment it would appear that LoL provides the same kinds of didactic resources that Carpentier (2003) describes in his
111 review of Video Nation that made it, in his estimation, a maximalist form of media participation. As Carpentier described it, the show started from a basis of educating the participating public into how to use the equipment and what expectations there were in the creation of short videos for the project. This could also be said about paratextual actors like champion.gg and naop.gg, as they provide players with information about what champions to play and information about how they are currently played, but there are essential components missing within LoL's media participation model. With the surveillance-based paratextual actors taking into account the actions of every person who is playing the game, the ability to actually shape what is happening with these practices is severely limited. The secret sauce of
Carpentier’s Video Nation case seemed to be the capacity afforded to participants to have input on the final product of their efforts, whereas in esports play this is not really the case.
Although the accumulation of meta-gaming capital could provide a rich avenue for players to hone their analytic skills and provide platform for self-expression through play, the paratextual environment puts pressure on the networked gaming environment making particular practices of play available and therefore popular or at the very least common enough to learn how to contend with. A player’s participation in the accumulation of meta-gaming capital is simplified to memorization and study of these paratextual resources. I used a combination of post-it notes with hand scribbled directions to cope with the load of information. A player can choose not to accumulate this kind of meta-gaming capital before entering the game or decide to pick it up as they play along, but this becomes a frustrating and fruitless pursuit for most.
112 These examples represent two of the most straightforward practices in LoL gaming and they generate practice-networks that reduce participation providing challenging features for the virtual environment and advertising value for paratextual actors like the .gg websites.
Simultaneously these websites present the positive case for the use of mass surveillance, by using access to server and user data to generate insights into game choices. Which champion a player selects could be in reaction to the knowledge that an opposing player has selected a champion who has a limited range of good counter champions. Optimistically this has created a longevity to the kind of gameplay available in esports titles like LoL and shifted revenue streams to in-game purchases and to Internet-based advertising industries and website producers in the paratextual sphere.
The practice of selecting a champion or the items that you collect throughout a match are both elements firmly entrenched in the meta-gaming capital of LoL play. In both cases the information that informs the practice of character or item selection is based solely on what is already available in the virtual environment. Knowing this information does not require that anyone has ever played the game. As it has been covered in the field of game studies there are always emergent behaviours that develop within virtual environments. Within the realm of esports play these emergent behaviours often coalesce into the identifiable esports practices that can be observed in the course of a match. It is these emergent actions that become the routinized, repetitive practices that provide the basis for observing para-gaming capital or knowledge of the way people play the game.
113 Paragaming capital and integrative practice
Paragaming capital is generally acquired from interacting with paratextual resources largely produced through the professional sphere of LoL gaming and are bound up in the nexus of integrative practices that are vital for the virtual environment of LoL. Without knowledge of these practices a match would be rife with mistakes and misfires that would ultimately provide a poor challenge for more skilled players and a generally unattractive competitive environment for esports enthusiasts. As it was covered in chapter four, for every player who wishes to compete in the ranked divisions of LoL gaming there is a period of time where they must play unranked matches. It is in these unranked matches that a wide variety of skill and competency levels are displayed in the game, which creates a less predictable environment for more informed players, which is commonly referred to as ELO hell (personal communication Roman,
Dec 3). It is in this early stage of LoL gaming where the uninformed actions of just one member of a team can drag the whole group into a losing match. These practices are necessary then for players to succeed within a given match and are also necessary for Riot Games in order to provide a highly competitive environment.
Beyond all of the metagaming knowledge that a player requires to choose their champion they also have to have the paragaming capital to know what their champion is good for, usually determined by a combination of their unique abilities and attributes. You do not just have to know where you want to be positioned in a match you must understand what your champion specifically excels at in the phases of a typical LoL match. This paragaming knowledge can be as specific as how and when to use a specific champion’s abilities or more
114 general like the practice of placing wards around the map. These practices are primarily developed and broadcasted through the professional sphere of LoL gaming.
By tracking what is available within the game's virtual environment and connecting that with what people in a specific region are doing in the game paratextual actors provide a foundation for the development of instrumentalized practices within LoL. The instrumentalization of these practices takes place on two levels. The first, is in the optimization of the individual practices themselves. For example, when the best time to do your "first back", or return to the spawn area to access the shop. At the second level, these practices are instrumentalized in specific in-game contexts3. Through these two levels of instrumentalization these practices are perfected and then reified in the game’s environment through their repeated use.
What you can see is what you can get
One example of a more general practice would be the use of wards in a match. A ward is a small item that can be deployed anywhere on the map for a variable amount of time, depending on the wards your character has access to. Once deployed these items provide a small pocket of vision that can let a player and their team see when their opponents travel past these items, like a security camera on the playing field. The distinction between warding as an action that a player can take within the game and warding as a practice within the game comes down to application of paragaming capital to the action. The practice of warding is generally governed by the timing in the match, as well as the positioning of the wards themselves. The
3 In LoL there are generally understood to be three phases once a match has commenced, the laneing phase, middle game and late game. 115 locations to place these wards is the aspect of this practice that has been most instrumentalized. If they are not placed in the correct locations the information they provide would be strategically useless but placed in the correct locations and you can reveal the movements of the opponent’s jungler and potentially prevent an attack on your lane.
Knowing which wards exist in the game, how long they stay on the map and how far they will allow the player to see around them are all elements of a players meta-gaming capital.
Where to place those wards to provide the most strategic benefit to your team is an example of para-gaming capital. The position, timing and frequency of using wards within a match are all elements that shape the way these items are used in the game. The practice of warding then is identifiable to both team members and opponents through these aspects of warding. Placing wards in the wrong place or at the wrong time or forgetting to place wards at all serve as signals to other players in the match that you may not be familiar with or not good at this in- match practice. This example demonstrates how the knowledge of what is possible within the gaming system can be layered together with the knowledge of what other people do within the game as players are moved from utilizing their meta to their para-gaming capital.
Knowing your role
The most complex displays of para-gaming capital come in the third phase of the match.
After roughly ten minutes of play the members of each team have usually progressed enough in their match-specific character progression to start to advance closer to the opponents’ spawn area and end the match. The towers that usually protect each lane are eliminated in one or more of the lanes by this phase in a match. A player needs to understand more than just what your own champion is capable of doing, but also how those abilities fit within the composition
116 of your current team and how they should be used against your opponents’ team. In this phase players start to gather in groups to “push” (advance and eliminate objectives as a coordinated group) various objectives within the game. This phase presents both the richest opportunities for advancement toward in-match goals and the risk of being completely wiped out.
During a match in LoL, a player never truly dies. When they are eliminated in a match by losing all of their available hit-points they are subjected to an iteratively increasing cool down timer. This counter must reach zero before they can re-enter the map. The more you die the longer the timer will become and the longer you will have to wait to re-join the match. More than a slight inconvenience, this mechanic creates a seesaw like impact on the rest of a match.
Each time one champion eliminates another; the survivor receives a sizable chunk of experience for the in-match progression system and a period of time to operate within that area of the map unimpeded by the presence of the vanquished champion. So, not only does the defeated player have to wait an increasing amount of time to re-join the match, every time they are defeated their opponent gets stronger.
Coordinating this phase of the match players often requires the text chat interface built into the game, or if a player is on a team they play with regularly, usually some third-party voice chatting platform. This is one of the ways that team members can address aberrant actions in game. The text chat provides a forum for sharing gaming knowledge or, as is more often the case given that the frenetic pace of the game does not provide much opportunity for verbose exchanges of text, affirmations and admonitions from fellow players. It is through these channels that team members can address another player’s paragaming capital. Even though two of the five members are typically in a lane by themselves, the players in the other lanes are
117 still observing them. In an environment where everyone can easily keep track of the other members of their team, through a minimap, text-based chat system or through voice chat it is very easy for members of your own team to identify the execution of in-game practices.
Practices, informed by a player’s paragaming capital, provide a device of interessement for players to attend to their role as esports spectators. Only one of my participants had indicated that they had not watched the competitive sphere of LoL play4. Spectatorship is necessitated by the instructive nature of esports broadcasting, which will be examined more closely in chapter eight. As professionals compete at high levels and develop competitive practices, which can be learned through avid spectatorship, the game is adjusted, and new practices are required. Spectatorship of LoL gaming is rewarded with exposure to the best competitive practices available in LoL gaming. In a similar manner to what I have described with metagaming capital, this once again fosters practice-networks that render gamers both vessels of competitive practices and the audience commodity for high-level competitions.
It is these competitive practices that make the virtual environment of LoL perpetually challenging and satisfying for the player population. In terms of participation the pursuit of para-gaming capital not only renders gamers into spectators for the professional sphere, but it also turns them into elements of the virtual environment. By bringing these practices from their spectatorship into the networks of match play they become the most challenging competitive elements within the game. Again, I would argue, this fosters a minimalist form of participation where players are turned into vital game elements that keep the gaming
4 As I will address in chapter seven, I’m not sure to what extent I should acknowledge the input I received from this participant for reasons that will be addressed. 118 environment attractive for a large player population. As a player strives to deal with the challenges of the competitive environment of match play by turning to the professional practice of the professional sphere they are not just improving their own competitive standing but also improving the product of the virtual environment.
Performed gaming capital
If paragaming capital is having the knowledge of what to do in the game, then performed-capital is acquired or lost through others’ observations of a player doing or failing to execute the correct practice. Acquiring performed capital in-game can prevent an opponent from being overly aggressive in the first phase of a match and alter how your teammates interact with you through the rest of the match. The acquisition of performed gaming capital is inherently the recognition of a players' perceived reserve of meta and para-gaming capital and their ability to execute specific actions based on it. Conversely missteps in game can lead to a deficit of performed-capital, which can lead to an opponent capitalizing on a lack of performed capital.
In a replay interview with Mikecal, he was able to identify one of these lapses in performed-capital. Early in the match he noticed that an opponent had placed a pink ward near a turret. As he explained, this is usually done to prevent the opponent from performing a turret dive, where the player would approach and attempt to take down the turret. When I probed about what should be done, he was able to recite the procedural knowledge that would be required to successfully complete the in-game practice that he had identified. The ward was not necessary in his estimation, because his team was not ready to perform a turret dive. Even though the ward was placed in the correct location the timing rendered it ineffective and a sign
119 that the opponent may not know what they were doing. Knowing what to do and when is crucial component to LoL play and is used as the essential measuring stick for all players in a match in their observation of other characters.
What to do, how to do it and when it should be done are all aspects of in-game practices that are linked to a players' store of para and meta-gaming capital. For a LoL gamer, it is expected that they learn not just what their chosen champion should be doing throughout a match, but also to learn what their likely opponents will do as well. Although performed-capital is intrinsically fleeting and contextual, as it requires the observation and recognition of other players in game, it does have more enduring rewards than just the affirmation or admonition of teammates in the game’s chat window. At the conclusion of each match players are given the option to continue working with their randomly assigned teammates. The amount of performed-capital a player can accumulate during a match can be the difference between being invited into a team or being ignored.
The demands placed on the player by their standing in the game’s competitive ranking system turn players in to the commodified eyeballs of websites like NAOP.gg and Champion.gg.
As a player encounters champions in-game that are unfamiliar to them, they are driven to these paratextual resources and spectatorship of the professional sphere. This would certainly support the concerns of Grimes and Feenberg (2009) about the commodification that seems intrinsic to the rationalization of activities like video gaming. Before esports, or even websites, gamers were able to turn to magazine publications and fee-based hotlines for information about their favourite games (Conslavo, 2007). What makes the context of esports different is the pressure that consistent high-level professional competition places on the practices in-
120 game. This pressure forces the developers to continually adjust the virtual environment, through patches and updates, making the accumulation of gaming capital an endless pursuit.
As professional players innovate the sphere of in game practices and the developers keep periodically adjusting the competitive environment making older knowledge obsolete.
Rationalized play practices
The idea that rationalized play practices would push out other approaches to play would certainly seem to be what is happening within these environments (Grimes and Feenberg,
2009). Either through ridicule, recrimination or even through helpful people who will point you in the direction of useful paratextual resources, tolerance of alternative approaches is not abundant. The concern here is less that rationalized practices within the game are being taken up and more the way in which failure to adhere to these practices is communicated. If one wanted to pick up a trombone and attempt to sit in with the local marching band, without having learned the piece of music being performed, they would also be met with a similar rejection of their freewheeling approach to the music. The difference is that an aspiring trombonist would be asked to leave, whereas in the setting of a match the ten players in a match are stuck with one another until the match has been completed, which will be a minimum of twenty minutes.
The acquisition and policing of performed gaming capital provides the pressure that facilitates the formation of the practice-networks described in the previous two sections. Being able to identify lapses in an opponent’s meta or para-gaming capital provides competitive advantage for players. Conversely lapses in a players meta or para-gaming capital leads to subsequent deficits in performed-capital, which lead to the wrath of team members who
121 identify these lapses. Whether the pressure comes from striving for competitive advantage or from fear of wrath this pressure can drive players to spend tremendous amount of time within the game to improve their performance.
Although performed-capital is trapped within the confines of the ephemeral match- networks, I have shown how the networks formed through the acquisition of meta and para- gaming capital are brought to bear within the game space. These networks position gamers as audience commodity, spectator and challenging feature within the game’s environment. For players who are able to successfully navigate these practice-networks there are the rewards of self-satisfaction. For the developer, and principle recipient of the fruits of all of this effort, the reward is a dynamic and engaging esports product.
The benefits of the participation associated with the acquisition of performed-gaming capital are without a doubt skewed in favour of the profit-driven actors involved in these assemblages. Paratextual producers who can fund their activities through revenue generated from advertising make it clear that the game engenders media practice-networks that excel at converting the interests of gamers into the revenue streams. This would seem to be inherently exploitative and should be a cause for concern but is it really that different from amateur sports or even music in the everyday context. In both of these other pursuits there are a plethora of actors who generate revenue from the interest of aspiring athletes or musicians. Unlike the spheres of music or sport though LoL gamers are not able to indulge in their interests without interacting with these profit-driven actors.
The cumulative impact of these first three forms of gaming capital directly impact what kind of inscribed-capital one is able to acquire in the game. If it is accepted that the ultimate
122 goal of competition is to win, then having a team that has already performed well in a previous match is an asset. Performed-capital plays the role of providing a metric within an esports gaming environment, providing a means to judge other players on their individual performances throughout a match. The ability to do the right thing at the right time, determines whether you have what it takes to continue on with other competitive players. The final element of gaming capital provides the outwardly visible rewards for these efforts.
Inscribed capital in networked environments
Inscribed captial is not unique to LoL gaming or even esports. Throughout the history of video gaming and through the field of game studies there has been much attention paid to the inscribed-capital of gamers. Inscribed gaming capital works like a curriculum vita for gaming. It is made up of a collection of outwardly visible emblems of a player’s past achievements within
LoL. From the early gaming’s high-score boards to the networked achievement systems of contemporary gaming platforms, there has always been a tendency to inscribe the successful actions of gamers. Within the environment of LoL this inscription manifests itself through champion skins, mastery and the player’s League rank. Each of these forms of inscribed-gaming capital can be acquired through playing the game and each has its own weight in the judgments of other players
Aesthetic displays as inscribed capital
Skins and characters, which are not in the current selection of free-to-play characters, are forms of inscribed-capital that can be purchased with earned in-game currency or real- world money. In an app store like feature, accessible from the lobby screen of the game, players can purchase various aesthetic and functional items for their LoL gaming. The next form
123 of inscribed-capital is the mastery level of a chosen champion. For each match you play with a particular champion you are provided with experience for a champion-specific progression mechanic. This mechanic provides a visible indicator that can be seen during the pregame matchmaking process. The final type of inscribed-capital in LoL is a players’ league rank. Once a player has completed the pre-ranked progression, they are then assigned a rank which determines who they will be playing with and against in their ranked matches.
Champion skins are the least impactful of the three inscriptions as they can be acquired either by playing the game an acquiring Riot points or by purchasing Riot points with real currency. Alternate skins represent a players’ willingness to invest a significant amount of time or at least invest real currency into the game. The champion mastery is accumulated through the repeated use of a particular champion and provides its own marginal enhancements to a champion’s basic attributes. There is a visual indicator of a champion’s level noticeable at the character selection screen, which lets teammates and opponents know that a player has spent a significant amount of time playing that particular champion.
Unlike skins and champions, the mastery level cannot be purchased and therefore represents a player’s familiarity with a particular champion. When you see the markers that indicate a player has mastered a particular champion you can assume that they have at least spent a significant amount of time playing the character. This can reassure teammates before a match or make you a target if you are not displaying these markers. Both of these aesthetic markers of inscribed capital are emblematic of a player’s investment in the game, either through real currency or the application of their own time.
124 The impact of player ranking
The third, and the most consequential, kind of inscribed-capital that I will explore has a particular impact on a players’ competitive standing. Originally starting with the ELO ranking system, designed for two player games like Chess, in the game’s third competitive season they introduced the League ranking system. With seven hierarchically arranged tiers from unranked at the bottom to challenger at the top5, as seen in figure 6, this system is the most impactful marker of inscribed capital. Some of the best players in the club were in the high Diamond divisions, one tier below master. When I completed my unranked play I was placed in silver 3.
The way the system is designed the more a player’s skills advance the more difficult their opponents will be. The reward for a player’s efforts is the endless challenge of increasingly difficult competition.
Figure 6. Diagram of the tiers in the League ranking system. Retrieved from http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/League_system
5 The current ranks in LoL from lowest to highest are unranked, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, master and challenger. Players progress through each tier's five divisions before advancing to the next tier until they reach master. 125 In a game with a very limited range of play environments and roles for gamers to engage with, the trappings of inscribed-capital provide a reason to keep logging in. There is a general concern among game scholars about the shifting revenue streams of an industry that is quickly moving from the concept of games as a product to the notion that games can be sold as a service. The principle difference in these approaches is that in the former the revenue stream ends at purchase, whereas in the latter the revenue could be continually collected from a dedicated player base through the sale of virtual items and services in the game. These concerns apply to the purchasable items within LoL, both champions and their skins. I invested in the games twice throughout my data collection, first to ensure that I would have access to the champion that I had spent the most time in in my first month of play and the second to expand my pallet of choices to other similar champions in an attempt to increase my chances to win matches.
What rank a player considers acceptable was one of the primary concerns I had when pulling this project together. The endless treadmill of attempting to improve your player rank, and therefore the competition that a player would face, provides a potentially stronger pull back into the virtual environment as players attempt to keep up with peers. When I asked my participants whether they felt that they could become professional LoL players, the answer was a resounding and nearly universal no6, with one caveat, which will be addressed in chapter eight. The ranking system in LoL provided both a reason to continually return to the game and
6 The one exception was a player who identified streaming as the way in which they would consider professionalizing their play. A streamer is someone who uses a video streaming service, like YouTube, to broadcast their personal play. If one can attract a wide enough subscriber base they can monetize their videos through specific platforms. 126 also a clear view of the stunning gap in what is required to maintain a rank high enough to compete professionally.
League rank, as a form of inscribed gaming capital, provides the recognition within the virtual environment of a players’ investment in the game. It seemed that the cosmetic, champion mastery and league rank forms of inscribed-gaming capital are all designed to be visible and recognized by other players. Whether these elements of inscribed-gaming capital have an impact on the practices that emerge in a given match is highly contextual. After purchasing a character that was highly favoured among the paratextual actors that inform practice in the game I can attest to players engaging with me more cautiously. The pursuit of these elements of inscribed-gaming capital provide goals for a player to work towards, as well as markers of their past achievements.
Inscribed gaming capital also provided a source for practical authority. Those players who have accumulated the skins, champions and League rank sufficient to grab the attention of their fellow competitors can reap the rewards, either within a match itself or in the match- making process. The same kind of deference one would pay to an expert practitioner in a field like music can be directed towards players who have accumulated the right kinds of inscribed- capital. The efficacy of their practices is assumed, until proven otherwise. As I made my way through the unranked sphere, I would often look for these markers and follow the directions given by the players who had them.
Inscribed-gaming capital only provides an advantage when it is backed up with sufficient performed capital. It is one thing to have a high League rank, but if one cannot perform the high-level competitive practices that are expected that advantage would quickly fade away.
127 Even though inscribed-gaming capital provides a reward, it does not provide a respite from the constant cycle of maintenance and improvement that the other forms of gaming capital require. Although skins and champions and mastery are elements that persist as long as an account is maintained, the League rank of a player requires continually attention. This problem is compounded when players find regular team members to play with, as the rank of each member will place pressure on the others to perform and therefore progress together.
After all of the time a LoL gamer puts into the virtual environment, inscribed gaming capital provides the digital reward that acknowledges their efforts. Attaining and maintaining a self-satisfying league rank, with the champions and skins to show for it, provides a player the opportunity to display their in-game achievements. Much like the airing of films for the Video
Nation program outlined in Carpentier’s (2003) work, these forms of inscribed capital are the end product of LoL practice-networks. At this point, zoomed in this closely to the practice of
LoL gaming, it is difficult to argue that these products really serve much more than the vanity of particular players.
