Power Play:
Digital Gaming Goes Pro
NICHOLAS T. TAYLOR
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Abstract
In the past several years in North America, an e-Sports industry has emerged that frames digital play as a professional, intensely masculinized 'sport' with its own leagues, mainstream sports media coverage, and cadre of sponsored 'cyber athletes'. My doctoral thesis follows a community of competitive video game players as they attend monthly small-scale gaming tournaments in order to train for larger, more lucrative (and, in some cases, televised) e-Sports events. For my ethnographic study, I employ audio-visual data collection to record and analyze competitive Halo 3 play in monthly LAN (local area network) tournaments operating in a large urban Canadian city. I explore the ways participants perform and produce a gendered discourse around 'professional' gaming through their interactions with one another and their elite-level play.
The process of professionalization explored here represents a shift in the pleasures and values normally associated with digital play: conventionally regarded as a recreational and participatory (though far from inclusive) activity, e-
Sport is an activity most of us can only watch rather than do. 'Pro' gaming is enacted through the association of digital play with professional sport, as well as through the standardization and regulation of the technological apparatuses for competitive Halo 3 play. It is also carried out at an embodied level, as players VI perform the highly specialized competencies and gendered subjectivities associated with professional gaming.
Concurrent with the professionalization of play is a seemingly opposite trend. Platforms like Nintendo's Wii and games like Rock Band afford new pleasures and possibilities, enabling configurations of digital play that might represent an 'opening up' of video games to new audiences. In contrast, competitive gaming represents the re-entrenchment of gendered privilege and disenfranchisement around digital games: like the professional sports it emulates, 'pro' gaming in North America is a domain in which men and boys are clearly the winners in a rigidly-maintained gender hierarchy. VI
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
The Opening Pitch 1
Framework: Gaming Goes Pro 5
Dissertation Overview 13
Chapter 2: Description of Study 19
Overview 19
NerdCorps: 'DIY' LANning 20
MLG: The 'Big League' 27
WCG: The Video Game Olympics 33
Conclusion 45
Chapter 3: Literature Review 47
Overview 47
E-Sports Studies 48
MMOG Studies 52
Ethnographic Studies of Gender and Gaming 63
The Wide World of Sports Sociology 69
Conclusion 78
Chapter 4: Methodologies 80 vii
Data Collection and Coding 80
Feminist Ethnography 83
Visual Ethnographies 91
Actor-Network Theory 99
Conclusion 103
Chapter 5: "Think of How Many People are Watching This" 104
Overview 106
Reciprocity 107
Activity Theory 115
Reactivity 133
Conclusion 136
Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't 139
Overview 139
'Cyber Athletes' 141
Where the Women Are 146
Fatal Fantasy 154
Conclusion 159
Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team" 162
Theoretical Background 163
Overview 169 viii
'Intrinsic' Speech 171
'Extrinsic' Speech 179
Taunts, Trash-talk and Put-downs 182
Affiliative Speech: The Name Game 190
Conclusion 192
Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play 195
Overview 195
Theoretical Background 197
Mapping LANscapes 201
Conclusion 214
Conclusion 217
After the Final Round 219
Theoretical Steps 223
Missing Pieces 229
Further Directions 232
Works Cited 237
Appendix A: Glossary 262
Game-related Terminology 262
Appendix B: Tournament Details 267
NerdCorps 267 ix
MLG Toronto 2008 269
World Cyber Games 270
Appendix C: Consent Forms 273
Appendix D: Spectatorship and Production 279
Learning to Watch 279
Appendix E: Annotated List of Referenced Video Clips 282
Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't 282
Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team" 283
Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play 284 VI
List of Figures
Figure 1.1. 'T-Squared' on the label of Dr. Pepper bottles, in a promotional image (retrieved March 4, 2009, from 3 http://www.gotfrag.com/portal/story/43454/) Figure 2.1. The MLG area at Toronto FanExpo. 28
Figure 2.2. The MLG Main Stage. 28
Figure 2.3. The MLG logo - an Xbox 360 controller replaces silhouetted 31 athletes.
Figure 2.4. The WCG information booth. 34
Figure 2.5. Competition areas for FIFA 08 and Starcraft. 35
Figure 2.6. Cologne's mayor at the Opening Ceremonies. 38
Figure 2.7. My view of the WCG Halo 3 finals. 42
Figure 2.8. Final Round accepting their gold medals. 43
Figure 4.1. Example of spreadsheet-based system for coding audio-visual 77 data. Figure 4.2. MAP's interface. 91
Figure 4.3. Misreading the 'boy' in red. 93
Figure 5.1. Representation of an "activity structure" (Lim and Hang, 2003, 111 p. 52).
Figure 5.2. Activity structure for normative video-based fieldwork. 113
Figure 5.3. Activity structure depicting my promotional work for NerdCorps. 114 xi
Figure 5.4. "Pro Player Feature" with Strongside. 120
Figure 6.1. Banners of MLG pro's at the 2008 Toronto Open. 135
Figure 6.2. "Status' Mom" (her head is on the right) acting as cheerleader. 141
Figure 6.3. A MAP of Status' mom's verbal and non-verbal 142 encouragement.
Figure 6.4. Booth babes modeling the Asphalt 4 stage. 145
Figure 7.1. Omg Its Chip and teammates during MLG play. 163
Figure 7.2. Shadow (on the left): "I couldn't hear you!" 169
Figure 7.3. "Keep this pace goin' guys". 172 Figure 7.4. Mad Hatter, Burns and Fatal (from the left edge of the clip), 177 disparaging novices. Figure 7.5. Vik (on the left), to Fatal (on the right): "You got a problem with 179 that?" Figure 7.6. A MAP charting the exchange between Vik Vicious (MM) and 179 Fatal Fantasy (ID).
Figure 8.1. NerdCorps LAN. 197
Figure 8.2. MLG Toronto Open LAN. 198
Figure 8.3. Halo 3 LAN at the WCG Grand Finals. 198
Figure 8.4. Wires and cords at an Xbox 360 LAN. 199 1
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Opening Pitch
In February 2008, at a panel presentation at the Game Developers Conference in
San Francisco, three sports media executives - representatives from the
Championship Gaming Series (CGS), a collaboration between DirecTV and Fox
Sports - spoke to a mostly male audience of digital games industry workers and journalists about their vision for electronic sports, or 'e-Sports'. As the executives explained, they wanted to do for competitive video gaming what ESPN and other sports networks have done in recent years for poker, transforming a male- dominated subculture conventionally associated with inactivity into a lucrative and ubiquitous sports media commodity (Kollar, 2008): they aimed to sell digital play as spectator sport. The presenters outlined how their league, which had just wrapped up its first year, functioned: each season, teams representing different
North American cities hold a draft, where team managers select competitive gamers from around the country to fill out their rosters. Teams compete against one another in a series of Local Area Network (LAN) tournaments,1 broadcast live on DirecTV. Each tournament features individual- and squad-based head-to- head competition in racing games, 'real time strategy' (RTS) games, martial arts
1 Please see Appendix A: Glossary for a more detailed definition of LAN, as well as lists of various games, genres and organizations associated with e-Sports. 2 fighting games, and 'first-person shooter' titles. A promotional video showing clips from previous CGS events followed this initial pitch. It showed moments of high drama folding out on strobe-lit stages in front of banks of PC's and televisions, as coaches pointed and yelled at their teams, players hugged one another in victory or hung their heads in defeat, and in-game cameras depicted spectacular car crashes, knock-outs, and assassinations. Interspersed throughout were quick sound bites from CGS 'athletes', as they talked about the pressures of virtual competition and their dedication to their skill, their teammates, and their sport.
From its launch in 2007, the Championship Gaming Series received considerable involvement (and investment) from established sports media networks, but it was not the first North American-based organization to promote competitive digital gaming as spectator sport.2 In January 2008, one month before the Game Developers Conference, Major League Gaming (MLG) announced a partnership with ESPN in which the sports media giant agreed to broadcast, on its web portal (ESPN.com), live action from MLG's 'Pro Circuit' series of LAN tournaments (http://www.mlgpro.com/content/page/181255/A-
Historic-Day-For-Major-League-Gaming). Operating since 2002, MLG - "North
America's first professional gaming league" - runs a series of tournaments where
2 For a journalistic account of the history of competitive gaming in North America and the emergence of the Championship Gaming Series, particularly as it relates to the team-based first- person shooter game Counterstrike for the PC, see Michael Kane's (2008) Game Boys. 3 players compete against one another in militaristic, team-based action games for the Xbox 360, the most popular being the futuristic first-person shooter Halo 3.
Using Xbox 360's infrastructure for online play, the organization holds online gaming tournaments throughout the year where registered teams are 'seeded' for
MLG's main events. These are the MLG LAN tournaments held at different cities across North America, constituting MLG's 'Pro Circuit'. At each stop on the Pro
Circuit, upwards of 130 four-person teams gather for three days to compete in a single elimination tournament. The stakes are considerable: MLG not only awards cash prizes for top-placed teams, but also confers 'professional' designation to the top eight teams at each event. The best teams, those that place consistently among the top four at Pro Circuit events, are signed to salaried contracts with MLG, while a select few individuals are awarded promotional contracts with the organization's sponsors. In 2008, for instance, Tom 'Tsquared'
Taylor, captain of the 'pro' MLG team Str8 Rippin, was offered a million-dollar contract with major MLG sponsor Dr. Pepper, and had his image appear on select Dr. Pepper bottles (Figure 1.1). Figure 1.1. 'T-Squared' on the label of Dr. Pepper bottles, in a promotional image (retrieved March 4, 2009, from http://www.gotfrag.com/portal/story/43454/).
MLG holds up 'Tsquared' and other gamers from its cadre of professionals as role models for a community of competitive gamers, and Halo 3 gamers in particular, to aspire to in their play, and as proof that the rewards offered by participation in 'e-Sports' are real and attainable.
This represents a fundamental transformation in digital play. While accounts of the educational (de Castell & Jenson, 2003; de Castell, Jenson &
Taylor, 2007), interpersonal (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005), economic (Dibbell,
2006), and vocational (Disalvo et al., 2009) benefits and applications of digital play certainly suggest digital play is far more than mere recreation for many gamers, it is now serious business for the competitive players who vie for wealth and fame within an industry that aggressively markets televised, spectator-driven digital play as 'the next big thing' in sports media. 5
Framework: Gaming Goes Pro
The transformations enacted by MLG, CGS and other e-Sports organizations involve a number of questions: what constitutes 'play', what constitutes 'sport', and what constitutes their emergent hybrid offspring; who can participate in (and reap the rewards from) this new domain; and whether and how the e-Sports industry and the 'professionalization' of play enacted by those who participate in it represent diminished opportunities or potentials for video gaming as a recreational, participatory activity. My dissertation takes up these questions, in the context of an ethnographic study involving a Toronto-based competitive Halo
3 gaming organization entitled NerdCorps,3 and its involvement in local, national, and international e-Sports tournaments. I document the kinds competencies cultivated in pursuit of elite competitive Halo 3 play and its rewards; what being a
'pro gamer' means, within a discourse that associates competitive gaming with professional sport, and who can/not occupy this subject position; and how participants differently perform and talk about the professionalization of digital gaming in their interactions with one another, the e-Sports industry, and the technological infrastructures of competitive LAN events.
My central argument is that the competitive Halo 3 LANs I attended constitute sites in which fundamental shifts are at work in the value, purpose, and
3 Throughout this dissertation, I use pseudonyms for all local names - i.e. participants in the Toronto-based Halo 3 gaming community I studied. This includes names of organizations, as well as players and organizers. 6 pleasures associated with digital play. These transformations are enacted at discursive, material, and embodied levels. At a discursive level, the association of digital play with professional sport mobilizes attendant gendered discourses around elitism, competition, and athleticism constrains who can play. At a material level, these changes are enacted through the standardization and regulation of the technological apparatuses for competitive Halo 3 play. At an embodied level, these changes are affected through players' performances of the highly-specialized, highly-regulated competencies, dispositions and gendered subjectivities associated with professional gaming.
Before offering an overview of how my dissertation proceeds, I begin by addressing the question of whether and how gaming constitutes (or can become) a professional sport. I contextualize this transformation in digital play alongside two shifts: the historical professionalization of sport, and the current 'opening up' of digital play to new audiences. In doing so, I suggest that the rise of 'e-Sports' - and its discursive coupling of digital play to very culturally-specific and highly exclusive forms of sports-based masculinity - is a reaction to this broadening of audiences and contexts for digital play.
Treating the connection between digital play and sport as a series of deliberate moves by organizations and individuals invested either economically or affectively in 'e-Sports', rather than as a 'yes' or 'no' matter, enables its comparison to histories of professional sport over the last century - shifts that not 7 only relegated most participants to the spectatorial sidelines, but also configured
'professionalization' and its rewards as the exclusive domain of men. Following this, I situate the professionalization of play alongside other recent shifts in digital gaming. I demonstrate how the emergence of e-Sports, and the exclusions and inequities it entails, might be read as a reaction to the discursive and material
'opening up' of gaming to new audiences.
Gaming as Gendered Sport
Based on how I saw competitive gaming practiced and talked about, I understand it as an activity involving significant amounts of training, skill and focus; at the same time, I find it difficult to associate something as kinesthetically stationary and unathletic as Halo 3 play with conventional, athletics-based definitions of sport. Unlike recent research on competitive gaming scenes in North America and Europe, however, my approach in this dissertation is to neither implicitly assume competitive gaming's status as legitimate sport (see, for example,
Hutchins, 2008; Rambusch, Jakobsson, & Pargman, 2007), nor argue explicitly for such legitimacy (Kane, 2008). Both approaches arguably legitimate the deliberate attempts by e-Sports organizations and players to profit from this association, and elide a more important and compelling consideration: namely, where, how and by whom connections between gaming and sport are mobilized, and for what purpose. 8
As I demonstrate throughout this dissertation, the connections between competitive gaming and sport are enacted in the service of an industry that aims to produce a mass market for the consumption of televised play, through pitching competitive gaming as a sport for professionals - configured discursively as young, male and (mostly) white.
Transformations in Sport
This line of inquiry regards the professionalization of an activity conventionally associated with leisure and recreation as a manufactured process, with clear winners and losers. This allows for parallels to the works of sports sociologists who chart the emergence and transformation of professional sports in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
According to feminist studies of sports (Brackenbridge, 2002; Lenskyj,
2003; McDonagh & Pappano, 2008; Messner, 2002, 2007), pro sports constitutes a domain where notions of male physiological superiority are mobilized as rationales for the ongoing marginalization of women, whether as '2nd class athletes' (McDonagh & Pappano, 2008) or in supportive, ornamental and sexualized roles (Grindstaff & West, 2006). In "Sports and Male Domination: The
Female Athlete as Contested Terrain", Michael Messner (2007) links the history of sports in the twentieth century to the diminishment of male power and authority in economic, political, and industrial relations. He identifies two major "crises of 9 masculinity" over the course of the last century that gave rise to modern professional sports (pp. 35-38). The first "crisis", roughly coinciding with the breakdown of Victorianism in the early twentieth century, arose in response to an alleged "feminization of society" as men moved from patrilineal to corporate- owned forms of labor and women attained greater economic and political power
(p. 35). Messner identifies the rise of organized sports over this period (as well as other leisure-time institutions, such as the Boy Scouts) as attempts to constitute a "male-created homosocial cultural sphere" invested in a myth of male superiority (p. 35). The second crisis Messner identifies followed World War II, in the gradual shift in North America from industrial to service-based economies, and the subsequent erosion of opportunities for male self-identification as the sole 'breadwinners' within a patriarchal family unit. Messner attributes the rise in spectator sports at this time - televised broadcasts of football and baseball in particular, sports that viewers "would hardly ever play" - to their ability to
"symbolically" (as well as technologically) "link men of diverse wages and socioeconomic backgrounds" to a shared spectacle that served as "testimony" to notions of male superiority (pp. 36-38).
In portraying sports as a deeply patriarchical and reactionary institution,
Messner attempts to problematize the optimism engendered by the 1972 establishment of Title IX, a U.S. policy forcing schools and colleges to implement equal numbers of (though not equal funding for) male and female athletics 10 programs (p. 34). The framework he develops continues to be relevant to current issues in professional sports: the ongoing differences in pay and promotional opportunities for female athletes compared to their male counterparts
(McDonagh & Pappano, 2008; Messner & Sabo, 1990), for instance, or the recent decision by the International Olympic Committee to disallow women's ski jumping from the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games (Mickelburgh, 2009) - even though ski jumping itself is a sport in which participants are covered from head to toe and in which, arguably, their gender only plays a symbolic role.
Working from Messner's framework, Celia Brackenbridge (2002) argues that professional sports are not simply resistant to the gains made by women elsewhere in society; rather, the maintenance of gender inequities in professional sports is a reaction to these gains, "a method by which to maintain power and a celebration of the making and re-making of threatened masculinity" (p. 262).
Messner's and Brackenbridge's insights demonstrate that far more is at stake in the elevation of recreational or amateur activities to the status of professional sport than an institutionalized elitism that means most participants watch but don't play. The rise of professional sports - and a sports media industry that has historically catered primarily to heterosexual men (McDonagh and Pappano,
2008; Messner, 1988, 1989, 2002, 2007; Wenner, 1998) - is deeply tied to the maintenance of gender hierarchies and the naturalization of male privilege. 11
Transformations in Play
As sports sociologist D.S. Eitzen (1989) demonstrates in a deconstruction of the idealized notion of "amateurism", amateur sports are also rooted in historical class- and gender-based power relations (pp. 97-98). For this reason, he cautions against invoking the "amateur ideal" as an antithesis to the "crass materialism" of professional sports (p. 96). Following this insight, I do not contrast the transformations enacted by the e-Sports industry to an idealized view of digital gaming as an inclusive form of recreation, untarnished by socio-economic and gender-based inequities. My account of the professionalization of digital gaming fully recognizes that video games have historically been, and continue to be, predominantly the domain of heterosexual men and boys (Beavis, 2005;
Ivory, 2006; Jenson & de Castell, 2008; Krotoski, 2004), and that competitive
LAN play involves technologies that have already been thoroughly 'masculinized'
(de Castell & Bryson, 1998; Schott & Horrell, 2000; Taylor, 2007; Walkerdine,
2007). I recognize that digital gaming is a heterogeneous and dynamic terrain in which several concurrent transformations are taking place: not just the
'professionalization' of competitive gaming and the rise of e-Sports, but also the popularity of mobile gaming, the emergence of kinesthetic or motion-based controls, the proliferation of 'casual' gaming, the ongoing popularity of persistent virtual worlds, and so on.
Recent research and reporting does depict a more general pattern at work 12 across many of these transformations of digital gaming, as new games and gaming platforms (and their associated promotional strategies) have begun to attract new audiences to the pleasures and possibilities these games afford. The
Nintendo Wii, for instance, can now be found among audiences not normally associated with digital gaming - most notably retirement homes (Blackwell,
2009). Similar stories abound with regards to rhythm-based games such as
Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band (Bojin, 2008; Hartley, 2009), as well as the burgeoning markets for 'casual' and mobile games (Chalk, 2009; Hall, 2005).
These games might represent a broadening of digital play beyond its traditional (hard)core demographic; marking a move, as Alison Harvey suggests,
"towards a more diverse terrain of gaming that may challenge understandings of video game play as hypermasculine" (Harvey, 2009).4 The professionalization of competitive play can be read against - and even, as Brackenbridge and Messner suggest in regards to professional sports, as reaction to - this opening up of new avenues for play(ers). The vision put forward by e-Sports organizations and enacted at their large-scale tournaments positions competitive digital play as a domain for the performance of elite skills, where for most, participation is limited to spectatorship - far from the 'pick up and play' discourse surrounding Rock
4 As Jenson and de Castell (2006) argue, stories about the disappearance of a gender gap in gaming should be met with some caution. Just as some reports show, for instance, equal numbers of female and male participation, they often dismiss deeper gender-based imbalances around how much leisure time is given over (made available) to gaming, and who owns and controls the means of play. 13
Band and the Nintendo Wii (Bojin, 2008; Simon, 2009; Weathers, 2007). More than this, however, these tournaments configure competitive gaming, and its substantial rewards, as the exclusive domain of men and boys. This shift in notions of who gets to play, and why, is in many ways antithetical to the changes collectively enacted by casual, kinesthetic, mobile, and rhythm-based games.
Dissertation Overview
This dissertation is a case story of NerdCorps, and the community of Halo 3 players the organization supported in their attempts to 'go pro'. It offers an account of the discursive and material conditions in which this professionalization takes place, and documents what this professionalization exacts from those who participate.
I begin in Chapter 2 with a detailed description of my audio-visual ethnographic study. This is presented as a narrative about my association with
NerdCorps and its players, as I followed them from the local, small-scale
NerdCorps events where they 'trained', to a Major League Gaming event in
Toronto attracting Halo 3 players from all over North America, to the 2008 World
Cyber Games Grand Finals in Cologne, Germany, where over 800 players from
78 different countries gathered to compete for bronze, silver and gold medals in fourteen different games, including Halo 3. 14
Chapter 3: Literature Review scans current and relevant literature in games studies as well as sports-related research. Here, I engage with the small amount of research on e-Sports, before turning to some of the conceptual pitfalls in studies of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG's). I take up this work because it constitutes the most extensive (and in many ways, most problematic) research to date on the 'social' aspects of digital play. I then situate my study alongside other socio-cultural accounts of gender and gaming, studies that approach gender as sets of power inequities constructed in relation to and around digital games and gaming technologies. I make further use in my literature review of feminist studies of sport, to explore the highly limited and problematic notions of gender in relation to athleticism, competition, and professionalization that the e-Sports industry evokes in its discursive construction of play as sport.
Following my literature review, Chapter 4: Methodologies describes the methodological frameworks I employ in carrying out and analyzing my fieldwork. I draw from three separate qualitative research traditions, each of which informs how I approach my (primarily audio-visual) material, as well as account for my own agency and bias in carrying out my fieldwork. Feminist and poststructuralist ethnography enables me to theorize the power relations at work in participants' interactions with one another, as well as the relations that I enacted in documenting their play. A more recent body of research that makes use of audio- 15 visual recording technology, and that comments on and/or demonstrates the epistemological affordances of video ethnography, guides how I engage with my audio-visual data. Finally, I draw from actor-network theory (ANT; see Latour,
1987, 1992, 2005; Law, 2004) as a way of approaching the complex configurations of bodies, meanings, and material and virtual technologies that collectively constitute competitive Halo 3 LANs. ANT allows me to conceptualize the professionalization of gaming as a process carried out across human as well as non-human actors, and that moves past the dichotomy between 'player- centered' and 'game-centered' approaches that besets much of the research on digitally-mediated play.
With this framework in place, I proceed with my analyses of competitive
Halo 3 as I saw it practiced at different local, national, and international tournaments. In Chapter 5: "Think of How Many People are Watching This", I examine how the professionalization of Halo 3 play involves an association between status, skill and spectatorship. I examine how this association affected my audio-visual fieldwork with a community of players for whom video cameras represent opportunities to be watched by spectators, and to participate in the construction of competitive play as something worth watching. I describe how I entered into a relationship with the NerdCorps organizers as a researcher, but also as the organization's dedicated videographer, responsible for producing promotional materials. Exploring this dual positioning, I speculate that in my 16 involvement with NerdCorps, I not only recorded, but affected participants' play, and their interactions with one another. I argue that in the presence of a videographer and camera, participants may have intentionally or unintentionally
'played up' certain competencies, communicative norms and dispositions that they associate with professional play.
In Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't, I examine how the connections between competitive Halo 3 and professional sport enable opportunities for hyper-masculine identity work. The construction of 'pro' gaming involves ascribing gendered discourses about the physical superiority of male athletic bodies to a set of practices normally associated with inactivity and physical apathy. Under these conditions, I argue, competitive gaming and its rewards become the exclusive domain of male 'cyber athletes'. I look at the opportunities for female participation in this discursive terrain, as I saw them performed at each of the competitive gaming events I documented: as in the professional sports events they emulate, these tournaments relegate women to ornamental, supportive and sexualized roles. I examine how the competent and confident participation of the one regular female NerdCorps participant complicates this gender hierarchy. At the same time, my analysis shows the tenuous and volatile position she occupies in the competitive Halo 3 gaming community.
Following this in Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team", I focus on the standardization and regulation of communicative norms across the Halo 3 17
LAN events I studied. Drawing upon speech act theory, I explore what players perform through their verbal interactions with one another, making a distinction between speech acts that are 'intrinsic' to play, and those that are 'extrinsic'.
Intrinsic speech acts have a direct bearing on in-game actions and enable the coordination of strategy, and as such constitute a set of competencies that players regard as being as instrumental to elite play as ability to aim, shoot, and jump. Unlike intrinsic speech acts, extrinsic speech acts are not part of the repertoire for professional play. I focus on extrinsic speech acts through which participants perform and take part in a hyper-masculinized and at times, deeply misogynistic discourse around 'pro' gaming.
Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play examines the technological conditions for the performance of 'pro' play at Halo 3 LANs. I draw upon actor-network theory to chart how an infrastructure of virtual and material technologies, common to each event, formats the embodied work of players in ways that are consistent across
'local' play contexts. In doing so, I argue that as this technological infrastructure is standardized, so are the verbal and embodied interactions of players. Rather than viewing a standardized configuration of game play settings, chairs, tables,
Xbox 360's, virtual arenas, and so on as the 'backdrop' for competitive play, therefore, this viewpoint entails a perspective on gaming as the play of agency across and among human and non-human (including 'virtual' and material) actors. 18
These separate but interconnected explorations of the discursive and material conditions involved in 'pro' gaming collectively play up what I believe is the central insight of this dissertation work: that pro Halo 3 play consists in the specialization, standardization and regulation not only of certain game play skills, but of the identities, dispositions and interactions made possible within the highly constrained spaces of competitive LANs. The discursive association between gaming and professional sport put forward by the e-Sports industry and reproduced through players' interactions represents a fundamentally limiting process involving increased opportunities for some, but diminished opportunities for most. As e-Sports organizations pursue a market-driven conception of competitive gaming as the domain of professionals, in which all but the most specialized and elite players are relegated to the margins, notions of who can participate in e-Sports, and what rewards are, fall upon the same gendered lines as the professional sports it emulates. 19
Chapter 2: Description of Study
Overview
In this chapter, I describe the three competitive gaming sites that I observed and took part in as videographer, researcher, and spectator. These include the eight monthly NerdCorps events that I attended between March 2008 and January
2009; the Major League Gaming Toronto Pro Circuit (MLG Toronto), from August
24-26, 2008; and the 2008 World Cyber Games in Cologne, Germany, from
November 5-9. In documenting each, I highlight what I deem significant or surprising in terms of the gendered dynamics at work, the discursive connections made to mainstream professional sports, and my own shifting understandings of competitive gaming.5 Collectively, these descriptions introduce some of the concerns I explore later: how is digital play performed, talked about and commodified as it 'goes pro'? How does an emergent pro-gaming discourse intersect with and capitalize on forms of male privilege that are already firmly entrenched with regard to both digital games and professional sport, and how do male and female participants negotiate this gendered terrain? How do players in
'localized' gameplay settings participate in and reproduce this discourse, which is not only centered around, but 'formatted' by sets of technologies and
5 For a list of the specific Halo 3 game formats featured, the stated rules for governing 'fair play' at each event, prizes awarded for top finishes, and significant event sponsors, please see Appendix B: Tournament Details. 20 technological configurations that are relatively stable across physical and cultural contexts? To what extent does this technological infrastructure create the grounds for a globalized Halo 3 competitive gaming community whose play practices not only look the same - but to a significant degree, sound the same as well?