Unlike the kinds of media production skills and input into the end product that was afforded the participants in Carpentier’s analysis of Video Nation, LoL gamers are left to fend for themselves in the profit-driven paratextual industries in which esports practices are immersed. As Carpentier et al. Suggested, minimalist participation frameworks reduce the notion of participation to merely, “access and interaction” (Carpentier, Dahlgren and Pasquali,
2013, p. 3). It is through these four variations of gaming capital that players form the practice- networks that expand play of a simple competitive match into a vast network of esports practice.
128 Conclusion
In this chapter I have zoomed in on the act of playing LoL in an attempt to trace the connections between the media practices that take place before a given match to the practices of players in the game. The information that players accumulate regarding the mechanics of the game for their metagaming capital and the information about the practices of other players for their paragaming capital are clearly the types of knowledge that are not just an asset, but also a necessity for players entering the LoL. The continuously changing nature of esports gaming environments like LoL make the acquisition of these kinds of gaming capital an unending pursuit.
Along with these kinds of capital, which directly inform a given players’ practice, are also the stores of performed and inscribed-capital that have the potential to inform the action of the other players in the match. Being able to perform the correct actions at the correct time can give teammates confidence and opponents pause. It gives a player an opportunity to act on their stores of meta and para-gaming capital. Lastly the visible signs of inscribed-capital can shape the ways in which others in the match interact. All of these kinds of gamer capital serve to order the practices of LoL gaming and shape the kind of participation offered through this activity.
The purpose of zooming in to the actions of individual players within a game like LoL is to establish firmly that even when a player is entering an esports environment ostensibly alone the practices that they perform are informed by a vast network of paratextual actors and influence that precede and persist outside of the gaming environment. As long as there are players willing to dedicate themselves to perfecting the practices of LoL gaming there will be a
129 connection between their practices and the practices of everyday gamers. Even if a player never engages in a club, or a tournament, or any kind of organized form of esports play, they are presented an opportunity to become connected to a wider, dynamic world of esports practices.
The accumulation of meta-gaming capital is a minimalist form of media participation that provides the kind of training that has the potential to provide a basis for a more maximalist engagement. As they are experienced in-game these practices fall short. The benefits of these practices fall primarily to the developer, Riot Games, whose virtual environment is made vibrant and competitive through players’ engagement with these practices. The forms of instrumentalized practices that make their way into LoL through a players’ accumulation of paragaming capital both bolsters Riot Games’ virtual product and at the same time creates the impetus for players to tune into the wider world of professionalized esports. Watching competitions, following professional leagues, attending to paratextual actors all become activities essential for advancement within LoL.
Performed-capital places players in the cross hairs of a rationalization process that makes them comfortable with conditions that many would find troubling. At the same time it is a mechanism that pushes out other approaches to play. The instrumentalized practices required for the accumulation of performed gaming capital come at the cost of more playful and exploratory approaches to playing the game. With pressure created from the ridicule of team members, this form of instrumentalized play has created a significant feedback network between the professional and everyday spheres of LoL gaming. With the adornments available
130 through the various forms of inscribed-capital, players are encouraged to consistently engage with the virtual environment to collect more and improve their standing.
Even before entering any organized form of esports play, LoL gamers are immersed in practice networks, which shape the wider activity flows of their engagement with the game an order the practices that are executed within. As a form of media participation, while zoomed in this closely on the networks that form esports practice, it would seem to be inherently minimalist in its formation. Extracting maximum effort from the player base to extract the maximal benefit for Riot Games of the attractive and challenging virtual environment for continuous play. The LoL club members I interacted with did not just play on their own immersed solely in these practice networks. They were, of course, a registered University of
Calgary club who occasionally met in person and online as which will by the focus of the next chapter.
131 Chapter 6 Visions controlled by others
This chapter will zoom out from the integrative practices that are executed within the virtual environment of LoL to map the practice-networks that defined the LoL club as an organization. Even the most competent LoL gamer cannot succeed within the virtual environment alone. Emulating the practices of professionalized esports, like organized competitions or streaming video broadcasts, requires a level of organization that takes gamers beyond the practices comprising their individual play. Finding other LoL gamers to play with and against was what brought most of the participants I interviewed to the club. I will focus on two of the actants that sought to shape the organization of the group. As I covered, one of the original concerns in the study of play was that it was being transformed from an open, exploratory and freely ignored bundle of activities to something else. The analysis will be centered on the obligatory passage point that each of these actants presented to the club.
Specifically, I will zero in on the dispersed practices that seemed to be the cost of their association with these other networks.
Playing esports games competently and organizing groups of esports gamers draw on very different sets of practices. The club was required to maintain compliance with the requirements of actants who provided support and resources. They also attempted to balance the skill level of members during club events to provide an inclusive environment that still interested their highly competitive players. These are just two examples of the kinds of organizational challenges that the club had to contend with that this chapter will explore. In their pursuit of esports gaming members of the LoL club were moved from the integrative practices of LoL play to the dispersed practices of organizing. This move provided an
132 opportunity for some members to cultivate skills that could be useful outside of the context of video gaming.
As Taylor (2012) indicated what separates esports gaming from other orientations is the explicit emphasis on the competition between players, which inevitably forces gamers to look beyond themselves to find others to compete with and against. The LoL club was one of places that dedicated players came together to produce meaningful play contexts that provided valuable opportunities for them to familiarize themselves with a range of dispersed organizational practices necessary for the execution of club activities. How were their practice- networks shaped by the dispersed practices of organizing? What other networks sought to shape the way the club was organized? How did the influence of these other networks shape the kind of participation available through the club? In the intermediary steps between everyday play and professional gaming are the many organizational networks that shape the way gamers interact with one another and the games they play.
In the following sections I will examine the connection between obligatory passage points and the practices that they required. Then the chapter will turn to the LoL club’s association with the University of Calgary Students’ Union (SU). Like most networks the SU had a specific definition for student clubs and I will evaluate the benefits, challenges and influence that the they had over the practices of the club. We will then turn to the club’s interaction with
Riot Game’s community outreach program. Much like the SU, Riot Games had its own definition for what LoL activities should be for university clubs. In both cases I will pay particular attention to the kinds of participation that each of these actants foster through their interactions with the club.
133 Obligatory practices
Dispersed practices, reviewed in chapter three, are taken up within many different social contexts. Drawing again on the hockey analogy introduced in the previous chapter, while puck handling would be considered an integrative practice for the game of hockey; skating would be an example of a dispersed practice because it can be found in other social contexts that take place on ice, like figure skating, speed skating or The Wonderful World of Disney on
Ice. All of these other social contexts involve the dispersed practice of skating, while only hockey requires the integrative practice of puck handling. In the social context of LoL club gaming players are immersed in networks of dispersed organizational practices that come as obligatory concessions for their connections to the University of Calgary Students’ Union and developer Riot Games.
As Callon (1986, p. 196) first described it, an obligatory passage point is the part of an actor network that imposes a particular definition of the problematization that has motivated actors into seeking a network. In his initial study of scallop fishing in Brueic Bay, the obligatory passage point was a research project being proposed by marine biologists seeking to facilitate the growth of scallops in a protected space in the bay. After attending a conference, the researchers became convinced that they could rejuvenate the scallop fishery by creating a nursery for the scallops to reproduce. The marine biologists enrolled the local fisher population and imposed their interpretation of how scallops reproduce on their local practices of fishing.
To allow for the scallop population to rebound the local fishers would have to avoid the nursery area until advised by the researchers. The fishers became a part of the research project network by accepting the researchers’ proposition that providing a place for scallops to
134 reproduce would solve the problem in their fishery. The acceptance of this definition of the problem of the Brueic Bay fishery was the obligatory passage point that local fishers had to traverse to become a part of the researchers’ network. The change in their usual fishing practices was the cost of traversing that obligatory passage. The restraint of local fishers, and its eventual lapse, was evidence of the necessity of the experimental scallop nursery for the continuation of this network. The researchers’ network shaped how scallop fishers conducted their fishing activities and when a group of fishers transgressed the imposed moratorium the experimental network depunctualized.
Liza Potts (2009) proposed that a Flikr photo-sharing group served as an obligatory passage point for users interested in obtaining or providing more information in the aftermath of the London tube bombings in 2007. The affordances of Flikr shaped what participants were able to do and imposed a definition onto the event that made the organization of visual data a necessary step to address the chaos caused by the event. Through the obligatory passage point of the Flikr group the event was defined as a visual puzzle that needed to be solved to provide valuable information for people who may find it.
Once actors within the Flikr group accepted this definition they were mobilized into the practices of sorting and tagging photos afforded by the platform. Their participation in the activities of the Flikr group served as evidence of the actors’ acceptance of this definition.
Obligatory passage points then are features of actor-networks that serve as catalysts, transforming actors as they accept the definitions being presented as they are enrolled and mobilized through networks. In each of these examples of obligatory passage points specific practices were the cost of inclusion in a particular network.
135 It is in this moment of translation that I would suggest specific practices can become obligatory. Being a SU sanctioned club or participating in Riot Games’ community outreach program are examples of the kinds of actants that sought to impose their own definitions of student organizing on the practices of the LoL club. As the club engaged with each of these actants the price for their enrolment in these networks could be described in terms of the practices that the club were required to take on. By focusing on these obligatory passage points I can begin to understand how club members’ practices were altered through these visions controlled by others.
I will argue that even though dispersed organizational practices were not sufficiently realized by the club to perform effectively by the standards of professional gaming they still provided a platform for more maximalist forms of participation than just playing the game alone. Organized competitive gaming offers opportunities for gamers to develop organizational competencies through leveraging their interest in gaming to immerse them in the practices of organizing. Team-based esports gaming requires players to develop the organizational competencies required to coordinate groups of players for their teams, as well as for larger competitive events. These dispersed practices could be beneficial beyond their gaming, which is very similar to the traditional kind of bait-and-switch that is proposed by scholars who study games in educational contexts.
As James Paul Gee (2003) established early on in his studies, games are intrinsically learning machines. It has been long accepted that it is possible to use the attractive nature of these platforms for the purpose of providing students with experiential learning possibilities
(Squire, 2004). The primary difference is that these opportunities are primarily located within
136 the organizational activities that encompass esports gaming. Figuring out how to form a club, working through Riot’s community prizing programs, hosting live events and maintaining an online presence that binds club members are all organizational accomplishments worthy of closer inspection.
From fandom to student clubs
Throughout the two school terms that I closely observed the LoL club they were able to hold two live events on campus, a few competitive events online as well as a weekly competitive series in the second term. While this may seem like a small number of activities, they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the organizational practices required for their execution. Despite not being able take part in the uLoL campus series the accomplishments of the club provided opportunities for participants to increase their organizational competence and learn some of the dispersed practices of organizing. The need created by the game for player-versus-player interaction forces dedicated players like the members of the LoL club to seek out groups to support their interest.
Just as sport and music have been taken up within our educational system and organized to provide the broadest possible range of opportunities for the students who take part, so too can esports gaming be organized. As esports gaming grows it can be shaped into a beneficial platform for players by focusing on the opportunities for the creation or enhancement of resources that address the organizational practices necessary for club development. To that end, in the following sections I will zoom in on the obligatory passage points that LoL club encountered and question where they may have been deficient, as well as addressing how they may be bettered in the future.
137 SU and the practices of student organization
The U of C Students' Union supports dozens of student organizations on campus, which provide valuable extra-curricular opportunities for those involved. For any group of students who want to organize their meetings on campus the SU serves as an obligatory passage point that must be traversed. They attract clubs into their network by providing devices of interessement like financial resources, access to space in the clubs’ office or through booking classrooms on campus. These incentives are offered to all clubs equally and due to the vast range of interests and goals of student clubs they are by their very nature generic. In exchange for these benefits the SU has expectations for how clubs organize themselves and what they do on campus. How did the SU shape the practices of groups like the LoL club? How did their definition of student clubs shape the organizational practices of the LoL Club?
With over three hundred clubs currently registered on their Clubshub website it is not difficult to understand the kind of pressure that comes with being an obligatory passage point for student organizations on campus. To foster the growth of student-organized clubs on campus, and to properly support each of those clubs, is a challenge driven primarily by the diversity of student interests. What works for a student-run manga club may be insufficient for a club that wishes to engage in intercollegiate competition. In this section I will examine the tension that arose between the LoL club’s needs and the resources provided by the SU.
In exchange for the benefits that come with being a registered club, the SU required the club to produce a constitution, form an executive, register with their ClubsHub website and maintain a membership of at least twenty students (whose names and student identification numbers had to be provided to the SU). With a template provided for club constitutions
138 provided and executive members counting against the total number of members in a club, these requirements were not very onerous. They did provide an opportunity for interested members to get involved beyond their gaming. By engaging with the SU and meeting their expectations, club members were able to use their fandom to move beyond the minimalist participatory framework presented within the game, which I described in the previous chapter.
The first tension that arose from this association came from the size of the LoL club. As
Steven (personal communication, Dec 8, 2015) noted in our interview the club membership ranged from forty people, to well over a hundred students, with a smaller group of very active members. Teams in LoL require five players, which meant that holding competitive events required a large membership. The tension created by the inability for the SU to scale their financial support for different sized clubs on campus required the club to engage with dispersed practices of budgeting. The $175 that the SU made available for clubs may have worked for clubs of less than twenty people, but for a group the size of the LoL club it was insufficient.
To put it into perspective, one club tournament with only eight teams (a gathering of
40-50 people) would mean the club has less than five dollars per person to hold the event. In the year before my observation began the club was able to stretch this budget over four live events on campus (personal communication, Dec 3, 2015). Of course, an actor like the SU would be put into an impossible position if they were required to address each club based on their stated needs. Their role as an obligatory passage point for the wide variety of student clubs necessitates that they treat each club the same way despite the differing needs of each group. This necessity leaves organizations like the LoL club with the task of dealing with the gap
139 between what they needed and what they had access to when it came to their financial management.
In order to address this issue for the fall competitive events the organizers’ opted for registration fees, which I also paid in exchange for being able to observe the events. These fees were levied to cover the cost of lunch at their weekend event. Although this strategy seems to be born of common sense it is not without its risks. Firstly, the drain that multiple in-person competitive events would pose for club members is not insignificant, especially when you consider these gamers could just continue to play the game on their own for free at home.
Facilitating organized esports gaming barriers, like the financial burden of in-person events, present challenges that must be overcome.
Moreover, the issue of charging fees for gaming events comes with increased scrutiny of those being asked to pay. This problem occurred to me early in the recruitment phase of the project. While interviewing the organizer of a local LAN gaming organization the topic of financial management seemed to be a source of agitation. When asking about the fees and costs associated with running his LAN organization, he was firm in his refusal to address my questions. It was clear to me through our conversation that scrutiny of his financial management had caused him some issues in previous years with his organization. For the LoL club this financial scrutiny is enhanced by their relationship with the SU.
Gaming in groups adds a layer of complexity to the activity that requires competencies other than those developed for gaming in order to ensure its success. Managing a small budget for the production of competitive events required club members to be familiar with the dispersed practices of budgeting. In the case of the LoL club these practices may seem
140 insignificant, but when you consider the scale at which these skills would have to be utilized to manage the budget of one of the clubs that did make it into the uLoL Campus Series, like the
UBC eSports Association, there is potential for significant skill development. Aside from budgeting competencies, the management of human resources in a skill-stratified community
(Taylor, 2012, p. 113) like the LoL club also proved challenging for the group.
Managing Gamer Capital
In interviews with club executive members Roman and Steven (personal communication
Dec 3 and 8), the challenge of managing the varying competitive skill levels of club members presented another pressure that emerged from their status as a SU club. Being a student club required that they provide a space for U of C students. As a competitive organization they were required to find and field the very best players they could find to represent the university in the newly rebranded uLoL campus series. Balancing the requirements of the SU and the aspirations of club members was another organizational challenge that the club contended with during my observation. Dealing with the organizational challenge of being an organization for all U of C students and also one that competes at a varsity level influenced the organizational practices of the club.
Highly-skilled LoL players frequently play on teams with the same people, but the club included many members who joined to find other people for that very purpose. Balancing these two kinds of member, those who already have teams to compete with and those who did not, was a challenge. Groups of players who regularly play together in the same positions, and work on their in-game coordination as a group, are normally referred to as premade teams.
Placing a team of five players who play together regularly against a team of people who have
141 just recently met would prove unsatisfactory for both teams. The club dealt with this tension by bifurcating their efforts to target both their highly competitive members, as well as their more casual players.
Determining who would be able to represent the club in the uLoL campus series was achieved through a weekend-long qualifying competition. An event like this highlighted the tension that existed when the club tried to balance the competitive needs of the club with the social needs of members. Despite indications like rank, provided by inscribe gaming capital, it is sometimes difficult to assess where a person falls within the ranks of a skill-stratified community of play. As Roman (personal communication Dec 3, 2015) indicated, the executive decided to allow anyone who was interested to enter the qualifying competition, even when the executive knew those people would not be able to make the team.
This was an important concession in order to fulfill their responsibilities as a SU club, but not one devoid of risk. The risk of a decision like this is the potential for discouraging highly- skilled players. Competing with or against players with an unsatisfactory skill level could leave a player with a poor impression of the skill level of the club’s membership. The club could not be a vehicle for advancing a team’s competitive aspirations if the membership was not sufficiently skilled. Despite their efforts to assemble the very best team they could for the Campus Series the University of Calgary was not represented in the organization’s inaugural year (Whitemore,
Jan 4, 2016).
Skill stratification also posed some organizational problems for their internal competitive events. As Roman (personal communication Dec 3, 2015) had indicated in their opening tournament they circumvented the problem by accepting competitors individually and
142 then distributing them among the eight teams in the tournament in a manner that balanced out the varying skill levels of club members. The strategy meant that every team was on an even playing field of having not played together. Although this provided an inclusive solution for one competitive event it does not provide a permanent solution to the issue.
The club was forced to alter their competitive practices to accommodate the SU’s definition of what constituted a student club. What became obligatory in their transition into being a student club were sets of dispersed organizational practices that helped the club conform to the SU’s definition of what constitutes a student clubs. In both of the examples I have explored these practices are primarily for the benefit of the SU. Providing the same amount of funding to all clubs and requiring them to be accessible for University of Calgary students make the job of the SU easier. Despite creating organizational challenges for the LoL club, the requirements of the obligatory passage point of the SU provided opportunities for club members to engage with the dispersed practices of budgeting and team management.
The influence of the SU
As an obligatory passage point for student organizations, by design, the SU has very little influence over the activities of clubs they oversee. Simplifying their approach to managing student-run organizations affords students the opportunity to form groups with wide ranging interesting, from video gaming to academically focused clubs. When every student group can expect the same resources and expectations it makes the job of managing these clubs much easier for the SU. For the LoL club the scalability of resources and the tension created from the bifurcated goals of being a club for everyone and a club for the highly competitive are just two of the complications that had to be overcome as a part of their association with the SU.
143 If the club was awash in funding and was able to focus solely on its competitive aspirations similar challenges would have still emerged. Instead of figuring out how to stretch a paltry budget they would have had to learn how to make a substantial budget sustainable.
Instead of mixing the best players with the uninitiated they could be deciding who would play with which team in representing the club. What is significant about the obligatory passage point of the SU is that, despite its shortcomings, it only required practices that help facilitate the organizational practices of the LoL club.
There is some value for club members in overcoming these complications. Addressing these issues was what made it possible for some club members to work on the dispersed practices of budgeting and competitive skill management. If LoL gaming could provide value for players, beyond just improving game-related skills, supportive organizational infrastructure like this ought to facilitate rather than constrain the activities of gaming clubs. It may seem unfair to criticize an actant like the SU on these grounds, as it is unreasonable to suggest that they should take special care with this student group. The alternative is to allow other actants to fill in these gaps and address the complications that their current level of support produces.
Actants like game developers are often more than willing to provide resources in exchange for various forms of compliance from groups like the LoL club, which will be examined in the following sections.
Riot and the practices of compliance
Riot Games, through their community support programs, influenced all the events that the club held throughout the fall term. For both of the on-campus events the club had
144 procured prizes7. Through the development of a varsity sphere for LoL competition, an online guide for student event organization, a contact email and small financial incentives Riot Games was able to extract a considerable amount of compliance from the LoL club. Unlike the SU, as an obligatory passage point Riot Games explicitly sought to shape the way club members organized their play. The concessions that Riot Games required from the club, much like the instrumentalized in-game practices explored in the previous chapter, benefited the presentation of their product.
In this section I will explore the ways in which these programs were used as a means to shape the practices of the LoL club. We will first address how the introduction of prizes impacted the kind of play observed at the club’s fall tournament. Even with paltry cash prizes the incentives seemed to infuse a sense of seriousness into their play. We will then turn to the concessions required of the club in order to procure these prizes. Much like the obligatory passage point of the SU network, Riot’s community development program also required the uptake of particular practices as the price for passage.
Small incentive, serious competition
For the solo queue tournament, which I observed in October, the club secured a small sum of money from Riot for the winning team. The sum was paltry compared to what a professional player would receive. The team that placed first received twenty-five dollars per player, with decreasing sums for the second and third place teams. Even this small sum of money was enough to recruit forty gamers for an eight-team tournament. It was also
7 Just as people gather to watch sporting events in groups the same phenomena has emerged within the spectatorship of esports. In the earliest stages of this project a local Facebook group of Starcraft fans who gathered in local bars to watch professional tournaments was on my shortlist of groups to approach. 145 significant enough to incentivize the club’s executive to engage with Riot Games in order to secure the money. Small prizes seemed to elevate the level of competition to something I would suggest is more serious than regular LoL play.
The most obvious sign of this seriousness was the atmosphere that emanated from the live event while matches were in session. When I arrived in the dimly lit lecture, theatre matches were already in progress. The frenzied murmur of team members communicating with one another, primarily through headsets despite sitting in small team-based groups, was tense with the occasional outburst as the competition heated up. Team communication was relatively curt, from what I could hear, mostly oscillating back and forth between status updates and strategic directions. Compared to gamers I had observed at other LAN events it seemed to me that the play at this tournament was more intense.
Typically, the notion of serious play is reserved for the deployment of games for educational purposes (Jenson and de Castells, 2003) or the use of game mechanics outside of the context of gaming, known more commonly as gamification (Walz & Deterding, 2015). In both of these strains of research the notion of seriousness comes from context in which gaming or gaming mechanics are deployed. In the educational setting games are used as a form of extrinsic motivation for students’ learning about subjects like history (Apperley and Beavis
2013, Squire, DeVane & Durga, 2008). Gamification makes gaming serious by positioning gaming mechanics as a means to a particular end like changing employee behaviours in the workplace (Robson et al, 2015) or incentivizing vulnerable parents to engage with online resources (Love et al, 2016). I would contend that when prize money is added to the mix of competitive LoL play it also becomes a form of serious play.
146 The first trace of the seriousness in the solo queue tournament was that the prizes club organizers procured came with specific stipulations set out by Riot Games. The first of these stipulations was that club members had to have registered Riot Games accounts in good standing8. The second stipulation was that the tournament required an officiator, someone who would sit out from play in order to make sure that everyone followed the rules of the competition set by Riot. For the fall solo queue tournament, the person to sit out was Steven.
He took the opportunity to provide some commentary on the live stream for the event.
Through the works of game studies scholars like Consalvo (2007) and Carter and Gibbs
(2013a), the notion of what constitutes fair play is negotiable within gaming communities.
Consalvo (2005) provides a continuum of cheaters from those purists who feel that anything that influences players’ in-game behaviours would be cheating; to those who believe that cheating is only something that can be done to other people. Carter and Gibbs (2012a) provided a description of spectator driven esports competition that was unbound by rules of fair play where players were, “...relatively unrestricted by Terms of Conduct and the social norm of fair play, honesty and sportsmanship” (p. 1). Given the flexibility that comes with the socially constructed concept of cheating within video gaming culture it is not surprising that
Riot Games would want to impose their own sense of fair play through their community support programs.
These event prizes are readily available to any gamer who wants to read through and adhere to the thirty-four-page tournament rules document made available by Riot. The manual
8 To police behaviours Riot bans players temporarily or permanently based on the severity of their transgressions. The most famous of these cases would be Tyler1 a top North American player who was banned for bad behaviour (Friedman, 2018). 147 provides guidance for the organizational roles players can take at a tournament, as well as the terms of play, contingencies for events like equipment failure and other rules that are required beyond those programmed into the game. The guide also promotes Riot’s Summoner’s Code, which provides rules for basic etiquette both in and out of the game. Through these incentives
Riot Games was able to shape how the club conducted their activities. They also apply similar incentive structures, with a much larger prize pools including funding for coaching and analyst positions, for teams that can successfully place within the top three teams in a season of their uLoL Campus Series.
By imposing their own rules on the play of the LoL club in exchange for the limited prize pool Riot infused the clubs’ tournament with a sense of seriousness, while at the same time constricting the freedom of the club to structure the competition how they saw fit. This resonates with the notion of participating through media where participation is circumscribed to the interactions people have through various platforms; with the power to shape those interactions and benefits from them firmly in the hands of the producers (Carpentier, Dahgren
& Pasquali, 2013). In the case of the club’s solo-queue tournament because of their decision to acquire prizes from Riot, they forfeited their chance to have power over the rules that governed their competition.
The struggle to formalize gaming practices by providing rules over and above the coding of the game is a common feature among developers who have moved into the esports space.
These attempts to constrain the play of gamers through these additional rules for competition could be seen as an attempt to institutionalize the practices of LoL gaming. Through the use of relatively small incentives Riot Games was able to impose their own vision of how LoL should be
148 played competitively. Between these incentives and their involvement in the professional sphere of LoL play it would seem that Riot was attempting to institutionalize their own sanctioned approach their game.
Initiatives like these free groups like the LoL club from having to reinvent the wheel when it comes to organizing competitive events through LoL. It also relieves most members from having to justify or explain why certain rules are in place. On the other hand, it robs club members their opportunity to think through how they would do esports play and stifles the possibility for new competitive organizational practices to emerge. This concession shaped the play of the LoL club primarily for the benefit of Riot Games. By accepting this particular quid pro quo in organizing their solo-queue tournament the club organizers accepted Riot’s definition of what constitutes fair play within LoL, which in turn serves the ultimate goal of the developer to provide an enjoyable experience in their game. With this minimal investment Riot was not only able to determine who could play, but it also seemed to influence how the club members played.
Prizes of interessement
For their on-campus World Championship rewatch event the club offered a free character skin to the first twenty members that showed up and held a raffle for free Tshirts, as seen in figure 7. Although these small investments seem like the kind of promotional blast that comes from companies attempting to build a strong brand amongst consumers, these prizes were not given to the club without due scrutiny. The executive member responsible for making the arrangements with Riot Games for these prizes appeared to have made a mistake in
149 completing the application for the prizes dragged on into December with a protracted conversation about the situation playing out on club’s Facebook page.
Figure 7. Facebook post advertising raffle prizes for watch party on the LoL Clubs’ newsfeed. Retrieved from Facebook. Although these kinds of incentives for campus clubs can provide opportunistic organizational goals for a group like the LoL club they do little to actual provide sustainability, which seems to me to be a more valuable goal for both Riot Games and the clubs. These resources seem to take for granted the ephemeral nature of student organizations in the way they are designed. It seemed clear to me that longevity was not a concern for Riot Games as they require that each club register its executive each year even if they had already signed up in previous seasons. By shifting some of these resources to organizational infrastructure Riot
Games could provide groups like the LoL club with the kinds of longevity that could ensure benefit for both the gamers and the developer.
Networks in competition
As I have described them it would seem that Riot Games and the SU are obligatory passage points competing over who will get to influence the activities of the club for their own
150 benefit. Each actant provided similar devices of interessement, but each extracted differing levels of compliance in the practices of the club. As Steven indicated to me in our interview, the way that the SU has set up its clubs’ infrastructure is not ideal for his group. This may be why the group seemed less interested in fulfilling the requirements of the SU than they did the stipulations placed on them by Riot9. The reason for juxtaposing these two actants as though they were competing over the organization of the club is because they are. Both require certain concessions from the club for inclusion into their networks, but if those concessions come into conflict the members will have to choose which to fulfill.
I highlight these stories to emphasize the fact that if people are not willing to get involved with these organizational matters profit driven actors like Riot Games will. Although their stipulations are fairly mild, in this case, there is little chance to alter them. Moreover, it would be better if these two actants actually worked in concert rather than separately to provide a solid foundation for organizations like the LoL club to grow in ways that can be beneficial to its members, SUs and Riot Games at the same time. Given that Riot Games is the only actor in this network who makes money from the game, this responsibility should be theirs.
The organizational competency required for facilitating esports play at this level provided a way for club members to utilize and develop the dispersed practices of organizing.
Making sure that organized esports gaming emphasizes the development of its players, beyond just their gaming competencies, could provide a useful avenue for esports in the future. The
9 During the SU Clubs Week event a student posted a question on the club’s Facebook page that seemed to indicate that they didn’t have a presence at the event. 151 campus series raised the stakes for the LoL club as they had aspirations to take part in the inaugural run in 2016. The University of British Columbia’s esports association took home three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in prize money in the previous iteration of the competition.
That prize money included thirty thousand U.S. dollars per player in scholarships for their victory (Chiyeuk, May 6, 2015).
While the prize pool that the LoL club was able to obtain was paltry compared to bigger competitions, it was not insignificant for a typical Canadian university student. Moreover, the prize pool for the campus series included money for coaching and analyst positions within a club, which could have helped to provide some organizational longevity. Working through the application process to obtain the prizes and managing their compliance with Riot’s competitive regulations provide further opportunities for LoL club members to develop more dispersed organizational practices.
Conclusion
Through the effective utilization and support of dispersed organizational practices esports gaming could provide a valuable venue for gamers to develop organizational literacy that could be utilized in their lives outside of gaming. As I have shown throughout this chapter there are plenty of obligatory passage points for groups like the LoL club to traverse in the formation of their competitive networks. Each of these passage points has the potential to significantly shape the organizational practices of the club and consequently the kind of participatory potential that the club can facilitate.
The SU provided the most flexible, although least impactful, requirements on the activities of the LoL club. By positioning themselves as a passage point for all student
152 organizations the SU has had to adopt the most broadly applicable approaches to supporting student activities. This approach creates a maximalist framework for student participation by leaving almost everything about the inner working to the groups themselves. Conversely this approach provided little influence over how the group conducted their activities and seemed to diminish the importance of meeting their obligations to the SU.
Through their community support programs Riot Games was able to exert a surprising amount of influence over how the club conducted its competitive affairs. From the qualifying tournament held in order to develop a team for the Campus Series, to the stipulations added to the clubs’ solo-queue tournament, Riot was able to shape specifically how the club played their game. The degree of control they exercised over how the clubs’ tournament was organized, and how the play within it was conducted, provided the club with a circumscribed form of participation largely designed to further the goals of the developer rather than club members.
By zooming in on these two obligatory passage points experienced by the LoL club I am better able to examine how each one shaped the practice-networks of the club’s members.
The passage point stand as the gateway to the enrolment of the club into the networks of the
SU or Riot and these are just two of the many networks that seek to enroll groups like the LoL club. Each provides a window into the process of ordering that took place, as the club became a part of other networks and the ways in which organizational practices become salient through each. By isolating the concessions required through the process of translation I can begin to evaluate the kinds of participatory culture that they facilitate or constrain.
As the esports gaming scene continues grow, finding ways to present gamers with as many opportunities as are possible to shape the conditions of their own play. Come together in
153 groups like the club to reproduce their own versions of what they spectate in the professional sphere exposed members to valuable organizational practices that could provide them real skills transferable to other activities they take part in in the politics of everyday life. The LoL club provided a platform that leveraged the interests of LoL gamers to elicit the organizational practices I have reviewed. In the next chapter I will explore the activities of the LoL club in the winter term when they moved from face to face events to a weekly media production.
154 Chapter 7 The missing masses of the LoL club
A variety of nonhuman actors assisted with the organization and production of the clubs’ activities and were integral for their accomplishment. From the club’s use of university lecture halls, the assemblage of Open Broadcasting Software (OBS) with streaming platforms like YouTube, to Facebook and Google sheets to organize their events, the roles that these nonhuman actors played in shaping the practice-networks of the LoL club will be the focus of this chapter. There was complex relationship between the affordances of these actors and the practice-networks of LoL club gamers. Building from Parchoma's (2014) contested ontology of technical affordances, I will zoom in on how these actors worked to enable, restrict and regulate the practice-networks of the LoL club.
Now that I have examined how esports practice informs the in-game play of everyday gamers and can lead them to form groups to facilitate those practices, I will now turn to the actors that were instrumental in what the club accomplished. Although these actors enabled the club to reach a wider audience of students with their events, it is also important to note the ways that these actors restrict and regulate the club’s practices. There has long been an acknowledgement of the necessity of objects in the accomplishment of particular practices
(Schatzki, 1996, Pickering, 1993). In this chapter I will examine some of the most prominent nonhuman actors found within the practice-networks of the LoL club.
Clearly the agency of nonhuman actors has been one of the most controversial aspects of actor-network informed approaches to the social world. The idea that a university lecture hall could somehow exert agency over a group of LoL gamers is a bridge too far for some. A fully robust version of material agency is not required to recognize that nonhuman actors often
155 have a direct relationship to the exercise of human agency. In this relationship these nonhuman actors can assist us by extending our natural abilities or prevent us from doing certain things in a given context. The affordances of the smartphone can enable you to have conversations with people from your favourite neighbourhood café, but it restricts you from sharing your scone with the person with whom you are talking. Lastly, the phone regulates the quality of the photo you can share of your scone to make the person you are talking to sufficiently jealous.
By focusing on how these nonhuman actors shape the practice-networks of the LoL club
I can better assess the kind of participation that they afford. Do these actors provide a means for engaging in practices that would provide useful skills for nongaming contexts or do they just exploit the interest of LoL club members for their own ends? What risks did these actors expose the club members to through their use? There is little question that technologies like social media and streaming video extend the reach of individuals, but what does that reach expose those individuals to? As LoL club gamers attempted to participate in the practices of esports play the nonhuman actors that were enrolled in their networks worked to enable, restrict and regulate their practice.
In the following sections I will zoom in on how the affordances of some of the most prominently placed nonhuman actors in the practice-networks of the LoL club. Actors like university lecture theatres, streaming platforms, social media and shared documents all impacted the practices of the LoL club. Starting with the spaces of play I will examine what was enabled by the use of university classrooms and how it was balanced out by what it restricted.
The affordances of the streaming platforms utilized by the club for the broadcast and storage of
156 their events will be examined next. The product of that streaming will be explored more closely in the next chapter, but to start I will address what affordances were evident in their use. In the final section I will examine the use of Facebook and Google Sheet’s played in the organization of club events.
The spaces of play
The club seemed somewhat torn between the places for their LoL play. In the fall term they held two events in classrooms on campus. Online the club held a qualifying tournament to prepare for the uLoL campus series in the fall and in the second term a competitive series streamed live. The affordances of both in-person and online meeting spaces inevitably shaped the way members participated in the club’s activities. Throughout my observation the clubs’ events shifted from an emphasis on meeting in person to exclusively online meetings. In this section I will examine the affordances of these on campus and online meeting spaces and how each shaped the practices of LoL club.
According to Steven and Roman (personal communications Dec 8, and Dec 3, 2015) before my observation of the group began, in the previous school year, they were having four competitive events each term on campus. Over the time of my observation these events were largely replaced with smaller competitive engagements that took place entirely online. Near the end of my initial data collection, the club was meeting weekly in an ad hoc round robin style of play where wins and losses were tracked in order to build up to a play-off and eventually winner of the series. Eventually this effort petered out as the school term progressed into exam time.
157 As Steven (personal communication Dec 8, 2015) had indicated in our interview, being able to book spaces on a university campus is a nice perk, but video gaming takes place in virtual spaces. Meeting in a shared space on the University campus required the club to either provide the gaming infrastructure to facilitate the competition (forty LoL-ready computers, network infrastructure, streaming equipment), or for members to bring their own LoL-ready computing equipment to campus. For the first term the club relied on the latter, which pushed their esports gaming well within the practices of a LAN (Local Area Network) party.
As I mentioned in the second chapter, LAN parties have long been a part of gaming culture, but in recent years they seem to have faded from the practices of esports. As Nicholas
Taylor (2011) noted in his study of professional Halo gaming, professional play has developed specific assemblages of technologies to conduct the practices of esports gaming. This is also become the case for LoL gaming. Most professional competitions provide players with infrastructure that is a part of the organization’s broadcast set. This is an expected development within professionalized competition as it would be potentially unfair to allow players with better equipment to succeed on the basis of such a technical advantage.
LAN parties, as Simon (2007) has indicated, become spaces where gamers can play, not only with their video games, but also with the technical infrastructure of their gaming equipment. From visual modifications of cases to showing off cutting edge equipment, LAN parties, make the computer itself part of a gamers’ self-expression. In the lecture hall there were rows that were dotted with laptops, computer towers and monitors with more than thirty players engrossed in the first round of the day’s tournament (fieldnotes, Oct 17, 2015). The range of equipment from mechanical keyboards to specialized computer mice, gargantuan
158 computer towers with specialized lighting to laptop computers, the technical assemblages of the groups’ first live event were varied and not at all what you would see in a professional competitive event.
All of this computer equipment would surely be utilized in the group’s online events as well, but when you mix the practices of LAN and esports gaming you get a combination of practice-networks that used to be common10 (Witkowski, 2012). The development of the professional scene has grown the emphasis on leveling the playing field by placing all of the competitors on the same equipment, in very specifically designed set pieces, for tournaments has become the norm, as seen in figure 8. It is important to remember that LoL was released more than ten years after the most recent emergence of professionalized competitive gaming in the late 1990s. In the early days, it was common for esports events to incorporate the practices of LAN gaming, but now it looks rather strange and disorganized.
10 In preliminary observations of a Calgary LAN gaming organization it seemed that esports practices were utilized in an ad hoc manner throughout the weekend. Even these LAN events it was a challenge to hold competitions because the attendees were not there to play the same game necessarily. 159 Figure 8. LoL World Championship set piece. Seated at the computers is the professional team, with their coach pacing behind them and alternate team members with arms folded in the left of the frame. The room that the group had booked for their event was a newer building on campus, with an elevated seating area and long tables forming rows. For the most part the computers were set up in groups of five, corresponding to the teams, with Steven in the center of the room. He was not competing that day so he was focused on providing commentary on the livestream of the matches on Twitch throughout the day. With the elevation of the seating area, people sitting near the back of the room had a clear view of their potential competitors in the rows at the front of the room. I personally took advantage of this topography to literally peer over the shoulders of a team to observe how they communicated during the match.
To add to the sense of disorganization, Steven, the commentator/organizer, was projecting his screen onto the front of the room, using a projector they brought with them.
What was strange about this kind of set up is that the Steven’s stream was primarily for an audience that would be following the event through Twitch. As matches finished, players would congregate in this room variously watching Steven’s stream, attending to things on their own computers or chatting with friends. It seems counterintuitive, but getting club members in the same room at the same time actually created as many challenges for the club as it presented opportunities.
The production of live in-person events is not an easy task and it was clear in my time at the tournament that the club members who had taken on the responsibility for the event were fairly overburdened. Aside from casting the matches, Steven, was also an officiator in accordance with Riot Games’ stipulations, as I mentioned in the previous chapter. This role
160 entailed intensely focused conversations between matches and the predictable wrangling required when attempting to make a group of more than forty people perform a coordinated activity. While another executive member’s girlfriend handled most of the logistics including the initial registration of the participants, collection of registration fees and a mountain of pizzas for lunch.
Organizing these kinds of events can provide a platform for players to become well- versed in a whole range of dispersed organizational practices, but the group seemed happy to outsource those aspects of the event to nonplaying club members. Although holding live events is a cumbersome task it can provide opportunities for a level of participation that can allow members to develop organizational competencies that can provide value for them beyond their time as gamers. Whether it was the logistics of arranging for spaces, food, prizes or coordinating the matches themselves, members were presented with numerous opportunities to hone the dispersed practices of event organizing. All of these practices were facilitated by the club’s choice to meet on campus.
The affordances of streaming platforms
Looking more closely at the two main streaming platforms, YouTube and Twitch, used by the club, I will demonstrate on how these actors enable, restrict and regulate the practices of club members in their production of their content. The first thing to note about these two actors is that from a technical perspective they can be used to do many of the same things.
Both can be used for synchronous live streaming of content, both can be used to post content that will be accessible asynchronously, both have chat features that enable streamers to interact with their audiences in real time and both require users to create accounts for their
161 creations to be associated with. Despite their similarities their use in the practice-networks of the LoL Club were fairly discreet. Twitch was used exclusively for the live-streaming the club’s competitive events, including the WLL series. YouTube was used to both stream the content live and store it. With the exception of one video, they are all still accessible through YouTube.
These actors enabled club to broadcast and store matches in a way that was accessible to anyone with a connection to the Internet. Paratextual actors like NAOP.gg did archive matches and files that could be downloaded and watched, but to do this a person was required to open the files in the game’s software. Streaming platforms enabled the club to bypass this limiting factor extending their reach with this content. Despite this affordance of persistence and reach that YouTube provided, views of the WLL matches still sit in the teens for most videos.
Both platforms also use algorithms to both police and position the content on their sites. These algorithms determine whether content will be added to features like YouTube’s auto-play or show up on the front page of Twitch. They are also used to flag content that violates the terms of service of either website. With these algorithms completely beyond the control of creators, self-promotion becomes a set of practices required in order to be seen. It was clear from the lack of views on YouTube and lack of activity on Twitch that these practices of promotion were not a part of the club’s practice-networks. The failure of the club’s streaming efforts to attract even as many viewers as there were participants at their events illustrates the imbrication of practice-networks required for a successful result. These streaming platforms do not just enable actors in the practice-networks of the club, as I will address in the next section.