NerdCorps: 'DIY' LANning
NerdCorps is a small, non-profit business (consisting of two partners) operating in downtown Toronto. Since 2004, it has run LAN events at various venues and with various partners (ranging from birthday parties to arts festivals). In April
2006, NerdCorps found a relatively stable venue for its events at the Ironside Inn.
Using the Inn's small gallery space to set up their Xbox 360 LAN, NerdCorps began to run monthly Halo tournaments, catering to a small but growing group of competitive Halo players. Between Spring 2006 and Winter 2008, the organization ran two seasons of a competitive Halo 2 league. Each season, they tracked individual and team statistics over the course of six events, and awarded to the winning team a cash prize of $500. During this time, they also formed an official NerdCorps Halo 2 team, the 'NerdCorps Militia', who attended Major
League Gaming (MLG)'s first Canadian event in Toronto in November 2007. My work with NerdCorps began in March 2008, during a time of transition for the 21
organization. While they still held monthly events at the Ironside Inn, they no
longer actively supported a Halo team or ran a formal league.
The Generals
The NerdCorps organizers are both white males in their early 30's. They name
themselves "General Error" and "General Electric", in keeping with the ironic
appropriation of military discourse marked by 'NerdCorps', and who show up to
events in camouflage t-shirts with their names emblazoned on the back. Both are
employed in full-time jobs, and see NerdCorps as a side project they do out of a
passion for gaming. General Error works for the provincial government as a
computer programmer; Electric installs cameras along provincial highways and is
also an amateur photographer and DJ. Having founded NerdCorps together and
worked at it for years, the two have clearly-established roles in their partnership:
Error runs the NerdCorps website and Facebook group, drums up interests for
events through his contacts with older NerdCorps regulars, and organizes
matches during events; Electric handles the complex logistics for setting up Xbox
360 LANs, troubleshoots technical issues, and seeks out new venues and
partnerships for NerdCorps.
A Typical (D-)Day in the Life
During my fieldwork with NerdCorps, they threw their monthly Halo 3 events, which they named 'D-Days', on the second Saturday of each month. While most 22 events took place at the Ironside Inn, the organization found another temporary venue (for two events in the summer of 2008) at the Rumble Room, another nightclub in downtown Toronto with unused space during the day. Both venues had enough space to allow a setup of 8 stations (an Xbox 360 and a 24" television at each station), as well as the routers, cables, extension cords, and power bars required to set up locally-networked play. Over the eight events I attended, the number of participants ranged from 12 to 32, but I identified what I, as well as the Generals, consider a 'core' group of approximately 20 participants who attended regularly. Of these core participants, there was one 16/17 year-old white female; the males, seven of whom were African-Canadian, one South-east
Asian, one East Indian, and the rest Caucasian, were all aged 16-25.
Events typically started at 11 in the morning with an hour or so of 'warm up' play, where participants played any Halo 3 game format they wanted (or, in some cases, earlier versions of Halo). Between noon and 1pm, the organizers lined up participants to pay the $20 registration fee ($10 if they brought their own controllers, which was most often the case). General Error then organized players in 'Free For All' (FFA) play, where eight players at a time competed against one another in a fifteen-minute match for the most 'kills' (number of times they've eliminated other players' characters). After three to four rounds of play
(depending on how many participants took part), players with the most total kills faced off in a final match to determine the overall FFA winner. Afterwards, 23 players were given a 30 to 45 minute break to get lunch from one of the nearby fast food restaurants, stretch their legs, make phone calls, smoke, and talk.
Between 3.30 and 4 pm, once they returned from break, players formed into teams of four and registered their teams with General Error. Teams were most often self-selected and arranged by participants beforehand, usually formed through online play. Players new to NerdCorps, however, were often assigned teams by the organizers, based on who the Generals thought would be most accommodating of and friendly towards the new players. Using the rules and game types featured in Major League Gaming (MLG) competitions, teams faced each other in round robin play, with each team playing the other once. Leading teams then faced off against one another to determine the overall winner; the winning team was awarded with NerdCorps t-shirts, hats, stickers, and other promotional material.
My tactic during these events was to arrive early to the venue, usually between 9 and 11 am, to help the Generals unload and set up equipment. Once participants began arriving, I alternated between taking notes, chatting with organizers and participants, and re-positioning the tripod-mounted camera. In interacting with participants, I followed the Generals' lead, only talking to players as they waited for their match to start or during other breaks in play. During play,
I would either rove up and down the rows of players, sometimes holding the camera and sometimes carrying it on a tripod, or I would set up the tripod in a 24 fixed position while I watched play, chatted with the Generals, or talked to participants while they waited their turn to play.
Consent and Confidentiality
At each monthly NerdCorps event I attended, I brought informed consent forms for participants whom I had not yet seen at previous events to sign. I also attached a secondary form, allowing participants to consent (or refuse) to have video footage of them and their play posted online, for the purposes of promoting the organization.6 When distributing these forms and/or introducing myself to players I had not yet met, I disclosed my research objectives and made clear that unless participants otherwise consented (by refusing to sign the secondary form),
I would preserve their confidentiality to the fullest extent possible - by not including them in any promotional or research footage posted online. In all instances, I refrained from using participants' real names, referring to them in the promotional videos I created for NerdCorps7 by their online gamertags.
As clear and careful as I tried to be in outlining these issues to participants, I found preserving participants' anonymity a convoluted and, in some cases, almost impossible process. For instance, by doing a quick search of the 2008
World Cyber Games medalists, one can quite easily find out the real names of
6 Please see Appendix C: Consent Forms for a sample of each. 7 Please see Chapter 5 for a description of the promotional 'player profiles' I published on behalf of NerdCorps. This chapter also offers a more thorough articulation of some of the broader epistemological and ethical issues involved in conducting video-based research with a community that regards video as a means for representing and even attaining a measure of 'pro' status. 25
Vik Vicious, King Cobra, and other members of team Final Round, whose identities and gamertags I alter in this dissertation. This is further complicated by my insight, developed in Chapter 5: "Think of How Many People are Watching
This", that the large majority of NerdCorps participants I talked to and worked with were accustomed to being filmed at events - I was, after all, neither the first nor the only person to audio-visually record NerdCorps LANs - and that many even welcomed the opportunity to be filmed, affirming a discursive connection between status and visibility that is at work in the broader North American competitive Halo 3 community.
All of the NerdCorps players that I encountered throughout my study signed both forms, often with little deliberation. Nonetheless, my ability to preserve participants' confidentiality and anonymity was significantly undermined, both by my own commitment to generate promotional work for NerdCorps as well as by some participants' involvement in e-Sports organizations that are far less concerned with players' anonymity - and that, in fact, hold up a certain measure of fame as incentive to participate in their tournaments.
Layout
The space at the Ironside Inn is a narrow, brightly-lit rectangular room, with hardwood floors, exposed brick along one of the walls and a large bay window by the door to the sidewalk. Used during the weekday as the Ironside Inn's art 26 gallery, the room provided a cramped and narrow fit for a LAN: the 4 rows of
Xbox 360's and TV's on long rectangular tables left little room for participants to either stand or sit in between rounds, and even during low-attended events (10-
12 participants) the space felt crowded with both bodies and technology, and the air quickly became stuffy. The Generals often left the door open for hours at a time, even during colder weather.
In contrast, the Rumble Room is a large, expansive nightclub; its dark decor (heavy black drapes, black floors and walls, black bar stools) and lack of lighting and windows make it feel almost cave-like. Unlike the Ironside's art gallery, where consoles and TV's were arranged in rows, the Rumble Room featured a long, elliptical bar in the center of its large floor, allowing all eight play stations to be lined up side-by-side. Despite these differences in layout, the LAN setups in both venues had an unpolished, "Do It Yourself aesthetic: surfaces were covered with tattered camouflage-patterned tablecloths; TV's and Xbox's alike were covered with NerdCorps decals; at the Rumble Room events, the router connecting the Xbox's was perched in the metal bin normally used for storing ice during nightclub hours.
When Major League Gaming held its first Canadian event (an invitational tournament in Toronto) in November 2007, NerdCorps underwent a shift in tactics. They had previously been the only organization in the city to focus on and offer rewards for competitive Halo play. No longer the only LAN in town, and able 27 to offer only a fraction of the monetary prizes MLG awards to its top tournament finishers, NerdCorps began to position itself as a training ground for elite Halo players, a venue for players to 'skill up' for larger-scale tournaments like MLG.
According to the NerdCorps organizers, however, the Canadian launch of Major
League Gaming in the Fall of 2007 would not have been a success had the
Generals not distributed free registration passes to the MLG tournament at their own events. The organizers saw their team's victory over an MLG-sponsored
Canadian team, in the quarterfinals of the inaugural Toronto tournament, as a validation of their 'grassroots' approach to building a community of competitive gamers, in contrast to what the organizers depicted as a heavily-corporatized, profit-driven MLG approach.
MLG: The 'Big League'
After attending five NerdCorps events between March and August 2008,1 attended the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, held August 21-24. Currently the most prominent e-Sports organization in North America, MLG runs its Halo-focused
Pro Circuit LAN events as well as several online competitive gaming services.
These include gamebattles.com, where players can organize matches with one another across a wide variety of games and platforms (from MarioKart for the
Nintendo DS, to Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe for the Playstation 3, for instance), but which primarily serves as a "farm league" for developing talent 28 among Halo and Gears of War players (Frederick, 2007). In 2007, MLG also bought GotFrag (www.gotfrag.com/), an online e-Sports magazine traditionally dedicated to reporting on PC-based competitive gaming (Frederick, 2007) as well as MMO Champion (www.mmo-champion.com), a strategy guide for World of
Warcraft players. MLG's primary interest, however, remains the development of its professional league for Halo players. Its broadcast partnership with ESPN significantly advances the organization's attempts to market gaming as a professional sport. As I describe below, the layout of the MLG Toronto event, the imagery it drew upon, and the media production practices it mobilized all reflected this commitment to selling gaming as spectator sport.
2008 MLG Toronto Open
MLG held its second Toronto-based event, the 2008 Toronto Open, between
August 21 and 24, as part of its 2008 Pro Circuit. The Halo 3 tournament was the primary draw, attracting 552 participants for 4v4 team play with a first-place prize of $20,000 (USD). The Open also featured smaller and less lucrative tournaments for Rainbow Six: Las Vegas and Gears of War. In total, there were over 900 gamers in attendance8 from across North America, most between the ages of 12 and 18.
Located on the ground floor of the sprawling Metro Convention Center in
8 Statistics for the event were provided in an email press release from Eric Michalko, Communications Manager for Insight Sports, the sports media company responsible for bringing MLG to Canada. 29 downtown Toronto, the tournament ran in conjunction with the 2008 Toronto
FanExpo. The event space was dimly-lit, bedecked with black curtains lining the walls and dark carpet covering the concrete floor. In the middle of the space was a large apparatus built of chrome scaffolding, lit up from the bottom by blue and white beams of light (Figure 2.1). The apparatus, the MLG 'Main Stage' consisted of two benches spaced diagonally from each other, each with 4 consoles and
LCD TV screens. Above these benches were three cinema-sized screens, side by side. The screens and benches faced bleachers capable of seating about 400 spectators (Figure 2.2). The Main Stage apparatus also housed the broadcasting booth. Flanking this apparatus were curtained-off areas: on one side, an area for press, and on the other for the top four seeded teams to practice.
Figure 2.1. The MLG area at Toronto FanExpo. 30
Figure 2.2. The MLG Main Stage.
The Halo 3 tournament area occupied most of the event floor, consisting of two areas cordoned-off by stanchions, each with two long rows of tables. During play, no one but the players, referees (responsible more than anything for ensuring matches started in a timely fashion), security guards, press, and team 'coaches'
-who stood or paced directly behind their team, motivating and coordinating team play - were allowed in the cordoned-off area. Spectators and players awaiting matches (there was significant overlap between the two groups) had to remain on the outside.
MLG Press Pass
Having obtained a press pass through a NerdCorps regular who volunteered for 31
MLG, I was able to record play/ers without having to obtain individual consent; upon registering for the event, all participants signed a media release form.9 The few informal interviews I carried out with participants whom I had not already met, and attained written consent from, at NerdCorps events (for instance, my interview 'Status' Mom' that I discuss in Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't) were prefaced with my full disclosure of my institutional affiliation and research goals.
NerdCorps at MLG
Several regular NerdCorps players attended the event, most of whom were enrolled with teams: Fatal Fantasy (the one female who consistently showed up to NerdCorps events) was teamed up with three young men she had met through the Xbox Live Halo 3 team-building options. A number of other male NerdCorps regulars had formed teams amongst themselves. The team I was most interested in, however, was 'Final Round', which at the time was comprised of three
NerdCorps regulars - Vik Vicious, Jumper, and King Cobra - and a younger
American player, Ganky, whom they had recruited only two weeks before the event. Final Round was regarded by several NerdCorps participants as the top
Canadian Halo 3 team, despite being eliminated in the opening rounds of the previous MLG event in Meadowlands, New Jersey (April 2008).
9 Please see Appendix C: Consent Forms for a sample. 32
The MLG Tournament
As I did during NerdCorps tournaments, I spent my time at MLG Toronto watching and recording play, and talking to participants - mostly NerdCorps regulars, but also referees, parents and other players. After five months of recording NerdCorps events either in the cramped quarters of the Ironside Inn or at the seedy Rumble Room, the MLG event, with its chrome Main Stage, ever- present logos of corporate sponsors (Ford, Zellers and Microsoft, the main sponsors, were visible everywhere), and the sheer size of its technological infrastructure, with its hundreds of Xbox 360's and LCD screens, was initially bewildering. In contrast to the ironic and self-mocking way the Generals' appropriated militaristic discourse to describe NerdCorps LANs, I was also surprised by the extent to which the tournament was presented as a sports media event. This was evident in the imagery the event drew upon: in the banners depicting MLG-sponsored 'pro' players in athletic wear, clutching their controllers; the structure of the Main Stage, with competitors facing bleachers full of spectators; and the ubiquitous MLG logo, a silhouetted white controller against a blue and red field, strongly evocative of the Major League Baseball and
National Basketball League logos (Figure 2.3), and through cameos by former 33 professional athletes.10 iuM^ B^l WM
MAJOR LEAGUE GAMING MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL ^BSflH
Figure 2.3. The MLG logo - an Xbox 360 controller replaces silhouetted athletes.
Sunday Spectatorship
By early afternoon on the last day of the event, sixteen teams were left. This marked the beginning of 'Championship Sunday', in which the remaining matches were played in succession on the Main Stage and telecast live on
ESPN.com and on MLG's web site, with play-by-play commentary by MLG commentators. Championship Sunday footage is an exclusive MLG commodity: no recording devices, including my video camera, were permitted at the event.
No NerdCorps-based teams reached the final sixteen (Final Round had been eliminated in a close match earlier that day), and so I left the tournament during one of the semi-final matches.11
WCG: The Video Game Olympics
The third venue where I observed competitive gaming was the 2008 World Cyber
10 In the second day of competition, former NFL star Marshall Faulk was introduced on the Main Stage and played a game of Madden NFL Football 2009 with MLG 'pro' Ghandi, as a promotion for the latest instalment of the popular football game. 11 Please see Appendix D: Spectatorship and Production for an account of how my audio-visual recordings changed as I became more familiar with the on-screen action of competitive Halo 3 - in other words, as I became a better spectator. 34
Games Final in Cologne, Germany. Operated by Korean company International
Cyber Marketing (ICM) (www.icm2k.com/eng_main.html), its mandate is to put a
"global business network" in touch with a "global gamers network" through what it sees as the rapidly-expanding market for "e-Sports"
(www.icm2k.com/eng_mission.html). Since the first installment of WCG in 2001, in Seoul, South Korea, the annual tournament has grown from 430 players representing 37 different countries, to over 800 players from 78 countries; likewise, its total prize money has grown from $300,000 to over $500,000, and it has increased the number of games featured in its tournaments each year, from
6 in 2001 to 14 in 2008.12
Unlike MLG, which ranks teams for its Pro Circuit league events based on a continual series of online qualifiers between registered teams, participants for
WCG's annual Grand Finals are chosen through a series of regional preliminaries, followed by national qualifiers, in each nation (or global region) involved. Preliminary tournaments are run by partnerships with local organizations; since 2007, NerdCorps has been WCG's organization in Toronto.
Regional partners like NerdCorps decide which of the fourteen games featured in the Grand Finals they hold qualifying tournaments for: for example, in 2008,
NerdCorps only held regional qualifiers for Halo 3.
Shortly after MLG Toronto, team Final Round participated in the World
12 This information was supplied in the WCG 2008 "Grand Final Media Guide". 35
Cyber Games (WCG) Canadian qualifying tournament in Montreal (Aug 30th -
Sept 1st), one of several national-level events to determine which players would represent their countries at the World Cyber Games Grand Finals in Cologne,
Germany. The Canadian competition featured six games,13 with the winning individual or team in each awarded airfare to and accommodation in Cologne, for the duration of the tournament (November 5-9). Final Round won the Halo 3 event, which put me in a position to follow them to the Grand Finals.
Play Grounds
The WCG Grand Finals were held in one of the ten pavilions making up
Kolnmesse, a series of modern convention halls in Cologne's industrial quarter.
The Halo 3 event floor was part of a walled-in area guarded by (male) security personnel, for competition involving '18+' ('mature') games (Halo 3, as well as
Counterstrike, Age of Empires, and Virtua Fighter 5). The 18+ area occupied one quarter of the large event floor. At the opposite end was a large stage, with three massive screens overhead, facing approximately 400 seats. Finals, semi-finals, and other marquee matches for particularly popular games like Warcraft 3 (a real-time strategy game) and FIFA 2008 (a soccer game) took place on this main
13 The Canadian qualifying tournament featured Counterstrike, a militaristic team-based FPS for PC's, and still the most prominent game in the global pro-gaming scene (Kane, 2008); Halo 3; Warcraft 3, a 'real-time strategy' (RTS) PC-based game, hugely popular in South Korea and featured in several Asian-centered pro-gaming leagues (such as the World e-Sports Games); Project Gotham Racing 4, an Xbox 360-based racing game; Guitar Hero 3, a popular rhythm game using plastic guitars; and Virtua Fighter 5, a one-on-one martial arts fighting game for the Xbox 360. 36 stage, as did the tournament's opening and closing ceremonies.
The floor space in between the stage area and the 18+ area was taken up by sponsors' promotional booths, a small cafeteria, and competition areas (rows of computers or consoles and TV's, bounded by short white walls) for the rest of the games. Figures 2.4 and 2.5 show the entrance to the event floor with its prominent information booth, and competition areas for two of the games, respectively.
Figure 2.4. The WCG information booth. 37
Figure 2.5. Competition areas for FIFA 08 and Starcraft.
WCG Press Pass
As I had done at the MLG Toronto Open, I was able to obtain a Press Pass for the WCG Grand Finals, which afforded me free registration to the event as well as the license to conduct audio-visual recording of participants and their play.14
Following the same protocol I employed at MLG, I fully disclosed my research role and interests prior to conducting informal interviews and conversations with the few non-NerdCorps participants I met.
14 I have been unable to access the media release forms required of participants at the 2008 World Cyber Games Grand Finals. 38
Gender at Work and in Play
Like MLG Toronto, where I only saw five female players (including Fatal Fantasy) over the course of the event, there was a very visible gendered division of labor at work at WCG. Each sponsor stall was worked by promotional models, slim young Caucasian women dressed in differently-themed outfits depending on the product. At the AMD booth, for instance, which uses as its mascot a computer- generated, buxom girl in Goth costume, the workers sported tattoos, dyed black or red hair, fishnet stockings and black leather bustiers and skirts, while a woman dressed in tight riding chaps and jacket accompanies the booth for an equestrian video game. These women appeared to have little interaction with the attendees, beyond having their pictures taken with them; most often, this would involve two or more men/teenage boys approaching one or two of the "booth babes" and asking to have their picture taken, at which point the women would pose amiably, sometimes provocatively with the man/men, who most often simply stood with their hands at their sides or in their pockets.15 Like the booth babes, female WCG employees were young, slim, and white, dressed in black WCG shirts and short black skirts. They operated the information booth as well as walked the floor, answering questions about the day's events, and handing out promotional material. In contrast, the security guards stationed throughout the hall, and
15 For an analysis of the role 'booth babes' play in the support of pro-gaming hypermasculinity, please see Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't. 39 particularly at the entrances to the hall and the 18+ area, were all men, dressed in dark suits and ties.
Opening Ceremonies
Although tournament play started on Thursday, November 6, the Games officially started Wednesday night, with the opening ceremonies. The show opened with a set from a German rock/rap group, then proceeded through an introduction of all
78 countries, as the MC's (one male, one female) announced each nation in alphabetical order. Afterwards came speeches by the mayor of Cologne (Figure
2.6), one of Samsung vice-Presidents, and the vice-mayor of Chengdu, China, host of WCG 2009. Speeches were followed by promotional videos: one for the city of Cologne, another by Adidas, in which gamers were hailed as the "athletes of the future" as silhouetted Bushido athletes prepared for a match, and the last, showing each of the video games ('disciplines') featured at WCG 2008. A torch- lighting ceremony concluded the tournament, featuring a video of an animated flame raced across a stylized globe before jumping off the screen in a burst of stage pyrotechnics, finally 'lighting' a digitized flame displayed on another screen to the right of the stage. 40
Figure 2.6. Cologne's mayor at the Opening Ceremonies.
These opening ceremonies made clear some of the different ways MLG and
WCG discursively connected their tournaments to mainstream spectator sport: where MLG invokes North American sports leagues in its imagery, organization and symbolism, WCG emulates Olympic ritual and imagery. Brett Hutchins'
(2008) description of the 2006 World Cyber Games supports my impressions of the tone set by the lengthy Opening Ceremonies: "cosmetically at least",
Hutchins claims, "the WCG is another sports festival, complete with the national flags and medals that have adorned Olympic athletes for more than a century"
(Hutchins, 2008, p. 859). 41
Canada Goes for Gold
Final Round did not play until the second full day of competition (Friday), though I encountered them on Thursday, when they expressed their frustration and anxiety at having had little time to practice with their new team configuration. Vik
Vicious and King Cobra, the two team regulars, were now accompanied by Cutty, another NerdCorps regular (and one of only two Black players I observed at
WCG) and Flip, a young man from British Columbia with some MLG experience, whom Vik Vicious had recruited through emails and online Halo 3 play. For their first match on Friday, Final Round arrived to the Halo 3 competition area dressed in their Team Canada track suits, black nylon trimmed with red and white lettering. In their opening match against the Dutch team, Final Round tied, after being behind by 20 kills (points) in the last five minutes of the fifteen-minute game. In their next match, which followed their first by only 5 minutes (during which time none of the players left their seats), the team played New Zealand, whom they beat resoundingly by a score of 133 kills to 62. The Canadians won their remaining two matches that day, putting them in first place in their pool, in line to face Italy (second place in the opposite pool) in the following day's elimination rounds.
The next day (Saturday, November 8) I noted that the number of attendees on the event floor had grown substantially; from about 700 for the opening ceremonies (almost all of whom were either players, employees, or 42 journalists), to around 1000 on Thursday and Friday, to close to 2000 on
Saturday - the start of the weekend, as well as the beginning of elimination rounds in most game tournaments. In the 18+ stage area alone, I counted about
400 attendees at one point, most of whom filled the bleachers to watch marquee
Counterstrike matches which ran simultaneously with Halo play, which had a smaller crowd of spectators clustered, standing, around the perimeter of the play area. There were significantly more spectators than at the MLG Toronto Open, where most spectators were players in between matches.
Final Round's win against Italy was decisive. Following their opening tie against Netherlands, the team's margin of victory over opponents had increased each match. This dominance continued in their semi-final match against the U.S. team, whose members had also, like Final Round's members, played in several
MLG tournaments. Canada's win over the U.S. concluded Saturday's Halo 3 action. The finals versus France took place on Sunday at 1pm. I arrived an hour before the start of the match to secure a good spot for filming, close to the
Canadians' side of the stage; Figure 2.7 shows my proximity to the team during the final match. Two other camera crews were present: WCG's own German- speaking crew, with a director, camera operator, boom mike operator, and assistant, and another (unidentified) English-speaking crew, consisting of a camera operator and an interviewer/director. 43
While the Canadians won the first round (of a best of three) handily, the second round was much closer - the closest and hardest-fought since their match against the Dutch. Playing on the 'Guardian' map, Final Round once again fell behind early, and was not able to mount a successful counter-attack as they had in previous matches. They would organize, push into their opponents' side of the map, and close the gap to 5 or so kills, before falling into disarray and lagging behind again. This persisted until about the thirteenth minute, when, much like the first match, Vik Vicious and King Cobra both urged their teammates to "slow down" and "chill out" - and once again, after a series of coordinated attacks against the French tower, they took a three-kill lead with just over thirty seconds left. At this point, they collectively took up positions within their own tower, and waited for a final attack from the French; when it came, with about fifteen seconds left, they repelled it successfully and held on to win the match by a score of 86 kills to 82. Immediately after the match ended, each Final Round member jumped out of their seats and hugged one another; Vik turned to the crowd and pointed with both hands at the small contingent of Canadian teammates in the stands holding aloft a huge Canadian flag, then turned to say a few brief words to me, before gathering with his teammates in the middle of the stage for a brief interview with one of the camera crews.16
16 A video clip depicting Final Round's win is available for online viewing at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter2/Chapter2_FinalRoundWinsGold 44
Closing Ceremonies
Around 5pm on Sunday, three hours after Final Round's win, the WCG Closing
Ceremonies began. Mirroring the opening ceremonies, they featured speeches by dignitaries from Cologne and Chengdu, China, the site of the 2009 Games.
After this came a lengthy medal ceremony, the highlight of which was Final
Round's podium entrance when the four boys held up the same large Canadian flag that had been hoisted during their finals (Figure 2.8). For their win, each team member received a gold medal, $10, 000 (USD), and a Samsung laptop.
Figure 2.7. My view of the WCG Halo 3 finals. 45
Figure 2.8. Final Round accepting their gold medals.
Conclusion
This account of my fieldwork and study design brings into play the major concerns I explore in detail throughout this dissertation. These are, specifically, the configuration of competitive play as a spectator sport, and how this impacted my fieldwork; the use of standardized communicative forms, from one event and venue to the next; gendered divisions of labor (and play) within and across these sites; and the persistence of a relatively stable technological infrastructure across three different local, national, and international tournaments, which at least partially accounts for the stability of embodied interactions and patterns of 46 gendered marginalization/inclusion across tournaments. Each of these issues explores a different facet of the professionalization of competitive Halo 3 play - that is to say, the regulation, refinement and standardization of highly-specialized and highly-exclusive ways to play.
Before exploring these issues in depth, I map existing research in areas relating to gender and digital play, ethnographies of gamers and gaming communities, and sociological studies of the gendered dimensions of sport in
North America. 47
Chapter 3: Literature Review
Overview
My dissertation makes use of and builds on research in the following areas: current academic studies of e-Sports; studies of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG's), which have received significant amounts of sociological/ethnographic attention; ethnographies of gender and digital play, particularly those that mobilize post-structuralist theories of gender as performative and contingent; and sociological and ethnographic studies of sports.
I do not look to sports-focused studies to support the notion that competitive gaming constitutes sport, but rather to better identify those elements of a globalized spectator sports industry that are appropriated in the professionalization and commodification of competitive gaming. Furthermore, ethnographic studies of leisure activities (some of which are, like competitive gaming, in the process of being legitimated as sport), demonstrate how post- structuralist notions of gender can be applied to studies of recreational communities, asking in particular how leisure activities and the places in which they're carried out become gendered (more particularly, masculinized) through the embodied actions and utterances of participants. 48
E-Sports Studies
This literature review begins by examining the few scholarly works to date that focus on competitive gaming. While little attention has been paid within academia either to competitive LAN events or the e-Sports industry, a small number of authors have looked at previous World Cyber Games (WCG) tournaments. Jana
Rambusch, Peter Jakobsson and Daniel Pargman (2007) focus specifically on
Counterstrike players at the 2007 WCG (held in Monza, Italy) while Brett
Hutchins (2008) discusses WCG as a postmodern cultural form, not focusing on any game specifically. Rambusch, Jakobsson and Pargman begin by articulating the difficulties in coming up with a "player-centered approach" to studying digital play, which they see as a corrective to overly-formalistic analyses of game rules and structures (p. 157). Calling such an approach "elusive", the authors arrive at a methodological framework informed by two methodologies: cognitive ethnography, designed to chart the ways cognitive processes are shared and distributed across members of a community (primarily through micro-analyses of participants' textual communication: see Hollan, Hutchins, & Kirsch, 2000;
Hutchins, 1995; Steinkuehler, 2008), as well as a political economic model set out by Steven Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter (2003) for theorizing the overlaps between the "circuits of interactivity" - game play, design and promotion - that constitute the digital gaming industry (Ramusch,
Jakobsson, & Pargman, 2007, p. 158). 49
In their ensuing discussion of competitive play, based primarily on semi- structured interviews with players (p. 159), Ramusch, Jakobsson and Pargman characterize competitive Counterstrike as a globalized network of smaller regional player communities, each of which acts as a "community of practice" where less accomplished players are given opportunities to skill up by playing other individuals and teams online (p. 160). The authors suggest that while different regions of the world may have different "play styles",17 among more elite teams - those capable of and accustomed to competing against other elite teams in global LAN tournaments like WCG - "regional" play styles disappear. While this insight could become a valuable basis for making sense of the similarities in tactics, verbal communication, and embodied work that I observed of Halo 3 players across national and international tournaments, they neither clarify exactly what kinds of regional differences "disappear" from teams competing on a global stage, nor do they offer any evidence for this beyond WCG participants' own descriptions of their experiences at global tournaments.
Ramusch, Jakobsson, and Pargman offer a useful snapshot of a competitive gaming community that has been around longer, and enjoys greater support in terms of sponsorship and tournament opportunities, than the North
American-based Halo 3 gaming community I worked with. Their methodological approach, however, seems to limit the extent to which they can offer a rigorous
17 What the authors mean by "play styles" is undefined, but presumably, it refers to team strategies and the distribution of in-game roles and skills. 50 account of competitive play. Their deployment of cognitive ethnography arguably flattens ethnographic accounts to a series of textual exchanges between disembodied actors (Taylor, 2008), and offers little room for analyzing how players 'perform', and not simply talk about, competitive gaming. There is little discussion of who these players are, what kinds of embodied subjectivities they bring to the game, or how they negotiate the professionalization of their play.
More importantly, the authors offer little rationale for why a "player- centered" approach to studying competitive play is needed, suggesting only that such a perspective can balance out an over-reliance in games studies on formalized analyses - as if researchers must choose sides between studying games and the people who play them. Working from this dichotomy, as this article does, arguably precludes any nuanced analyses of the choreography between gamers, on-screen action, and the physical/material contexts of play,
Instead, it depicts competitive gaming as a set of practices in which the array of material and immaterial technologies involved have no say in how and under what conditions play becomes professionalized.
Whereas Ramusch, Jakobsson, and Pargman discuss Counterstrike play at WCG through a qualitatively-driven, player-centered approach, Brett Hutchins'
(2008) exploration of WCG is a largely theoretical attempt to address the new configuration of gaming, media and sport that 'e-Sports' entails. For Hutchins,
WCG represents "sport as media" (p. 851), and as such, requires a new "syntax" 51 capable of accounting for the ways competitive digital play is both like and unlike
"traditional" sports (p. 862). He sees the term 'e-Sports' as demarcating an emergent "sociological unit" that is both sport and media practice (p. 862).
Hutchins' argument is problematic for one primary reason: by framing the
"newness" of e-Sports as a conceptual problem for which we have no "syntax",
Hutchins removes from critical examination the role of marketers and competitive gaming leagues in playing up, if not actively manufacturing similarities between competitive gaming and mainstream professional sports. In labeling e-Sports as a "sociological unit", and not as part of a discursive process involving competitive gaming organizations, players, and sports media institutions, Hutchins renders static a globalized network of gamers, organizers, sponsors, and so on, who are actively participating in the often unsuccessful processes through which competitive gaming is produced and commodified as spectator sport.
As these studies of competitive play make apparent, there is a pressing need for accounts of competitive gaming which open up to analysis, rather than take for granted, the corporatized attempts to sell gaming as sport. Neither
Rambusch, Jakobsson and Pargman nor Hutchins take up, in any meaningful way, the embodied work of players as they perform, rehearse and negotiate 'pro' gaming. By documenting how players engage with one another, event organizers, and the immaterial and material technological infrastructures of competitive Halo 3 tournaments, my study is better positioned to explore the 52 gendered and highly technologized terrain of pro-gaming. In doing so, it looks at the professionalization of play neither from a limiting, exclusively "player- centered" perspective, nor as a fixed and determinate unit of analysis, but as a tumultuous and volatile process in which concatenations of human and technological agencies are in play.
MMOG Studies
In recent years, massively multiplayer online games (MMOG's) have attracted the overwhelming share of attention from sociologists and ethnographers of digital play18 - as if the rise and explosion in popularity of networked play in 3D fantasy worlds marks the emergence of gaming as a 'social' (and sociologically relevant) phenomenon. These digitally-mediated, networked spaces are regarded as sites where players explore new social collectives (Boudreau, 2005;
Duchenaut et al, 2006; Jakobsson & Taylor, 2003; Williams et al., 2006), participate in vibrant learning communities (Steinkuehler, 2004, 2006, 2007,
2008; Ducheneaut & Moore, 2005; Galarneau, 2005), and negotiate new forms of trade and profit-making (Dibbell, 2006; Castronova, 2005; Molesworth & Denegri-
Knott, 2005; Taylor, Jenson & de Castell, 2005; Thomas, 2005). In this section, I take up some of this MMOG-related scholarship in order to describe some of the
18 This is not to say that ALL ethnographic and sociological work within games studies is dedicated to MMOG play: a notable exception is a handful of educationally-focused ethnographic studies of children's play (Walkerdine, 2007; Jenson, de Castell and Fisher, 2007; Carr, 2006, 2007; Taylor, 2007b), which I will take up in proceeding sections of this literature review. 53 conceptual issues that arise in their accounts of social play - specifically, a mode of conducting and reporting on games-related research that elides the material and embodied contexts in which game players (and researchers) are situated.
MMOG studies are generally concerned with exploring how a perceived divide between online play and offline life is rendered increasingly obsolete. Mia
Consalvo writes about games "spilling over" into our everyday realities
(Consalvo, 2005, p. 11). Constance Steinkuehler talks about the increasingly
"porous" boundaries separating online and offline experiences (Steinkuehler,
2008, p. 621). Edward Castronova describes how patterns of behaviour generated online are never "completely contained" within the game (Castronova,
2005, p. 101). Seepage, porosity, spillage: these metaphors position MMOG's as discrete spaces that are only now beginning to extend into our 'real' lives, as if these games are not already situated in, and affected by, the contexts of their play and the embodied identities of players. By re-situating these works within a history of ethnography, the critique I offer here points to more nuanced ways of theorizing, in terms of my own study, the connections between gender, embodiment, digital play and agency (including my own agency as participant, videographer and researcher within the community I studied).
'IVI or F? Reading Gender in Online Play
Nick Yee is one of the most influential scholars in MMOG studies, and his work 54 represents an attempt to generate a comprehensive and understanding of the motivations, demographics, and experiences of MMOG players. The concerns he takes up, as well as his methodological orientation towards large-scale accounts of life 'inside' MMOG's, have significantly informed several subsequent sociological studies of MMOG play (for instance, Ducheneaut et. al., 2006;
Williams et. al., 2006). In "The Demographics, Motivations and Derived
Experiences of Users of Massively Multiuser Graphical Environments", Nick Yee
(2006) charts the behaviours and play preferences of MMOG players across four games: Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age ofCamelot, and Star Wars:
Galaxies. Yee builds on Richard Bartle's (1996) model of player "types" developed to illuminate interactions in text-based Multi-user Dungeons (MUDs); in doing so, Yee claims, his work provides a framework for differentiating players based on their demographics as well as their stated reasons for playing (Yee,
2006, p. 10). Yee argues that his quantitative survey-based approach affords greater empirical rigor than Bartle's anecdotally-derived framework (p. 11).19 He does not, however, explore the limitations in applying Bartle's typology, intended for an exclusively text-based media, to the richly three-dimensional worlds of
19 In "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players who Suit MUD's", Richard Bartle (1996) argues that MUDs are populated by four basic 'types' of players, plotted along two axes: acting/interacting and players/world. In Bartle's taxonomy, "Killers" are concerned mostly with seeking out confrontation with other players; "Achievers" are interested in winning the game; "Explorers" try to discover all of the virtual environment's secrets and details; and "Socializers" are primarily interested in cultivating relationships with other players (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm). 55 digital games. Instead, Yee suggests that MMOG's are simply MUD's "on a grand scale" (p. 12). The implication here is that the intensely choreographed dungeon raids by high-level players in World of Warcraft, for example, or the frenetic chaos of team-based player-versus-player combat in Guild Wars, can be understood as a series of textual interactions among players. This precludes any more nuanced understandings of the multi-modal complexity of communication in
MMOG's, or in digital games in general, where in-game text is often used alongside of (if not wholly displaced by) vocal communication via headsets or microphones, graphical displays, and auditory feedback.
Yee bases his findings on responses to surveys that he posted on MMOG- related websites and discussion forms, answered by a self-selected pool of participants. This survey is comprised mostly of multiple-choice questions around players' in-game behaviors and 'real life' demographics (age, marital status, gender, and profession - race is not included). From this data, Yee arrives at several conclusions for who plays MMOG's, and why: participants ranged from
11 to 69, from students to "homemakers", representing a demographic diversity that he says highlights "the wide appeal of these environments" (pp. 17-18) - though the majority of Yee's respondents appear to be males between 18 and
35. While most play for 10-20 hours a week, Yee's data reveals that a significant number of both males and females play between 30 and 50 hours a week (p. 19). 56
Participants in Yee's survey are asked to choose between a series of three options regarding their experiences around MMOG play: one question, for instance, asks to what extent ("not at all", "a little", "a lot") game play has helped foster "real life" social skills (pp. 48-52). Such questions arguably collapse a host of messy and complex considerations: skill level, access to the requisite hardware/software as well as the long periods of leisure time required of committed players, and whether and under what conditions players from different racial, gendered, or socio-economic backgrounds see it as desirable, or even safe, to 'out' themselves as a gamer - as well as what they conceive of as 'real life' social skills. This tendency towards flattened accounts of the socio-cultural complexity of online play is perhaps most problematic when Yee reports that women play differently and for different reasons than men. Claiming that because of his study "we now know a great deal about female players in MMORPGs", Yee asserts "female players are more likely to use the MMORPG environment to build supportive social networks, escape from real-life stress and be immersed in a fantasy world" (p. 36). Yee claims that this finding contradicts a body of research, such as Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins' (1998) edited volume, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, which (in his words) holds that "generalizable differences do not exist with regards to computer gaming preferences" (p. 24). According to
Yee's study, MMOG's most certainly do provide evidence of broader sex-based 57 differences, as he concludes "female players prefer to relate to other players, while male players prefer to work together to achieve goals" (p. 24).
Missing from this discussion is a more accurate description of the arguments around gender and play that Yee portrays as undermined by his research. In their chapter in From Barbie to Mortal Kombat, for instance,
Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson (1998) are less concerned with whether generalized differences "exist", than with showing how claims about gender as a static set of differences and dispositions have historically and continue to position women and girls as marginal and less competent users of digital technologies
(de Castell & Bryson, 1998, p. 237). Yee also ignores the significant body of research that has emerged around the topic of gender and gaming in the years since From Barbie to Mortal Kombat was published, research that consistently illustrates how gendered play is affected by where play happens, with whom, and with what tools (both gaming technologies and particular games).20
Ignoring the ways gender asymmetries work across gaming landscapes,
Yee's conclusions about gender and gaming arguably re-inscribe tired notions of why women play - a discursive move which de Castell and Bryson (1998) argue essentializes women's desires, packaging them in "pink boxes" (p. 252). Such a positivist stance on gendered gaming preferences not only neglects much of the ethnographic work on gender and gaming over the last decade, but it ignores the
20 In the proceeding section of this literature review I take up this research in greater detail. 58 work of post-structural gender theorists (such as Raewyn Connell, 2002; 2005, and Judith Butler, 1993; 1999) whose insights into gender as a contingent set of power relations form the conceptual framework for many of these recent studies of gendered play. Seen in this light, these findings might not so much report on gender differences as actively participate in their reconstruction, in ways that naturalize male privilege with regard to games: men, naturally, are more concerned with winning, women with making nice and meeting friends.
In his more recent work (Yee, 2008), Yee updates his findings to reflect more recent insights into gender and gaming, offering, for instance, that "social contexts" constrain players' "access to games, how they were introduced to the game, and whom they play with" (Yee, 2008, p. 84). What remains, however, is the problematic notion that it is possible to infer something as intractable and slippery as 'real world' identity from such singular and superficial metrics as the survey Yee deploys. While his recent work recognizes the complexities involved in asking 'who plays and why', the tools he uses to report on gender and play still enact a simplistic model of the relationship between in-game activities and 'real world' identities.
Repositioning 'Fieldwork' in MMOG Studies
Like Nick Yee, Constance Steinkuehler's work around MMOG's constitutes some of the most visible and oft-cited research on 'virtual' gaming communities. 59
Steinkuehler has written extensively about the South Korean-based MMOG's
Lineage and Lineage 2 (2004, 2006), and more recently, World of Warcraft
(2008). She portrays these games as richly educational spaces where players
"enculturate" each other "through scaffolded and supported interactions" in the shared space of the game (Steinkuehler, 2004, p. 525). Learning the ins and outs of the game world and the normative rules of player communities is a social accomplishment, one realized through "naturally occurring" learning mechanisms in which new(b) players are mentored by more experienced ones (Steinkuehler
2004, p. 522). According to Steinkuehler, this makes the learning practices of
MMOG player communities markedly different from the "culture of schooling" which, she claims, adheres to "skill and drill", transmission-based pedagogical practices that are increasingly irrelevant to today's networked, tech-savvy youth
(Steinkuehler, 2004, p. 522; 2008, p. 612)21
To explore the shared meaning-making practices of MMOG players,
Steinkuehler employs cognitive ethnography, in a similar way and for similar purposes as in Rambusch, Jakobsson and Pargman's analysis of interviews with competive gamers (Rambusch, Jakbosson, & Pargman, 2007; see the first section of this literature review). Cognitive ethnography, Steinkuehler states, involves traditional forms of ethnographic data collection (participant observation,
21 In none of her works does Steinkuehler offer a ground-level exploration of classroom practices, instead limiting her critique to federal education policy in the United States. This is akin to making claims about the practices of MMOG communities based on the game's instruction manual. 60 field notes, and interviews), as well as focused analyses of subjects' linguistic interactions. The latter are crucial to understanding how participants "construe the world in particular ways and not others" (Steinkuehler, 2008, p. 626). The mode of linguistic micro-analysis that Steinkuehler demonstrates in her article
"Massively Multiplayer Online Video Gaming as Participation in a Discourse"
(2006) involves unpacking elements of subjects' language use, such as word choice, syntax, and "thematic organization" (p. 42) - linguistic cues which, she explains, can only be read by those who already have "considerable background knowledge" of the game "acquired only through having actually played" (p. 44).
For Steinkuehler, cognitive ethnography is less a means for generating an understanding of a particular gaming community's practices and values, than it is for theorizing how players accomplish and perform participation in that community through linguistic communication. Her approach has produced accounts of online play in which micro-analyses of players' textual utterances, de-contextualized from any sustained exploration into players' 'real life' identities
(including her own), become vehicles for her claims about the educative value of online play.
In one of her field stories, Steinkuehler describes how a fellow Lineage player comes to her aid and helps her character, JellyBean, search for the valuable ore 'mithril' in a dungeon in the Lineage world. Framing the story as a
"thick description" of in-game practices, she tells of how Myrondonia, the more 61 knowledgeable character, instructs Jellybean in how and why to avoid both undesirable enemies as well as other players pursuing the same resources (p.
526). Myrondonia's mentorship, according to Steinkuehler, not only involves modeling successful play, but also educating the newer player in the community- shared "values" around farming for particular resources: in this case, when another farming character approaches, give them a wide berth so that neither poaches the other's spoils (p. 526). Steinkuehler contends there are two lessons here: instruction in the social practice around farming mithril, as well as in "the kind of person/elf' Myrondonia wants her to be (p. 527). Echoing James Gee's
(2003) analysis of game-based education, Steinkuehler concludes from this portrayal that MMOG's offer forms of socially-distributed, apprenticeship-oriented learning which leave traditional formal education far behind.
Missing from this field story, however, is an exploration of the significance of this interaction for the players involved, including Steinkuehler herself. As
Clifford Geertz's initial formulation of "thick descriptions" suggests, part of conducting ethnographic studies involves working outward from observed phenomena to the "webs of significance" in which both researcher and participant are implicated - including the ethnographer's own research and writing practices
(Geertz, 1973, p. 5). For instance, I am left to wonder what happened to
JellyBean and Myrondonia after their meeting: did Myrondonia ever ask for help in return? Was this part of a more sustained mentor/student relationship between 62 the two players? Or did they never talk again? There is also little discussion of
Steinkuehler's own role in generating this story, which she holds up as illustrative of the kinds of informal learning systems she claims are widespread within
MMOG communities. It is as if her dual positioning as both player and educational researcher is merely incidental to this story in which a more experienced character patiently schools a less experienced one.
In focusing almost exclusively on the actions and utterances of players' characters, both Yee's and Steinkuehler's modes of inquiry hide from view not only the embodied experiences and identities of players (and researchers), but the technological infrastructure supporting their play. It is as if the mass of mice, keyboards, monitors, cables, routers, servers, and personal computers that enable 'virtual' worlds somehow does not matter in our understandings of digitally-mediated play. The lesson seems to be that what counts sociologically is what the technology shows us, a viewpoint which Giddings (2007), Giddings and
Kennedy (2008), Latour (1987, 1992, 2005), Haraway (1988, 1991), and Stone
(1991), among others, thoroughly debunk in their analyses of the agency exerted by (digital) technologies in shaping how we work, play and communicate. As with
Ramusch, Jakobsson and Pargman's (2007) "player-centered" approach to competitive play, it is surprising to find that sociological and ethnographic studies organized around the digitally-mediated experiences made possible by a globalized technological infrastructure pay such scant attention to the particular 63 configurations, affordances and constraints of the material and virtual technologies with which players (and researchers) interact.
Ethnographic Studies of Gender and Gaming
Bart Simon (2007b) points out that although MMOG's provide a particularly salient or obvious case of social gaming, digital games are always "social" insofar as they always involve multiple participants - whether configured as other humans (either real or imagined) non-human agents like the game's Al, controllers, and software, or a broader culture of players, designers, producers, critics, and scholars with whom a particular game affords a shared experience.
Simon explores of the social "contextures" of Everquest play - for instance, the domestic dynamics of a married couple that play the MMOG in the same physical space, but with two different sets of virtual peer groups (Simon, 2007b, n.p.). His analysis makes clear that such considerations are as central to ethnographic understandings of digital gaming as interactions among avatars in a virtual space, the primary (if not exclusive) focus of the MMOG studies I discuss above.
In this section, I turn to ethnographies of digital play that focus on embodied, rather than virtual forms of sociality, looking in particular at studies that make gender an explicit focus in mapping interactions between technologies, games and participants. This section highlights ways of studying digital play that sidestep the methodological and conceptual pitfalls of the MMOG scholarship I 64 examined. The works I look at here include educationally-focused ethnographies of gender and gameplay; contrary to Steinkuehler's "cognitive ethnography" which depicts game-based sociality to be a primarily text-based accomplishment, these studies show how the acquisition of competency around a particular game and within particular contexts is not only a social achievement, but always an embodied one as well. This forms a central insight around the performance of digital play that I deploy in my gender analyses of competitive Halo 3 play.
Suzanne de Castell and Mary Bryson's (1998) research into the gendering of digital play actively resists the discursive construction of gender as an inherent and 'natural' set of dispositions and attitudes (as in Yee's earlier work). This discourse, the authors claim, serves as a rationale for pathologizing certain behaviours and performances that fall outside of normalized gender expectations
(de Castell & Bryson, 1998, p. 242). The authors claim that designing games for girls as a means of redressing gender inequities in game play delimits 'what girls want' and what they are allowed to be good at within a hetero-normative gender hierarchy (de Castell & Bryson, 1998, p. 234). The authors outline their own small-scale, school-based interventionist research project that sought to build up female participants' technological competence to "atypical levels" through collaborative skills-building between novice and expert female users (p. 240).
They describe how the project often elicited negative responses from both students and teachers for the ways it inverted girls' typically disadvantaged 65 status in relation to digital tools - disrupting "business as usual" in the ongoing masculinization of digital technologies, (p. 240).
Building upon this theoretical work, and operating in a similar methodological vein, Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell and Stephanie Fisher
(2007) describe a school-based research project ("Education, Gender and
Gaming", or EGG) in which girls who had only marginal access to gaming technologies in their homes participated in a gaming club, building game-playing competencies in a space (ostensibly) free from interruption and disruption (by male students). Over the course of the three-year study, many of the characteristics normally attributed to girls' gaming 'preferences' - such as the notion that they are more likely than boys to suffer nausea from playing 3D games (Graner-Ray, 2004) - disappeared, as female participants became as skilled and well-versed in gaming as their male counterparts. This suggests that what researchers have commonly thought of as differences in game play stemming from innate differences between females and males may be more a function of novice vs. expert status, and are contingent upon inequitable access to and entitlement towards digital games, not physiology or externally-derived sex roles (Jenson & de Castell, 2008).
While not educationally-focused like studies carried out by Jenson and de
Castell (2006, 2008) and Diane Carr (2006, 2007), Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter
(2003, 2005) similarly resist notions of gender as static and immutable sex-based 66 differences in their ethnographic analyses of children's play. Rather than a
"politically neutral set of categories," Bryce and Rutter approach gender as sets of "power asymmetries, exclusions, and constraints" enacted across the social landscapes of gaming (2005, p. 303). In "Gendered Gaming in Gendered Space"
(2005) Bryce and Rutter look to actual physical environments in which video games are played, challenging, as T.L. Taylor does (2006a, 2006b), the invisibility of female gamers in research and reporting around digital play. The authors argue that locating investigations of gender and gaming in the spaces
(bedrooms, arcades, living rooms) in which play is performed helps move research in this area "beyond textual exigesis and places gaming within a real world context in which gaming practices are negotiated in real time and space"
(2005, p. 304).
Valerie Walkerdine's (2007) study of children's play, Children, Gender,
Video Games: Towards a Relational Approach to Multimedia, provides one of the more exhaustive ethnographic explorations of gendered gaming. Informed by
Bruno Latour's (2005) call for sociologists to look more closely at the complex and ever-shifting associations made between human and non-human actors,
Walkerdine claims to offer an account of gender and game play that moves beyond individuated subjects, and looks at the relationship between gaming consoles, games, and bodies. Walkerdine's aim is to illustrate how games are configured in the lives of her participants as means of fulfilling particularly 67 masculinist fantasies around agency and control.