162 Streaming and ownership
Both YouTube and Twitch regulate, through a combination of software and terms of service, what content can be posted on their platforms and how those creations are promoted.
As mentioned earlier YouTube removed one of the club’s videos in the second term for a copyright violation, as seen in figure 9. This regulation forces creators to be aware of issues like copyright infringement or be subject to the laws that govern them. The creation of content on these platforms has been a source of conflict with IP owners, who can be very protective of their properties. As Jenkins (2006b) has covered in the past the production of this kind of hybrid creation can place creators in the crosshairs of a intellectual property owner’s legal team.
Figure 9. Removed LoL club content. Message displayed in the place where the LoL club’s Day 4 video should be. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDldWNu2Rw&index=8&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgN BK-h9OXjHu5pT&t=0s
The creator of the video shown in figure 9 was never in real legal jeopardy from this violation of copyright. YouTube has a number of services related to copyright enforcement that
163 automatically find and remove content in violation. If a user posts content that is identified by
YouTube’s copyright enforcement, they receive a notice from the company and if they continue to break the rules outlined in the terms of service their account can be revoked. The biggest penalty that the creator suffered from this removed video was the view count, seen in figure 9 under the title of the video. None of the club’s video content garnered much viewership, but this video is a particularly acute case, as I can attest to being one of the two viewers.
The cost of the affordances of these platforms is the legal exposure it creates for creators who are not familiar with copyright law. The use of captured gameplay footage has, for a long time, been a central feature within esports practice. It is not surprising that a group like the LoL club would include streaming prominently in their own practice-networks. The practices associated with the creation of streaming video content expose gamers to risks that they may or may not be aware of. In the next section I will demonstrate that even if they do not violate copyright there are other concerns that should be noted about the affordances of streaming platforms.
Streaming Toxicity
Even when creators produce content without running afoul of intellectual property owners there is the issue of toxic gaming behaviours within the community. As the creation of content for these streaming platforms grows, so too does their capacity to expose creators to increased scrutiny for their creations. Felix Kjellberg, one of the most successful YouTube creators, better known by his screen name Pewdiepie, has been a frequent subject of mainstream publications who have highlighted his missteps (Parker, 2015). Recently, another streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, a former professional video game competitor, was recently
164 embroiled in similar controversies after uttering a racial epithet while singing along to music while he was streaming (Gilbert, 2018). The affordances of streaming platforms remind us that increasing the reach of one’s voice come with expectations and responsibilities.
Tyler1 was a LoL gamer and Twitch streamer who was emblematic of the kinds of toxic behaviour that a person can encounter while playing LoL. He was not part of the LoL club or involved in their activities, but I did become aware of him through my survey of the paratextual environment surrounding LoL. Tyler1 was sanctioned by Riot Games for his in-game behaviour, which included things like being abusive to team members during and after matches, purposefully losing matches and throwing tantrums. Put into the context of broadcasting practices Tyler1 was providing the same kind of dramatic content that you would find on reality television shows, where outlandish and abusive behaviour is often the most compelling aspects of the product. Creators like Tyler1 illustrate the bifurcated problem for LoL practice-networks.
On the one hand, his toxic in game behaviour negatively impacts the people he is in a match with. On the other hand, this kind of toxic in-game behaviour is wildly entertaining when consumed as a viewer on a streaming website. Almost every esports game has these kinds of community members. Although I cannot say that I have ever played with or against Tyler1, I did encounter plenty of people who behaved like him in my own progression to ranked status. The concern I want to highlight with his example is the pressures that are inherent in practice- networks like this.
Tyler1 has surpassed over one million subscriptions on YouTube and 30,000 on Twitch
(Alexander, February 1, 2018). Through his toxic behaviour and provocations he has led dozens of players to be permanently banned from the game, which means those players have lost any
165 items they may have collected in the game as well as any of their inscribed capital. He does this by baiting them into responding to his behaviour until they do something that violates Riot’s terms of service. Tyler1 is a classic example of an Internet troll who entertains through provoking other people online with his own outrageous behaviour. The pressure to emulate him, based on his success, should be a concern.
The affordances of reach and persistence provided by streaming platforms were always most evident in their failure. As I mentioned above, none of the YouTube videos created by the group had even attracted as many views as there were people involved in the activity. It is difficult to frame this as anything less than a failure of these platforms to deliver on the affordance of reach. Despite this failure to connect the content created by the club with an audience the content still serves its purpose for the platform.
Facebook as an organizational actor
While balancing online and offline events and the requirements imposed on them by the SU and Riot the club’s Facebook group provided an excellent platform for the promotion and coordination of their events. What makes Facebook such a good platform for this kind of connection is that members are never cycled out of the group. At the time of writing this, there were over four hundred and fifty members still included in the LoL club Facebook group, myself included. In a game that relies so heavily on coordinating small groups of people, Facebook provided an excellent directory of other students and former students with similar interests, in the same time zone, with similar schedules (mid-terms, exams, etc.). These factors made
Facebook a powerful actor that provided the connective material between all of the club’s activities and their membership.
166 As the fall term progressed, executive members created Facebook events for each of their on campus meetings and used the group’s timeline to coordinate and promote the club’s activities. Facebook’s affordances also raised the possibility of people participating in ways that threatened to destabilize the cohesion of the group. In the late spring and early Fall of 2016, a student from Mount Royal University and another from a rival University of Calgary club, used the large number of members in the LoL Club’s Facebook group to recruit for their own esports focused organizations. Although neither seem to have had a significant impact on the club's membership, at least as far as it can be observed on Facebook, the affordances of public groups enable this kind of encroachment.
With Facebook slowly bleeding into every aspect of our social lives it is not surprising that it served as a central hub for the club’s organizational practices. Facebook transformed the club from ephemeral and dispersed amongst the suburbs of Calgary, to an organization that was enduring and connected through the timeline of their group page. More than any of the previous nonhuman actors that I have described in this chapter, Facebook provided the most flexibility to allow group members to take part in shaping their club. Facebook provides for LoL club members what Michael Wesch (2009) once referred to as a “deep and loose” connection with the group.
In his explorations of the practices of vlogging on YouTube, Wesch (2009) posited that the kind of connection that existed between vloggers and their audiences was at once both
“deep and loose” (p. 27). The depth came from the intimate connection that audiences could make with vloggers, based on the kinds of deeply personal content that their videos contained.
Although I am not claiming that the club’s Facebook page was a hotspot for personal
167 confessions, I would suggest that the interactions contained on the clubs’ timeline reveal things about the character of the organization and the people who comprise it. The executive was able to successfully recruit for its live events and in the second term a regular member was able to recruit for their weekly series. The success of both competitive events is evidence of the power of these loose connections.
Concerning the looseness of these connections, Wesch suggests that this is because the engagement between vlogger and audience member is entirely in the hands of the audience member. At any time, the viewer can stop watching or engaging. I would argue that the club’s
Facebook page fostered a similar relationship with the membership. Although the large group membership would suggest that there might not be that much attrition from people leaving, it is entirely up to the individual members whether they want to engage with the club’s Facebook presence. It is possible that what Wesch had observed within the YouTube community could be more broadly applied to social media and could very well be its greatest strength; connection without obligation.
The flexibility the platform offers for the club for organizing their activities made it one of the most valuable nonhuman actors for the club outside of the game itself. This enabled the club to hold a mix of sanctioned and more casual gaming events, which provided the most opportunity for players of varying skill. Although Facebook did not contribute any financial resources to the club, they did provide a public platform, archive, directory and event organization tools. Facebook made the dispersed practices of stakeholder management and event coordination easily accessible for club members.
168 While the LoL club utilized the tools of Facebook to organize their events, they simultaneously became the product of Facebook. The social media platform provided a shared space to communicate club events and a directory of interested local LoL gamers. The club’s inclusion of the social media platform into their practice-networks club provided opportunities for a number of members to develop and hone their organizational. It is important to remember that Facebook’s interest lies in how long and how often their users engage with content through the site.
Facebook and enabling leadership
After the fall term's face-to-face events it seemed as though the LoL club was on the brink of collapse. This was something that I was anxious about. The first group I had identified as a potential site for observation had been forced to take a hiatus from organized gaming events during the fall term. The Weekly League of Legends (WLL) series that the club accomplished started with a poll in the club’s Facebook newsfeed. From that poll a small group of gamers in the club came together, using Facebook and Google Sheets, to produce over eleven hours of YouTube content. In this section I will explore the how the affordances of these two actors enabled a more relaxed hierarchy within the club’s organizational structure and regulated the play of the WLL series.
The affordances of these two platforms facilitated a regular member of the club, Seth73, to take charge of organizing their practice-networks for the term. The organization of the WLL series did not require executive committee that the club’s constitution outlined. Or the approval of Riot Games, as they did with the prize pool obtained for the fall events. Utilizing these actors Seth73 was able to recruit and coordinate enough people to accomplish their
169 competitive series. The emergence of the WLL illustrated how the affordances of these platforms empowered these individuals within the club to organize their own play.
As I was posting additional calls for interviewees on the club's Facebook page I encountered Seth73’s post, as seen in figure 10. His parameters were clear. Matches would be on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the series would be structured in a round robin format and
Seth73 would organize it. If members of the club’s network accepted Seth 73’s definition of what the club ought to be doing, he welcomed their enrolment into the WLL network.
Facebook provided an accessible way to mobilize their interest through this simple poll. In this way the Facebook poll became the WLL’s interposition between committing to a weekly series of matches, which could take between 1.5-6 hours a week, and reading the clubs’ timeline.
Facebook enabled the organization of an ad hoc network within the LoL club with its own unique definition of what constituted esports practice.
Figure 10. Facebook poll on the U of C Lol club’s page assessing interest in weekly competitive play. Retrieved from Facebook.
170 Seth73, as the spokesperson for the WLL, was able to successfully mobilize his fellow club members by utilizing the affordances of Facebook. The openness of the Facebook platform enabled him to circumvent the formal structure of the club’s executive, which was described in the previous chapter, and coordinate an event with as much LoL play as their fall on-campus event. Through his use of Google’s Sheets, cloud-based spreadsheet software, he was able to provide a common touchstone for interested members. Regulating their play through a shared schedule, links to match histories, links for YouTube videos and standings.
The majority of members who responded were interested, but unsure if they had the time, as the figure indicates. With 70% of respondents either unable or unsure about whether they could participate one could characterize the response to the poll as discouraging. Despite the tepid response, Seth73 was able to confirm that there was enough interest in his offer. It is in this example that the blackbox of Facebook organization was revealed in the limited uptake of the first call for WLL participants.
The response to his poll was also illustrative of the bifurcated nature of Facebook organizing. It is important to remember that the LoL club Facebook group had over four hundred members. So, forty responses would seem to suggest that either the majority of group members were not interested or not available. When discussing their play time both Steven and Roman had indicated how their gaming time would inevitably contract during the more intense periods during the school term, like mid-terms or exams (personal communication Dec
3, 8, 2018), which could account for some lack of engagement. Given that the poll was posted at the beginning of term it seemed more likely that the lack of engagement could be explained by the looseness of the connection most members had to the group.
171 On the one hand, the failure to translate more than 10% of the clubs’ membership from
Facebook group members to participants in the WLL reveals how the loose connections formed through social media were easily ignored. On the other hand, Seth73 was able to recreate the work of 3-5 people that were required to accomplish the face-to-face events of the fall term.
Since the WLL took place almost entirely online, there were logistics that he did not have to address. In terms of the esports practice specifically, he was able to attract as many teams for as many matches as the previous event. Even when social media seemed to have failed to convert people into participants the reach and persistence of the Facebook group was sufficient to find and convince enough people.
The WLL series consisted of four teams with a few members serving as alternates and a small team of commentators. The spreadsheet outlined how the matches would be conducted, with a short blurb at the bottom containing the general rules for the series. Each meeting would have two matches between 7-9pm and teams would be awarded a point for each match they won. The WLL network was able to produce six broadcasts from February 24 to March 16,
2016, which was just over eleven hours of video. Just as the Facebook group provided the club with a constant online presence the shared spreadsheet enabled the same for the information required to organize the series.
In the same way that Facebook was able to flatten the power relations between regular and executive members of the club, by facilitating Seth73’s outreach efforts, Google Sheets was able to take on some of the responsibility of organizing the series. By providing a repository of all of the information necessary to hold the matches, the spreadsheet could be the silent arbiter of what ought to be done on a given night. Google’s sharable spreadsheet was enrolled
172 into Seth73’s WLL network and mobilized as a spokesperson for the series. Like any good spokesperson it enforced the definition offered for the club’s play by Seth73. Making his vision for the series always available online for the other members to access and interact with and it provided him with the flexibility to be a participant, as well as an organizer of the series.
The Facebook poll enabled Seth73 to assess the level of engagement that he could expect from other club members with minimal effort. If members could not bring themselves to fill out the poll then one could assume that there would be little chance of getting them to participate in the WLL. By facilitating this kind of interaction with the wider LoL club, the affordances of the platform elevated Seth73 to an equal footing as the executive of the club who would normally undertake this kind of production. Facebook empowered Seth73 to take the reins and shape the activities of the club.
There was something lost though in the kind of play that Seth73 was able to organize.
Organizing through online platforms and playing the game through a network is much easier and certainly more convenient, but it comes at the cost of meeting face-to-face. I do not want to suggest that meeting face-to-face is better than socializing in virtual environments like video games. There are plenty of studies that depict the complex and often-beneficial ways gamers have come together within and because of the games they play. The concern I am attempting to draw out here is that this kind of connectivity can shield us from seeing whom they were connecting with, which will be explored in more detail after I examine the role of Google
Sheets.
In both cases the affordances of these actors provided openness to the organizational practice-networks for the club. This openness allowed members outside of the formal
173 organizational structure to take on roles within the club that would otherwise be directed through their constitutional structure. Even when organizational effort received a limited response the practice-networks of esports can subsist on the long tail of Facebook engagement.
The persistence and accessibility of Google sheets allowed for members of the smaller WLL group to take on various roles throughout the production of the series. These affordances shaped the organizational practices that were utilized in the practice-networks of the WLL. In the following section I will address how this openness also posed a risk.
Dynamic and Dylan Klebold
In my final round of interviews, I met a player who used the screenname Dynamic.
While attempting to open a replay file in our interview session he accidentally opened up his profile page. The group that he belonged to in the game used what I perceived to be a crude joke as their name. Upon noticing the name his hand came off the keyboard to cover the screen, as if he was attempting to prevent me from reading the group name. Once it was apparent that I had read it, he immediately dismissed the name as though it should not be taken seriously. Our scheduled time was coming to an end and we were experiencing technical difficulties with the replay file, so I shifted our conversation to secure another meeting to obtain a replay interview.
I rationalized in the moment that I was interested in his gaming practices, and tried to convince myself that how he and his group members chose to present themselves in game was not my core focus. I was immediately deeply uncomfortable with my decision. After our meeting I composed an email seeking advice from my adviser, comparing Dynamic’s group name to Hunter Thompson’s description of the Hell’s Angels use of swastikas in the early 1960s.
174 Thompson (1966) suggested that the biker club members’ use of crude or offensive symbols was, “a guaranteed gimmick to bug the squares” (p. 243). This is how I had interpreted
Dynamic’s group name. As a gamer myself, I was familiar with the kinds of anti-social and offensive behaviours that are often passed off as humour in many online gaming networks. This was the first that time I had encountered it in my observations of LoL.
When that second interview came I decided that engaging him over his group name would pull me off track. When Dynamic brought up the replay there on the loading screen amongst the players names on the screen was a player who used the name Dylan Klebold, as seen in figure 11. Klebold, was one of the attackers during the Columbine High School shooting massacre in 1999. In a troubling trend, within some of the toxic online networks (Massanari,
2015), these two killers are revered and in many cases gamers will use variations of their names in an attempt to troll onlookers. Although there are many scholars who deal with this part of online culture it has had a unique resonance in the field of game studies.
Figure 11. League of Legends in-game team member portrait for Dylan Klebold At this point I assumed that Dynamic was trolling me, which was a common practice at the time for people associated with a particular hashtag campaign11. At the time of the interview, a sustained months-long online mob had been engaging with media, academics and
11 In the weeks following I participated in a panel discussion at the local Calgary Expo where a professor and myself administered a survey, which I thought I could use to explore this hashtag campaign. Within twelve hours over 1286 people had completed our online survey in a loosely organized attempt to sabotage our small study. 175 event sponsors (Chess and Shaw, 2015, Mortensen, 2016). Whether he was attempting to troll me, or was genuinely participating in the study, his group name and aberrantly named team member illustrated the toxicity that exists in many online communities. My decision to press forward with Dynamic provides one of the best examples of the price of decentering subjects in practice-based approaches. By bracketing out his subjectivity I missed an opportunity to gain insight into the comingling of toxic online cultures and gaming.
When I started this project, I was aware that there were toxic elements to online gaming culture. One does not have to click around too much on sites like Reddit before you encounter something distasteful. I have to admit I was fairly naïve when I first met Dynamic.
Alt-right and white nationalist provocateurs had not yet broken through in mainstream culture.
Like many people at the time, I underestimated the extent to which these toxic online networks had grown. The affordance of openness provided through the Facebook platform can enable individuals to utilize the practice-networks of organization effectively for whatever ends.
Although it is important to acknowledge how the enabling affordance of openness can empower people like Seth73, it can also facilitate others like Dynamic to become part of these groups. It is important to note, at that time, Facebook had failed to appropriately regulate who was able to use their platform and what they could use it for. This is an issue that Facebook and other social media companies are still very publicly struggling with today. Dynamic did not attend any of the club’s in-person events in the fall. If he had, his sense of humour or lack of sensitivity may have put him at odds with other club members. Some may have been uncomfortable with his group name and whom he associated with in the game. The openness
176 of the club’s Facebook group allowed people like Dynamic to be a part of the network and control their interaction with the group.
Participation in dangerous time
My examination of a selection of the nonhuman actors enrolled in the LoL club’s practice-networks and their ability to enable, regulate and restrict the practices undertaken by the club should lay bare the fulcrum upon which esports practices currently rests. In this chapter I have zoomed in actors like university lecture theatres, streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube and Facebook to emphasize that they too have had a significant impact on the practice-networks of the LoL club. There are some benefits to the expansive practice-networks required for this kind of esports play. Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) have suggested that we are, “playing around with tools and practices in our recreational life, which may have more
‘serious’ uses…”(p. 2). The benefits of these practice-networks are balanced out by the risks posed by intellectual property laws or inadvertently connecting with toxic online networks that can be just as easily facilitated by these actors.
In this chapter I first wanted to focus on how the choice to utilize space on campus had a direct impact on the way in which the club conducted their activities. The onerous burden of
LAN gaming is not for everyone, but the practices of LAN gaming are unavoidable for a group like the LoL club if they want to meet in the same space. Although LAN style meetings were a common feature of esports gaming in the early ought’s, they create obstacles for contemporary esports gaming.
Even just the feat of fitting all forty computers and their players in the same room for the solo-queue tournament was a challenge. When you mix the practices of LAN gaming with
177 esports gaming you get a hybrid array of practices that require a range of organizational challenges to be overcome from providing lunch to accessing the technical infrastructure on campus. Again, the constraints of LAN gaming tend to constrict the kind of participation that is available for members, while at the same time providing valuable skills for club members to use in the future.
Although streaming technologies seem to come with the promise of enabling reach to a wider audience. This promise is constrained by a creator’s ability to promote their own content or devise how the platform’s algorithms deal with content placement. The actors that facilitate these practices of streaming also expose creators to the legal restrictions of copyright law.
There will be very little consequence for the club’s video that was removed from YouTube, but if Riot decided as a company that it was in their interest to prevent gamers from streaming their intellectual property they can intercede.
Streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube promise to enable creators like those in the LoL club to reach much wider audiences than would have been available otherwise, but what these platforms restrict and regulate about content creation pose a threat to club members. Violating copyright, or posting something that attracts the outrage of individuals, are common constraints on this kind of creativity. The risk of having a video flagged for copyright is relatively small, the video will not be available for public viewing and your YouTube account will be flagged, but it is bound up in the affordance of reach that the platform provides.
The openness and durability of Facebook connections made it possible for a regular club member to take on the practice-networks of organization that had been used to accomplish the club’s events in the fall term and replicate them on a similar scale. Even with such a low and
178 mixed response to his initial poll, Facebook enabled Seth73 to recreate a competitive event on par with what multiple members of the clubs’ executive accomplish in the previous term.
Through enrolling Facebook and Google into his WLL network Seth73 was able to successfully shape the play of the LoL club on his own terms.
My encounter with Dynamic illustrates the vulnerabilities enabled by the openness of
Facebook networks. He presented himself as a normal, polite, young man. If it was not for the happenstance that lead to me seeing the crude joke contained in his group name or the inclusion of account named after one of the Columbine shooters in his replay I would never suspected him of being connected the kind of toxic subcultures that are intermingled within gamers’ practice-networks. It is the openness afforded through platforms like Facebook that enable networks like the WLL to flourish, but they also enable these toxic networks to persist.