Though she develops a nuanced theoretical and methodological framework for carrying out explorations into gendered play, Walkerdine's analysis operates by a mode of reporting similar to the those I critiqued in my look at MMOG scholarship: a disembodied observer recording game-related utterances between players, with the on-screen action in the game, the physical space in which the players' sit, and the players' embodied gestures relegated to secondary importance. As in Steinkuehler's cognitive ethnography of Lineage characters, what results is a privileging of textual/linguistic exchanges between individuals in which the complex relationality between and among gaming technologies, participants and the researchers themselves forms the background for linguistic exchanges between participants (and, infrequently, between participants and researchers). In one instance, Walkerdine unpacks what she sees as the struggle for dominance and mastery between two female players: though she says the girls' exchanges "appear to be friendly" on video, "in reality" the textual transcript of their interaction reveals an unsettling power dynamic as one girl seeks to undermine the other's confidence (p. 59). One might just as easily come to the opposite conclusion, if one were able to watch the video: perhaps the girls' amiable gestures and giggling 'reveals' a camaraderie beneath their apparently antagonistic speech. Similarly, one might be able to see how the game itself invites and urges a kind of friendly competition between the two girls, as 68 characterized by both their gestures AND speech, as opposed to one communicative mode displacing the other.
Equally problematic in Walkerdine's account is her willingness to generalize on both the causes and effects of children's gendered play. She applies her insights around a small group of young participants playing two particular genres of game ('racing' and 'action/adventure') to all games and all children, ignoring
Latour's insistence that technologies are agential "mediators" in the formation of social relations as opposed to passive, interchangeable objects. Walkerdine also portrays gender problematically, as a dichotomous struggle between masculinity and femininity: there is not room in her account for multiple masculinities and multiple femininities (Connell, 2002, 2005) but rather for a monolithic masculinity and femininity which are then used as categories in which to order participants' preferences and experiences along predictable (and arguably, pre-determined) lines.
The studies of gendered game play offered by de Castell, Bryson, Jenson,
Carr, and Bryce and Rutter highlight the need to understand identity as contingent and tenuous, performed differently by subjects working and playing
(and researching) in determinate contexts. For my own study, I map the "gaming landscapes" (Bryce & Rutter, 2005) of competitive Halo 3 play, moving away from conceptualizations of gender either as insoluble, sex-based difference as with Yee's earlier work, or as monolithic and largely static categories as in 69
Walkerdine's analyses. Instead, following more extensively eludicated, socio- cultural analyses of gendered play, my work reads gender as "assemblages"
(Latour, 2005) of inequities and privileges, connected with access to, competence with and enjoyment of digital games, that participants 'perform' at certain times, in certain places, and with (or to) certain people.
The Wide World of Sports Sociology
The competitive gaming industry has emerged at a time when women have achieved greater participation, and visibility, in professional and/or televised sporting events (Grindstaff & West, 2006; McDonagh & Pappano, 2008;
Messner, 2002; Wachs, 2005; Wenner, 1998). While they remain largely 'second class athletes', the recent high-profile successes of the Olympic U.S. women's soccer team and the Canadian women's hockey team, and ongoing popularity of the WNBA (Women's National Basketball Association) LPGA (Ladies
Professional Golf Association) and WTA (Women's Tennis Association) represent significant inroads, both economically and socio-culturally, to a traditionally male-dominated domain. It is therefore significant to see e-Sports events, which (as I outline in Chapter 2) invest so much in looking and 'acting' like professional sports spectacles, making no deliberate attempt to recruit greater numbers of female players into their ranks. Boys and men are by far the 70 biggest winners thus far in the professionalization of play 22
In this next section, I review research on the sports in order to more fully flesh out the discourses that are enacted and transformed in the e-Sports industry's attempts to establish pro gaming as legitimate and mass market, professional spectator sport. My exploration of sports-related research focuses on two areas. I begin by expanding on Messner's (2007) and Brackenbridge's
(2002) accounts of the history of professional sports in the twentieth century
(covered in my introduction), detailing the growth of the sports media industry in recent decades as it adapts to new technological conditions and pursues new markets for the televised consumption of 'alternative' and recreational sports. I then focus on ethnographic studies that, similar to my own, focus on communities and individuals involved in activities conventionally associated, like gaming, with recreation and leisure. These ethnographies analyze the gender performativity of female and male participants, providing valuable insights into how gender discourses are mapped onto, and performed by, participants' bodies.
Selling Sports
In the introduction to his edited volume, MediaSport, Lawrence Wenner (1998) lays out the work's central concept: "mediasport" refers to "the cultural fusing of sport with communication" forming a "global communication, entertainment, and
22 Not one of the 63 bronze, silver, or gold medals offered at the 2008 World Cyber Games tournament in Cologne, Germany, for example, was awarded to a woman. 71 leisure complex" wherein sports athletes, teams, events at merchandise are marketed for consumption by fans and spectators (Wenner, 1998, p. 13). While the term is too generalized to be of any direct application to my exploration of competitive gaming and attempts to market it as sport, it lays out a field of study for the critical examination of the relationship between media and sports industries (Hutchins, 2008; Mahan & McDaniel, 2006; Real, 2006).
David Whitson (1998), in an article in Wenner's volume entitled "Circuits of
Promotion: Media, Marketing and the Globalization of Sport", describes the roles television and televised sports events played in the rapid growth of the professional sports industry from the 1960's onward. Whitson suggests that the emergence of nationalized, if not globalized markets for televised sports enabled and was in turn fueled by an intensified commodification of teams as well as individual athletes. Using the example of Michael Jordan's endorsements for
Nike, Whitson describes the "circuits of promotion" linking popular teams/athletes to their sport, their league, and an array of products they helped advertise and endorse (p. 67). As such, Whitson argues foresees a continued global spread of a pattern of "intensive commodification" around sports (and athletes) that the
NFL and NBA established in the 1990's, enabled through and fuelled by advertising revenues and television contracts.
Like Whitson, Robert Rinehart (1998) is concerned with documenting the strategies involved in producing televised sports events for a mass audience. 72
Whereas Whitson focuses on mainstream sports institutions that had been around well before the advent of network television, however, Rinehart looks at
'extreme' sports (a label popularized by ESPN and other media outlets) that became popular during the 1990's. His work provides a glimpse into the commodification of activities which, like competitive gaming, have conventionally been associated with youth subcultures and not traditionally considered sports: skateboarding, inline skating, BMX biking, as well as street luge and bungee jumping. In his 1998 article, "Inside of the Outside: Pecking Orders Within
Alternative Sports at ESPN's 1995 "The extreme Games"", Rinehart uses
ESPN's 1995 broadcast of its inaugural extreme Games event to examine the strategies employed by network commentators and producers to sell these activities to mainstream audiences of sports spectators. This involved framing and referring to the participants as "hardcore professionals" who devoted countless hours of training to perfecting their skills, and emphasizing the competitive dimensions of each activity, while downplaying any aesthetic or creative dimensions (Rinehart, 1998, p. 407). At the same time, Rinehart notes how the broadcast describes athletes as 'regular folks' who are passionate about their sport, and not in it for money - a message which he sees as deliberately contradictory, presenting the sport as at once elite and accessible, professional and participatory (Rinehart, 2004, p. 316). Rinehart returns to these themes in his
2004 work, "Sport as Constructed Audience: A Case Study of ESPN's "The 73 extreme Games"", arguing that these strategies directly appropriate the cliches and imagery of mainstream sports broadcasts and in doing so, serve to make accessible to a broader audience these 'alternative' activities (Rinehart, 2004, p.
318).
Whitson and Rinehart illustrate the kinds of strategies, particularly around the management and presentation of players, that Major League Gaming and, to a lesser extent, the World Cyber Games, employ in ongoing attempts to forge a
North American mass market for televised competitive gaming. MLG follows the lead of the NFL and NBA in cultivating "circuits of promotion" targeted at a young, male, and mostly white audience. In Chapter 5: "Think of How Many People are
Watching This", I leverage these insights in my analysis of the commodification of elite competitive gamers, referred to as 'cyber athletes'.
Sports Ethnographies
The literature on the sports media industry that I outline above explores the organizational structures and production strategies emulated by MLG and the
WCG. In this sub-section, I examine focused ethnographies of women and men engaged in competitive leisure pursuits. These works analyze how participants negotiate gendered meanings around their activity, and how their embodied performances regulate who belongs and what counts as legitimate participation.
While the activities explored in these ethnographies differ greatly (surfing, 74 cheerleading, collegiate sports), they share a concern with how participants negotiate a discourse that links their activities to mainstream, organized sports and its attendant gender inequities. This will help me begin to theorize the
"gender effects" (Butler, 1999) working on and through players' embodied actions in competitive gaming tournaments like WCG and MLG, where the appropriation of professional sports rituals, imagery and competition structures are ever- present in the organizational, physical and semiotic structuring of events.
Timothy Curry's (2002) article, "Fraternal Bonding in a Locker Room" (originally published in 1991), explores the sociality of a collegiate locker room through analyzing "talk fragments" from players and coaches involved in a "contact sports program at a large Midwestern university" in the United States (p. 171). Using grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1990) to code interviews with and observations of players, Curry discusses "talk fragments" that highlight what he identifies as the key themes in players' speech: competition and status, and sexualization/objectification. He pays particular attention to how players employ misogyny and homophobia in the locker room to shore up players' own heterosexual masculinity. While this discourse might be dismissed as
"ephemeral" and having little play outside the locker room, Curry asserts that participation in such a culture eventually "desensitizes athletes to women's and gay rights" and preserves male participants' sense of superiority within a heteronormative gender hierarchy (p. 184). Curry's article is an early attempt 75 within the field of sports sociology to theorize the relationship between sports and male privilege through an ethnographic study of men's interactions in a sports- related context. His work offers some similarities to the small-scale events like the NerdCorps LANs I attended: spaces materially and discursively set apart from 'everyday life', in which male relations are enacted and solidified through spoken forms of homophobia and misogyny that might certainly be unacceptable
'outside'. I take up Curry's sketch of 'locker room discourse' in Chapter 7: "A
Silent Team is a Dead Team", in my exploration of players' 'extrinsic' speech acts.
Like Curry's ethnography of a collegiate locker room, Gordon Waitt's (2008) study of Australian surfers takes up concerns around the performance and regulation of aggressive heterosexual masculinities amongst a community of
(mostly) male athletes. In '"Killing Waves': Surfing, Space and Gender", spatial considerations are central to Waitt's analysis, as he explores not only how, but where gender is performed in relation to the localized environment of Australian surfing spots. Waitt argues that "different breaks [surf sites] offer different ways in which gender norms can be challenged, reworked and reshaped" (p. 77). For instance, for a particular group of young, white, straight and male Australians in his study, mastery of a dangerous break is crucial to how they articulate and embody a particular masculinity; they refer to male beach-goers attending other parts of the beach (swimmers, body-boarders) as "wankers" and "gay" in contrast 76
(p. 86). Waitt's ethnography portrays a leisure space aggressively colonized by male bodies, illustrating how certain heteronormative masculinities can be enacted through the domination of spaces linked symbolically with male superiority. This insight into the relationship between space and gendered bodies has parallels in Thome's ethnography of schoolyard play (1998) and my own earlier exploration of a gendered video gaming club in an elementary school
(Taylor, 2007). Recognizing what Waitt refers to as the "spatial imperative of subjectivities" (p. 78) enables me to make sense of how different participants in my study physically position themselves in relation to other participants, technologies, organizers, and myself. I make particular use of this notion in
Chapter 7 and Chapter 8, both of which read players' negotiations of the confined spaces of LANs as central to how participants perform gendered identities.
The final ethnography of sports/leisure communities I turn to here is Laura
Grindstaff and Emily West's (2006) "Cheerleading and the Gendered Politics of
Sport", which reports on an ethnographic study of collegiate cheerleading squads in northern California. The authors describe cheerleading as an activity in which male and female participants both "do" and "undo" hetero-normative gender discourses, particularly as they attempt to legitimate their pastime as "sport" (pp.
501-502). What becomes clear in their depiction is the extent to which cheerleading attains greater legitimacy as sport, in the eyes of governing bodies
(like the NCAA), the media, schools, and participants themselves, the more it 77 moves from "cheering" for (and in the service of) a (male) sports team, to an athletic display in its own right - a shift which, not coincidental^, is both driven by and attracts greater numbers of male participants. Participants (especially, though not exclusively, the male interviewees in the study) applaud the transformation of cheerleading from a supportive, "showy" activity to a competitive activity emphasizing athletic prowess. As the authors note, this discursively links female-dominated squads to a less legitimate form of cheerleading. Though the authors maintain that cheerleading is a site where normative gender boundaries "are crossed as well as preserved" (p. 515), their interviews and observations illustrate how male cheerleaders enact what they call a "compensatory hypermasculinity", legitimating their participation in a traditionally feminized activity by explicitly asserting their heterosexuality and comparing themselves to athletes in more established, and traditionally male- dominated sports such as football (p. 511).
Though cheerleading and competitive gaming are drastically different - one, a traditionally feminized pastime that nonetheless demands a degree of athleticism, the other a male-dominated practice that requires little in the way of physical ability - participants in both seek to legitimate their activities as sport. In both cases, attempts at legitimation are made through recourse to what
Grindstaff and West call a "compensatory hypermasculinity" (p. 511), as male participants position their activity as a more competitive, demanding, and 78 masculinized version of a pastime not commonly construed as sport.
These ethnographies collectively examine how women and men engaged in competitive recreational pursuits negotiate gendered meanings pertaining to their activity. Curry explores the role of speech in maintaining a locker room culture based on misogyny and homophobia; Waitt looks to how male surfers aggressively colonize more dangerous surfing spots, instantiating a relationship between masculine identity and the occupation of space; (Waitt, 86); and
Grindstaff and West examine the ways cheerleading becomes both more legitimate and safer for heterosexual male participation, the more it moves towards athletic 'sport'. Together, they show how leisure activities work as
"contested terrains" (Messner, 1988) in which gender discourses are constantly
(re)produced, challenged and transformed through the embodied work of actors, and they support my observations around how competitive gamers participate in a discourse that links (male) gamers' bodies to professional spectator sport.
Conclusion
The professionalization of digital play that I explore in subsequent chapters operates, at least partially, through a discursive connection between two traditionally masculinized and male-dominated domains: digital gaming, particularly in public places, and mainstream spectator sports. I have therefore 79 situated my work alongside ethnographic studies of digital gamers, as well as sociological and ethnographic research on sport.
The next chapter lays out in detail the methodological orientation to my ethnographic work with a community of competitive gamers, and in doing so, builds on some of the critiques put forward in this chapter with regard to the ways ethnographies of digital gaming have been carried out thus far. In particular, the next chapter invokes a tradition of feminist ethnography which lays out the conditions for carrying out ethnographic work on digital play(ers) which highlights, rather than flattens, the complexities of participants' 'real life' identities (including my own). It also outlines ways for illuminating and making visible the agential roles played by "non-human actors" (Latour, 2005) - material and immaterial technologies - in the competitive gaming community I worked with. 80
Chapter 4: Methodologies
My work with NerdCorps is informed by three research traditions: feminist ethnography, visual ethnography, and actor-network theory. In this chapter, I outline each in order to address how they have guided my exploration of a community of competitive gamers participating in the ongoing professionalization of Halo 3 play. I begin with a brief overview of my data collection and coding processes.
Data Collection and Coding
Data Collection
For my video ethnography, I employed audio-visual recording, alongside written accounts of my non-participant observation at each tournament, to generate textual and audio-visual data. I collected just over 50 hours of audio-visual data
(including 4 hours of video recorded interviews) that I edited into approximately
400 individual clips, between 30 seconds and 4 minutes in length.
Selection and Coding
Following a set of coding protocols developed and refined through my involvement in previous, large-scale ethnographic projects employing audio- 81 visual recording tools,231 edited and coded data through an iterative and inductive process similar to, but not strictly following, the methods laid out by grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). This involved generating and re-tooling categories of analytic codes through studying my audio-visual data, and then using movie-editing software to lift out, as individual clips, instances in the audio-visual record that either clearly represented or in some cases, problematized a category or set of codes. I then
'tagged' each clip with the codes that applied to it; this in turn enabled me to further refine and tweak my coding framework. I also transcribed short verbal comments and/or offered a brief description of what I read as the central and significant action in each clip (Figure 4.1, a screenshot of one of the spreadsheets I created for coding purposes, offers an example).
DATI
MLGSkmday Topel 14 £R starts next match - Slayer? Dude frcrr. other tear* gets 4y4 MiG Pcjturtt/gcsture during play: standing up (blenee guy at 0:08) no right away (after kSKrg «?) and ye) is 'ewnage!* Speech gestjres: yetlng (same rromem! (maybe?) - M then wracks seme duces dead bocy with Speech gestjres: taont (same moment) rocket launcher after loikng fur"! Came-based talk: "coce" Game-based tafc: repetition
KLGSjndsy .Tapei...l6 Ambush {farside besWe ER) vs Status Quo (near side vsj 4*4 MlG Spectators'*?: "coaching" ER); pro {Ambush) vs Serra pro (Status cuo); fan in crewe, Spectatcrship: dapping {0:10, 0:21, 1:32, 2:47) "let's go ar-:bush>* Garwrelated Cafe: motivation (part* coach at t:13. green ccaeh at 2:20) . Game-based talk: "code" Gac^-bascd UBc: repetition Spectahsrshfp: dose prexirrtty to player's) Spectatership: duster around 1 tv/atorg 2 row Posture/gesture during p4ay: screen pomt (2 :09) Speaatcrship: verbal interaction with players (motivation rt 2 AS) •^GSurday. Tape I 20 A/nbush beats Status Que: watch two of the Soys get up and 4v4 MlG Spectatorship: "coscNng' yett at other team, hard to tefl what they're saying; they SoectatorsJWp: dapping (Q:0i, 0:22) then go over 8> five,;shafce; (jo those Outbursts constitute Game-related talk: motivsben (green coach 0:93 —»-w play a?ter a wlf then'? Game-based tafc: "coce" Game-based tafcr repetition Spcciatorship: dose proximity to player's) Spectatershijj: duster around X tv/afong 1 row Game-based tafc: game objective ("2 more" 0:09. "1 more" 0:215 Coorsfrrsting »pe«ch: players (green coach 0:15) Post^e,'gesture during pfay: starting jp (3 green players right after win) Speed-: gestures: chcer Speech gestures: loud swearing (green player cm left 0:25) Specch gestures; taunt (green player on left) Nor-verbal Site faction among players: hug^ng (among green players, but also "heinz" to opponent at 1:00) Nor-verbai interaction among players: congratulatory Woo-verbal interaction among players: pourds/TK-es/shakes (between teams
Figure 4.1. Example of spreadsheet-based system for coding audio-visual data.
23 These are: Suzanne de Castell and Jennifer Jenson, "Charting Emerging Educational Discourses" (CEED, 2002-2004) and Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, "Education, Gender and Gaming" (EGG, 2004-2008). 82
It is important to note here that in editing, coding and analyzing my audio-visual record, I did not rigidly follow a grounded theory methodology, as outlined in
Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss' initial formulation (1967). In their approach, hypotheses are developed through iterative rounds of sampling and abstracting from data, a process that (in theory) remains uninformed by pre-determined theoretical frameworks. Rather, my coding process was significantly informed by my methodological commitments to post-structural feminist theory and actor- network theory - commitments that significantly shaped how I approached,
'read', and edited this video data. Unlike traditional grounded theory, therefore, I began my coding process with an explicit attention to the ways participants performed pro-gaming through their interactions with one another, organizers, myself, and the array of technological and material "agents" constituting a LAN
(Latour, 2005).
Tracing a network
This methodological concern is reflected throughout this dissertation, in how and when I report on the individual personalities and backgrounds of individual participants. I do so sparingly, partially because I want to let participants 'speak for themselves' through the video clips I link to (listed in Appendix E: Video
Clips). As well, in focusing more on the collective behavior of this community 83 rather than on the actions of individual participants, I want to emphasize the extent to which participants in this community are regulated - by themselves, other players, the technological apparatus of events, and a discourse around
'pro-gaming' - into certain forms of embodied action, speech, and play that remain relatively constant across different spatial and temporal locations. For this reason, while I do, in some instances, report on individual personalities in my study, I am more concerned with tracing a network of players, organizers, technologies and discourses, in which conditions for participation and play are highly-constrained.
With this overview of my data collection and coding practices in place, I now turn in the following sections to the methodologies I employed in carrying out my study.
Feminist Ethnography
The approach I characterize here as "feminist ethnography", and which significantly informs my work in terms of how I read interactions among participants as well as my own agency in the competitive Halo 3 community I was involved with, consists of several traditions. These include cyber-feminist studies, de-colonizing ethnography, institutional ethnography, and deconstructive ethnography. Each tradition challenges conventional sociology and anthropology for re-inscribing the inequitable flows of power and privilege through which 84 traditionally marginalized groups (women, LGBTQ, racial or ethnic minorities, citizens of colonized or previously colonized nations, First Nations/aboriginal populations) continue to be marginalized. In response to the damaging legacies of traditional social science, these approaches share two goals: to chart and challenge the ways privilege and inequity are re-produced through the embodied work of individuals and groups, and to devise ways of carrying out ethnographic research which seek to redress forms of privilege (re)enacted through conventional research practices. Before situating my study in relation to this shared tradition, I provide a more substantial explanation of their critique of normative social science - including approaches which are still very much in play in sociologies of digital gaming, as illustrated in my literature review (Chapter 3).
The God Trick
In "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective" (1988), Donna Haraway characterizes the social sciences as pre-occupied with objectivity and obsessed with producing tools (both technological and conceptual) that grant to the researcher a perspective that is at once removed and absolute, capable of seeing "everything from nowhere" (p.
581). Haraway calls this the methodological "god trick": a mode of knowledge production in which the researcher makes generalizable claims about her 85 subject(s) while simultaneously disguising, obscuring and making invisible her own positionality and agency within the research context (p. 581).
Kamala Visweswaran's (1994) work, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, extends Haraway's critique of normative and objective science. She applies the notion of the 'god trick' to her deconstruction of an ethnographic canon, in which ethnographic knowledge is defined as legitimate only to the extent the researcher remains "nonintrusive" and distanced (p. 39, p. 84). Anthropology and ethnography, Visweswaran claims, are historically rooted in practices in which the researcher ventures out to 'the field', most commonly to populations and locales configured as an exotic 'other'; there, she conducts her observations and fieldwork and returns back home, ready to produce and publish an account of what life is really like for that group. Visweswaran notes how fieldwork within this tradition is often framed in terms of conquest - the ethnographer's task is to overcome her informants' recalcitrance or reluctance to divulge information, at which point she will have rendered her 'subject' intelligible and knowable (p. 60).
Like Haraway's god trick, denoting modes of scientific inquiry in which the researcher and her tools remain both omniscopic and hidden, the practices
Visweswaran associates with normative ethnography build exploitative relationships between the researcher as knower and the subject as informant (or, for Visweswaran, "informer" - p. 60). Haraway and Visweswaran both see this mode of knowledge production enacting deeply problematic relations of privilege 86 and disenfranchisement between researcher and subject, relations that have historically been linked to, and continue to be produced through colonialism and patriarchy (p. 93).24
"Accountable Positioning"
The way out of the 'god trick', according to both authors, is through acknowledging, rather than trying to overcome, the positionality and limited vision of the researcher. This means recognizing that scientific 'facts' are only ever partial and contingent: as Visweswaran states, "it is not that facts disappear, but that their limits are exposed" (Visweswaran, p. 82). Haraway argues for research designs that acknowledge and work within commitments to particular communities, and that recognize the contingent power relations that bind the researcher to her participants. The aim is to produce accounts of the world that are verifiable and legitimate insofar as they are grounded within, and pertain to the experiences of localized communities. Articulating the researcher's positionality within institutional and social relations of power, as well as whatever motivations and intentions might be guiding her work, becomes a necessary pre- condition for ensuring she remains accountable for the knowledge she produces.
"Accountable positioning" (Haraway, 1988, p. 590) therefore demands that
24 If this critique seems overly polemic, consider the use of 'bots', automated, non-player- controlled characters, used in recent studies of World of Warcraft (Ducheneaut et al., 2006; Williams et al., 2006) to automatically, and without players' consent, collect data on their avatars' utterances, guild affiliation, and movement. For a more detailed critique of this 'god trick', see Taylor, 2008. 87 researchers see themselves, and the research tools they use, as constitutive elements in the research context. It asks that they make clear their relation to participants and the technologies that mediate these relationships, and not just what their participants say and do.
Visweswaran goes a little further in articulating what "accountable positioning" might demand of ethnographers in particular. In her articulation of a
"deconstructive" approach to ethnography, Visweswaran details the ethical and epistemological difficulties she faced in her fieldwork, an ethnographic study of women involved in India's struggle for independence. She describes the project as "an endeavour to be answerable for what I have learned to see, and for what I have learned to do" (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 48). In unpacking the colonial and positivist legacies at work in normative anthropological conceptions of ethnographic research, she repudiates notions of 'the field' as the privileged domain of the researcher, a site where knowledge is produced through the skilful manipulation of her subjects (pp. 101-103). Instead, Visweswaran argues for less
'fieldwork' and more 'homework' in ethnographic accounts - a notion (as I understand it) involves critically interrogating the power structures enacted in ethnographic research, and thereby chipping away at the historical divide between researcher and participant, academy and the field. She also employs the term 'homework' to describe how ethnographers themselves are schooled in particular institutionally-sanctioned research practices. This approach challenges 88 ethnographers to unlearn modes of producing and reporting on knowledge that disguise the researcher's own agency and the privileges leveraged in coordinating encounters with subjects.
Accountable Positioning at (Field)Work
One example of an attempt to establish an "accountable positioning" in ethnographies of youth and gender is C.J. Pascoe's (2007) study of masculinities in a southern California high school. Pascoe discusses her attempts to learn about the gendered hierarchies among students, while also negotiating them.
She describes how she deflected unwanted sexual advances by adopting a
"least-gendered identity" in her interactions with both males and females (p. 175).
This involved, she says, particular clothing styles and postures that enabled her to "maintain rapport" with participants while at the same time "enforcing a professional distance" (pp. 181, 175). Though Pascoe is able to remark that she not only reported on students' gender identities, but "became part of the very process through which they constructed these identities" (p. 176), she stops short of identifying the kinds of power she may have leveraged in achieving such a productive, not to mention safe, position with regard to her subjects. That is, not only is she able to self-identify as someone institutionally entitled to a
"professional distance", but she seems able to draw upon considerable socio- economic privilege in doing so (p. 182). As a result, a critical line of inquiry 89 perhaps missing in Pascoe's text is the extent to which her female participants do not have recourse to the same institutional and socio-economic resources that she draws from in resisting her male participants' sexual advances - meaning that the intersection of gender with socio-economic privilege, particularly as they apply to relations between women as well as between researcher and subjects
(Visweswaran, 1994, p. 92) goes largely unexplored.
Barrie Thome's (1997) study of children's schoolyard play offers a slightly different mode of accountable positioning, perhaps more in keeping with the deconstructive project Visweswaran lays out. Thorne confronts the tendency in previous school-focused studies to "study down", to position children as Western researchers have traditionally positioned Third World cultures (p. 12): as subjects who are somehow less competent, less fully human than their white/Western/adult counterparts (pp. 12-13). This assumption of superiority over the 'objects' of study marks an "unexamined point of privilege and blindness"
(Visweswaran, p. 104) that, in Thome's reckoning, prevents a more nuanced, intersubjective understanding of the ways children engage in complex gender and identity work. Thome's careful avoidance of a patronizing stance towards her participants involves resisting theoretical frameworks that position children as partially-formed adults - i.e. as passive recipients of 'socialization' and
'development'. Instead, she writes how she tried to approach the children she worked with as "competent social actors who take an active role in shaping their 90 daily experiences" (p. 12). In doing so, Thorne is actively unlearning commonly- received notions of how or why her participants behave in certain ways, carrying out the kind of 'homework' Visweswaran calls for around unlearning normative approaches to social science. As a result of an 'accountable positioning' to both her participant and her topic of study, Thorne is able to show how gender is not something that happens to children, but is a set of meanings and discourses they actively take up, transform, subvert, and play with.
Accountable Positioning in Play
These feminist ethnographies inform my work by providing a set of considerations for carrying out research that helps ensure that I remain accountable to those about whom I make claims about - the women and (mostly) men who participated in and organized the competitive Halo 3 tournaments I attended. An accountable positioning in the context of this study requires first and foremost that I attend to my own participation within a shifting and unsteady assemblage of organizers, participants, material technologies and digital texts, and the sites where 'professional' gaming is articulated through the arrangement of these various actors. This consideration is taken up in greater detail in the ensuing chapter, where I discuss how my positioning as 'videographer' shaped what and how I learned about competitive Halo 3 play. 91
Visual Ethnographies
In this sub-section, I take up a body of research that makes use of audio-visual tools to both record and analyze video data. I engage with this work in order to show how and why I employed audio-visual recording technologies in my study.
In particular, I address the potentials of "video ethnography" (Mohn, 2006) to move beyond the limitations of exclusively text-based ethnographies. This is particularly important in studying communities and practices that are themselves digitally-mediated, organized as Halo 3 competitive play is around a multiplicity and choreography of communicative modes. Video ethnography makes visible, and open to analysis, the following considerations: the highly kinetic auditory and visual dynamics of on-screen, networked action; posture and placement of participants' bodies in relation to one another, the game stations, and the overall material layout of the LAN; vocal and gestural communication among participants, and the focus of their gaze; and the location and position of the camera itself, which always brings into play my own shifting expectations about what counts as ethnographic knowledge in that setting.
Show and Tell
Shadowing the epistemic transformations brought about by digital technologies more generally (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Lankshear & Knobel, 2003;
Lemke, 1998), there has been a steadily-increasing attention to the affordances 92 and capabilities of audio-visual technologies for social sciences research, including opportunities for reporting on research that are not limited to textual formats (Jewitt et al., 2001; Kress et al., 2000; Knoblauch, Schnettler and Raab,
2006; Pink, 2006; Roth, 2002). In ethnographic studies of education, for example, several studies have explicitly made use of audio-visual tools for data collection. Cary Jewitt et al.'s (2001) analysis of educational communications in a science classroom describes the instructor's coordination of multiple communicational modes to convey meaning; their text includes graphics (pictures and charts) derived from their audio-visual record. More recently, Gareth Schott and Maria Kambouri (2006) and Valerie Walkerdine (2007) have made extensive use of audio-visual data in their accounts of the gendered forms of socialization and learning that take place around digital play. That said, these studies often use audio-visual data to support, rather than supplant or complexify, analyses of what participants say in these instances.
Situated Gaze
The availability and technical sophistication of video camcorders allows for the production of ethnographic data which is far more rich and complex than conventional fieldnotes (Pink, 2006; Knoblauch, Schnettler, & Raab, 2006, p. 14).
Their use in research settings has also raised questions around "reactivity"
(Knoblauch, Schnettler, & Raab, 2006, p. 11) - the ways the camera itself 93 becomes a topic or focus for research participants. In "Permanent Work on
Gazes: Video Ethnography as an Alternative Method", Elizabeth Mohn (2006) suggests that anxieties around reactivity stem from the unproductive notion that researchers and their tools should remain unobtrusive (Mohn, 2006, p. 174).
Instead, Mohn suggests, video cameras can be more usefully construed as part of the research contexts they are to capture (p. 175). Interpreting audio-visual data not only involves making sense of what participants are doing, but also how the data itself is produced: the position and angle of the camera, whether it was held (and by whom) or mounted on a tripod while the researcher was elsewhere, and how data was edited down and by whom. Mohn's approach brings into focus the agency of the researcher in producing and editing an audiovisual record, making visible the researcher's own observational focus and production practices. These considerations resonate with Haraway and Visweswaran's notion of accountable positioning, particularly regarding the production of ethnographic knowledge using audio-visual technologies.
Multimodal Application Program: Thick Depictions'
Despite this growing recognition of the uses for audio-visual technologies in social sciences research - the potential, in particular, to expand and deepen our understandings of social practices, in a world where forms of communication are increasingly multimodal (Kress et al., 2000) - analyzing and reporting on 94 research, even research employing audio-visual tools, remains rooted in primarily text-based practices (de Castell & Jenson, 2005). Textual recording and analysis has long been seen as central to the 'doing' of ethnography, even as researchers confront the epistemological reductionism inherent to exclusively textual accounts of ethnographic experience. James Clifford, for instance, in his introduction to Writing Culture (1986), says of the volume's collected works of unconventional ethnographic writing that they "do not claim that ethnography is
'only literature'. They do insist it is always writing" (Clifford, 1986, pp. 25-26).
In both Schott and Kambouri's (2006) and Walkerdine's (2007) accounts of audio-visual studies of children's social video game play, for instance, linguistic communication among participants is still treated as the primary source of ethnographic meaning-making: descriptions of non-verbal communication between participants, or their embodied interactions with technologies (e.g. the controller) and/or on-screen action are used to furnish or embellish accounts of what is said.25 This kind of textual description, as Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) note, collapses the "multiple articulations" through which meanings in a given context are communicated - gesture, intonation, pitch, proximity, gaze - into the
"double articulation" (form and content) of written language (Kress & van
Leeuwen, 1996, p. 27). Going beyond notions of ethnography as "always writing"
- where, no matter how thick the descriptions, cultural processes are codified in
25 See the previous chapter for an example from Walkerdine's (2007) study of this privileging of textual communication over other forms. 95 ways that flatten and render static the communicational complexities of a given context - is particularly important for research on digitally-mediated practices, where there is so much more in play within a choreography of bodies, technologies and digital texts than simply what is spoken or written.
Many of my analyses of competitive Halo 3 play in the following chapters therefore make use of a tool for visually analyzing and reporting on audio-visual data. MAP (the Multimodal Analysis Program), programmed by students at
Simon Fraser University and York University, is a software application that mounts and plays a selected audio-visual clip above a series of channels, similar in look (and, by extension, in how it is read) to a musical score. The image below
(Figure 4.2) shows the MAP interface, in which I have mounted a clip from the
June 14th NerdCorps event.
Figure 4.2. MAP'S interface. 96
Each user-defined channel represents a separate communicative mode and/or layer of significance shown in an audio-visual data sample. In this clip from the June 2008 NerdCorps event, for instance, I have identified the boy in the white shirt's game-related speech, the girl's game-related speech, and the girl's gaze as significant to my analysis. I populate the score by adding events to each (differently-coloured) channel as instances of that particular mode occur in the clip. The result, as I create, define, and fill in (or leave blank) numerous channels, is a 'thick depiction' which charts interactions across the various forms of communication that I see as significant in the audio-visual record. This multimodal coding of video data means I can not only attend to a range of communicative modes, but also observe how these communicative modes are coordinated across time.
More than Words can Say (or Do)
In my previous uses of MAP to code audio-visual data (Taylor, 2007; de Castell,
Jenson, Taylor & Undo, 2007) I argue that it enables a degree of reflexivity not readily available through primarily textual means of conducting ethnographic research. Through MAP-ping an instance during a school-based girls' gaming club where two boys infringe upon and disrupt the girls-only play, for instance, I attempted to work through (i.e. unlearn) the kinds of gendered privilege around access to and enjoyment of digital games that I experience as a socio- 97 economically advantaged male (Taylor, 2007, p. 6).
In a later experiment using different data from another school-based mixed- gender gaming club, a colleague and I each mapped the same series of clips, showing a less competent girl marginalized by her peers as they play Mario Kart together (de Castell, Jenson, Taylor & Lindo, 2007). In comparing my MAPs with my colleague's, I confronted the ways my research interests worked to shape how I read the data: I had mistakenly assumed one of the girls, the more knowledgeable one who, with the boy, was marginalizing the other girl, to be a boy. This mistake, made visible through comparison to a colleague's coding of the same record, can be attributed both to my desire to confront male forms of privilege, as well as my (contradictory) assumption that a competent and exclusionary player whose gender is not immediately obvious must be male (see
Figure 4.3). As a result, my MAPs of these clips told a story in which two 'boys' actively excluded and undermined girls' play, when in fact the clips show a competent boy and girl rather reluctantly helping a second, more vocal girl learn the game's controls. 98
User name: nick
i in white: utterance Start h—* |
||girlm blue: immobile posture I |Stert||'»H(3E) ^^ | boy in red: immobile posture
Figure 4.3. Misreading the 'boy' in red.
The tendencies I acted on in initially reading these clips are problematic, insofar as they compelled me to make the data conform to previously-derived expectations and understandings about what gendered play looks like. In acting on them, I arguably helped re-produce, in a small way, the normative conditions of gendered play that I want my research to explore and challenge. Comparing my MAPs and, by extension, my coding processes with those of my colleague allowed me to confront these tendencies in my own research practices, and to become more aware of the kind of 'black boxing' of gender into fixed notions that characterizes much of the research on gender and digital play (de Castell &
Bryson, 1998; Jenson, de Castell & Fisher, 2007; Taylor, 2008). 99
Actor-Network Theory
MAP's capability to visually re-construct the choreographies of interactivity depicted in audio-visual data helps to lay the groundwork for what Bruno Latour
(2005) calls a "second empiricism".26 By this, Latour denotes a mode of inquiry that follows the empirically traceable associations between human and non- human agents. Before unpacking what "second empiricism" may mean to my study, I offer a brief summation of actor-network theory, as articulated in Latour
(2005). Latour broadly portrays normative sociology as reliant upon definitions of
"the social" which treat assemblages of people, practices and technologies as explanations, rather than as the very phenomena that have to be explained
(Latour, 2005, p. 97). As a result, Latour claims, many sociological approaches
(particularly 'critical' sociologies, as typified by Pierre Bourdieu) do not so much illuminate social phenomena as replace them with externally-derived theories (p.
64).
Non-human Agents
Latour's project in elucidating actor-network theory is to propose an alternative social theory that preserves what he calls the "basic intuition" of conventional
26 Latour articulates the primary difference between this and the "first" empiricism by locating the central fallacy in positivist sociological accounts: that because there is only one unified reality, there exists only one interpretation. He cites a range of current controversies in biology and chemistry to show how, even in the hard sciences, multiple interpretations of the same empirically-observable reality are possible: "hermeneutics", he suggests, "is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself (Latour, 2005, pp. 115-116, p. 245). 100 sociology: that humans are acted on by forces outside of their "local contexts" in which they go about their day to day lives. At the same time, actor-network theory resists explanations that reduce these forces to abstract theoretical constructs (Latour, 2005, p. 47). The task, instead, is to "trace associations" between and among assemblages of individuals, tools, and the material world, and to document the technologically- and institutionally-mediated relations that suture local contexts together across time and space (p. 65). In order to accomplish this task, Latour asserts, it is necessary to expand sociology's traditional notions around what kinds of entities can be considered as having agency. Instead of placing humans exclusively in the foreground of sociological accounts and relegating entire realms of material and technological objects to the context 'in which' humans act, Latour urges us to recognize the ways non-human objects act upon us, enabling, compelling, eliciting or demanding certain activities and practices while disabling, preventing or making difficult others (pp. 63-86).
This approach makes it possible to see that each local interaction "is the assemblage of all the other local interactions distributed elsewhere in time and space, which have been brought to bear on the scene through relays of various non-human actors" (p. 194). In one example, Latour briefly documents the complex interplay of agencies at work in a university lecture hall. He asks:
Fathom for one minute all that allows you to interact with your students without being interfered too much by the noise from the street or the crowds outside in the corridor waiting to be let in for another class...The result is 101
inescapable: if you are not thoroughly 'framed' by other agencies brought silently on the scene, neither you nor your students can even concentrate for a minute on what is being 'locally' achieved, (p. 195)
It is the world of non-human "things" to which we delegate agency - texts, objects, materials, tools, physical structures, traditionally neglected in normative sociologies, that enables human relations and practices to achieve any kind of durability (Latour, 2005, p. 244; Strum and Latour, 1987, p. 790).
ANT in Games Studies
"Second empiricism" as Latour describes, is a mode of conducting and reporting on research that charts the interplay between multiple human and non-human agencies in a given context, while resisting the use of theoretical constructs to explain away the complexities of these relations (Latour, 2005, p. 155). Seth
Giddings and Helen Kennedy's (2008) 'Little Jesuses and *@#?-Off Robots: On
Cybernetics, Aesthetics and Not Being Very Good at Lego Star Wars" offers a productive example of this framework. The authors see actor-network theory as particularly useful to games studies, in its capacity to unite considerations around player competence and subjectivity with accounts of a game's formal characteristics and technical constraints (Giddings and Kennedy, 2008, p. 17).
Giddings and Kennedy employ ANT in analyzing audio-visual data from their
"micro-ethnography" of cooperative play in the game Lego Star Wars, asking how the game trains its players into certain dispositions and forms of action. The 102 authors frame their study as a challenge to a humanist notion of 'interactivity' as the extension and amplification of human agency. Instead, they argue, gaming competence can be thought of as the result of a game training its player, not vice-versa. They cite an anecdote about game programmer Jon Romero's ability to play Pacman with his eyes closed, and offer an alternative reading of this example of player agency:
Romero could play Pac-Man with his eyes closed because the game had thoroughly and completely mastered him, it had taught his fingers the precise micromovements needed to fulfill its intentions (continued play), and it had imprinted on his brain cognitive analogues of its virtually mapped game world. The player is mastered by the machine, (p. 19)
The authors suggest that contrary to most player-centered accounts of game play in which pleasure comes from the extension of player agency (Gee, 2003;
Newman, 2004; Poole, 2000), pleasure is instead provided by the unpredictable and dynamic interplay between mastery and "being mastered" (p. 19).
Though their analysis remains limited by a primarily textual account of their play, Giddings and Kennedy's work begins to sketch out what an ANT- informed perspective might offer to analyses of digital play. Chapter 8:
LANscapes of Play picks up on their work, deploying ANT in an account of the technological infrastructures of the Halo 3 LANs I attended. I explore how a shared set of technological configurations works to 'format' players' embodied actions in similar ways, regardless of players' different cultural or linguistic backgrounds. 103
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have outlined the three approaches I draw from in composing my methodological orientation to this study of competitive Halo 3 play: feminist ethnography, visual ethnography, and actor-network theory. Each departs from normative approaches to social science research, offering in the place of a positivist and objectivist stance on knowledge production a perspective that sees the researcher as implicated in and part of the same network of actors as the
'subjects' who they work with and report on.
The next chapter offers a more substantial account of my own situated perspective within the community of NerdCorps gamers, and explores how my dual role as 'researcher' and 'videographer' shaped how I came to know of (and participate in) the professionalization of Halo 3 play. I argue that my highly visible, even obtrusive use of a video camera at NerdCorps events was not construed as problematic or distracting. Instead, it was offered as service to a community in which status as a 'pro' gamer is at least partially conferred through having play put on display to an imagined audience of spectators. 104
Chapter 5: "Think of How Many People are Watching This"
Just before the start of the 2008 WCG Halo 3 finals between France and Final
Round, King Cobra leaned forward in his chair and looked at each of his teammates, saying "Let's get this money guys - think of how many people there are back home, how many people are watching this". The match was played on the main stage of the 18+ games area of the event, in front of a crowd of roughly
400 spectators, with a large, stationary video recording apparatus, two mobile camera crews and myself, all recording the spectacle.27 As King Cobra alluded to, the gold medal match was an opportunity not only for monetary reward, but also for exposure to a substantial and potentially global technologically mediated audience. For these players, taking centre stage at the WCG Grand Finals, in front of a crowd of spectators and recording apparatuses, marked their emergence into an elite domain of professional competitive gamers.
MLG and WCG, the e-Sports organizations whose events I attended, engage in media production practices that deliberately invoke mainstream spectator sports. At their tournaments and on official websites, these organizations prominently display flashy, fast-paced promotional videos that depict competitive gaming as a dynamic and thrilling spectacle. With regard to
MLG in particular, these videos are significant marketing tools to sell its stars and
27 Not to mention any spectators using cellphone cameras or digital cameras - though the use of audio-visual recording devices was only "officially" permitted to those with Press Passes. 105 its e-Sports media brand to gamers, as well as, crucially, more casual audiences.
MLG's video interviews with successful gamers and its broadcasts of Pro Circuit tournaments have helped to create and sustain a cadre of high-profile, professional Halo 3 players whose play styles and tactics, as well as personas, can be studied and emulated. For the NerdCorps players I followed, MLG's promotional videos form part of a 'pro-gaming' discourse in which being watched
- playing to an audience of spectators, either bodily present or digitally-mediated
- confers a measure of status and legitimacy.
In this chapter, I explore some of the issues around my decision to 'give back' to a group of competitive gamers, primarily made up of young, socio- economically advantaged men, through working as the NerdCorps videographer,28 producing promotional materials for the organization and its players. My analyses of my activities as research and videographer directly build from the previous chapter (Chapter 4: Methodologies), in that I engage with ongoing debates around how to carry out ethnographic fieldwork, and video- based research in particular, so as to be accountable to the relationships that developed between NerdCorps participants, my audio-visual research tools, and myself. I frame this chapter as a discussion of the 'three R's' at work in my audiovisual ethnographic fieldwork - reflexivity, reciprocity, and reactivity - taking up each in order to examine how my role as NerdCorps videographer not only
281 use the term "videographer" to denote the production of video for promotional, commercial, or journalistic (as opposed to personal or research) purposes. 106 affected what kinds of fieldwork I accomplished, but also when and how participants actually performed professional play for the camera.
Overview
I begin with by exploring issues around reciprocity in ethnographic research, examining feminist approaches to conducting fieldwork that seeks to redress the exploitative relationship between researcher and 'subject' typical of most conventional ethnographic work (Smith, 2005; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999;
Visweswaran, 1994). Recognizing that the participants in my study had very little use for what I could 'give back' to them in my capacity as an academic researcher, I look at how my commitment to NerdCorps and its players affected what kinds of fieldwork I was able to carry out. As a result, I re-position reciprocity as a primarily epistemological, rather than ethical, consideration. In order to make sense of this shift, I turn to activity theory (Cole & Engestrom,
1993; Engestrom, 1987, 1990, 1999), which offers a way of schematizing the interconnectedness of agents, tools and practices within a given community or institution. Using activity theory, I plot how my activities and obligations as videographer differed from those of a conventional audio-visual researcher, and examine how and where these roles came into tension. I focus in particular on how videotaped interviews with players were appropriated for promotional purposes, and the differences this illuminates between what counts as significant knowledge for players and for myself. I conclude by exploring the extent to which my presence/work as a videographer, for a group of players schooled by the e-
Sports industry in the linkages between being a professional gamer and having an audience, may have actually elicited and not simply recorded the performance of professional play at NerdCorps events.
Reciprocity
Concerns around reciprocity - how, when and what to 'give back' to participants
- abound throughout accounts of ethnographic fieldwork. Tracing the notion from the 1970's and 1980's on, Lisa Weems (2006) characterizes conventional understandings of reciprocity as "the exchange of favors and commitments"
(Weems, 2006, p. 997). In this model, 'exchanging favors' between researcher and subjects is a means of generating trust and goodwill, and thereby secure better data from otherwise obstinate 'informants' (see, for example, Wax, 1952;
Everhart, 1977). Weems follows earlier critiques by feminist and postcolonial ethnographers such as Patti Lather (1986), Judith Stacey (1988), Celia Haig-
Brown (1990, 1992), Leslie Roman (1993), and Kamala Visweswaran (1994), arguing that this conventional approach to reciprocity re-inscribes the inequitable relationship between researcher and subject, in which the researcher has far more to gain from her interactions with participants, than vice-versa. 108
As a means of redressing the exploitative legacies of conventional ethnography, feminist and postcolonial ethnographers began, in the 1980's and
90's, to articulate and put into practice radically re-worked notions of reciprocity in their work with marginalized groups. Leslie Roman and Celia Haig-Brown, in their respective ethnographies of Punk women (Roman, 1993) and First Nations educators and adult students (Haig-Brown, 1990, 1992) both frame 'reciprocity' as an imperative in which researchers work with participants to improve their lives. I offer a more detailed examination of each of their works to illustrate how they conceptualize 'giving back' in ethical terms, in the context of fieldwork involving marginalized groups or individuals.
Giving Back to Marginalized Groups
In "Double Exposure: The Politics of Feminist Materialist Ethnography" (1993),
Roman distances herself from the two stances that she says defines "naturalistic"
(i.e. positivist) ethnographic methodologies, where the researcher either "goes native", adopting the community's dispositions, or works as a "fly on the wall", documenting subjects' practices from a carefully-maintained distance (p. 281).
The first stance, Roman suggests, neglects to account for the kinds of privilege and power exercised by the researcher who "goes native" (and then often simply leaves, once the research is done), while the second assumes that researchers
"can and should" cultivate an aloof and objective relationship with subjects (pp. 109
281-282). Roman describes the difficulties she had at the outset of her fieldwork with Punk women in tacking between these two positions, unable to either effectively or convincingly immerse herself in Punk subculture, or, drawn into her subjects' personal lives, to maintain any kind of 'critical' distance from them (pp.
287-289). Instead, Roman sets out an alternative methodology that she labels
"feminist materialism", premised on an open admission to her subjects of both her ignorance of the Punk musical scene, as well as her commitment to charting their class- and gender-based oppression. She describes her attempts to build relationships with her female subjects whereby they become active participants in exploring the inequities they face in their day-to-day lives, encouraging their development of a women-focused Punk fanzine, as well as coordinating group interviews for discussing challenges and issues the women faced participating in a male-dominated subculture (pp. 300-301). She sees in these forms of involvement a way of fulfilling her "political and ethical" obligations to the community she set out to study, and concludes that her methodology moves past naturalist or positivist ethnography, where 'reliable' data is that which is generated out of the researcher's unobtrusive presence (p. 306).
In Roman's feminist materialist approach, reciprocity is a matter of consciousness-raising between participants and researcher: it involves leveraging the researcher's own institutional or socio-economic privilege (in
Roman's case, that of a white, middle-class university-educated woman, working 110 with younger women from different class backgrounds; p. 303), to contribute to,
and deepen, subjects' own understandings of the sexism and classism that beset their everyday lives. This is a form of reciprocity that, as Roman sees it, is both
ethically and epistemologically sound: it allows her to explore her subjects'
conditions of oppression and marginalization while at the same time, offering
them the tools to change these conditions. Roman notes, for instance, that
following her group interviews, many of the women she worked with reported
ditching their abusive partners, practicing safe sex, and seeking out support for
drug and alcohol abuse (p. 305).
In "Choosing Border Work", Celia Haig-Brown (1992) outlines her
research with a First Nations adult education center in western Canada, in which
she took a slightly different approach to working with her participants (teachers,
students and administrators involved with the center) than Leslie Roman's
'consciousness-raising' agenda with Punk women. Haig-Brown describes how
she invited participants to edit and critique her research from its proposal stage
to its final revisions (p. 105). She also notes how she structured her interviews as
"chats" between her and participants, working towards an equitable exchange of
self-disclosure (pp. 104-105). In Roman's case, 'reciprocity' involves "teaching"
participants about their gender- and class-based oppression (Roman, 1993, p.
292). For Haig-Brown (who began the research after teaching in the center),
'giving back' is a matter of more open partnerships with participants, who in turn 111 are positioned less as people in need of help (from the researcher) and more as collaborators in a shared enterprise of knowledge-building (p. 102).
These works represent careful and rigorous attempts to re-frame reciprocity between ethnographers and research subjects as an ethical imperative, premised on the recognition that qualitative research, particularly with marginalized groups, has too often worked to re-inscribe power inequities between the researcher and her subjects, and that it is the researcher's moral obligation to use her (institutional, as well as possible socio-economic) privilege to rectify these inequities. Framing reciprocity as a primarily ethical concern, however, assumes that the research in question really can or does serve to benefit those involved - a presumption that is particularly compelling when working with marginalized groups. This might be the case for the Punk women in
Leslie Roman's study, or for the participants in Haig-Brown's research. As
Roman points out, however, contributing to participants' lives in ways that are relevant to their own interests and aspirations depends on the particular power relations between researcher and participants (Roman, 1993, p. 106).
Re-thinking Reciprocity
In undertaking my research with NerdCorps (and later, at the 2008 MLG Toronto
Open and the 2008 WCG Grand Finals), a community predominantly made up of straight, middle- and upper-middle class males with similar kinds of socio- 112 economic privilege as my own, I realized I might have little to 'give back' in my capacity as a university researcher. I had to frame my involvement in ways that aligned with their expectations and needs. Here, I describe how my relationship with the Toronto competitive Halo 3 community grew out of a commitment to carry out promotional video work for NerdCorps in exchange for 'access' to participants. This commitment, in turn, shaped the kinds of video-based fieldwork
I was able to accomplish.