The toxicity of some online subcultures has not left gaming culture untouched. Before
Bernie bros or the Trump effect a toxic strain of online misogyny and conspiratorial mindset had taken hold in online gaming culture (Chess and Shaw, 2016, Massanari, 2015, Mortensen,
2016, Van Veen, 2015, Vossen, 2014). Provocateurs launched careers from stoking it and many problematic forms of online activism and harassment emerged12. When people are making content for platforms like Facebook connections to these more problematic communities online are just one of the many things that are enabled. During my observation of the club it was common for this strain discriminatory online networks to be intertwined with the normal paratextual networks of gaming.
12 Famed provocateur Milo Yannanopolis garnered a great deal of attention and a following online for his support of these more problematic elements of gamer culture online. He transitioned his antifeminist roadshow from gaming culture to Trump support in 2015 in the lead up to the election. 179 As Carpentier (2016) has indicated the notion of fully maximalist participation, “where each individual member of a decision making body has equal power to determine the outcome of decisions” (Pateman as quoted in Carpentier, 2016, 73), is itself an unattainable ideal.
Through platforms like Facebook and Google Sheets, Seth73 and other participants in the WLL were able to move their participation closer to that ideal. Through the affordances of social media platforms like players were able to move beyond just being vehicles for instrumentalized professional practices in-game and take a hand in shaping how they approach their competitive play.
180 Chapter 8 Calling the shots, esports and the practices of machinima production
The spectacle of esports gaming is not reserved for just the professional sphere. The club’s competitive series in the second term, despite its lack of viewership, was designed to be a spectacle. The group produced live-streamed and archived videos on YouTube, as I have mentioned previously. They tracked the standings of their series, set their own rules for the competition and even provided a small team of casters to provide commentary and analysis during their matches. What made the WLL interesting was that none of the production elements of the series were necessary for their play.
In this chapter I will draw on a closer examination of the practices of streaming content production as they were enrolled in the practice-networks of the club. In the production of the
WLL series in particular the members involved did not just simply stream a raw feed of their scheduled matches, as they had done for the fall event. Using freely available software they were able to provide voice over, real-time commentary, on-camera casting personalities and various other production elements (chyrons, music, etc.). None of these practices were necessary for the creation of an archive of members’ performance that function is already available in the paratextual environment. By taking on the practices of sports broadcasting the participants involved in the production of the WLL series pushed beyond accessing or interacting with the media to a form of expression more commonly referred to in the area of game studies as machinima.
Unlike the club's campus events in the fall, the WLL was conducted almost entirely online. With the sole exception of the casting team, who often appeared together in the same physical location, everyone else was presumably participating from wherever they regularly
181 play. Just like the qualifying tournament that was held in the fall, this series would rely on a host of nonhuman actors to be possible. From the LoL spectator capabilities to streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch the affordances of these nonhuman actors had a tremendous impact on the practice-networks enacted throughout the series. The most notable impact was to enroll the practices of machinima production into their practice-networks.
The production of video content through the use of video games has increased exponentially since the rise of platforms that cater to user generated content like YouTube and
Twitch appeared. Producing videos with video game engines, even within the context of esports, represents a form of machinima and should be analyzed as such. In this chapter I will first trace the historical development of machinima production and its growth within professional esports practice-networks. The chapter will then examine whether the democratizing claims made within the machinima literature still hold up when applied to esports machinima production. Finally I will examine how the practices-networks of sports broadcasting were enacted throughout the WLL series.
It is through these practices of content creation using the game that the practice- networks of the LoL club presented the most complex assemblages that reflected how professional esports is informing the practices of everyday gamers. While some club members transitioned from avid gamers to machinima producers, the dispersed practices of organization, media production and sports broadcasting were enrolled into their practice-networks. The difficult and superfluous nature of machinima production makes its inclusion in the practice- networks of the LoL club the strongest evidence for the influence of professional esports practice on everyday gaming. Would the WLL have been streamed live if professional esports
182 productions were not a key feature of LoL gaming? In this chapter I will zoom in on the production of the WLL series with a particular focus on the practices required to accomplish this production.
Machinima production and esports gaming
The production of esports content once again extends the practice-networks of LoL club members to move from being just consumers of content to becoming the architects of their own esports experience. Free of the constraints that came with their acquisition of prizes from
Riot Games in the fall term, their production of WLL was the closest that the group got to participation in media during my observation. Remember, participation through media provides an illusion of empowerment as the activities of audience members are molded primarily to the benefit of the producers, whereas participation in media empowers audiences to make meaningful choices and gain valuable knowledge through their participation.
As it was briefly mentioned in chapter two, machinima has been developing within gaming culture since about mid-nineties (Lowood, 2007) when ID software included the ability for players to record their gameplay in small easily shared files. It was in these very early days of machinima that demonstrations of elite gameplay like speedruns, competitions and eventually narrative productions took root. Since then the practices of making content using video game engines have exploded. New media companies like Rooster Teeth began from a group of friends making a series of narrative videos using the Bungie’s Halo 2 called Red vs.
Blue, that has run for thirteen seasons with roughly 352 episodes and a cast of remarkably
183 similar looking character avatars from the game13. Their company, founded in 2003, now employs 380 people as they manage a subscriber base of 45 million people on their YouTube network (About Rooster Teeth, n.d., Rooster Teeth, n.d.).
As the practices of machinima have developed over these last three decades the academic analyses of the participatory potential of these practices have largely focused on the production of narratives, like Red vs. Blue, through the use of gaming software. While this is a certainly a worthy area to focus, it will be my goal to test whether the claims about the participatory and empowering nature of machinima still hold when looking at the production of esports content. Esports machinima is to narrative machinima what Hockey Night in Canada would be to the movie Slapshot (1977). In each case the events of a hockey game or esports competition are not predetermined. Players compete and broadcast analysts do their best to explain and describe, in real-time, what is happening during the competition for an audience.
Resembling the early beginnings of machinima, with the emphasis on elite competitive game play and instructional paratextual content, esports media production has largely been overlooked for the more narratively focused creations in the literature (Hancock, 2011,
Harwood, 2011, Harwood and Garry, 2013, Jones 2011, Nitsche, 2011). When those who study esports do turn their attention towards the use of streaming video they rarely conceptualize it as a form of machinima (Scholz, 2012, Hamari & Sjöblom, 2017, Hamilton, Garretson and
Andruid, 2014). Despite its arguable lack of narrative14, the production of esports content for
13 In the Bungie’s Halo 2 the only feature that distinguished one player avatar from another was their colour. 14 I will address this misnomer later in the chapter in my analysis of the role of casting in esports media production. 184 the LoL club used many of the same practices as the production of narrative machinima content.
To treat the productions of esports gamers as something other than machinima obfuscates the complexity involved in live mixed-media performance. It makes it seem as though, for esports gamers, there is a simple switch that can be flipped that can magically turn gaming into a media production. As I explore the practice-networks that resulted in the WLL, the complexity of esports machinima production should become clearer. Including esports productions within our conceptual understanding of machinima production can be beneficial for both scholars who study machinima and those who study esports. Studies of the more narrative driven form of machinima tend to zero in on its participatory and democratizing potential.
Broadcasting professional esports has been one of the defining features of the subculture since its emergence in the late 1990s (Scholz, 2012). Just as narratively focused machinima requires elements such as plot, characters and setting, esports machinima requires player performances, dramatic tension and insightful analysis of the action as it happens. The practices of esports machinima creation require the inclusion of the practices of sports broadcasting, specifically commentary and analysis, referred to as casting within esports culture. What makes casting particularly interesting is that in the everyday gaming of club members it is at once intensely difficult and wholly unnecessary.
The difficulty of the activity occurred to me when I noticed the juxtaposition between the replay interviews I had been conducting with club members and the first few broadcasts of the WLL. Whereas my interview participants would often go silent or jump from one in-game
185 event to another the WLL casters were able to provide a stream of real time commentary and analysis akin to their professional counterparts in the esports sphere. Public speaking is often a difficult enough practice to execute, but doing it while spectating and analyzing a LoL match makes their feat impressive. Through the incorporation of the practice of sports broadcasting interested members were provided a platform to develop their own voice.
The WLL series was the most productive convergence of the practice-networks I have already explored in previous chapters with the addition of machinima production. It was in this freewheeling environment that gameplay became a gateway to creating machinima content and all of the benefits and perils that come with it. In producing their own series the members of the LoL club who took part moved closer to Carpentier’s notion of participating in media, as I will argue. More than any other aspect of the club’s activities, the inclusion of the practices of machinima production provided the clearest and most direct example of how professional esports is informing the practice-networks of everyday play.
A brief history of machinima practices
The idea of watching people compete against each other in video games has always been a part of their design. From the first player-versus-player game, Higinbotham’s Tennis for
Two in 1958, there has been an element of spectatorship bound up in the practice-networks of video gaming. The purported purpose for creating this game was to showcase for visitors of
Brookhaven National Laboratory the prowess of the computing equipment through their interaction with and spectatorship of this simple competitive game15 (Brookhaven national
15 What made Tennis for Two impressive at the time was the fact that the computer could calculate with some accuracy the trajectory of the ball in real time from one player’s end of the court to the other. 186 Laboratory, n.d.). This demonstration was recreated in the basements of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology with their game Spacewar!, which was created for the same purpose
(MIT, n.d.) just a few years later. From these early demonstrations of computing prowess, through the early eighties arcade boom, to the breathless anticipation of players waiting for their turn in front of their home gaming devices, the practices of spectatorship in video game practice-networks have been persistent.
For esports, the roots of machinima production started with those first shared Doom videos. In the late nineties Id software, the developers of Doom and its successor Quake, created some of the first player-versus-player competitions, with John Carmack famously giving away his red Ferrari sports car as the top prize in a gaming tournament in 1996 (Baker, 2016). It was at this point that machinima production developed into a variety of genres with some focused on the creation of a unique narrative not necessarily tied to the game’s intellectual property. Others, like QuakeDoneQuick (Nitsche, 2011, p. 15), focused almost entirely on the interplay between player and game.
The South Korean esports community, which Florence Chee and Dal Yong Jin (Chee,
2006, Jin and Chee, 2008) have both explored in their work, was where the archiving and sharing of competitive match videos was confirmed as an esports practice. It was from the environment that these authors describe in their work that the current professional esports scene got its start (Plott, 2018). While Starcraft:Broodwar grew in popularity, the machinima produced from the game jumped from the video archives of professional teams and
187 associations to the screens of millions of South Koreans who tuned into GOMTV and the rebranded GOMeXP streaming services starting in 2003.16
This move married the practices of capturing and sharing gameplay footage with the normal trappings of sports broadcasting. The scale and production quality of esports machinima has grown impressively over the past fifteen years with Riot Games’ Championship series filling venues like New York city’s Madison Square Gardens, for their top tier competitions. Taking on many of the practices of regular sports-broadcasting millions of fans around the world tune in to watch the best LoL players compete the same way hockey fans may tune into their favourite teams during the NHL playoffs.
What is important to note in this brief history esports machinima practices is that they have developed in parallel with their narratively focused counterparts. Impacted by the same advances in streaming and recording technologies and undergoing the same kind of explosion in the diffusion of the practice. Given the commonalities between these types of machinima and their shared historical development it begs the question why esports content production has not been championed in the same way as its narrative counterpart. In the next section I will review some of the claims made by machinima scholars before turning to the content produced for the WLL.
The promise of machinima
Harwood and Garry (2013) have focused their research on the empowerment of machinima creators through what they referred to as the “post-product consumption
16 GOMTV operated from 2003-2015 providing a home for the Global Star League, one of the more successful esports endeavors in recent decades. 188 environment” (p. 293). The concept is meant to differentiate the practices that are intended by the developers of a game, like completing a narrative or progression mechanic, from the activities of machinimators who use the game to create their own video content. For the authors, empowerment stems from the potential value that products of machinimators can generate from their own creations17. The authors’ position assumes that the value created through the production of machinima is necessarily a component of the practice that takes place after the games initial value to the player has been depleted.
This contention is somewhat problematic given that there are genres of gaming like
MMORPG, mobile and esports games that are designed specifically to not have a post-product consumption environment. In each case these kinds of games are designed to be played until the developers have decided to end the game. All three tend to have the characteristic of being continually updated by developers with the addition of new content to extend the lifespan of the product. In the case of League of Legends, creating a game that did not traditionally end was an explicit goal of the founders of Riot Games (Riot Games, n.d.). Despite the lack of post- product environment all three of these types of perpetual gaming environments are currently used for the creation of machinima.
When players, like those in the WLL, produce machinima from their matches are they not doing what the developers intended? Given that the play of LoL club gamers was emulating the machinima practices of professional esports broadcasting it would seem that making machinima does not automatically entail acting outside of what the developers of a game had
17 As unlikely as it may seem deriving an income or even building a production studio has been accomplished by Machinimators in the past like the creators at the company Rooster Teeth located in Austin, Texas. Beginning with a short narrative series made with the Halo series of games the company has branched out into a variety of different types of content production including both machinima and more traditional television fare, like talk shows or news. 189 intended. Is it still empowering for gamers to express themselves through machinima if they are just continuing to operate within the parameters envisioned by the game’s developer? Is the only way to conceptualize a gamer’s empowerment from machinima production through their ability to sell their products?
Despite having a Paypal link embedded in his Twitch streaming page, Seth73 the lead organizer for the WLL, was pretty clear about his view of this kind of empowerment. As he has posted on the page, “While I certainly don't expect or deserve donations, if you absolutely feel like you must give me money, who am I to say no?” (https://www.twitch.tv/seth73starcraft ).
To begin, it is telling that the notion of financial remuneration for the production of streaming content is so entangled with the practices of content creation, that despite his seeming resistance, Seth73 felt it necessary to create an account to receive donations.
Although financial remuneration for machinima content creation would be a clear sign of the empowerment of gamers through their gaming practices, it is a fairly limiting metric.
Akin to the ratio of esports gamers that will be able to become professional competitors the chances of obtaining this kind of financial support is rare. The difficulty for players like Seth73 is that his content is offered alongside professionally made esports machinima. Trapped behind the incomprehensible and unstable algorithms that govern the placement of content within streaming platforms the WLL was released amidst a flood of content that is uploaded daily to streaming platforms. If financial compensation for the production of the WLL was not a realistic possibility then what did the producers get out of the production.
Aside from this kind of direct connection between the creation of cultural products and direct remuneration, other machinima scholars have highlighted the democratizing potential of
190 the practice. By providing gamers with a medium to express themselves and develop their own voice machinima serves a higher purpose that personal profits. As Hancock (2011) suggests it is, “part of the long-term historical trend of technology-driven art forms becoming increasingly accessible”(p. 32). Although I am not as certain about how long-term this historical trend has been, it is certainly evident that since the Internet became a publically accessible resource the ability of users to engage in content creation speaks to this notion of accessibility. Tools like video games, broadcasting and capturing software and streaming platforms do enable content like the WLL to be more easily produced.
The inclusion of esports content production into the literature regarding machinima can help to flesh out more nuanced understandings of why people engage in the practice. Most esports games are created without post-product capacity. Also esports machinima content exists alongside well-produced offerings from professional competitions, which makes financial remuneration challenging. Conversely, the consideration of esports content, as a form of machinima, provides a way of conceptualizing the impact that these practices had on the gamers who engage in them. Producing content for platforms like YouTube or Twitch comes with a host of challenges and opportunities that gamers expose themselves to when they engage in machinima content creation.
The consideration of machinima
Only one of my interview participants, who went by the screen name Greed 6 Sins, indicated any kind of interest in becoming a professional gamer. When I followed up on his anomalous response he clarified that he did not think that he could compete professionally, but that he could stream his play as a way of professionalizing his gaming. Although Greed 6 Sins
191 had considered competition to be beyond his capabilities he thought that he might have had what it took to stream his LoL play if he was, “entertaining enough to stay on YouTube”
(personal communication, March 22, 2016). Whether his assessment of his own play was accurate his interest in creating his own content does stand as evidence that machinima creation seemed accessible enough for him to consider.
To benefit financially from these platforms a gamer like Greed 6 Sins would have to attract thousands of viewers and survive the various algorithms designed to demonetize content that is considered risqué by mainstream advertisers, as I have examined in the previous chapter. This is not to mention the temptation to engage in toxic in-game behaviours in an attempt to entertain. Greed’s confidence in his LoL gaming and ability to be ‘entertaining enough’ is a great example of the often-referenced democratizing potential of machinima production. Through his competence in LoL gaming practices he saw a space through which he could express himself online.
Greed, like the casters for the WLL, saw in his LoL gaming the potential for his own voice to be expressed through the creation of LoL based machinima. The affordances of games like
LoL and platforms like YouTube and Twitch enable people like Greed to see a place for themselves in public where they can make their mark. As danah boyd has suggested it is, “only through interacting in and helping create meaningful publics that people can understand society as a whole” (Jenkins, Ito, boyd, 2016, p. 51). Greed had a pretty firm grasp on where he stood in the practice-networks of LoL gaming and could see a role for himself through the creation of machinima.
192 Machinima is argued to be democratizing for this very potential to provide an avenue for expression and a public for consumption to people who would otherwise not have the ability to create or find an audience to consume those creations. This democratizing potential is fragile and ripe with all of the concerns of access and audience that critics of these claims level.
As Robert Jones (2011) has suggested even though machinima is no longer merely a, “discourse of the computing elite” it is “still reserved for those, with the means and knowledge to harness its power” (p. 63). It is entirely possible that had Greed attempted to create his own esports machinima that he would have discovered that he lacked this knowledge, but his interest could have driven him to acquire it.
WLL and the Practices of Sports Broadcasting
When zooming in on the practice-networks of the WLL, one of the practices that stands out, was their use of casters for the clubs’ competitive events. As I mentioned earlier, the practices of casting stand out because they are at once difficult and unnecessary. Thousands of matches of LoL are played daily without the real-time interpretation and analysis provided by a casting team, but for the LoL club casting was a reoccurring feature of their competitive events.
The addition of the practices of sports broadcasting translated the normal competitive interactions of LoL club gamers into compelling machinima content. As I will explore in the following sections casting requires a mix of practices that include public speaking, sports broadcasting and a healthy supply of gamer capital.
For the LoL club casting was accomplished through two primary assemblages of practice-networks, which both started with the connection between the competitors and spectators connected to the match, as I explored in chapter five. The second connected
193 network included the casting team and the actors they drew on for the production of the series.
In the case of the WLL, the casting team consisted of two members who occupied the same physical space on camera and another who attended sporadically via Skype, only contributing his disembodied voice. The second machinima network required two observers to join the initial match network. Observers can switch amongst the perspectives of each of the competitors or just choose a position on the map they would like to see. This puts the observers in the position of both commentators, as well as directors of the production. One of these observers would then stream out that match from their computer, in this case using an additional layer of software called Open Broadcaster Software, adding onscreen graphics and kaleidoscopic screen savers with electronic dance music in between the matches as seen in figure 12.
Figure 12. Onscreen graphics used to display match-up information between games.
194 From this software the match was then streamed on Twitch, and simultaneously streamed and archived on YouTube. The final step in the production process was for someone to post the links to the YouTube video and match history to the WLL shared spreadsheet, discussed in the previous chapter. While matches took place the team of casters would provide a description of what was happening on screen, as well as real-time analysis of the action they observed. Just before matches began, while the competitors were joining the match, they would preface the match with information about the competitive standings in the ongoing series highlighting what was at stake for the competitors.
My intention in describing the creation of WLL machinima in procedural terms is to emphasize the complexity of the practices involved. All of these practices were emulations of the practices of machinima production in the professional sphere. Even some of the team names chosen for the WLL series are themselves appropriations from the professional sphere.
The team name displayed on the right side of the frame in figure 12, SKT T2, is a reference to a successful LoL professional team sponsored by South Korean SK Telecom Co. Like this team name, the use of onscreen graphics, casters and other practices are imported from professional esports broadcasts. This is the primary reason that the WLL stands as the most conclusive evidence that professional esports is informing the practices of everyday gamers.
Moreover, the inclusion of these professional broadcasting practices, even in the rudimentary form they used during the WLL, provide an interesting opportunity for gamers to engage in a form of participation through media. Even though what they produced was a facsimile of what is produced in the professional sphere, their demonstrated ability to create such a production required a certain amount of media literacy. For Carpentier (2011) acquiring
195 this kind of literacy was one of the preconditions for participation in media. In order for actors to truly have a chance to participate they must be able to engage with a medium to create something.
The distinction between his Video Nation case and what took place in the WLL is that there was no effort on the part of the game’s developer or either of the streaming platforms utilized to facilitate the production of the series. Carpentier (2011) notes, in his concluding remarks on the Video Nation case, that enclaves of maximalist participation are often unstable, which places the producers of the WLL in a precarious position. Without the presence of an actor, like the BBC in the case of Video Nation, to facilitate their participation in the creation of esports machinima their efforts are prone to collapse. Unfortunately in the case of the WLL the series did succumb to this instability as the competitive series was never completed. In the next section I will focus on the practices utilized by the WLL casting team.
Looking the part
Just like their counterparts within the broadcasting of professional sports, casters involved in esports productions are supposed to serve a dual role. On the one hand, the casting teams’ description of the gameplay is meant to elucidate the connections between what is happening in the specific match with what is known about the game, the competitors and their competitive history. These connections serve the paradoxical roles of making the action on the screen accessible for the viewer while also highlighting the precision and difficulty of the practices on display.
For professional Lol play the role of casting is modeled directly on modern sports broadcasting. There are a few teams of analysts and commentators and during the downtime
196 between matches and other breaks in gameplay these analysts fill the time with their discussion of preceding matches or speculation about the upcoming match. Their productions move from the casting team that is describing what is happening in the match as it is happening to an additional two teams of analysts. All of the personalities are dressed professionally in full suits and have presumably had hair and makeup work commensurate with what you would find in professional sports broadcasts on television, as seen in figure 13.
Figure 13. Casting team from the LoL World Championship broadcast on Oct 29, 2016.
Using Open Broadcaster Software, which enabled the addition of onscreen graphics, music and a live camera feed for the casting team, the WLL production was closely modeled on the professional sphere. During their inaugural broadcast the first thing that was noticeable was that the onscreen casters also chose to dress in formal attire, as seen in figure 14.
197
Figure 14. Picture of casting team from inaugural WLL stream in formal dress. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-j9hP7W9LE&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK- h9OXjHu5pT
During the streaming of the fall competition Steven and Roman did not have to consider how their appearances would impact the audience’s impression of their casting and analysis.
The software used for the production of the WLL enabled the casting team to be seen, which in turn regulated how they would be perceived. Their outfits, although they fell short of wearing a full suit like their professional counterparts pictured above, demonstrated that they were taking their role as casters somewhat seriously for the series. With collared shirts, and even a jacket for the caster on the left side of the image, their appropriation of the dress code of the professional counterparts again illustrates the influence of the professional sphere.
The practice of wearing formal attire while presenting oneself in a broadcast context might seem to be a trivial element in the nexus of practices that comprise machinima production, but it is significant exactly because of its triviality. As the fall live event casting illustrates, the inclusion of the caster’s image is unnecessary for machinima production of this kind of context. That the casters for the WLL chose to include their own images and present themselves in this attire speaks to their understanding of the practices of broadcasting utilized
198 in the production of esports machinima. To dress up on camera was, for them, what made sense to do at the time.
Casting and the practices of public speaking
With both of the assemblages used in the LoL club’s machinima production, public speaking practices were central. The spectator functionality enabled the real-time production of casting performances to be possible. While the game is unfolding before them the casters selected what action to feature on screen in the stream while simultaneously providing a verbal description, commentary and analysis. This would be what you would expect while viewing a regular sporting event. To accomplish this practice casters combine their deep stores of gamer capital with the commonly accepted practices of public speaking found within sports and esports broadcasting.
Public speaking is one of the most necessary and feared practices for people in democratic society (Burgess, 2013). The ability to formulate analysis and communicate effectively is crucial for participation. Media practice-networks like esports gaming can provide a platform for gamers to develop these abilities and explore the practices of public speaking through their interest in the production of esports machinima. In their role as casters, these members were able to hone their ability to inform and entertain as they provided their insights on the competitive aspects of the WLL. The practices of casting for the club fell into two broad categories, public speaking practices and broadcasting practices.
The practices of public speaking were primarily utilized for entertainment value within the matches. As Hedrick (2000) suggested the role of a sports broadcaster, much like an esports caster, is not just to inform the audience of what is going on, but also to entertain
199 them. The WLL casters demonstrate their awareness of this idea through their use of tone and banter throughout the series. Using a variation of rate, pitch and tone the casters were able to heighten the action on screen through their description. As the action on the screen becomes more frenetic and the stakes become higher the casters typically spoke more quickly and in an excited tone, which aptly conveyed the importance of a given moment onscreen. It is with the injection of this performance in the videos produced by the LoL club where I would suggest that narrative has a role to play. After the first match, the casters would frequently begin their videos with a recap of the competitive stakes for the teams involved in the match that would follow.
Through their commentary the WLL casters provided the narrative elements of competitive production that I often see in professional sports. Keeping track of the match history between teams, the competitive stakes in a given match or the proclivities of individual competitors they made sure to emphasize these narrative aspects of the matches. These narrative elements in competitive productions again add to the entertainment value of the overall product. Just as in professional sports broadcasting, every competition is itself part of a longer story of a tournament, a series, a season or a franchise. These narrative elements provide the connective tissue between competitive encounters and add additional entertainment value to the production. It is the job of the caster to perform that story while providing information to the viewing audience.
One does not need to be able to express a single thought out loud to be able to engage with other players in LoL. The extraneous nature of the practices of public speaking for the practice-networks of LoL club gaming cannot be overstated. The value of the practices of public
200 speaking outside of the practice-networks of LoL gaming is undeniable. Moreover, they are inextricably linked to the most basic conception of participation. I only observed five club members partake in the practices of casting during my observation and only two of them ever appeared onscreen. Zooming in on this aspect of my observations must seem exaggerated, like one last desperate straw to grasp from the dataset, but it encapsulates concisely the potential I observed in the practice-networks of esports gaming. Esports gaming provides opportunities for their players to engage in practice-networks outside of the game. In the next section I will describe how the practices of sports casting allowed the casters to utilize their accumulated gaming capital in LoL.
Cashing in on gamer capital in the practices of casting
In order to be able to identify the practices that are performed in the course of a match the LoL club casters had to have enough gamer capital to effectively identify what was happening. Casting is also a significant practice for its utilization of gaming capital, covered in chapter five, outside of the gameplay context. With a comfortable level of meta and para gaming capital the casters can easily recognize the significant moments throughout a match and draw the viewers attention to them. Casting is a practice that allows gamers to use their gaming capital to empower themselves to take up roles in esports machinima production.
The practices of casting reframe the instrumentalized practices I examined in chapter five. Examined in isolation these practices do present the characteristics of a minimalist form of participation. The acquisition and execution of instrumentalized practices from the professional sphere of esports play primarily serves the role of improving the product of Riot
201 Games. Through the practice of casting these forms of capital become vehicles for expression allowing a caster to easily describe in complex practical short hand the action on the screen.
Their paragaming capital is on display throughout the matches as they describe, in colourful detail, what is happening within the match. Often zeroing in on moments when players have failed to execute a particular in-game practice. In the same way that interview participants would explain significant moments as I worked our way through their replay footage, the casters are tasked with explaining these moments as they happened without the benefit of being a part of the match or having the actions already in their memory to provide the viewer with a sense of what is at stake in particular clashes within the match.
Even from the beginning of the match, while competitors are drafting their champions, the casters would explain for the audience what each pick meant within the context of the match. During the day two match between Team Soul Trap and Machine gun Kelly the casters had a short conversation about the status of a particular champion in relation to their best position on the map.
Caster 1:… So, Lee Sin jungle Caster 2 : Yup Caster 1: I guess Graves is kind of a flex pick now, I guess he can go top and ADC. Caster 2: Yeah. You could even go jungle… Caster 1: …and go like a top Lee Sin? Caster 2: Yeah… (Seth73, 2016a)
Their identification that the champion Graves has been used in multiple roles in game is an excellent display of both meta and para-gaming capital. Remember, meta-gaming capital involved understanding the properties and mechanics of the game itself and para-gaming capital is recognition of common in-game practices. The design of Graves as a champion would
202 be intended for a specific role on a team. His use as a “flex pick” is a result of player practices.
As I explained in chapter five, the metagaming capital required for the execution of picks and bans in the drafting phase is itself is substantial. To be able to analyze the picks, present alternatives and speculate on what impact it will have on the upcoming match requires even more intense application of metagaming capital.
The last casting practice I will examine is improvisation. Often in live sports broadcasts unexpected delays or other events will interrupt the normal flow of the commentary. In these moments broadcasting professionals are expected to be able to improvise and fill time. The improvisation is supposed to fit seamlessly into the flow of commentary. To accomplish this usually requires professional broadcasters to spend hours on preparation for the event.
Choosing to record the WLL as a live production put the casting team in similar positions throughout their series.
A memorable example of this happened in their day five video (Seth73, 2016, March
17a), when the casters were required to stall while teams were being organized. To fill the time the casting team directed their exchanges towards the latest game update, one of the primary culprits for the delay. As they discussed each champion they analyzed what the changes would mean in terms of their use in play. In their descriptions of the changes they would often use examples from their own experiences within the game blending in their analysis with deep knowledge of meta-gaming capital (Seth73, 2016, March 17a).
A professional sports caster may refer to the acquisition of this kind of capital as part of their preparation for broadcasting. Before a professional sports broadcast an announcer may review past games of a particular team or player, study names and jersey numbers or complex
203 plays in order to be able to identify them during the broadcast. Unlike their professional counterparts though, the LoL club’s casters did their preparation almost entirely through the practice-networks of their play. To be fair there are not many situations where these skills will be directly transferable, but they represent the level of media literacy of the club’s casters.
Being able to reproduce the practices of professional broadcasting is usually something that a person would seek schooling to develop and these casters were did it because of their interest in playing LoL.
Learning literacy through making machinima
Media literacy is one of the common benefits attributed to participatory culture.
Livingstone (2004, p. 5) has suggested that media creation is one of the core elements of a skills-based approach to media literacy. Having been through the process of organizing, streaming and recording the WLL series those club members who were involved should have a better understanding of the kinds of practices that are bound up in the production YouTube machinima.
As I have attempted to demonstrate the study of machinima and the study of esports stand to gain something from their comingling. For esports researchers, the scholarship on machinima provides a set of claims to test and reshape in accordance with the kinds of machinima production I have presented from esports culture. For researchers who study machinima, the production of esports content provides an interesting, and starkly different, kind of performance than the kinds of narrative productions that attract so much attention.
Machinima production in esports provides a clearer example of how expression through the media of video games can be beneficial beyond just the financial gain of creators.
204 In the same way fans of television shows poached characters settings or plot lines to create their own fiction within fan communities (Jenkins, 2016), so too were LoL club gamers poaching the practices of esports broadcasting, sports broadcasting and machinima production to make their own content. To what extent they emulate the professional broadcasting practices of Riot Games’ Championship series was completely up to them. This opportunity to shape their own relationship to the practices of broadcasting can provide access to a range of practices that would provide avenues to enhance a participants’ media literacy.
Despite the toxic behaviours of some creators and the potential risks associated with the creation of machinima content, explored in the previous chapter, the inclusion of these practice-networks into everyday gaming enhances the level of participation available through these practices. By enabling and encouraging the creation of machinima platforms like Twitch and YouTube are providing a space for players to immerse themselves in the practice-networks of media production and a chance to develop their own voice. This would satisfy what
Carpentier (2011) refers to as the sociological approach to media participation, which positions participation as becoming part of, through a series of interactions, a media text.
The addition of the practices of sport casting provided a valuable platform that enabled a handful of the clubs’ members to develop their own public speaking skills. The extent to which our participation with popular media enables the opportunity for users to develop their own voice seems to be a necessary condition of maximalist participatory networks. The input that was provided for the creators of Carpentier’s (2010) Video Nation example to shape their own stories seemed to be one of the principle benefits. With esports casting the same kind of authorship exists with only the paratextual environment of LoL esports to provide guidance for
205 the practice. This illustrated the key deficit in this practice-network. Because machinima production seem to be integrative of organized LoL gaming practices it seems like the emergence of a spokesperson for the practice-networks of casting would be welcome.
Conclusion
My intent in this chapter was to highlight stories that drew attention to the practices bound up in the production of machinima that were enrolled in the practice-networks of the
LoL club from the live streamed fall event to the WLL series in the winter term. The similarities between the machinima practices of the LoL club ’s WLL series and those of the professional sphere of esports gaming should at this point be clear. Professional esports productions provide frameworks for everyday gamers to model their own machinima productions. It also provides the clearest example of the possibilities of esports gaming.
Games like LoL can provide players with many valuable opportunities and skills through the practice-networks that converge in the production of machinima. By exploring these practice-networks I have attempted to highlight these positive elements of esports machinima production. With new games staking out their own practice-networks, within the still expanding esports landscape, the story of the LoL clubs’ machinima production should provide a map to help players and their significant others navigate these networks for their own benefit.
If you accept that the practices of machinima represent a way for fans to empower their own creative impulses through the intellectual property of developers like Riot Games, then it is clear that WLL served that role for some of the club’s members. Giving these members an opportunity to immerse themselves in the practice-networks of machinima production, games
206 like LoL, can serve as a useful tool for the furtherance of media literacy. Familiarizing themselves with the practice-networks of machinima production gave some club members the chance to develop their voice in a world where the opportunities to be heard keep increasing.
Thousands of gamers are uploading machinima content in the form of esports competitions, let’s plays, reviews and paratexts every day. In the fourth quarter of 2017
YouTube and Twitch combined reported over thirty thousand concurrent streamers on their sites with a combined audience of nearly a million and a half people. The WLL series was a tiny drop in the fire hose of content that is being created by gamers from all over the world.
Empowering gamers through enabling them to incorporate the practice-networks of machinima into their play can enable gamers to expose themselves to a range of practices that have utility beyond their gaming.
The affordances of actors like LoL’s spectator features, screen sharing platforms like
Twitch and software like Open Broadcasting System enable club members to enact the practices of streaming video content. Mixing the practices of public speaking with the caster’s store of gaming capital, the enrolment of this practice networks into the play of the WLL. Both
Steven’s disembodied play calling, from the fall term, and the two to three person team of on- camera casters who provided commentary for the WLL were enabled by the assemblages of technical actors enrolled in their practice-networks to emulate the practices of professional LoL casters on their own terms.
When I compare what the WLL network within the LoL club was able to accomplish to what has been happening at the upper echelon of collegiate esports they would be easy to dismiss what they have accomplished as insignificant. I would argue that the initiative taken by
207 the members who participated in the WLL demonstrates how easily esports gaming can be used as the impetus to organize small networks where gamers can take a larger role in arranging their play practices. Rather than being locked behind their computer endlessly contributing to the perpetuation of instrumentalized esports practices to the benefit of Riot, they used these play practices as a reason to organize their own play, on their own terms.
Increasing the power of WLL participants to shape their own participation in esports gaming.
208 Chapter 9 Concerning everyday gamers’ participation in esports practice
Why should you bother to know how esports gaming informed the practice-networks of everyday gamers in the LoL club? What is the use of a description of esports gaming practices and what is the value of understanding the practice-networks they comprise? There is little that can be done to stop the spread of the esports approach to games as more developers jump onto the bandwagon. The ways that profit-driven actors are imposing their own vision of how esports gaming should be does not have to be the only approach. If steps are not taken to preserve the beneficial aspects of esports gaming then we miss opportunities to cash in on the educational and developmental potential for those players who opt to participate.
In the analysis chapters of this dissertation, I sought to find a middle ground between the two poles on this spectrum of concern. Combining the concepts of gaming capital and practical intelligibility I intended to provide a means for understanding the various kinds of knowledge required for the practices of LoL gaming and how that knowledge is both policed and rewarded within the game’s environment. My intention in using the concept of the obligatory passage points was to highlight the ways in which certain practices become obligatory as the club interacted with other actants seeking to shape their organization. In addressing the affordances of the nonhuman actors who shaped the practices of the club, I wanted to bring attention to the things that these actors make possible, as well as what they restrict or regulate. Finally, by applying our understanding of machinima to the production of the LoL club’s YouTube series I wanted to illustrate that there is still some value, particularly in the benefits to an individual’s media literacy, in this kind of participation.
209 The process of arriving at these findings was informed by the robust literature surrounding gaming ethnographies, practice-networks and the wider area of game studies. In the opening chapters of this dissertation I made it clear how I was drawing from each of these areas and how they shaped my work. In return, I believe I have made some small contributions to these areas that I will address further in the remaining sections of this chapter.
Constructing a project of this size required a series of difficult choices. At several points during the data collection, issues arose that could have changed the direction of the project. I see these paths not taken as opportunities for future research. In this final chapter I will explore the concerns outlined in the dissertation regarding instrumentalized in-game practices, actants who sought to shape the practices of the club, how the affordances of nonhuman actors impacted their practices and finally what the production of machinima exposed club members to. As I review these concerns I will pay some attention to what I thought could have been done to maximize the benefits of these practice-networks. The chapter will then revisit to the intellectual foundation of my work to position my contributions in each area. Finally, I will conclude the chapter with an eye towards the directions for future research that became clear to me as the project unfolded.
What was found in the practice-networks of LoL club
Taken in isolation, the practice-networks required for the participation in esports gaming in LoL are minimalist at best and exploitative at worst. Applying the concept of gaming capital, and seeking to expand it, was a means for addressing this concern. One might suggest that this could have been achieved more concisely by addressing the question of how much time LoL club members spent on their gaming. It was a question that I asked all of my interview
210 participants and I even made sure to ask them to include time that they may not have considered part of their gaming. The metric of time spent in the game, without the context provided through the concept of gaming capital, would have been a poor reflection of what should be concerning. Spending dozens of hours a week playing a video game may seem shocking to nongamers, but when compared to the time individuals spend on other activities like playing sports or learning music it is not that out of step.
Gamers, and the people who they consider significant in their lives, need to understand their position in the practice-networks of the games they play. As large game developers move towards more multiplayer experiences, gamers have to recognize that there is a fundamental shift in what comprises the content of a game. When a developer creates a world and uses it to tell a story the content of the game is fairly clear. When a gaming environment is created with player-to-player interaction as its primary focus, gamers need to be aware that the developer sees the them as the games’ content. The uptake and execution of instrumentalized esports practices within games like LoL make the product better for Riot Games. It is not unreasonable to suggest that gamers deserve more than rewards in the form of game attributes such as just champion skins for their efforts in sustaining these practices.
Exposing how the acquisition of gamer capital functions in the practice-networks of LoL gaming should clarify the relationship between gamers and game developers. Committing one’s self to instrumentalized gaming practices does not only make the individual’s play more successful, it makes the game more challenging for other players. It is reasonable to question whether you are getting a sufficient return on your investment of time. It should also make clear that this is not the only way to approach these competitive environments. Understanding
211 which instrumentalized practices are being utilized within a game can be a first, rather than final, step in your pursuit of esports participation. Whether it is using this gaming capital in the creation of machinima as I explored in chapter eight or using it as a launching point for your own exploration of your own in-game innovations, the acquisition of gaming capital does not have to be an end unto itself.
Zooming out to the context within which these practice-networks were being deployed provided an opportunity to survey a sample of the kinds of actants that sought to directly shape the practice-networks of the LoL club. Obviously, there are many more actants that shaped the practice-networks of the LoL club than could be addressed in this project. I selected the juxtapositions of the Students’ Union and Riot Games community outreach program to provide contrast between the kinds of participation that were fostered through their influence. Both organizations were able to impose specific practices on the networks of the LoL club as a condition of the club’s affiliation with them. Both sets of obligatory practices were seemingly designed for the benefit of the actants imposing them, SU and Riot Games, but only one of these actants generated revenue from these connections.
We may have reached a point in North America when it is time for the development of organizations that can advocate for the benefit of everyday esports gamers. There are already organizations that advocate and oversee the professional scene of esports gaming in Europe and South Korea and a smattering of game specific organizations here on our continent.
Individual participation in esports practice is constrained by the need to find other players to play with and against. As everyday gamers collectivize their gaming through organizations, like the LoL club, it may be a good idea to have an organization that can advocate on their behalf.
212 Since Riot Games is able to generate revenue from everyday gamers’ participation, they ought to provide better resources to make organized gaming easier and more beneficial.
Through their participation in esports practice-networks some of the gamers of the LoL club are already learning how to organize small events for fifty or more people. To harness those organizational practices could be the most significant thing that LoL club event organizers may draw from their time as LoL gamers. What makes gamers an interesting subject to study, as Dmitri Williams (2006) has suggested, is that gamers do not bowl alone. Having a place to hone these organizational practices is one of the most important potentials that esports gaming holds. We must be cognizant of who is shaping that organization and do our best to make sure that the best possible framework for their participation is facilitated.
Recognizing that the affordances of nonhuman actors also shaped the practice-networks of the LoL club was to draw attention to the bifurcated nature of their influence. Actors like the university lecture halls used for the club’s live events would seem to enable the group to come together, but the virtual nature of LoL lends itself much more easily to virtual environments like streaming video. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch would seem to enable the club to reach a wider audience, but they also regulate how content is shared. Social media like Facebook provides the kind of loose social connections that enable anyone within a group to organize an activity and anyone within the group to mask their own problematic affiliations. In each case the inclusion of these nonhuman actors into the practice-networks of the club provided members with useful abilities, but they all come with considerable drawbacks.
Highlighting how the affordances of these actors impacted the practice-networks of the club provides an opportunity to improve these actors for future networks. I do not expect that
213 university lecture halls will someday be designed to facilitate LAN gaming, but it is possible that groups like the LoL club could be directed towards more appropriate facilities on campus. The
University of Calgary could easily accommodate the club in one its many computer labs.