My relationships with the competitive gamers I studied were mediated by the NerdCorps Generals. Having run the club for several years, the Generals are accustomed to negotiating mutually-productive partnerships with outside individuals and organizations: at various times, they have entered into collaborations with other competitive gaming organizations, including venues for their LAN tournaments, local video game retailers, and so on, always with an eye towards promoting either the club or individual players. In my first, preliminary meeting with the Generals in April 2007, I expressed my interest in carrying out some research with the club, and the three of us explored possible forms of collaboration. We discussed working together on a 'zine29 about the competitive gaming scene in Toronto, and I suggested contributing academic research on the educational and social benefits of gaming, research with which I had the most familiarity. The Generals seemed interested at the time (possibly out of courtesy),
29 "Zine's" are independently-published, small-circulation publications, typically reflecting a 'DIY' aesthetic (Dunscombe, 2008). 113 but my follow-up emails to them in the weeks after met no response. I read this as an indication that my work as a university-based researcher held little relevance to the Generals' aims of building their organization's profile or attracting new players. Months later, I emailed the Generals again to request a meeting. I had perused the NerdCorps website and noted that they had a section dedicated to videos of events, with little actual content on it, and I realized I might have an 'in' to studying NerdCorps events. When we met again, I presented some video editing work I had done in the past, and offered to contribute to the club any audio-visual data I took, as well as my video editing skills, in exchange for their support on my research project. The organizers told me that the last videographer, an acquaintance of theirs who showed up sporadically to events and had little experience with editing or publishing video, was no longer able to work for them, and that I could assume the role of new NerdCorps videographer.
In entering into this collaboration with the Generals, I was able to leverage my access to a video camera and my prior experience with carrying out audio- visual research. As the Generals made clear to me, most regular players were accustomed to video cameras at NerdCorps events, and they suggested my presence would be neither remarkable nor problematic. At the first few events I attended, the organizers introduced me to players as the "new videographer" associated with York University; while my institutional affiliation was made clear, and I fully disclosed my research interests to all the participants I encountered, 114 the Generals consistently framed my involvement as a recognizable form of service to the club, rather than as 'research'.
In making possible this collaboration and my attendant (self-)identication as videographer, the video camera I brought to the partnership acted as what
Susan Leigh Star and John Greisemer (1989), in their archival study of the formation of a research-focused natural museum, describe as a "boundary object". Star and Gresiemer define "boundary objects" as artifacts and/or techniques that "have different meanings in different social worlds" but which are stable and "recognizable" across local contexts (p. 393). Boundary objects are key "means of translation" between different social worlds, enabling forms of work valuable to different individuals and communities (p. 393). In this perspective, my video camera helped bridge the boundary between my own research interests in documenting the 'professionalization' of competitive play, and the interests of a group of gamers and event organizers for whom the camera represented opportunities for the kinds of exposure associated with 'pro' gamers. Because it represented and afforded opportunities for the club's promotion as well as for my own fieldwork, the camera allowed me to work across boundaries I may not have otherwise been able to: boundaries between academia and a relatively socio-economically privileged community of competitive gamers. 115
In the ensuing section, I describe how this collaboration structured the kinds of fieldwork I was able to carry out. I work from the understanding that those I worked with (both organizers and players) seemed to have little interest in the kinds of reciprocity described by Roman and Haig-Brown - i.e. 'giving back' as collaborative consciousness-raising and knowledge building. Instead, I attend to how 'giving back' shaped what and how I came to know about this community of competitive gamers, as my responsibilities as videographer came into tension with (and sometimes supplanted) my research activities.
Activity Theory
To illustrate this, I turn to activity theory, particularly as developed by Yrgo
Engestrom (1987, 1990, 1999). Like Star and Greisemer's work, activity theory focuses on unpacking technologically-mediated collaborative work processes
(Engestrom & Miettinen, 1999, p. 7). Drawing on the works of Russian cultural- historical psychologists Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Luria and Aleksei Leont'ev, whose theories of distributed cognition explore the mediation of mental processes by symbolic as well as material tools (Cole & Engestrom, 1993, pp. 4-
5; Engestrom & Miettinen, 1999, p. 1), activity theory situates this relationship in its broader social contexts. Rather than seeing cognition and mediation as individualized processes, it offers a framework for exploring the connections between individual human action and the larger "collective practices, 116 communities and institutions" in which subjects act and through which they are constituted (Cole & Engestrom, 1993, p. 7; Engestrom & Miettinen, 1999, p. 11).
Central to this project is the schematization of "activity structures", a unit of analysis that Cole and Engestrom (1993) define as "historically situated systems of relations among individuals and their proximal, culturally organized environments" (p. 9). Activity structures plot the relationships between actors, tools, communities, and institutions. In this triangular schema (Figure 5.1), a human "subject" directs her work towards an external "object" in order to realize a particular "outcome". Her work is shaped by the tools she uses as well as the community in which she works, including the "division of labor" among members and the "rules" (either stated or unstated sanctions) that "regulate acceptable interactions among the participants" in the schema (Cole & Engestrom, 1993, p.
6). The lines between the various points in the schema illustrate the interconnectedness of each aspect of activity. 117
Mediating Tools
Figure 5.1. Representation of an "activity structure" (Lim and Hang, 2003, p. 52).
This schema makes it possible to analyze individual activity in a way that recognizes the collective and mediated nature of social practice (Cole &
Engestrom, 1993, p. 7). By mapping the complex interplay of constituents in an activity structure, activity theory can account for transformations in seemingly durable social processes (p. 8): the 'ripple effects' of a change to one element in an interconnected activity structure (for instance, a re-configuration in participants' division of labor) become visible, however small or subtle.30
Using this schema, I can plot my work within NerdCorps in a way that highlights the differences and tensions between my obligations as the organization's 'videographer' on the one hand, the outcome of which was to
30 Cole and Engestrom (1993), for instance, discuss the dramatic changes to patient care in a Finnish health center when the division of labor shifted from a rotating pool of doctors responsible for a large population, to system where each doctor was assigned to a smaller and more stable number of patients (pp. 32-39). 118 generate promotional videos for the club and its players, and the requirements and expectations around normative audio-visual fieldwork on the other, where the desired outcome is conventionally defined as the non-intrusive and
"naturalistic" documentation of social practice (see, for instance, Laurier & Philo,
2006; Mondala, 2006). Doing so affords an exploration of how my positioning as videographer - by which I was able to access the club in the first place - significantly affected not only what kinds of fieldwork I carried out, but how participants (players and organizers, representing the "community" in the activity structure schema) in turn reacted to (and performed for) the presence of a device which participants regarded less as a research instrument than as a means for promotion.
The next two figures (5.2 and 5.3) depict these two overlapping roles. Both are made possible by my use of a video camera, but differ in most other aspects, from the implicit and explicit rules governing this use, to the community for which my video work is intended. Figure 4.2 depicts my activity from the standpoint of conventional audio-visual fieldwork as described by Hubert Knoblauch, Bernt
Schnettler and Jurgen Raab (2006), Chris Laurier and Eric Philo (2006), Lorenzo
Mondala (2006), and Sarah Pink (2006), among others. 119
Mediating tools: Camera, field notes
\ Outcome: Dissertation (ethnography of 'pro' play)
Rules: Community: Division of labor: - Guidelines for audiovisual Other researchers Consulting with supervisors & ethnographic fieldwork & colleagues - University research ethics - 'Giving back'
Figure 5.2. Activity structure for normative video-based fieldwork.
Under this model, as a video ethnographer, the "object" of my work is research on the professionalization of competitive gaming; the video camera is one of the mediating tools, along with field notes, questionnaires, and secondary texts. This work is carried out within a community of scholars in game studies and education. Other participants include my supervisors and colleagues, who critique and advise me on my fieldwork, as well as the NerdCorps gamers and organizers, whose activities supply me with 'data' collected through my research tools. The rules informing my fieldwork are generated and regulated explicitly, through the university's code for ethical research as well as its administrative regulations for carrying out and completing dissertation requirements. There are 120 also implicit protocols, laid out in other ethnographic texts, for conducting fair and rigorous fieldwork work; this includes the imperative to "give back" to research participants. This activity structure is constituted almost entirely of processes and practices relating to academia, and is geared towards the outcome of generating my thesis dissertation on competitive gaming.
Figure 5.3 represents the activity structure formed through my agreement with the NerdCorps organizers to create and publish promotional materials using my video camera. As the schema suggests, this involves not only altering what I did with my data; it affects how I used the camera, who I consulted in filming, and what kinds of rules governed my audio-visual production.
Mediating tools: Camera
Outcome: Promotional videos
Rules: Community: Division of labor: - MLG promotional videos - NerdCorps organizers Consulting with organizers - expectations of organizers & players & players & players - Broader community of competitive gamers
Figure 5.3. Activity structure depicting my promotional work for NerdCorps. 121
While the mediating tools (video camera) and object (NerdCorps events) of the activity represented in each schema remain similar, the set of relationships represented in Figure 5.2 differs in fundamental ways. It shows my fieldwork as constituted in and informed by the domain of competitive gaming, and in particular the NerdCorps community of players and organizers for whom I worked, rather than academia and the domain of supervisors, colleagues, research ethics protocols, and other scholarly texts. The relationships represented in these schemas are not mutually exclusive, of course. At no point in my fieldwork did I choose to be 'researcher' instead of 'videographer', or vice- versa. Rather, my fieldwork consisted in constantly negotiating the expectations and rules of these two communities. In the following sub-sections, I discuss particular elements of these schemas, paying attention to where and how these two communities, outcomes for my work, and sets of rules came into tension.
Outcome
The most significant difference between the two activity structures is in the outcome of each. The primary goal of my activity over the course of my fieldwork was to generate an ethnographic understanding of a community in the process of becoming professionalized - i.e. a group of players working to improve those particular game-based skills regulated and rewarded by e-Sports organizations like WCG and MLG. The main concern with this kind of ethnographic work 122 involving audio-visual research, as some researchers argue (Knoblauch,
Schnettler, & Raab, 2006; Laurier & Philo, 2006), is to generate a record of
"naturalistic" or "naturally-occurring" activity, remain as unobtrusive as possible, and minimize the researcher's "influence" on recorded phenomena (Knoblauch,
Schnettler, & Raab, 2006, p. 11).31
In my partnership with the NerdCorps organizers, my goal was to produce and publish short videos promoting the club and its players, as a means of attracting new members and increasing the visibility of NerdCorps within an increasingly crowded competitive gaming LAN scene in Toronto. Where my objective, as researcher, was to record mundane interactions among participants, my objective as videographer was to capture the more spectacular and climactic moments. With a limited supply of cameras (the most I ever had at an event were two) and a limited amount of time to look through and edit footage,
I often had to choose, both in my on-site shooting and my post-shooting editing, between working with what I believed to be significant 'ethnographic' moments, and what I thought competitive gamers would find compelling. Overtime, however, these differences between material that was 'good for ethnography'
31 As some have noted (Mohn, 2006; Shrum, Duque, & Brown, 2005), the notion of "naturally- occurring" interactions in front of a camera elides the numerous ways the presence of a camera inevitably affects a situation. As I discuss below in the section on 'Reactivity', this is particularly true for a community of aspiring competitive gamers, whose knowledge of and access to the lucrative world of 'professional' gamers is often through videotaped interviews and event footage - i.e. the same kinds of audio-visual material I was committed to providing to their community. 123 and 'good for videography' diminished, particularly as my own appreciation for competitive Halo 3 grew.32
Community
This difference in the outcomes of my fieldwork was, in part, reinforced and structured in my interactions with organizers and players. Not only did the broader community of competitive Halo 3 gamers form an "imagined audience"
(Eco, 1979) for the videos I produced (including how I shot footage), but
NerdCorps participants often intervened directly in my shooting, urging me to record action on a particular television rather than on interactions among participants. Players' accompanying remarks - such as, "why are you filming us?
You should be recording the game" (Fieldnotes, May 5, 2008) - speak to quite a different conception of what makes professional gaming compelling than my own academic interests in the gendered dynamics of competitive digital play. My expectations about what to look for over the course of my video-based fieldwork were shaped by my prior experiences working within a community of scholars exploring issues around gender, digital technology, and digital play; players' expectations about the possibilities and affordances of a video camera at their events, however, were shaped by an emergent video genre, popularized by MLG
32 Please see Appendix D: Spectatorship and Production for an account of how my recording practices shifted as I learned more about competitive Halo 3 play. 124 and other competitive gaming organizations, that promotes pro players and organizations.
Rules
There were many regulations and imperatives guiding my fieldwork, including university-based protocols for conducting ethical qualitative research and conventions around how to 'do' non-participant observation (see, for example,
Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Hammersley & Atkinson, 1989). Here, I focus specifically on how I carried out interviews with NerdCorps players, as I noticed significant differences between my responsibilities as researcher and videographer in terms of the rules regulating player interviews. In "Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms" (1981), Ann Oakley surveys qualitative research methodology texts for their descriptions of effective and "legitimate" interviewing practices (p. 32). The normative model of qualitative interviewing, Oakley suggests, can be characterized as a specialized form of conversation, the purpose of which is the retrieval of 'data' from a more or less passive subject by the trained and disciplined researcher (p. 36-37). The rules of this positivist paradigm (which include, for instance, not voicing one's beliefs or opinions, p. 35) are designed to minimize researcher bias and ensure that data is as objective as possible (p. 36).
Oakley explicitly rejects this paradigm in her own research with new and expectant mothers, and describes her attempts to come up with a more 125 equitable, collaborative, and personal interview protocol. In her approach, the subjects are encouraged to ask questions back, and knowledge-building is viewed as a collaborative and emotionally-charged endeavor spanning multiple interviews. Bias is expressed as the researcher's commitment to her participants' well-being rather than something to be minimized. Oakley notes that in this shift towards a less exploitative relationship between researcher and subject, the role of the interviewer changes dramatically, from collecting data for the project, to collecting data "for those whose lives are being researched" (p. 49): like Leslie
Roman and Celia Haig-Brown's respective studies, ethical concerns around reciprocity are framed as integral to the research (and interview) process.
The interviews I carried out with players in collaboration with NerdCorps did not conform either to the conventional model of interviewing Oakley describes, or to the more equitable approaches put forward by her, Roman, and Haig-Brown, among other feminist and post-colonial researchers (see, for example, Lather,
1986). Like the model Oakley puts forward, these interviews were carried out as much to benefit interviewees (by portraying them as elite competitive gamers, to a digitally-mediated audience of other players) as they were to advance my own understanding of competitive gaming. In order to accomplish this, however, we modeled them after an emergent genre of promotional 'pro' gaming videos, particularly those published by MLG that were most popular with players, rather than any particular qualitative research-based interview paradigm. 126
A Different Set of Rules: MLG Videos
MLG videos33 carry out a similar balance as the one Robert Rinehart (2004) describes in relation to the 'extreme Games':34 they frame competitive Halo 3 play as a sport demanding highly-refined skills, but at which anyone can perform well through practice and determination.
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• I Control NY T-Shift Now AvaSe&e in the MLG Store - Buy Ore Today! Pro interview: Strongside MLG sits dowtt with Strengside of Final 9oa» lo find out wha he thinks of being o« the#3 ranked Halo 2 K
lirk to Video; nap:/ftywwjrtgpro.»mtod»o?pSay= 156742 MA2.Q9 - First Cotumtma Hato 3 ard GoW 2 VoO Rotoaaod 06.12.09. Chig Featured m ESPN SaonsNatioft C*a! Previous * Pre interview: ti*rma Next > Pro Piayw F«wtfcs*: T»qu»<»wJ ; n? Figure 5.4. "Pro Player Feature" with Strongside. This is particularly true of their "Pro Player Features" (available at 33 The clips on MLG's video portal (http://www.mlgpro.com/video/) are divided into several sections, each of which showcases the organization's 'pro' players and teams (those either sponsored directly by MLG, or with several top-place finished at MLG events). Sections include weekly matches between top-place teams, sensational highlights from past tournaments; broadcasts from the last day and a half of the most recent MLG tournament, with play-by-play commentary, tutorials where MLG pro's demonstrate vital skills and techniques, and in-depth interviews with individual MLG pro's. 34 Please refer to the sub-section 'Selling Sports' of Chapter 3: Literature Review for an account of Rinehart's research on 'extreme Games' broadcasts and the commodification of amateur/recreational athletes. 127 http://www.mlgpro.com/video/ proplayer&c=Pro%20Player%20Feature), in which top MLG gamers are interviewed. These 'profiles' follow a set pattern: an MLG pro is depicted, from torso up, in his team t-shirt against a white background, his gaze directed at a point beside the camera. While the layout of the shot suggests an off-screen interviewer (see Figure 5.4, a screenshot of an interview with MLG pro Strongside35), questions are never explicitly heard or shown in the video: players' answers are spliced together, creating the impression of a single but fragmented monologue. Interspersed throughout these monologues are highlights from the pro's career - tournament footage showing their reactions to victories or defeats and clips of their in-game actions. These videos follow a certain topical trajectory as well: players trace their involvement with competitive gaming and with MLG in particular, articulate their value to their team, comment on recent and upcoming MLG events, and explain how MLG made their successes possible through professionalizing and legitimating competitive Halo 3 play. The impression across these videos is of a group of 'ordinary guys' - young, predominantly Caucasian, middle-class males - who, with a little bit of talent and a lot of hard work, have been able turn their love of gaming into lucrative careers. In modeling interviews with NerdCorps players after these videos, General Electric and I created opportunities for players to likewise get exposure in a 35 Strongside is one of the most popular MLG pro's. At the time of writing, he is a member of Final Boss, one the most successful MLG-sponsored teams. He is mentioned in Chapters 5 and 6 as well. 128 broader community of competitive Halo 3 gamers. We did so through following a fairly rigid, scripted interview protocol borrowed from the world of pro-gaming rather than through the open-ended, conversational or "chat"-like protocols described by feminist researchers. This points to how different my attempts at 'giving back' were than the approaches outlined by Roman and Haig-Brown; I was perhaps less confident that participants in my study stood to benefit, or were even interested in, my academic research. In the next sub-section, I detail how General Electric and I structured interviews with NerdCorps players less as a means for generating insights into the lived experiences with players, and more as a way to promote the organization and its players by profiling its more personable and/or successful participants. Division of Labor The Generals mediated and controlled my access to the players attending their Halo 3 events, acting as "gatekeepers"36 for the community, particularly early on in my fieldwork: they introduced me to the players they thought were most interesting or engaging, and they regulated how and when I approached players to talk with or interview them. At the same time, and in my activities as videographer, we collaborated intensively on audio-visual production: General Electric in particular suggested locations to set up the tripod and camera, 36 Many ethnographic texts talk of "gatekeepers" in ethnography: participants who mediate and restrict an ethnographer's access to a community of research subjects. See, for instance, Garfinkel (1967); Hammersley and Atkinson (1989). 129 solicited interview subjects for me, and counseled me on which players were likely to offer compelling answers, which had the more dynamic personalities, and who would best represent the organization as offering fun and challenging opportunities for both seasoned and inexperienced Halo 3 players to 'level up' their competitive gameplay. Electric not only set up these interviews, but offered continual feedback to me on how to make them 'better' - i.e. closer in content and style to the promotional videos described above. From 'Interviews' to 'Profiles' The following anecdote illustrates some of the tensions described above, between the two 'activity structures' representing my involvement as both researcher and videographer. My first two interviews with NerdCorps players, during the March 2008 event, were carried out in groups of two and three, with participants seated on a couch on the second floor of the venue during breaks in their play. General Electric and I stood behind the camera, asking questions about players' experiences with Halo 3 and trying to engage them in an open- ended focus group conversation about competitive gaming. Their short answers and lack of eye contact (with the camera, Electric, or myself) suggested either a reluctance to participate or nervousness around being interviewed on camera, or both. When pulled out of the context of their LAN play, in which I was introduced as videographer, and into a setting in which I positioned myself more clearly as 130 researcher and the camera as research instrument, the five participants we interviewed that day - all of whom had seemed unperturbed by my activity up to that point - were visibly anxious and uncomfortable. At the following (May 2008) event, General Electric suggested we re- configure interviews to loosely emulate MLG Pro Player Profiles, a format that he said participants were familiar with. The list of questions I had initially arranged were expanded, at General Electric's suggestions, to include considerations I did not initially recognize as particularly relevant for my research, but which became central to my own growing understanding of what matters to a community of gamers who practice their competitive play upwards of 30 hours a week. These questions included what players' favorite Halo 3 weapon is, which type of grenades they found most useful, which maps and game types they prefer and/or excel at, and what installment of the Halo franchise they most enjoyed and why. Similar to the MLG Pro Player Profiles, we also asked players to recount their competitive gaming experiences: their participation in various tournaments, favorite Halo 3 moment (either at a NerdCorps event or other tournament, or on Xbox Live), and aspirations for any upcoming events. In filming and editing what we eventually called "NerdCorps Dossiers",37 we departed from the look of the MLG videos in significant ways: participants were asked to look directly at the camera, and were shot not in front of a white 37 The Youtube url's to these videos, which use NerdCorps' real name, are available upon request. 131 screen, but against a dark wall with minimal lighting. Players' gamer tags, as well as textual introductions to players' responses, are presented in a style evocative of espionage/war films, in keeping with NerdCorps' appropriation of militaristic language and imagery. Most noticeably, where MLG videos focus on one player at a time, our videos featured 3 participants at a time, in order to generate a quicker and more dynamic pace than in MLG's interviews. The most significant difference between these video 'dossiers' and MLG player profiles is in the players featured: where MLG's videos focus exclusively on the league's cadre of sponsored and highly successful pro gamers, our videos focused on participants who, though most were regulars to NerdCorps events, had at the time had little success or recognition in larger tournaments. Posted (with participants' written consent) on YouTube and linked to from NerdCorps' Facebook and Myspace pages, the dossiers became a means for NerdCorps to promote itself as a place where competitive gamers could 'skill up', as well as a way to make public the stories and personalities of participants to a (digitally- mediated) audience of competitive gamers, including other NerdCorps attendees. Before being posted online, I showed the videos at NerdCorps events, where interviewees could request edits, re-shoots, and omissions, giving them significant control over whether and how they were represented. For the gamers involved, the dossiers seemed to be a way for them to carry out identity work by recounting their experience with competitive Halo 3 132 play - how they got into it, what their tournament experience has been, what they are particularly good at. In doing so, they participated in a discourse around what it takes to be a professional Halo 3 gamer, to the extent that being 'profiled' in videos is itself a form of recognition within a community that places much stock on being seen. Several participants used the videos as an opportunity to address an imagined audience, either playfully or seriously: Hopper gives a shout out to "all his fans", while Fatal Fantasy sends a greeting to gamer friends she hadn't seen for some time. Vik Vicious urges "Canadian gamers" to support each other at MLG tournaments. Adopting an interview format which participants were familiar with meant that I was able to 'give back' to the community in a way that the participants involved recognized as useful. At the same time, because the interview questions and format were regulated by the NerdCorps organizers and by the genre of videos we emulated, I had to find other means of inquiring into aspects of participants' lives that fell outside of the topics covered by promotional videos. For discussions concerning players' formal schooling, socio-economic backgrounds, and aspirations aside from gaming, and so on, I had to be largely opportunistic, offhand, and tangential. Any conversations I had with players about their lives outside of NerdCorps (and competitive gaming more generally) usually occurred in the small breaks in between rounds of play, or before or after events: 133 in this respect, then, my researcher activities were relegated to the margins of competitive gaming events. Reactivity In this last section, I explore in greater detail how my videographer work may have contributed to the professionalization of play at NerdCorps events, as participants performed their 'sport' for the camera. I attempt to move past current notions of "reactivity" in audio-visual research, defined (and measured) as discrete instances where subjects react to/acknowledge the camera's presence (see, for instance, Knoblauch, Schnettler, & Raab, 2006, p. 11). Instead, in keeping with activity theory's perspective on the interconnectedness of tools, subjects and practices, I ask how my camera-based work affected participants' interactions with one another, the organizers, and myself. Working within a discursive context where visibility is a marker of status, I argue that participants played up aspects of competitive gaming discursively configured as the markers of professional play: intensive communication and cohesive group play, and as well as hyper-masculine bravado.38 38 The behaviors I associate with professional Halo 3 play are taken up in greater detail in ensuing chapters. 134 Acting Natural Over the duration of my fieldwork (including the first events I attended), participants seemed unconcerned, even comfortable, about my presence with a video camera. There are few instances in my audio-visual data from these events of participants looking at the camera and/or verbally acknowledging its presence. It is certainly possible that participants came into the study already somewhat 'naturalized' to the presence of digitally-mediated surveillance in their everyday lives.39 What is more likely, however, is that 'acting natural' - i.e. deliberately avoiding any of the usual cues associated with reactivity (making eye contact with the camera, speaking to it directly, or reminding others of its presence) - might itself be a reaction to being watched. In "Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium" (2005), Wesley Shrum, Ricardo Duque, and Timothy Brown discuss the ways video-based research creates a "videoactive context": a 'stage' on which researchers and participants, as well as video recording technologies, engage, deliberately and reflexively, in the co- production of an audio-visual record.40 In the view put forward by Shrum, Duque 39 Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld (2008) note that for users of Facebook, Myspace, and other forms of voluntary, "participatory" surveillance which traffic in users' digitally-mediated self-representations, being watched can be a source of pleasure and play. While I did not collect data on NerdCorps participants' use of social networking technologies, this might help to account for how comfortable they acted in the presence of a camera. 40 The authors recognize, as Laurier and Philo (2006) do, that participants' reactions to the camera diminish over time, but instead of seeing this as an indicator of participants resuming their 'natural' behaviors, the authors instead see it as an acclimatization to a new set of conditions that includes the camera's presence (Shrum, Duque, & Brown, 2005, p. 12). 