Moreover, it is important to recognize what platforms like streaming video and social media provide for individuals in their practice-networks. Clearly in the last two years these platforms have had to address specific systemic problems with the content they circulate, but even in these failures it is easy to recognize the power they hold.
The practice-networks of esports gaming provide one more reason for us to ponder the impact and importance of actors like YouTube, Twitch and Facebook. Participation in esports gaming inevitably requires a heterogeneous mix of actors and the nonhuman among them are some of the most impactful. Drawing attention to the ways that these actors enabled, restricted and regulated the practices of LoL club gamers should draw attention to the perils and potential associated with these actors. Organized esports gaming would be impossible if these actors were not available to be drawn on, but that does not mean we should not be oblivious to their shortcomings.
The production of esports machinima can provide the most maximalist framework for participation in esports gaming. As Carpentier (2016) has indicated, maximalist participatory frameworks are an ideal. He stresses this point to remind us that these frameworks are always necessarily under pressure by the real conditions of media environments. Despite this pressure, the club was able to organize and produce the series of more than eleven hours of competitive gameplay, asserting their own interpretation of how LoL esports ought to be. In
214 their pursuit of producing LoL machinima club members were exposed to even more practices that have value beyond their practice-networks immediately related to play.
Understanding how streaming video content is produced, what goes into organizing the production of machinima and what production elements are required for live broadcasting are all aspects of media literacy that were necessary for the production of the WLL. Just as participation in LoL esports practice can move gamers to organize their competitive play, the production of machinima can add another layer of valuable distributed practices to esports practice-networks. In a world replete with content, practices like machinima production provide a useful tool for broadening the audience’s media literacy.
Participation in esports practice is certainly not without its risks. If esports stakeholders can focus on ways to make these participatory frameworks more flexible, then the benefits for everyday gamers could be more significant. As Henry Jenkins has suggested culture is not self- replicating, which means that esports stakeholders, including gamers, have a chance to shape what these practice-networks turn out to be. If participation in esports practices can be a means for teaching gamers how to organize themselves and how to create media content, then
LoL practice-networks need to emphasize these aspects at least as much as the dissemination of instrumentalized play.
Making a small contribution
With almost a hundred years in between when ethnography was first conceived to when I chose to draw on it, making a contribution would by necessity have to be small. What I attempted to do in this project was to push Giddings notion of microethnography back into a connective multi-sited tool for game studies. Collectives in gaming culture are often ephemeral
215 in nature. They emerge around particular games or styles of play and disappear as those things go out of fashion. Although scholars like Pearce (2009), Bergstrom (2017) and Consalvo and
Begy (2015) have been able to provide interesting insights by exploring gamers after they have left a game, or after a game has left them,we need methodological tools that can be deployed to capture as much as possible from these transient gaming cultures.
T. L. Taylor has been the most consistent producer in the area of video gaming ethnography and her projects seem to take on average five years to complete. While this usually provides an interesting and thorough perspective on the element of gaming she has placed under study, it is not an approach that is easily replicated in a field with so many people under the publishing pressure of graduate studies or their early career. By attempting to flesh out Giddings’ micro-ethnographic approach, through reintroducing the connection of multiple field sites, I hope to have provided a direction for this kind of limited but intensive observation.
That is not to suggest that my approach was the only possible way forward. My inability to cultivate a true informant throughout the project was a hindrance. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to blend what I experienced in the game with what my participants told me they were doing and what I observed through their competitions. Having someone on the inside of the club consistently throughout the project could have sped up some of my own learning in the game and about the club. The lack of consistent access to a club insider did not make the project impossible, but it certainly made it much more difficult.
Now that I have had an opportunity to explore the practice-networks of LoL club gaming
I feel more comfortable advocating for the ways that I think it could be improved. With relationships that were cultivated better with my participants, I could have been playing the
216 role of advocate from the beginning of the project. In Giddings use of the approach his participants seem to be people he already knew. The role that these bonds play in the conduct of ethnography cannot be overstated. The confirmation of the importance of these kinds of relationships for ethnographic research, even the micro variety, is the second small contribution that I hope my project has made.
As I have suggested earlier, both the perspectives of practice theory and actor-networks have been deployed beneficially in the study of gaming. In this dissertation I sought to demonstrate what could be explored through their combination. Particularly, Nicolini’s zizo approach provided an interesting perspective to connect the various bundles of doings and sayings that were implicated in the practice-networks of the club. This approach provides a means for connecting instrumentalized practices of esports play in-game with the practices of organization and machinima production bound up in the club’s participation.
In my use of this approach, I attempted to reassert terminology from both bodies of theory the practice-network approach originated from, in an attempt to describe with more accuracy the relationships within them. Schatzki’s distinction between dispersed and integrative practices provides a concise way to address the portability of particular practices.
The flexibility of the zizo approach provides a means for connecting disparate contexts. The ad hoc nature of organized esports gaming is an interesting subject that can challenge and extend this approach.
Necessarily there were some contexts that I was not able to address through this project. Although my interviews and interactions with some participants gave me a vague impression of how esports fits within the specific practice-networks of their individual lives, I
217 was unable to develop more than a rudimentary sketch. It was clear that LoL was just one aspect of their gaming time and how it was uniquely situated within the individual practice- networks of each participant would have provided more nuance in my depiction of how these networks were imbricated. A richer depiction of the wider activity flows for each individual could highlight further concerns and interesting practices to be explored.
With richer descriptions of these individual practice-networks, better metrics for evaluating esports participation could be developed. What I have explored through this perspective can provide a good start for the creation those metrics, but further study of these practice-networks is required. The relational nature of the practice-network approach provides a means for mapping the assemblages that comprised the LoL club’s activities. Like any map, practice-networks require constant revision and should at no point be mistaken for the territory they represent.
Despite being the newest area of literature among the areas I have sought to contribute to, the speed at which game studies has expanded in the last decade makes it no less difficult to contribute to. Even the exploration of esports has grown significantly since I first became interested in this project. I have attempted with this study to bring the focus back to what is happening with esports in the everyday context. That is the context where esports was discovered and also where esports has its biggest impact. Thousands of gamers have been able to become professionals through their gaming, but millions of gamers play esports games every day. Despite being the larger population, the everyday context of esports gaming has not attracted as much attention as the professional scene, at least in publications. By turning my
218 attention to this more mundane context for esports gaming I hope to have provided insight into the connections between the professional and amateur spheres of esports practice.
This is not to suggest that the professional sphere of esports should be ignored, just that
I felt better suited to explore it at the local level. The gamers I observed were not able to compete at a professional level, but they nonetheless persisted with their participation in esports practice. From hosting live events to producing their esports machinima, LoL club members used their interest in esports gaming to shape their own fandom. How everyday gamers choose to construct their own esports practice-networks is at least as important as what is happening within the professional sphere.
There was nothing particularly glamorous about the achievements of the LoL club. Even their greatest achievement, the WLL YouTube production, remains unfinished, but their participation still provided valuable insight into the potential and pitfalls of esports gaming.
What I hope to contribute to the area of game studies is a recommitment to the mundane.
What people do with their games can be an interesting and rich a source of data. Even something as ephemeral as instrumentalized gaming practices can provide a window into the complex relationships that pervade participation in video gaming.
As a happy epilogue to my time observing the club, I can report that they have since transitioned into a competitive ULoL campus series team. Even if the club never achieved this transition, it is my contention that their efforts were not wasted. Even those members who took on no responsibilities, organized neither live nor online events, and just participated when it was convenient for them, get to walk away from the experience with the memory of being a part of something through their gaming. For those who did take part in the organization and
219 production practices required for the clubs’ accomplishments they walk away having developed, or at least practiced, valuable skills that they can use beyond their gaming.
Organized gaming can provide a means for everyday gamers to use their interest in video gaming to come together and benefit from their interactions.
Conclusion
In this final section I wanted to address some of the areas that I have identified for further exploration through this study. In many ways these three areas have been addressed in the dissertation but provide ample opportunity for more study.
The evolving relationship between games and their paratextual environments was a theme that I have already had the opportunity to explore in previous conference presentations
(Buckland, 2014). Clearly in the practice-networks of esports, paratexts are an essential component. Exploring to what extend this is true for other types of video games would provide an interesting perspective on the activities of gamers. From paratexts, which speed up a players’ consumption of video games by providing vital gaming capital, to paratexts that directly shape the actions of gamers by providing a modification of the games’ code or the way the game is played, this terrain is diverse and full of complex practice-networks.
The potential for using esports machinima production for increasing media literacy for everyday gamers also provides an interesting direction for future research. Firstly, a baseline measurement of the ways that machinima production impacts a person’s media literacy would be a good place to start. Moving beyond measurement to designing frameworks for esports participation that maximized its ability to facilitate the improvement of participants’ media literacy would be a valuable direction for further work. Carpentier’s work has been mostly
220 evaluative to date, so it would be interesting to attempt to create the kinds of maximalist participatory frameworks that he has championed in his work. Building from what I had observed in the LoL club it would be useful to attempt to facilitate the creation of these maximalist participatory frameworks in a different organization.
Lastly, the spread of toxic online networks is an issue that has become acutely salient within game studies. We have specific rules for what can be tweeted from our conferences now. Some people who study games have had to endure unimaginable levels of harassment and scorn for their work. Despite having addressed the topic directly, through separate research project, I have endured very little of these drawbacks. Understanding how these networks persist, spread and how to contend with them, will be an important direction for future. These toxic online networks transcend gaming culture and provide an urgent, albeit uncomfortable, path forward for research. All of these directions for future research share something in common with the current project; they all provide a means for creating networks that can benefit their actors.
The participation in esports practices has a great deal of potential for everyday gamers, but only if they make it so.
221 References
About Rooster Teeth (n.d.) Retrieved from:https://roosterteeth.com/about
Alcoff, Linda (1992). The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique vol 20 5-32
Alexander, J. (2018, February). League of Legends’ Tyler1 surpasses 1M subs on YouTube, 30K subs on Twitch. Polygon. Retrieved from https://www.polygon.com/2018/2/1/16957278/tyler1-league-of-legends-subs-twitch- youtube-stream
Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2001). Effects of violent video games on aggressive behavior, aggressive cognition, aggressive affect, physiological arousal, and prosocial behavior: A meta-analytic review of the scientific literature. Psychological Science, 12(5), 353-359.
Anderson, C. A.,& Dill, K. E. (2000).Video game violence and trait aggressiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 772-790.
Ang, I. (1990). Culture and Communication: Towards and Ethnographic Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System. European Journal of Communication. 5(2) 239-260 DOI: 10.1177/0267323190005002006
Apperley, T., & Beavis, C. (2013). A model for critical games literacy. E-Learning and Digital Media, 10(1), 1–12. http://doi.org/10.2304/elea.2013.10.1.1
Associated Press. (2018, September 1). Esports have no Olympic future until ‘violence’ is removed, IOC boss says. CBC News Online. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/sports/ioc- bach-esports-1.4807712
Baker, C. (August, 30, 2016). Meet Dennis ‘Thresh’ Fong, the original pro gamer: World’s first ‘Quake’ champ was recently inducted into the esports Hall of Fame. Rolling Stone Magazine Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/meet-dennis- thresh-fong-the-original-pro-gamer-w437184
Basu, P. (2013). 'Material Culture: Ancestries and Trajectories in Material Culture Studies', in J.G. Carrier & D.B. Gewertz (eds), Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology, Oxford: Berg.
Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A., & Walker, S. (2014). Organization in the crowd: Peer production in large-scale networked protests. Information Communication and Society, 17(2), 232– 260. http://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.870379
222 Bergstrom, K. (2017). Temporary Break or Permanent Departure? Rethinking What It Means to Quit EVE Online. Games and Culture. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017698872
Bird, S. E. (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life: living in a media world. New York: Routledge
Boellstorff, T. (2006). A Ludicrous Discipline ? Ethnography and Game Studies. Games and Culture, 1(1), 29–35. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412005281620
Boellstorff, T. (2008) Coming of Age in Second Life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Boellstorff, T, Nardi, B, Pearce, C & Taylor, T. L. (2012) Ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of method. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
Brettell, Caroline (1996) When they read what we write: The Politics of Ethnography. Westport: Bergin & Garvey
Brookhaven National Laboratory (n.d.). The first video game? Retrieved from https://www.bnl.gov/about/history/firstvideo.php
Bruns, A. (2008). The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage. Fibreculture Journal, 11, 1–10. Retrieved from http://eprints.qut.edu.au/7520/
Bruns, A. (2009). From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation. Journal of Education Policy, 25, 717–727. http://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2010.508181
Buckland, A. (2014, May) Persistence through Paratext: Where the Game Goes When Players Stop Playing. Paper presented at the Candian Popular Cultura Assocaition, Calgary, Alberta
Burgess, K. (October, 30, 2013). Speaking in public is worse than death for most. The Times. Retrieved from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/speaking-in-public-is-worse-than- death-for-most-5l2bvqlmbnt
Callon, M. (1986). Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation-Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St-Brieuc Bay. Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, 196–223.
Carpentier, Nico (2011). Media and Participation: A Site of Ideological-Democratic Struggle. Bristol, GBR: Intellect Ltd.
Carpentier, N., Dahlgren, P., & Pasquali, F. (2013). Waves of media democratization: A brief history of contemporary participatory practices in the media sphere. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. doi:10.1177/1354856513486529
223 Carpentier, N. (2016). Beyond the ladder of participation: An analytical toolkit for the critical analysis of participatory media processes. Javnost, 23(1), 70–88. http://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2016.1149760
Carter, M., & Gibbs, M. (2012b). eSports in EVE Online : Skullduggery , Fair Play and Acceptability in an Unbounded Competition. Foundations of Digital Games International Conference
Carter, M., Gibbs, M., & Harrop, M. (2012a). Metagames, paragames and orthogames: a new vocabulary. Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games - FDG '12Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2282346
Castell, S. De, Jenson, J., & Taylor, N. (2007). Digital Games for Education : When Meanings Play, Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference pp. 590–599.
Chee, F. (2006). The Games We Play Online and Offline : Making Wang-tta in Korea The Games We Play Online and Offline : Making Wang-tta in Korea, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture 4(3). DOI https://doi- org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1207/s15405710pc0403_6
Chee, F. (2012). Online games as a medium of cultural communication: An ethnographic study of socio-technical transformation. Retrieved from http://ovidsp.ovid.com/ovidweb.cgi?T=JS&CSC=Y&NEWS=N&PAGE=fulltext&D=psyc12& AN=2015-99010- 106%0Ahttp://mcgill.on.worldcat.org/atoztitles/link?sid=OVID:psycdb&id=pmid:&id=doi :&issn=0419-4209&isbn=9780499226174&volume=75&issue=7- A%28E%29&spage=No&pages=No+P.
Chess, S., & Shaw, A. (2015). A Conspiracy of Fishes , or , How We Learned to Stop Worrying About # GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity, 59(1), 208–220. http://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2014.999917
Chia, R., & MacKay, B. (2007). Post-processual challenges for the emerging strategy-as-practice perspective: Discovering strategy in the logic of practice. Human Relations, 60(1), 217– 242. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726707075291
Chiyeuk. (May 6, 2015) We are UBC eSports, the best collegiate team in North America. We won $180,000 in scholarships for playing this video game – Ask Us Anything. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/353g6x/we_are_ubc_esports_t he_best_collegiate_team_in/
Clifford, J., G. E. Marcus. (2010). Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. 25th anniversary edition. Berkeley: University of California Press
224 Coleman, S., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2007). Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in video game culture. Media, Culture & Society, 29(6), 934–953. doi:10.1177/0163443707081700
Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining advantage in video games (Kindle). Cambridge, Massacesetts: MIT Press.
Consalvo, M. (2009). There is No Magic Circle. Games and Culture , 4(4), 408–417 http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343575
Consalvo, M. (2005). Gaining advantage: How video game players define and negotiate cheating. Changing Views: Worlds in Play, 1–7. Retrieved from http://pdf.aminer.org/000/156/065/gaining_advantage_how_video game_players_define_and_negotiate_cheating.pdf
Consalvo, M. (2005). Rule Sets, Cheating, and Magic Circles: Studying Games and Ethics, International Review of Information Ethics. 4(July), 7–12.
Consalvo M. and J. Begy (2015). Players and their pets: Gaming communities from beta to sunset. University of Minnesota: Minneapolis
Consalvo, M., & Dutton, N. (2006). Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games. Game Studies 6(1)1–15.
Consalvo, M. (n.d.). Video game Content Game, Text, or Something Else ? The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies 3, 406–425. DOI : https://doi- org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1002/9781444361506.wbiems075
Couldry, N. (2004). Theorising media as practice. Social Semiotics, 14(2), 115–132. http://doi.org/10.1080/1035033042000238295
Couldry, N. (2012). Media, Society, World: Social theory and digital media practice. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
Creswell, John (2013). Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches. Thousand Oakes: Sage Publications Ltd
Crogan, P & Kennedy, H.(2009). Technologies between games and culture. Games and Culture 4(2) 107-114
Czarniawska, B. (2004). On time, space, and action nets. Organization, 11(6), 773–791. http://doi.org/10.1177/1350508404047251
225 Deegan, Mary Jo (2001) The Chicago School of Ethnography in Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of ethnography. London: Sage.
Denzin, Norman K.(2011) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research. 4th ed Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications
Denzin, Norman K., & Lincoln, Yvonna S. (eds).(2007) Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry. 3rd Edition. Thousand Oaks, Ca: Sage Publications de Peuter, G. and N. Dyer-Witherford. (2005). A Playful Multitude ? Mobilising and Counter- Mobilising Immaterial Game Labour. The Fibreculture Journal, (5), 1–21.
Deterding, S., Sicart, M., Nacke, L., O’Hara, K., & Dixon, D. (2011). Gamification. using game- design elements in non-gaming contexts. Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHIEA ’11, 2425. doi:10.1145/1979742.1979575
Domahidi, E., & Quandt, T. (2015). “ And all of a sudden my life was gone …”: A biographical analysis of highly engaged adult gamers. New Media & Society, 17(7), 1154–1169. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814521791
Dor, S. (2014). The Heuristic Circle of Real Time Strategy Process : A StarCraft: Brood War Case Study. Game Studies 14(1). Retrieved from : http://gamestudies.org/1401/articles/dor
Dumitrica, Delia (2011). An exploration of cheating in a virtual gaming world. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Volume 3, Number 1, 29 March 2011 , pp. 21-36 http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1386/jgvw.3.1.21_1
Dyer-Witheford, N. (1999). The work in digital play. Journal of International Communicaiton, 6(1), 69–93.
Dyer-Witheford, N. (2001) Empire, Immaterial Labor, the New Combinations, and the Global Worker. Rethinking Marxism 13.3-4 70-80
Dyer-Witheford, N. and G de Peuter (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis
Emerson, R., Fretz R., and Shaw, L. (2001). Participant Observation and Fieldnotes in Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of ethnography. London: Sage.
Emerson, R., Rachel Fretz, Linda Shaw (2011). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
226 Erden, Z., Schneider, A., & von Krogh, G. (2014). The multifaceted nature of social practices: A review of the perspectives on practice-based theory building about organizations. European Management Journal, 32(5), 712–722. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.01.005
Erden, Z., Schneider, A., & von Krogh, G. (2014). The multifaceted nature of social practices: A review of the perspectives on practice-based theory building about organizations. European Management Journal, 32(5), 712–722. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2014.01.005
Feldman, M. S., & Orlikowski, W. J. (2011). Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory. Organization Science, 22(5), 1240–1253. http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0612
Fields, D. A., Kafai, Y. B. (2009) A connective ethnography of peer knowledge sharing and diffusion in a tween virtual world. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 47(4) 47- 68
Fields, D. A., Kafai, Y. B. (2010) Knowing and Throwing Mudballs, Hearts, Pies and Flowers; a connective ethnography of gaming practices. Games and Culture 5(1) 88-115
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Computers in Entertainment (CIE). Retrieved from http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&btnG=Search&q=intitle:No+Title#0
Gee, J. P. (2008). Video Games and Embodiment. Games and Culture 3(3-4) doi : 10.1177/1555412008317309
Geiger, D. (2009). Revisiting the Concept of Practice: Toward an Argumentative Understanding of Practicing. Management Learning, 40(2), 129–144. http://doi.org/10.1177/1350507608101228
Giddings, S. (2009). Events and Collusions: A glosary for the microethnography of video game play. Games and Culture, 4(2), 144–157. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412008325485
Giddings, S., & Kennedy, H. W. (2008). Little jesuses and fuck- off robots: on aesthetics, cybernetics, and not being very good at Lego Star Wars. In: Swalwell, M. and Wilson, J., eds. (2008). The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics, 13–32. Retrieved from http://eprints/uwe.ac.uk/8360
Gilbert, B. (March 29, 2018). Ninja, the hit Twitch streamer who played ‘Fortnite’ with Drake, just apologized for using a racial slur on his stream. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/ninja-tyler-blevins-apologizes-after-accidentally-using- racist-term-on-twitch-2018-3
227 Goldstein, J. (2003). People@play: Electronic games. In H. van Oostendorp (Ed.), Cognition in a digital world (pp. 25-45). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Gomez, M.-L., & Bouty, I. (2011). The Emergence of an Influential Practice: Food for Thought. Organization Studies, 32(7), 921–940. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840611407020
Grayson, N. (2015). Why Riot Is Pissed Off At A League of Legends Streamer. Kotaku. Retrieved from https://kotaku.com/why-riot-is-pissed-off-at-a-league-of-legends-streamer- 1687538838
Greitemeyer, T., Osswald, S. (2009). Prosocial video games reduce aggressive cognitions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 45 pp. 896-900 doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2009.04.005
Greitemeyer, T., Osswald, S. (2010). Effects of prosocial video games on prosocial behaviour. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 pp. 211-221doi:10.1037/a0016997
Grimes, S. M., & Feenberg, A. (2009). Rationalizing play: A critical theory of digital gaming. Information Society, 25(2), 105–118. http://doi.org/10.1080/01972240802701643
Gruneau, R. (1999). Class, sports, and social development. Champaign Ill.: Human Kinetics
Hamari, J., & Sjöblom, M. (2017). What is eSports and why do people watch it? Internet Research, 27(2), 211–232. http://doi.org/10.1108/IntR-04-2016-0085
Hammersley, M., Atkinson, P. (2007). Ethnography: Principles in Practice. 3rd ed. Taylor & Francis Group
Hamilton, W. A., Garretson, O. and Andruid, K. (2014). Streaming on Twitch: Fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media (pp. 1–48). ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Toronto, Ontario http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557048
Hancock, H. (2011). Machinima: Limited, ghettoized, and spectacularly promising. Journal of Visual Culture, 10(1), 31–37. http://doi.org/10.1177/1470412910391552
Harwood, T. (2011). Towards a manifesto for machinima. Journal of Visual Culture, 10(1), 6–12. http://doi.org/10.1177/1470412910391547
Harwood, T., & Garry, T. (2013). ‘It’s Mine!’ – Participation and ownership within virtual co- creation environments. New Developments in Online Marketing, (March 2015), 113–124. http://doi.org/10.4324/9780203722381
Hedrick, T. (2001) The art of sportscasting: How to build a successful career. Lanham, MD: Diamond Communication
228 Henricks, T. (2008). Nature of Play. American Journal of Play, 1(2), 158–180.
Henning Loeb, I. (2016). Zooming in on the partnership of a successful teaching team: examining cooperation, action and recognition. Educational Action Research, 24(3), 387– 403. http://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2016.1185377
Herepath, A. (2014). In the Loop: A Realist Approach to Structure and Agency in the Practice of Strategy. Organization Studies, 35(6), 857–879. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840613509918
Horkheimer, M. T. Adorno (2002) Dialectic of Enlightenment: philosophical fragments. Standford: Standford University Press
Hutchins, B. (2008). Signs of meta-change in second modernity: The growth of e-sport and the World Cyber Games. New Media and Society, 10(6), 851–869. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444808096248
Huizinga, Johan. (1998) Homo Ludends: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Routledge
Jansz, J., & Martens, L. (2005). Gaming at a LAN event: The social context of playing video games. New Media and Society, 7(3), 333–355. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444805052280
Jarrett, M., & Liu, F. (2016). “Zooming With”: A Participatory Approach to the Use of Video Ethnography. Organizational Research Methods, 21(2), 366–385 http://doi.org/10.1177/1094428116656238
Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J., & Seidl, D. (2007). Strategizing: The challenges of a practice perspective. Human Relations, 60(1), 5–27. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726707075703
Jarzabkowski, P., Bednarek, R., & Cabantous, L. (2014). Conducting global team-based ethnography: Methodological challenges and practical methods. Human Relations, 68(1), 3–33. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726714535449
Jarzabkowski, P., & Seidl, D. (2008). The Role of Meetings in the Social Practice of Strategy. Organization Studies, 29(11), 1391–1426. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840608096388
Jarzabkowski, P., Paul Spee, A., & Smets, M. (2013). Material artifacts: Practices for doing strategy with “stuff.” European Management Journal, 31(1), 41–54. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2012.09.001
229 Jenkins, Henry (2006 a). Fans, Bloggers and Gamers; exploring participatory culture. York: New York University Press
Jenkins, Henry (2006 b). Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press
Jenkins, H. (2013) Textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture, New York: Routledge
Jenkins, H., Ito, M., boyd, d.(2016) Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce and politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press
Jenson, J. J. and Ha, D. (2004) Serous Play. Journal of Curriculum Studies 35(6) 649-665
Jin D. Y. and Chee, F. (2008). Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry. Games and Culture, 3(1), 38–58. doi:10.1177/1555412007309528
Jones, R. (2011). Does machinima really democratize? Journal of Visual Culture, 10(1), 59–65. http://doi.org/10.1177/1470412910391559
Kahn, A. S., Ratan, R., & Williams, D. (2014). Why we distort in self-report: Predictors of self- report errors in video game play. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(4), 1010–1023. http://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12056
Kline, Stephen, Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig DePuiter (2003). Digital Play: The interaction of technology, culture and marketing. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press
Kücklich, J. (2005). Precarious Playbour: Modders and the Digital Games Industry, The Fibreculture Journal. 1–10.
Latour, Bruno (1992). Where are the missing masses? In Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 225–258
Latour, Bruno (1999). On Recalling ANT. In John Law and John Hassard, eds, Actor Network Theory and After. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 15-50Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social : An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, , GBR: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ucalgary/docDetail.action?docID=10233636
Law, J. (1992). Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity. Systems Practice, 5(4), 379–393. http://doi.org/10.1007/BF01059830
230 Leroy, J., Cova, B., & Salle, R. (2013). Zooming in VS zooming out on value co-creation: Consequences for BtoB research. Industrial Marketing Management, 42(7), 1102–1111. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.indmarman.2013.07.006
Levy, Pierre (1997). Collective Intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. New York: Plenum Trade
Lindberg, O., & Rantatalo, O. (2014). Competence in professional practice: A practice theory analysis of police and doctors. Human Relations, 68(4), 561–582. http://doi.org/10.1177/0018726714532666
Livingstone, S. (2004). Media literacy and the challenge of new information and communication technologies. Communication Review, 7(1), 3–14. http://doi.org/10.1080/10714420490280152
Livingstone, S. (1993) The Rise and Fall of Audience Research: An old story with a new ending. Journal of Communication 43(4)
Livingstone, S. (2010). Giving people a voice: on the critical role of the interview in the history of audience research. Communication, Culture & Critique, 3(4), 566-571.
Livingstone, S. (2013). The Participation Paradigm in Audience Research. The Communication Review, 16(1-2), 21–30. doi:10.1080/10714421.2013.757174
Loeb, I. H. (2016). Zooming in on the partnership of a successful teaching team: Examining cooperation, action and recognition. Educational Action Research, 24(3), 387–403. http://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2016.1185377
Love, S. M., Sanders, M. R., Turner, K. M. T., Maurange, M., Knott, T., Prinz, R., … Ainsworth, A. T. (2016). Social media and gamification: Engaging vulnerable parents in an online evidence-based parenting program. Child Abuse and Neglect, 53, 95–107. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.10.031
Lowood, H. (2006). High-performance play: The making of machinima. Journal of Media Practice, 7(1), 25–42. http://doi.org/10.1386/jmpr.7.1.25/1
Lynch, Micheal (1993) Extending Wittgenstein: The Pivotal Move from Epistemology to the Sociology of Science In Pickering A. (Ed.) Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago, Chicago University Press
Macdonald, Sharon. (2001). British Social Anthropology in Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of ethnography. London: Sage
231 Malaby, T. M. (2007). Beyond Play: A New Approach to Games. Games and Culture, 2(2), 95–113. doi:10.1177/1555412007299434
Marcus, G. (2008). Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Reivew of Anthropology, 24(1995), 95–117.
Marwick, A. (2007). I can make you a (net) celebrity overnight: Fan production and participatory culture in online reality shows. Media in Transition, 44, 1–27. Retrieved from http://ssrn.com/paper=1421290%5Cnhttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =1884386
Massacheusettes Institute of Technology (n.d.). Spacewar! Retried from: http://museum.mit.edu/150/25
Massanari, A. (2015). # Gamergate and The Fappening : How Reddit ’ s algorithm , governance , and culture support toxic technocultures. New media and society. 19(3), pp. 329-346 DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444815608807
Mills, T. (2018). What has become of critique? Reassembling sociology after Latour. The British Journal of Sociology 69(2)
Mol, A. (2010). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Zeitschrift Für Soziologie, 50(1), 253–269. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-010-0122-1
Morley, D. (1992). Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge
Mortensen, T. E. (2016). Anger , Fear , and Games : The Long Event of # GamerGate, Games and Culture, 13(8), 787–806. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016640408
Mäyrä, F. (2010). Gaming Culture at the Boundaries of Play. Game Studies, 10(1), 1–6. Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/mayra
Nardi, Bonnie (2010). My life as a night elf priest: an anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press
Narine, N. and Grimes, S. M. (2009) "The Turbulent Rise of the Child Gamer: Public Fears and Corporate Promises in Cinematic and Promotional Depictions of Children’s Digital Play." Communication, Culture & Critique, 2(3). pp.319-338.
Nandhakumar, J., Panourgias, N. S., & Scarbrough, H. (2013). From Knowing It to “ Getting It ”: Envisioning Practices in Computer Games Development. Information Systems Research, 24(4), 933–955. http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2013.0482
232 Nicolini, D. (2010). Zooming In and Out: Studying Practices by Switching Theoretical Lenses and Trailing Connections. Organization Studies, 30(12), 1391–1418. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840609349875
Nicolini, D. (2011). Practice as the Site of Knowing: Insights from the Field of Telemedicine. Organization Science, 22(3), 602–620. http://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0556
Nicolini, D., & Roe, B. (2014). Surfacing the multiple: diffractive methods for rethinking professional practice and knowledge in Reconceptualising professional learning : sociomaterial knowledges, practices and responsibilities. (eds.) Fenwick, T. J. and M. Nerland (pp. 67–81). Retrieved from http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/60346
Nimmo, R. (2011). Actor-newtork theory and methodology: social research in a more-than- human world. Methodological Innovation, 6(3) 108-119.
Nitsche, M. (2011). A look back at machinima’s potential. Journal of Visual Culture, 10(1), 13– 18. http://doi.org/10.1177/1470412910391549
Parchoma, G. (2014). The contested ontology of affordances: Implications for researching technological affordances for collaborative knowledge production. Computers in Human Behavior, 37, 1–19. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.028
Parker, L. A. (December 15, 2016). The Cult of PewDiePie: How a Swedish Gamer Became YouTube's Biggest Star :Felix Kjellberg quit his job at a hot dog stand to play video games for a living — and gained 40 million screaming fans along the way. Rolling Stone Magazine Retrieved from
Paul, C. A. (2011). Optimizing Play: How Theorycraft Changes Gameplay and Design. Game Studies 11(2), 1–16.
Pearce, C. (2009). Communities of Play; emergent cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press
Perron, Bernard. (2006). The Heuristic Circle of Gameplay. The Case of Survival Horror. In M. Santorineos (ed.) Gaming Realities: A Challenge of Digital Culture (pp. 6269). Athens: Fournos
Petersen, Søren Mørk. (2008). Loser generated content. From participation to exploitation. First Monday 13 (3).
Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559–589. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781283
233 Pipan, T., & Czarniawska, B. (2010). How to construct an actor-network: Management accounting from idea to practice. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 21(3), 243–251. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2008.04.001
Pitts, R. (2006). Secret sauce: The rise of Blizzard. The Escapist, (June). Retrieved from https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?rlz=1C1CHWA_enAU616AU616&es_sm=93&um=1 &ie=UTF-8&lr&q=related:YL4rts9Y4I9l3M:scholar.google.com/#14
Plott, Sean (February, 2, 2018). A brief history of esports. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahE6ePrp1EI
Potts, L. (2009). Using Actor Network Theory to Trace and Improve Multimodal Communication Design. Technical Communication Quarterly, 18(3), 281–301. http://doi.org/10.1080/10572250902941812
Press, A., & Livingstone, S. (2006). The Question of Method in Cultural Studies. (M. White, & J. Schwoch, Eds.) London, UK: Blackwell.
Radway, Janice. (1989). Reading the Romance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Raelin, J. (2011). From leadership-as-practice to leaderful practice. Leadership, 7(2), 195–211. http://doi.org/10.1177/1742715010394808
Rambusch, J., Jakobsson, P., & Pargman, D. (2007). Exploring E-sports: A Case Study of Gameplay in Counter-strike. Situated Play, Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference, 157– 164. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/dl/db/07313.16293.pdf.
Reckwitz, A. (2002). Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263. http://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432
Reckwitz, A. (2002). The Status of the “Material” in Theories of Culture: From “Social Structure” to “Artefacts.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 32(2), 195–217. http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00183
Robson, K., Plangger, K., Kietzmann, J. H., McCarthy, I., & Pitt, L. (2015). Is it all a game? Understanding the principles of gamification. Business Horizons, 58(4), 411–420. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2015.03.006
Rock, P. (2001) Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnography in Atkinson, P., Coffey, A., Delamont, S., Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of ethnography. London: Sage.
Roig, a., San Cornelio, G., Ardevol, E., Alsina, P., & Pages, R. (2009). Video game as Media Practice: An Exploration of the Intersections Between Play and Audiovisual Culture.
234 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15(1), 89–103. doi:10.1177/1354856508097019Schatzki, T. R. (2005). Peripheral Vision: The Sites of Organizations. Organization Studies, 26(3), 465–484. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840605050876
Rooster Teeth (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https//:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooster_Teeth
Schatzki, Theodore (1987): Overdue analysis of Bourdieu's theory of practice, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 30:1-2, 113-135
Schatzki, Theodore (1996). Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Schatzki, Theodore, Knorr-Cetina, Karin and Eike von Savigny eds.(2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York: Routledge
Schatzki, Theodore (2002). The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change. University Park: Penn State Press
Schatzki, Theodore (2005). Peripheral Vision: The Sites of Organizations. Organization Studies, 26(3), 465-484. doi:10.1177/0170840605050876
Schatzki, T. R. (2006). On Organizations as they Happen. Organization Studies, 27(12), 1863– 1873. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606071942
Shaw, A. (2011). Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity. New Media & Society, 14(1), 28–44. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811410394
Schmidt, K. (2017) Practice theory: a critique. in Wulf, V., V., Pipek, D. Randall, M. Rohde, K. Schmidt, and G. Stevens (eds.) Socio-informatics: A practice-based perspective on the design and use of IT artifacts Oxford: Oxford University Press
Scholz, T. (University of S. (2012). New broadcasting ways in IPTV- the case of the Starcraft broadcasting scene. In World Media Economics & Management Conference. Thessaloniki, Greece. http://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/
Shove, E. and Pantzar, (2005). Consumers, Producers and Practices: Understanding the invention and reinvention of Nordic walking. Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(1), 43–64. http://doi.org/10.1177/1469540505049846
Searle, K. A. & Kafai, Y. B. (2012). Beyond Freedom of Movement: Boys Play in a Tween Virtual World. Games and Culture 7(4) 281-304
235 Seth73. (2016, Feb 24a). U of C WLL Day 1 Match: Rainbow Sparkles vs. SKT T2 (Part 1) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h- j9hP7W9LE&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK-h9OXjHu5pT&index=2&t=764s
Seth73. (2016, Feb 24b). U of C WLL Day 1 Match: Rainbow Sparkles vs. SKT T2 (Part 2) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncF11Zm2xlg&index=2&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgN BK-h9OXjHu5pT
Seth73. (2016, Feb 28a). U of C WLL Day 2 Match: Team Soul Trap vs. Machine Gun Kelly (Part 1) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6asA3- ORsc&index=3&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK-h9OXjHu5pT
Seth73. (2016, Feb 28b). U of C WLL Day 2 Match: Team Soul Trap vs. Machine Gun Kelly (Part 2) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LChOYVBrwEI&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK- h9OXjHu5pT&index=4
Seth73. (2016, March 3a). U of C Weekly LoL League - Day 3: Team Soul Trap vs. SKT T2 (Game 1). [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CimwtwEZfsw&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK- h9OXjHu5pT&index=5
Seth73. (2016, March 3b). U of C Weekly LoL League - Day 3: Team Soul Trap vs. SKT T2 (Game 2). [Video file] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=- jul0zkz9Rw&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK-h9OXjHu5pT&index=6
Seth73. (2016, March 9) U of C Weekly LoL League - Day 4. [Video file] Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDldWNu2Rw&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGgNBK- h9OXjHu5pT&index=7
Seth73. (2016, March 17a) U of C Weekly LoL League - Day 5 [Video file] Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIn1Eng387c&index=8&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGg NBK-h9OXjHu5pT
Seth73. (2016, March 17b) U of C Weekly LoL League - Day 6 [Video file] Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpFnrameE50&index=9&list=PLxvzwk8IjGriUgmkLGg NBK-h9OXjHu5pT
Silverman, M., & Simon, B. (2009). Discipline and Dragon Kill Points in the Online Power Game. Games and Culture, 4(4), 353–378. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009343572
Simon, B. (2007). Geek chic: Machine aesthetics, digital gaming, and the cultural politics of the case mod. Games and Culture, vol. 2, no. 3: 175--193.
236 Swidler, Ann. (2001). What Anchors Cultural Practice? In Schatzki, Theodore, Knorr-Cetina, Karin and Eike von Savigny eds.(2001). The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. New York: Routledge
Squire, K. (2011). Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age. Teachers College Press: New York
Squire, K. D., DeVane, B., & Durga, S. (2008). Designing centers of expertise for academic learning through video games. Theory into Practice, 47(3), 240–251. http://doi.org/10.1080/00405840802153973
Takhteyev, Y. (2009). Information, Communication & Society Networks of Practice as Heterogeneous Actor-. Information Communication and Society, 12(4), 566–583.
Taylor, N. T. (2009). Power Play: Digital Gaming Goes Pro. PhD Dissertaion York University, Toronto
Taylor, N. T. (2011). Play Globally , Act Locally : The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming. International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 3(1), 229–242.
Taylor, T. L. (2006b). Play Between Worlds Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Taylor, T. L. (2012). Raising the Stakes: E-sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Tear, M. J., & Nielsen, M. (2013). Failure to Demonstrate That Playing Violent Video Games Diminishes Prosocial Behavior, PLOS ONE 8(7), 1–7. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0068382
Thompson, H. (1966). Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. Ballantine Books, 1996
Van Veen T. C. (2014) Safeguarding research: a scholarly roundtable on gamergate part 1. First Person Scholar. Retrieved from http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/safeguarding- research/
Van Veen T. C. (2015) Congnitive Dissonance: A scholarly roundtable on gamergate part 2. First Person Scholar. Retrieved from http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/safeguarding- research-part-2/
Vossen, E. (2014) Smoky-room communist meeting: Academic, #gamergate & the feminization of games. First Person Scholar. Retrieved from http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/smoky- room-communist-meetings/
237 Walz, S. P., Deterding, S. (2015) The gameful world: Approaches, issues, applications. MIT press: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Watson, M. (2015). A medley of meanings : Insights from an instance of gameplay in League of Legends. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 6(1), 2068.
Wesch, Michael. (2009).YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam. Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 19-34.
Whitemore, A. Introducing the uLoL Campus Series - the next evolution of the North American Collegiate Championship (NACC) retrieved from https://www.lolesports.com/en_US/articles/introducing-ulol-campus-series
Williams, D. (2005) Bridging the methodological divide in game research. Simulation Gaming 36(4) 447-463
Williams, D. (2006). Why Game Studies Now? Gamers Don’t Bowl Alone. Games and Culture, 1(1), 13–16. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412005281774
Williams, D., Yee, N., & Caplan, S. E. (2008). Who plays, how much, and why? Debunking the stereotypical gamer profile. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(4), 993– 1018. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2008.00428.x
Witkowski, E. (2012). On the digital playing field : How we “do sport” with networked computer games. Games and Culture, 7(5), 349–374. http://doi.org/10.1177/1555412012454222
Wright, S., & Parchoma, G. (2011). Technologies for learning? An actor-network theory critique of ‘affordances’ in research on mobile learning. Research in Learning Technology, 19(3), 247–258. http://doi.org/10.1080/21567069.2011.624168
238 Appendix 1
Structured Interview Research Protocol
1. Do you play any other esports games? Which ones? Any non-esports games? Which ones?
2. Roughly how many hours do you spend playing games in a typical week? How much of that time is spent on LoL?
3. Do you watch esports competitions? What competitions do you watch?
4. Do you read esports gaming websites(Wikimedia, Reddit)? Which ones?
5. Do you follow any esports personalities/celebrities? Which ones? Why?
6. Do you contribute to any forums, wikis or websites about esports games, strategies or anything else related to the game? Where?
7. Did you include reading about or watching videos about the game in your gaming time in the second question? If you added in the time spent on these activities as well as your in-game time how many hours per week do you spend on esports?
8. Do you feel as though you could be a professional player? Why or why not?
9. How do you feel about that match?
10. What happened? How did you contribute?
11. How did you do that?
12. What have you learned from following esports culture?
239