135 and Brown, gauging whether and how participants react to the presence of a camera, and what kinds of new interactions the camera generates (and documents), is never simply a matter of counting the number of times they look at the camera or reference it directly in their actions or speech (Laurier & Philo, 2006). The camera might also elicit performances from participants that play up what they construe as their 'natural' behavior, what they regard as 'safe' to show, and, importantly, what they think the study purports to examine. In such cases, participants' actions in front of a camera might be read as a kind of embodied "ventriloquation" (de Castell & Bryson, 1998) of 'appropriate' or 'natural' behaviour. Following Shrum, Duque and Brown's notion of "videoactive contexts", I look at my work with NerdCorps as a set of interactions that I not only recorded, but altered through participants' awareness that they were being recorded. From this perspective, the lack of explicit reactions to my camera activity might be read as part of their performance of elite competitive play. For these players, pursuing success within a competitive gaming industry that equates 'being seen' with status and skill, acting aloof towards the recording of their play might be one way in which they align themselves with the professional Halo 3 players whom many of them watch (either online or at MLG tournaments), reference, and otherwise emulate. This might constitute a re-tooled "Hawthorne Effect". Initially devised to account for increases in factory worker productivity (Landsberger, 1958), the 136 Hawthorne Effect theorizes that subjects under surveillance will improve aspects of their behaviour. While it has since been undermined (for example, Jones, 1992), the possibility that participants 'play up' to the camera might have currency in competitive gaming (not to mention other domains, such as mainstream professional sports) where 'being seen', i.e. having an audience, is discursively equated with skill and proficiency. Working as dedicated videographer for NerdCorps, which offers little in the way of monetary rewards for its top players, my videographer activity represented and afforded opportunities for players to reach an audience outside of the local community that attended NerdCorps events. It may be the case that with such opportunities available, players may have acted more in line with the discourse around what it takes to be a "pro" gamer, a discourse many players were familiar with partially, if not primarily, through the professional gamer videos that Electric and I appropriated in shooting and producing NerdCorps promotional material. Conclusion Returning to King Cobra's comment at the outset of the gold medal Halo 3 game at WCG, "think of how many people are watching this" can be read as an affirmation of the significance competitive gamers assign to having an audience. E-Sports, as Michael Kane repeatedly asserts in his look at professional Counterstrike play (2008), is an industry heavily invested in garnering 137 spectatorship. In this context, being featured in promotional videos and on tournament broadcasts - i.e. being watched - represents a degree of status. In this chapter, I have charted the issues and concerns around using recording technology as a means of studying a group of competitive gamers, many of whom aspire to become 'pro' and most of whom seemed intimately familiar with an emergent genre of videos associated with competitive gaming. In giving back to this community in which any institutional or socio-economic privilege I may have had as a researcher gave me little currency, but my camera equipment and production experience certainly did, my fieldwork was transformed and, in certain cases, displaced by my obligations as videographer. This was particularly true of the formalized interviews I carried out, which told me little of participants' lives outside of competitive gaming, as I had initially intended them to do, but told me much of what matters to members of this community. This chapter serves as an introduction (or caveat maybe) to the ensuing chapters, where my analyses of 'professional' competitive gaming are derived from fieldwork in which I not only recorded, but participated in the professionalization of play - at least to the extent that 'acting natural' in front of a camera may very well mean, for the aspiring pro gamers I studied, acting 'professional'. In carrying out promotional video work for this community of competitive gamers, I was arguably implicated in the discursive association between spectatorship and 'professional' play, and in the configuration of 138 competitive Halo 3 gaming as a spectatorial activity. By using activity theory as a means of schematizing my involvement, I have shown how the presence of a videographer at NerdCorps events activated this discursive association and affected the material conditions of 'pro' play. 139 Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't Overview This chapter approaches the local, national and international Halo 3 LAN tournaments I attended as gendered "landscapes" (Bryce & Rutter, 2005) where male privilege is ossified through the discursive coupling of digital gaming and professional sports, two traditionally male-dominated domains. I begin by exploring in greater detail the construction of competitive gamers as 'cyber athletes'. This discourse envisions competitive gaming as the exclusive domain of young men most capable of embodying a "hypermasculine" subject position (Bryson, 1987; Connell, 2002, 2005; Curry, 2002; Welch, 1997), one premised on the performance of highly-specialized technological skills that are (tenuously) associated with the male-dominated world of professional sports. Rather than focusing on how this discourse is taken up and performed by male participants, however, this case study examines how and where women position themselves in the gendered landscapes of competitive gaming LANs. In doing so, I take up Bryce and Rutter's (2005) challenge to highlight the experiences of women in male-dominated gaming cultures, and to confront the ways women and girls are too often rendered invisible by players, designers, researchers, and, in the case of competitive gaming, tournament organizers and promoters as well. 140 To do so, I employ Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's (1991) concept of "legitimate peripheral participation", asking what kinds of female participation are regarded as legitimate and illegitimate within a "community of practice" rooted in the association between male bodies and digitally-mediated ('cyber') athleticism. I examine some of the forms of 'women's work' in relation to competitive gaming tournaments, roles that configure womens' participation in sexualized and supportive terms: either as 'cheerleaders' for their male partners/relations or as promotional 'booth babes', women whose work modeling sponsor products at large-scale events like MLG and WCG provides an interactive staging for affirmations of male heterosexual desire. With this documentation of "legitimate" (and sexualized) female participation in place, I turn to an analysis of Fatal Fantasy, the only consistent female NerdCorps participant and a regular attendee of MLG events all over North America. I show the ways she attempts to retain, even play up, a heteronormative sexuality and femininity while also engaging in and often excelling at elite-level competitive Halo 3 play. I suggest that while her tenuous positionality is by no means unproblematic, it represents an accomplishment within the highly-constrained gender hierarchy at work in competitive gaming. Like Janet Schofield's investigation of computer use in schools in Computers and Classroom Culture (1995), I did not initially set out to document the marginalization of women in this culture of competitive play. My observations, 141 and in one case, informal interview with mothers and promotional models (at the 2008 MLG Toronto Open and the 2008 WCG Finals, respectively) were largely incidental to my investigation of pro-gaming. As Schofield reports on in the context of school-based gender inequities around technology use, the limited opportunities for female participation became increasingly apparent, the more I followed a group of players to local, and then national and international competitive gaming tournaments. Therefore, instead of describing and detailing players, spectators and organizers who are almost all male, this chapter examines where and how the few women involved in or even observed over the course of this study find and/or create a place for themselves within this almost exclusively male setting of emergent gamer professionalization. 'Cyber Athletes' In their gendered studies of arcades (Alloway & Gilbert, 1998; Taylor, 2005) and LAN cafes (Beavis & Charles, 2005), researchers characterize these spaces, which are predecessors to corporatized tournaments like WCG and MLG, as sites where male participants perform a discursive link between masculinity and digital play through their demonstration of game-based mastery. While MLG and WCG operate like large-scale LANs, however, the spectacle they produce is more in line with professional sports events. At these events, the central theme - gaming as masculine e-Sport - is ubiquitous. The main promotional video for the 142 2008 WCG Grand Finals, for example, showed highlights of participants, always male, intensely watching their screens, celebrating victories, and agonizing over defeats, while a male voiceover describes gamers as the "cyber-athletes of the 21st century" (Fieldnotes, Nov. 9, 2009). At MLG Toronto, this invocation of corporatized athleticism was even more explicit, from the massive banners flanking the main stage depicting (male) pro's, shot from below, clutching Xbox 360 controllers, their faces glowering at the camera (Figure 6.1), to cameos by former NFL athletes, to commentators' celebration of individual players' skills and feats. Figure 6.1. Banners of MLG pro's at the 2008 Toronto Open. The link between gaming and sport is carried out not only through the imagery and language of these LAN tournaments, but through players bodies as well. 143 Players are often described (by each other, journalists, and promoters), as athletes, young men with competitive 'natures' whose desire for competition somehow transfers to, and is satisfied by, competitive gaming. In Game Boys, for instance, Michael Kane (2008) repeatedly plays up his subjects' involvement in athletics; the coach of the Counterstrike team he focuses on is an ex-college football player (p. 110), while the team's star player was an accomplished athlete in high-school until injuries put a halt to his career (p. 112). Largely on the basis of these two examples, Kane claims that competitive gaming "is for athletes too old for the junior varsity team and not good enough to make varsity. So they get their competitive fix where they can, in e-Sports" (p. 113). However tautological this line of reasoning may be ('pro-gaming is athletic, because those that play it are athletes'), it works to buttress the discursive association between gamers and athletes: competitive gaming is another outlet for the 'inherent' competitive drive of the athletes who participate. Similarly, in competitive gaming journalism and on official websites, players are described as possessing game-related skills that are somehow analogous to 'real life', male-dominated sports. Kane, for instance, notes that the former star athlete and Counterstrike star is highly-regarded in the competitive community for his skills with the sniper rifle: Kane even suggests a certain amount of transfer between the skills required for baseball pitching and those demanded of Counterstrike sniping (p. 113). Similarly, an interview with MLG pro "Strongside" describes the players' progression as if he were a 144 dedicated athlete, citing the "daily training regimen" he underwent in order to "refine" his "raw talent" (http://www.mlgpro.com/?q=pro/strongside). These representational and organizational strategies invoke the masculinized world of professional, mainstream North American sports, represented and popularized by the National Football League, National Basketball Association, and Major League Baseball. In the face (and often in spite) of ongoing attempts to open professional sports to female participation, the North American sports-media industry continues to celebrate the hypermasculine: physical violence against self and others, aggression, individual skill, and the desire and ability to inflict pain and humiliation over those less capable (Brackenbridge, 2002; Messner, 2007; McDonagh & Pappano, 2008). Women (and most men) are regarded as lacking the physical capability or 'guts' to participate in these lucrative arenas on equal terms, even as female athletes undermine the physiological rationales for keeping female sports separate from - and lesser than - male counterparts (McDonagh & Pappano, 2008). In invoking this particular sporting tradition, then, the North American pro gaming industry, and Major League Gaming in particular, constructs a similarly misogynistic and exclusionary discourse. 145 Sports Talk In my observations of play and interviews with players at monthly NerdCorps events, players often appropriated this sports-related discourse in their interactions with one another, the Generals, and myself. Players frequently talked of 'training', particularly in the lead-up to MLG events. Similarly, players and organizers often spoke of the rigorous discipline needed to hone game-based skills. The most explicit instance during my fieldwork of a participant appropriating this sports-related discourse - and invoking its hypermasculinized notions of gender and athletics - came in an early telephone interview with Vik Vicious, NerdCorps' most successful player,41 and one of the more gregarious and affable members of the club. In our interview, I asked Vik what he thought about MLG's attempts to brand competitive Halo 3 as sport. He told me he thought it was "definitely" a sport, and should be considered so. He went on to discuss how he watches his diet before big gaming events, in order to keep his energy up and avoid "crashing" during competition, and said he "trains" upwards of 4 hours a night in the weeks before MLG tournaments (Fieldnotes, March, 2008). He then, unsolicited by any question on my part regarding female participation, told me that he is annoyed by young women who show up to NerdCorps LAN's, events he described as key to his training. He claimed these 41 Aside from winning the 2008 World Cyber Games gold medal for Halo 3, Vik's team has never lost a NerdCorps Halo 3 tournament. He has also had moderate, but increasing success at MLG tournaments. 146 young women are simply a distraction to the "serious" purpose of NerdCorps LANs, i.e. to prepare and "train" for larger, more lucrative tournaments, and said women generally lacked the "testosterone" to compete on a level playing field with men, in competitive gaming (Field notes, March, 2008). In doing so, Vik not only presented his investment in gaming in 'athletic' terms, but invoked the same kinds of physiological pseudo-science used to keep women out of violent sport (McDonagh & Pappano, 2008) - only here, in the context of an activity which shares none of the same physical or athletic demands as the sports it emulates. Where the Women Are This section explores the various ways women negotiate the gendered discourse described above. I focus on women performing three very different roles: a mother at MLG Toronto who flies her sons' teams to events all over North America, two promotional models operating a sponsorship booth at the 2008 World Cyber Games, and a young female player who participates extensively in NerdCorps and MLG tournaments. While each carry out different kinds of embodied work, each 'role' is tenuously maintained within a community that most commonly reads female participation in sexualized terms that support, and are subordinate to, male heterosexuality and heteronormativity: the mother describes herself as a 'cheerleader', promotional models become 'booth babes', and perhaps most problematically, female players at NerdCorps events risk being 147 labeled as 'Halo hoes'. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation provides a framework for understanding how these women might be differently positioned within the emergent "communities of practice"42 around competitive Halo 3 play. Lave and Wenger articulate the notion of "legitimate peripheral participation", whereby new members of an affinity group or community are gradually incorporated into "full" (i.e. more intensive and more competent) participation in the community's practices through either formal or informal apprenticeship systems. They stress that "legitimacy" within a community of practice is not only a matter of mastering particular competencies, but also of modeling the behaviours, dispositions and talk of full- fledged or dominant members, those who "embody practice at its fullest". In this way, communities of practice regulate inclusion and legitimacy on the grounds of identity, as well as competency or knowledge acquisition, and in this way work to re-produce (or transform) social and political power relations. Here, I use Lave and Wenger's notion of legitimate peripheral participation as a framework to make sense of the ways gender is enacted as a significant, if not primary criterion for "legitimate" participation in competitive play. For the group of players who regularly attended NerdCorps events, and who also 42 Lave and Wenger define a "community of practices" as "a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, overtime and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice" (p. 98). 148 participated in broader networks of online competitive play as well as larger, more lucrative tournaments, being male - and performing a certain kind of heteronormative masculinity premised on competition and on competitive gaming's tenuous connections to professional sport - is as, if not more important to becoming a legitimate competitive gamer as actual game-based skill. Cheerleading During a break in play at the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, I approached a tall, tanned, middle-aged Caucasian woman, one of the few women actually on the floor of the large gaming tournament, and introduced myself as a university researcher. She responded by introducing herself as "Status' Mom", referring to her son's gamer tag, and described herself as the "cheerleader" for her son's team, Against the Odds. Status' Mom said she knows "all about MLG", having been to several events in both the 2007 and 2008 seasons. When asked how many events she has been to with her son's team, she replied "most of them", and said that she had even taken out an equity loan to in 2007 to fly her son's team to events, emphasizing the lengths the has gone to support her son and his team (Fieldnotes, August 11, 2008). Once the next round of her son's team's play began, Status' Mom began her "cheerleading" work. Attached (Figure 6.3) is 149 a 'thick depiction'43 of her verbal and non-verbal encouragements over the course of the round's initial two minutes of play, represented visually through the Multimodal Application Program (MAP). This depicts Status' Mom's steady stream of clapping and comments either spurring the entire team or specific players. The attached image from the clip (Figure 6.2) shows the 'cheerleader', from behind, gazing at her son's team 44 Figure 6.2. "Status' Mom" (her head is on the right) acting as cheerleader. 43 See Chapter 4: Methodologies for my initial use of the term, "thick depiction". As I imply in that chapter, the term is an attempt to re-frame Clifford Geertz's (1973) notion of "thick descriptions", in which the ethnographer offers layered accounts of the "webs of significance" in which both researcher and participants are implicated, as a tool for multi-modal rather than exclusively textual meaning making. 44 These videos are available for online viewing at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6/Chapter6_StatusMom.mov and http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6/Chapter6_StatusMom2.mov. Figure 6.3. A MAP of Status' mom's verbal and non-verbal encouragement. Figure 6.3 illustrates Status' Mom's marginalized form of participation. She engages in an almost constant pattern of clapping, calling out her son and his teammates using the same stock phrases ("Come on" or "Let's go"), and occasionally shouting a violent (possibly ironic) phrase like "Kill them all!" or "Kill the enemy!". The (perceptible) structural regularity of her cheering seems to have little correlation to what is actually occurring on-screen, where the action (and the boys' verbal responses to it, as they utter map call-outs to one another) follows a more irregular and spasmodic pace. Also, neither her son nor his teammates appear verbally or bodily, to acknowledge or respond to her encouragements. Instead, one way of understanding this interaction is to read it as a performance of cheering - publicly demonstrating her support of her son's activity, which actually extends well beyond her presence at the event (having paid her son's airfare, lodging, and entry fees). It might also be possible to see her performance as acting interested - as 'enacting interest' - in the game in order to become, or 151 at least appear, interested, much like a student making copious notes at a lecture in order to stay awake 45 Unlike the other mothers I noticed at these large-scale events (no more than five at MLG Toronto, and only one at WCG), Status' mom and her participation in her son's gaming is clearly visible. At the same time, however, she does not seem to follow her son's play, or to participate in the discourse of the game. Instead, she describes it as cheerleading, invoking a practice historically linked to male-dominated sports in which women are kept literally on the margins, capable of only superficially supporting or buttressing the 'real' action rather than participating constitutively in it (Grindstaff & West, 2006). Her 'cheerleading' not only underscores larger attempts by e-Sports marketers and promoters to legitimate competitive gaming as spectator sport, but also re- inscribes what kinds of roles are available to females at these events: roles that shore up, rather than actively participate or, indeed, to threaten, boys' 'ownership' of competitive gaming. Booth Babes There is one mode of female participation I observed at both WCG and MLG that seems "legitimate" - in fact, eagerly welcomed - by male participants: 'booth babes', women who facilitate male participants' engagements with a range of 45 See, for example, Mundsack, Deese, and Deese (2002), How to Study. 152 products (primarily digital technologies) at promotional exhibits scattered throughout events.46 At the World Cyber Games in Cologne, such promotional booths were set up throughout the ground floor of the event. Each featured young, slender, predominantly Caucasian women, dressed to match the booth's theme (for instance, at the station for graphics chip maker ATI, whose mascot is a computer graphics image of a buxom woman in Burlesque clothing, models wore fishnet stockings, tight black leather or PVC, and black or red wigs). The models' responsibilities included standing by the product, greeting and handing out brochures to passers-by, running product demonstrations, and posing for photographs either by themselves, or with their colleagues and/or attendees. The expectation for these women is to 'be seen and not heard'. In a video clip from the final day of the World Cyber Games, two women are stationed at the Ferrari booth, located near the middle of the event floor, on either side of a red sports car on display (Figure 6.4). Two young men sit side-by-side in the car, playing each other in the finals for the cellphone-based racing game Asphalt 4. Figure 6.4 shows the women, dressed in racing-themed jackets and hotpants, posing while a crowd of male spectators looks on, the racing match broadcast on screens at the front of the exhibit.47 46 "Booth babes" are a common site at game development industry gatherings as well, such as the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Tokyo Game Show, and Game Developers Conference (GDC). 47 The corresponding video clip is available to view at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6/Chapter6_BoothBabes.mov. 153 Figure 6.4. Booth babes modeling the Asphalt 4 stage. Halfway through the clip the two players finish their match, and a male employee pulls the next round of male players up and seats them in the car. The women continue to stand, hands on their hips, facing the crowd. They occasionally look at each other to make comments (in German), but otherwise, they remain relatively still, standing beside the technological spectacle of a racing game being played in a 'real' sports car, while their male colleague sets up competition between male players in front of a crowd of male spectators. It is possible to read the work these women carry out, posing with male participants and masculinized technologies, as guarding an intensely "homosocial" (Willis, 1991) space from homosexual desire: the presence of highly sexualized women ensures for the male attendees that their heterosexual desire is firmly secured and on display (particularly since these women are 'available' to take pictures of/with). They work to facilitate attendees' spectatorial 154 engagements with typically masculinized technologies in ways that affirm, rather than threaten, a discursive link between heteronormative masculinity and technological competence (Wajcman, 1991). Fatal Fantasy The lone female regular at NerdCorps events, and one of the few female players at MLG Toronto, Fatal Fantasy is an anomaly in the North American competitive Halo 3 LAN scene. Status' Mom deliberately positions herself in a marginal, supportive role, while the 'booth babes', silent and ornamental, represent one of the few forms of female participation that a hypermasculine discourse around pro-gaming configures as "legitimate"; Fatal, on the other hand, seems to strive to be recognized as a legitimate, indeed masterful member in the competitive Halo 3 community, despite her gender and sexuality. She occupies what seems to be a volatile position within the male-dominated community I studied, presenting herself as both a desirable heterosexual female, and as a competent and capable competitive gamer, fully capable of 'playing with the boys'. Fatal Fantasy is a Caucasian 17-year old high school student. On top of her extensive involvement with NerdCorps, she has also been to several MLG tournaments. She is relatively successful at NerdCorps events, particularly in the 'Free For All' (FFA) portion of events - she placed first in round-robin FFA play at the first event I attended in March 2008, the first time a female player had placed 155 so well. She was among the more vocal players, particularly during team play, loudly dispensing strategies as well as taunts. In a clip taken during the team finals of the March 2008 event, for instance, Fatal acts as primary 'strat' (strategy) caller and chastises a fellow player, Burns, for his poor communication. She tells him "I'll kill you if you do that at Meadow", referring to the upcoming Meadowlands MLG event where the two teamed up (Fieldnotes, March 2008). At another point in the clip, she exclaims to all of her teammates (as well as their opponents), "look who we're losing to!", urging her teammates on through the humiliating possibility of losing to a clearly inferior team.48 In this and similar instances, Fatal Fantasy shows herself to be a competent gamer, and a dominant presence at NerdCorps events. She positions herself as an accomplished and demanding teammate: a self-assured female Halo 3 player, critical of other (male) participants' play. The kind of performance described above complicates a discourse in which, by virtue of its connections to masculinized cultures of both mainstream sports and gaming, competitive Halo 3 is configured as the exclusive domain of young men. Her skillful play further stresses that there is nothing in terms of gameplay itself - the technological skills required, the intensive communication and coordination demanded of team play, or the stresses of competition - that are 'inherently' masculine. Instead, it is the discourse that links competitive gaming with a misogynistic (and homophobic) 48 The corresponding video clip can be viewed online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6/Chapter6_Fatal.mov. sports tradition that makes her identity as a 'good girl/ girl gamer' so tenuous and contingent. By her own account, Fatal Fantasy does well in school, exchanging her good grades for extensive participation in competitive gaming (including attending numerous MLG tournaments all over the U.S). This disclosure is in stark contrast to the majority of male NerdCorps participants I talked to, who neither mentioned their schoolwork nor seemed to have their competitive gaming activities fettered by or contingent upon schoolwork. Fatal informed me that her parents trust her to "be good" and avoid trouble in her travels to MLG events all over North America, and that they fund these trips but do not accompany her (Fieldnotes, September 2008). On both points - her schoolwork and her assurances of 'proper' behavior - Fatal discussed concerns rarely, if never, heard from male players in similar conversations about their participation in competitive gaming. Whether or not she is alone among the participants I talked to in having to bargain with her parents over her pastime or the costly traveling it entails, the fact that this was so central to the ways she described herself to me perhaps reflects her perceived need to legitimate her intensive participation. Other researchers of gender and gaming have noted that young women tend to do more work justifying their gaming habits than men do, perhaps owing to and reflecting the ways gaming technologies - and leisure time in general - are held 157 back, and parentally regulated, more for females than males (Jenson, de Castell & Fisher, 2007; Walkerdine, 2007; Carr, 2006). "Just There to Game" In a conversation with me at one of the last NerdCorps events I attended, Fatal described her participation in the male-dominated NerdCorps community, and her interactions with other female participants, in ways that positioned her as a desirable woman who is nonetheless 'off limits' to male players. She recounted a story about another young woman who used to attend NerdCorps events regularly; according to Fatal, the young woman was infatuated with one of the more successful NerdCorps regulars, leading to a sexual encounter at the Ironside Inn during an event in Fall 2007. She described the animosity the other girl had towards her, stating the girl thought the two were in "competition" for young men at the club. Unlike the girl in her story, Fatal asserted, she is "just there to game" (Fieldnotes, September 2008). At stake in this conversation was Fatal's ongoing attempt to position herself as a legitimate gamer a community in which young women are most often configured (as they were in Vik Vicious' portrayal of female participation at NerdCorps events) as distractions, only there to flirt with and 'pick up' successful male players. Some players, as well as the NerdCorps organizers, described young women at gaming events as "Halo hoes" (Fieldnotes, March 2008; 158 Fieldnotes, September 2008).49 At stake as well was my own positionality as older male and as a researcher and documenter of a set of practices in which she has much invested. As an older man, someone who had been very visibly taking notes and filming her and her peers' play, and who was also friendly with and 'in' with the organizers, I became implicated and involved in Fatal's gendered identity work. It seemed important to her that I understand she is not a "Halo ho" and there for the right reasons - i.e. just to game. Through her highly competent play, Fatal challenges a discourse that frames competitive gaming as the exclusive domain of males: she is fully capable of performing the abilities, as well as the talk, required of a 'pro' gamer, and by her own admission to me, she is "just there to game". That she did so through invoking the negative stereotype of the "Halo ho", however, perhaps points to the complex and tenuous conditions for young women's equitable participation in this culture. Fatal articulated her own 'safe' and legitimate gendered identity primarily by setting it against what seems to be the normative understanding of how and why other young women attend competitive gaming events: to pick up guys. The discursive construction of"Halo hoes" simultaneously positions women as sexualized objects, incapable of participating on equal terms with men, while at 49 Significantly, though NerdCorps players and organizers mentioned "Halo hoes" several times, I did not see one instance over the eight NerdCorps events I attended of such behaviour - suggesting, perhaps, that the notion of "Halo hoes" is a discursive construction used in the service of a (homo-)erotics of male 'cyber athletes'. It may also be a discursive resource by which male participants can categorize, position, and/or possibly dismiss female participants who might actually show up to events, whether they are 'just there to game' or not. 159 the same time constructs 'pro' gamers as young, sexually desirable straight males. Conclusion My examination of 'cheerleaders' and 'booth babes' explores the normative conditions by which women are rendered (in)visible in this community, as participants relegated to supportive (and sexualized) positions. Status' Mom's self-described capacity as 'cheerleader', when in fact her work facilitating her son's play makes her more like a 'general manager' or 'team owner', points to the kinds of limited and discursively constrained participation made available to players' mothers when they visibly (and audibly) support their sons' play. Unlike the largely invisible forms of support offered by parents, the ubiquity of 'booth babes' at MLG and particularly WCG suggests that the pro-gaming discourse I outline here does enable, perhaps even require, some form of legitimate and highly-visible female participation - but one informed by a mandate to be seen and not heard, and to facilitate, rather than regulate, men's access to digital technologies. In light of these other, more sanctioned, forms of female inclusion made available within, and in the service of, this masculinized technoculture, Fatal Fantasy's ongoing participation is a welcome peculiarity. It is by no means either straightforward or unproblematic, however. Her own participation involves 160 considerable socio-economic and racial privilege, as well as the re-inscription (by her disassociation from it) of the deeply misogynistic construction of "Halo hoes", based on the notion that women are there to 'pick up'. While she insists that she is "only there to game", she plays up and performs a subjectivity that seems otherwise thoroughly rooted in heteronormative and heterosexual notions of femininity, as if enjoying and being good at gaming are her only major transgressions within a heteronormative gender order. Fatal's identity as a competitive gamer, like all subject positions that, in one way or another, transgress hierarchies that are often rigidly maintained (Butler, 1993, 1999; Connell, 2002, 2005), particularly around the use of an access to digital technologies (de Castell & Bryson, 1998), appears highly contingent and fraught with contradictions. She seems to tread between two equally 'unsafe' and undesirable subject positions conventionally made available to women in relation to digital technologies: that of a "Halo ho", occupying an ornamental and supportive role that bolsters male privilege, or as a woman whose mastery of masculinized technologies marks her as similarly masculinized within a hierarchical and dichotomous gender order - i.e. as a lesbian. Evoking the symbols and structures of a mainstream sports discourse that bases continued male domination (and privilege) on an alleged physiological superiority of men over women, the 'cyber athleticism' touted by the 'e-Sports' industry is emptied out of the very things believed to separate male from female physiology (such as musculature, resistance to pain, and so on; see McDonagh & Pappano, 2006). In its place are abilities that are only 'masculine' by virtue of the fact that they are virtual - i.e. rooted in long-standing patterns of male privilege in relation to digital games. Competitive gaming and mainstream sports may therefore be most alike in the ways both naturalize a discursive connection between masculinity, competition, and athleticism. Both domains offer rationales for a grossly unlevel "playing field" (Wachs, 2005), where claims about what women lack- competence, interest, inclination, ability - are put forward as physiological or psychological differences between sexes. That these allegedly inherent sex-based differences have been thoroughly undermined by not-so- recent developments in gender theory, which has shown them to be either grossly overstated or the outright fabricated "phantasms" (Butler, 1993) of a hierarchical gender order invested in keeping women in their place, seems to have had little impact on the conditions for female participation in e-Sports. 162 Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team" In a 2008 interview with ESPN, Chris Puckett, a play-by-play commentator for Major League Gaming's Pro Circuit tournaments, offers this advice to aspiring competitive Halo 3 players: "put in the practice, focus on communication first, then your shot" (http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/chatESPN?event_id=22042). In Puckett's opinion, verbal interactions between teammates are as more important to success in team-based competition than one's "shot" - the dexterity and hand- eye coordination normally associated with game-based competency, and with first-person shooters in particular.50 This advice about what it takes to become an elite competitive Halo 3 player highlights a central aspect of the professionalization of Halo 3 play as I saw it practiced by the gamers I studied: players' performance of specific forms of verbal, game-related communication and the regulation of these performances by other players, as well as organizers and spectators. As one player described to me when asking about the importance of communication, "a silent team is a dead team" (Fieldnotes, May 2008): knowing how, when and what to speak in the context of team-based play are as important the performance of professional Halo 3 play as (for example) the ability to re-load a weapon at just the right time, or aim while running and jumping. 50 See, for instance, Thompson (2002). 163 My particular focus in this chapter is to develop an analysis of players' verbal communications with one another. Though my primary focus is on speech during and around team-based (4v4) play, I also include for consideration utterances made during Free-For-AII (FFA) play.51 I draw from audio-visual data to discuss the following kinds of utterances: a highly-codified set of game-based descriptors used during play to coordinate team action (called 'map call-outs' by players), verbal encouragement, critique and mentorship among players (which often focused on how and when to use map call-outs), rebukes and taunts between players and the homophobic/misogynistic language used to do so, and participants' 'name-dropping' of other tournaments and professional players. Theoretical Background How to do Things with Speech Act Theory In order to more meaningfully differentiate between the communicative forms players used, I draw upon speech act theory, first articulated by John Austin (1975) and then refined/re-worked by John Searle (1969, 1976), Kent Bach and Michael Harnish (1979), and Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre (1990), among others. Speech act theory offers a framework for categorizing and analyzing the "performative" aspects of spoken language, asking how speakers 'do things with words' (Austin, 1975): formalize relationships, coordinate the actions of others, 51 Of the three sites I attended, Halo 3 Free-for-AII mode was only played at the local NerdCorps events. 164 commit to a particular intent, and so on. In a series of lectures collectively titled How To Do Things With Words (1975), John Austin articulates an understanding of spoken language where the utterance "is, or is a part of, the doing of an action" (Austin, 1975, p. 5). According to Austin, a performative utterance can be analyzed in three ways: as "locutionary" act, in terms of its ostensible meaning and content; as "illocutionary" act, in terms of its intended effect on the speaker or listener(s); and as "perlocutionary" act, in terms of its actual effects on the speaker, the audience, and the context of the utterance (pp. 98-103). A video clip taken from my study can help illustrate Austin's primary distinction. In the clip, from the March 2008 NerdCorps event, Fatal Fantasy sits beside a novice male player as he plays a pre-match 'warm up'. After watching him play for some minutes, she says to him loudly, "your name is Talent and you suck." The player seems to ignore her comment; he does not look at her and continues playing, and she continues to watch, in silence. Using Austin's three- fold framework, her comment can be interpreted in the following ways: as a "locutionary" act, Fatal Fantasy identifies an apparent (and ironic) discrepancy between the young man's gamer tag and his game-related competence. As an "illocutionary" act, her comment can be read as an attempt to either distract and/or humiliate the young man, while at the same time, position herself in relation to other players (and in front of the camera) as a more experienced player. Finally, as a "perlocutionary" act, the comment seems to have no visible 165 effect: the young man does not seem distracted from his play, and none of the other participants in the shot seem to take up or otherwise react to her taunt. Working from this distinction, Austin asserts that analyzing the illocutionary sense of an utterance - what the speaker does or intends to do through the speech act - is of primary importance to social studies of language (Austin, 1975, p. 139). John Searle, Austin's student and colleague, builds on and extends Austin's articulation of illocutionary acts. Across a number of works (Searle, 1969, 1976; Searle and Vanderveken, 1985), Searle re-formulates Austin's rough taxonomy of illocutionary acts, a project he sees as crucial in accounting for the "limited number of basic things we can do with language" (Searle, 1976, p. 22) 52 In "A Classification of Illocutionary Acts" (1976), Searle outlines the re-worked taxonomy, in which the main criteria for differentiating types of speech act is the intent or "point" of each (p. 10). "Representative" illocutionary acts describe a set of conditions, with the intent to "commit the speaker" to the veracity of the statement (p. 10): for instance, by claiming "I'm really good at Halo 3" I might intend to convince my listener (and myself) of my prowess at the game. The point of a "directive" utterance is to realize the conditions to which it refers - to literally, as Searle claims, "get the hearer to do something" (p. 11). "Play Halo 3 with me" is one example. "Commissives" 52 Searle, like Austin, maintains that the intended effects of a speech act cannot be conflated with its actual effects, and preserves Austin's distinction between illocutionary (intended) and perlocutionary (actual) effects of speech. 166 consign the speaker to carry out a particular intent or goal (pp. 11-12): by saying, "I'm going to go to the next MLG tournament", for example, I am ostensibly committing myself to attending the event. Searle describes "expressives" as statements that communicate the speaker's state of mind (pp. 12-13); an example might be, "I can't believe you beat me". Finally, "declaratives" bring about the conditions to which they refer; Searle cites "You're fired" as a prime example (pp. 13-14). To use another, if a competitive gaming referee catches me breaking Halo 3 tournament rules, she might say "I'm kicking you out", which effectively bars me from further participation in the event. Intrinsic' and 'Extn'nsic' Speech This taxonomy and its further refinements and extensions (Alston, 1991; Bach & Harnish, 1979; Harnish, 1990; Sbisa, 2002), has been used to carry out focused analyses of discrete talk segments (see, for example, Kubo, 2002; Moulin & Rousseau, 2002; Recanati, 1987; Yamada, 2002). As in Searle's initial discussion of his taxonomy, these works often represent statements in symbolic and/or schematic form as sequences of syntactic elements, in order to examine their mechanics: the 'force' with which they are expressed, for instance, or the presumed 'sincerity' of the speaker. Rather than apply Searle's taxonomy analytically to individual talk fragments, however, I employ it more informally as a set of concepts for 167 expressing and organizing how different speech acts 'work' in the contexts of their utterance. I appropriate it in my exploration of how (and when) players employ certain kinds of performative utterances, in order to assess how participants employed these various forms in their performance of 'pro' Halo 3 play. In doing so, I follow Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre's attempt, in their article "Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves" (1990), to bring speech act in line with poststructuralist theory. The authors invoke a poststructuralist notion of "discourse" as dynamically realized and socially-reproduced systems of meaning through which we regulate and negotiate 'acceptable' identities, activities and practices (p. 45). Illocutionary acts are one means by which subjects position themselves and are positioned by others in relation to particular discourses. According to Davies and Harre, this theoretical move departs from conventional speech act theory (as exemplified in Searle's work; Davies and Harre, p. 45), in that their approach does not attempt to 'de-code' individual speech acts in order to reveal the speaker's intention or psychological state of mind. Rather, speech acts are regarded as a means through which individuals take up and rehearse particular subject positions within a given discourse community (p. 46). Following Davies and Harre's poststructuralist re-working of speech act 168 theory,53 the different performative utterances I document in this chapter constitute one means (alongside non-verbal forms of communication such as gesture, proximity, gaze, and game play) through which players engage in and reproduce a discourse around 'professional' Halo 3 play: mastery of a highly- codified lingo, and an ability to 'trash-talk', is as important as one's 'shot', and silence is associated with incompetence and/or inexperience. This discourse is further characterized by an acceptance (celebration even) of misogynistic and homophobic banter between players - banter that has far more to do with rehearsing particular hyper-masculinized subject positions than with executing game play. In keeping with this recognition of the roles linguistic exchanges play in the regulation and reproduction of subjectivities, the performative utterances I document here are organized in two general theoretical categories. I differentiate between speech acts intrinsic to play, those that immediately relate to events in the game (i.e. which direct players' attention and efforts to a particular strategy or course of action), and speech acts extrinsic to play, those that relate to participants' identities and performances in relation to pro-gaming - i.e. taunting, tutelage, and name-dropping. Put another way, while all the speech acts I look at here involve players participating in a discourse around what professional Halo 3 53 A similar framework is offered up in James Gee's articulation and application of discourse analysis (1992, 1999), insofar as inclusion in a particular 'affinity group' is partially a matter of mastering the group's discursive practices. 169 play entails, 'intrinsic' speech acts concern the performance and regulation of play, and constitute one part of a domain of tactics and skills for securing in- game power-ups, achieving certain objectives, repelling opponents' attacks, and generally coordinating actions among teammates. 'Extrinsic' speech acts concern the performance and regulation of players, involving participants in the maintenance and reproduction of acceptable pro gamer subject positions. This distinction is not intended as a mutually-exclusive set of categories; almost all of the speech acts I examine here relate to or reference in-game events in some way, while all of them involve and affect players' positionalities within the community of competitive Halo 3 players. I use this distinction in support of my central argument in this chapter: that much of the verbal communication which is regarded (and regulated) by players as necessary for elite-level play, has perhaps less to do with being good at 'the game itself and more to do with taking part in the discursive association of Halo 3 with professional sport - insofar as this discourse traffics in the same kinds of homophobia, misogyny and hyper- masculinization as the professional sports it emulates (Curry, 2002; Waitt, 2008).54 Overview In the analyses that follow, I draw from audio-visual clips that are particularly 54 Please see the previous chapter, "Where the Women Aren't", for a more thorough exploration of the gender inequities I observed at Halo 3 tournaments. 170 illustrative of the kinds of utterances that characterize verbal communication at NerdCorps events. Following the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic speech acts, the first set of utterances I look at involves a specialized vocabulary for competitive Halo 3 play, generally referred to by players as "map call-outs". This system of codified descriptors is used in over two-thirds of the approximately 200 clips in my audio-visual record depicting competitive team play, making it a particularly prevalent form of verbal communication between players. I also look at instances in which participants critique eachothers' play, focusing in particular on when and how players regulate peers' use (as well as mis- or disuse) of map call-outs. These constitute intrinsic forms of communication in so far as they address (and re-inscribe) conventions around the kinds of verbal competencies required for professional competitive play. I then turn to an exploration of speech acts that are largely extrinsic to play, those that involve participants urging each other on, engaging in taunting and trash-talking, and referencing names and events from the world of professional play. In analyzing these extrinsic speech acts, I argue that they involve, to a significant degree, the appropriation of discursive practices commonly associated with a masculinized, and misogynistic, domain of mainstream sports (and sports spectatorship). Through their invocation, players actively participate in the discursive association of competitive Halo 3 play with masculinized sport. 171 'Intrinsic' Speech Map Call-outs "Map call-outs" constitute a highly-codified terminology for describing and identifying on-screen events among teammates, referring to specific areas in specific game arenas where enemies, power-ups, and/or objectives appear during the course of game play. To show how they are used and what they accomplish within competitive team Halo 3 play, I turn to a clip recorded during the first day of competition at the 2008 MLG Toronto Open (August 22).55 The clip shows 'You Scared?', a high-ranked American team, playing against another, unidentified American team (Figure 7.1). Figure 7.1. Omg Its Chip and teammates during MLG play. 55 This clip is online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_OMGitsChip.mov. 172 The player on the far left, 'Omg its Chip', is the more vocal and audible team member throughout this clip, though the other three team members participate in map call-outs as well. In this clip, as in almost all instances of map call-outs in my audiovisual data, players repeat each map call-out two or three times. Unlike the systems of specific pre-scripted plays or formations used in high-level organized team sports (as engineered, for instance, by the quarterback in football, or the midfielder in soccer), map call-outs are most often not employed in 'directive' speech acts; they are not intended to direct other players' actions. Rather, they are usually used in 'representative' utterances to describe, in a codified and concise way, the action unfolding in a particular part of the game environment, which other teammates might not be in a position to see on their screens. For instance, when Omg Its Chip yells "Two dead in their lobby", he describes a specific set of conditions that he is viewing/taking part in: two opposing players have been killed (either by Omg Its Chip or another teammate) in their 'lobby', the area of the arena that the opposing team embarks from and where they 're-spawn'56 after being killed. Similarly, when his teammate, 'Rifles Up' proclaims "One shot our snipe, one shot our snipe" he is notifying other teammates of two conditions: he has spotted an enemy player on their side of the map close to the area on their side of the arena where the sniper rifle power-up 56 When they are killed, players must wait a certain set amount of time (depending on particular tournament rules) before they re-appear - 're-spawn' back in a designated part of the game arena (their 'lobby') usually on the far side from their opponents' lobby. 173 appears ("Our snipe"), and this player has been weakened (presumably, though not necessarily, by Rifles Up himself) to the point where he is only one direct shot of the battle rifle (the default weapon for MLG competitive play) away from being eliminated. As these examples show, map call-outs are used to instantiate a shared virtual topography through a pre-determined system of verbal cues. Map call-outs can also be employed as directive utterances, in players' instructions to one another. In the same clip, Omg Its Chip alerts his team members to 'Jester', an opponent. At first, he exclaims "Jester one shot Jester one shot", his representative utterance indicating that this player has been weakened; in the next instance, he yells "Jester's one shot, just jump up and shoot him once", a directive utterance aimed at no team mate in particular. A second later, Omg Its Chip comments, "I got him I got him". In the span of four seconds, Omg Its Chip identifies an enemy's weakened status, urges his teammates to finish Jester off, does so himself, and then alerts his teammates that he's done so. From my observations of competitive Halo 3 play across various tournaments, this rapid-fire narration, in which map call-outs are invoked and repeated several times in quick succession to describe unfolding events in- game, marks a standard, even mundane competitive gaming moment. At the same time, the use of map call-outs in directive utterances is less common, in my audio-visual record, than their use in representative utterances, perhaps indicating (and/or instantiating) Omg Its Chip's status as team leader. 174 Verbal 'Screen Looking' The prevalence of map call-outs in 4v4 play can be at least partially accounted for by examining how the technological configuration of competitive team Halo 3 play at the events I attended constrain player agency,57 particularly in the ways players' field of vision is curtailed. Competitive Halo 3 play, particularly at the elite levels I observed, is intensely fast-paced and chaotic, and the difference between killing another player or being killed by them is often a matter of who sees who first: knowing the location of teammates and opponents offers considerable strategic advantage. As a communicative system for representing on-screen events, then, map call-outs are a means of verbally extending players' field of vision, and they overcome two technological limitations to players' line of sight. The first limitation is virtual, and relates to the design of the game arenas used at each event (the four most popular arenas at the NerdCorps, MLG and WCG events I observed are named "The Pit", "Construct", "Narrows", and "Guardian"). These spaces are comprised of dark corridors, multiple, disjointed platforms, and sharp, blind corners: they are designed to curtail and confound players' in-game lines of sight.58 The second limitation concerns the material layout of televisions and 57 For a more exhaustive account of the technological and material layout of LANs and how they structured players' embodied actions, please see Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play. 58 This insight is in stark contrast to Valerie Walkerdine's argument, in her ethnography of children's gendered digital play (2007), that games offer players "omnipotent fantasies" of vision and control (p. 30). This assertion might be true of some games - i.e. 'god games' such as Black 175 consoles at LAN tournaments: because a team of four has to use multiple television sets (either two televisions running in 'split screen' mode, accommodating two players each, or four televisions, one for each player on the team), players usually have to look away from their own television in order to see where their teammate(s) are and what they are doing. As I observed at NerdCorps Free-for-AII tournaments, looking at another players' screen, or 'screen looking', is a much-maligned practice during Free-for-AII play, where players usually have to sit beside or share screens with other opponents. Screen looking your opponent is a means of gaining strategic advantage, and over the course of my fieldwork at NerdCorps I observed several instances of players accusing one another of cheating and/or defending their screen looking as a legitimate tactic.59 In team play, however, screen looking is an encouraged and even habitual act: when a player dies, they look at their teammates' screens for the 10-15 seconds before they re-spawn, often shouting out encouragements and/or warnings as they do so. When their avatars are alive, however, the frantic pace and White and SimCity that offer top-down, birds' eye perspectives on the field of play - but it falls apart upon considering the degree to which players must overcome/work around the constraints of limited vision, particularly in first-person shootersJike Halo 3 and 'survival horror' games like Silent Hill (Perron, 2004). 9 Most players play far more Halo 3 online, over Xbox Live's online gaming service, than they do in LAN's, meaning screen looking is only an issue at LAN play. The regulation of screen looking is, therefore, part of a more general negotiation between players, organizers, and promoters about what counts as 'legitimate' tournament play, particularly as the e-Sports industry positions LAN events as the primary arenas for professional gaming (see, for instance, Taylor, 2009). 176 of competitive team play makes it almost impossible to look at other teammates' screens. As such, because of this physical limitation as well as the design of virtual arenas, map call-outs constitute 'verbal screen looking': a kind of collaborative "lateral surveillance" (Andrejevic, 2005) that extends players' awareness of on-screen actions beyond what their limited line of sight, constrained by the configuration/design of both virtual and material technologies, allows for.60 Community Artifacts: Mapping Speech Call-outs are regarded as central to the skill repertoire required for competitive team-based Halo 3 play, as I learned from observing the local, national and international LAN tournaments I attended, as well as talking with players and organizers. Like the 'hardcore' gaming communities around other games (particularly massively-multiplayer online games; see Steinkuehler, 2008; Taylor, 2006b), these discursive practices are also articulated and debated in online game-related forums (the most prominent among competitive Halo 3 players in North America are MLG's forums, at http://www.mlgpro.com/forums). On these sites, players produce and publish graphical maps of call-outs, identifying the locations and communally-regulated codenames for weapon and power-up 60 T.L. Taylor, examining user-created software modifications to World of Warcraft, makes a similar comment regarding experienced players' deployment of software tools for monitoring teammates' in-game actions. Taylor claims such practices perform "important work in assisting collaborative play, especially at the high end of the game" (Taylor, 2006b, p. 329). 177 spawn points, elevators between platforms, team 'lobbies', and so on.61 As resources made explicitly to instruct other players in not only where certain points on the map are located, but how to call them out to teammates in online and LAN-based matches, these digital artifacts re-produce a codified set of verbal/textual referents which are then rehearsed and regulated as part of the competencies associated with professional Halo 3 play. Regulating Talk: "Be Loud!" As with T.L. Taylor's (2006b) look at in-game communication tools for participatory surveillance in World of Warcraft, a player's use or mis-use of map call-outs is subject to regulation and critique from other participants - whether teammates, spectators, or opponents. In another clip from the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, a NerdCorps participant, 'Beans', is watching a local Toronto squad lose to an American team.62 After the match, Beans criticizes one of the Canadian team's members for not being loud enough. "When you do badly don't be quiet- you weren't talking!" he says, leaning in after some seconds trying to get the other player's attention (Figure 7.2). When the other player defends himself, claiming "I was yelling", Beans replies that the only player he heard making call- outs was 'Cutty', another player on the team. The interaction between these two 61 See, for instance, the detailed and extensive work created by 'MLG Widowmak3r' and published on http://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/stuff/callouts/. 2 This clip is online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_BeLoud.mov. 178 players suggests a shared conception about the importance of 'being loud' to successful play. According to the understanding that these players seem to share, the team lost in part because one player wasn't audible enough in his map call-outs. Figure 7.2. Shadow (on the left): "I couldn't hear you!" Here, a player critiques their peer for his perceived silence during play; the player accused of not communicating properly insists that he was being loud (perhaps just not loud enough), signaling his recognition of and participation in the discursive equation between "being loud" and competence. It is not enough that this particular player utilizes map call-outs; it is also how he produces these utterances (being 'loud enough') that matters to his participation in a pro-gaming community. This instance demonstrates the extent to which the performance of map call-outs is central to not only successful team strategy, but is also to the discursive construction of professional Halo 3 play. 'Extrinsic' Speech In this next section, I examine speech acts that relate far less to in-game events than map call-outs, but are as important to the performance of particular subject positions within this community. This includes forms of encouragement and motivation between players, as well as the various ways taunts and insults are deployed; whether to distract, provoke, or alienate other players. Included as well are instances of 'name-dropping', where players reference MLG professionals in an effort to affiliate their play with those of the 'pros' and to demonstrate their knowledge of these players' personas and skill sets. I argue that although each of these communicative forms is related to and often triggered by participants' game play, they are largely 'extrinsic' to in-game events - that is, they concern the regulation and certain subject positions regarded as acceptable within a community heavily invested in the links between gaming competence and a (sports-related) hyper-masculinity. "Keep This Pace Goin' Guys" This sub-section examines instances where participants (players as well as spectators) congratulate each other for specific in-game achievements (i.e. "Nice shot"), or spur each other on (i.e. "Let's go"). These kinds of speech acts occur in about 80 audio-visual clips in my record. Two successive clips from the March 2008 NerdCorps event offer examples. The clips depict one of the teams in the 180 4v4 finals (entitled 'NYGiants', presumably after the NFL team that had just won the Super Bowl in the previous month), consisting of a young Asian woman (whom I did not see at another NerdCorps event), a young Black NerdCorps regular regarded as one of the club's better players, another young Black man (who has also not returned since), and 'Reach', a young Caucasian man who is widely regarded as less skilled than most other NerdCorps regulars, but who was heavily involved in helping the Generals run monthly events, and often acted as their liaison to other local players. Reach is exceedingly tall (hence his moniker), athletically-built, and gregarious, and often aggressive and intimidating in his interactions with other players (particularly when helping the Generals facilitate events). Like many male NerdCorps regulars, he dresses in sports wear: ball caps, jerseys, track pants. During my study, Reach was volunteering for MLG Canada to help organize their Canadian events, and expressed to me his aspirations to work for MLG as a play-by-play commentator. One of the NerdCorps organizers described these activities as attempts by a less competent player to "make a name for himself in the competitive gaming industry (Fieldnotes, June 2008). At the start of the first clip (Figure 7.3), Reach exclaims "Let's keep this going guys, we got a good pace going here".63 In the second clip (an immediate 63 These two clips are online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_Reach_1.mov and http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_Reach_2.mov. 181 continuation of the first), Reach again shouts "Keep this pace going guys" as I pan the camera from his teammates to him. As illocutionary acts, Reach's comments constitute "directive" utterances; he urges his teammates to bring about the situation he describes (keeping up "the pace"). His insistence appears somewhat redundant, however, and disconnected from his teammate's play. Gazing intently at their screens and shouting map call-outs, they seem to already be invested in "keeping up the pace", and it is unclear what effect his exclamation has on his team's play (although the position of the camera did not allow me to see whether and how Reach's utterances affects his teammates' in-game play). They do not give any gestural cues as to whether they're heeding his directive, though they continue their map call-outs. "Keep this pace goin' guys" may be framed as a 'directive' utterance but seems to instead enable Reach to signal his participation in the fast-paced play of his more competent teammates. Figure 7.3. "Keep this pace goin' guys". 182 Reach's comments evoke the motivational language of athletics coaches (see, for instance, Kassing & Infante, 1999; Kassing & Pappas, 2007), and gain some significance in so far as they re-enact the discursive link between competitive Halo 3 and sport. Through these speech acts, Reach positions himself as a team 'coach' and authority figure, capable of 'doing' competitive Halo 3 and participating in a pro-gaming discourse, despite his lesser abilities in comparison to other NerdCorps regulars. Taunts, Trash-talk and Put-downs The next sub-section explores different ways participants use taunts and insults during play. These speech acts recur frequently in my audio-visual record, appearing in over 100 clips out of 400, during both FFA and 4v4 play.64 In looking at specific moments of players mocking, teasing and/or provoking one another, I argue that inclusion in a competitive gaming community involves, for these players, participating in an antagonistic discourse in which 'trash-talking' between opponents is regarded as a legitimate tactic. Through similar speech acts, less competent play(ers) are characterized as feminized and/or sexualized. Once again, the discursive parallels between competitive Halo 3 play and masculinized sports practices and institutions is significant: across both, competence is often associated with heteronormative masculinity, and expressed in violent and hyper- 64 Significantly, the only site/event where taunting among players is not present is at the World Cyber Games, where trash-talking was disallowed as part of a mandate to promote 'good sportsmanship' at events styled as competitive gaming 'Olympics'. 183 masculinized language, while incompetence is equated with feminity and homosexuality (Atencio & Wright, 2008; Curry, 2002; Waitt, 2008). Here, I examine three clips in which participants at NerdCorps events engage in antagonistic and aggressive speech acts. In the first instance, players on opposing teams engage in trash-talk during heated 4v4 play, which I characterize as a kind of belligerent but harmless verbal sparring. The second clip shows novice players being punished and marginalized through the speech acts of their teammate; here, put-downs are used to disassociate an accomplished participant from the incompetent players she has been teamed up with. In the third clip, which is perhaps qualitatively different in ways worth pursuing, a dominant male player (Vik Vicious) loudly but 'jokingly' threatens a female player (Fatal Fantasy) after she reacts to his sexualized comments during Free-for-AII play. Unlike the first two clips, the exchange is wholly unrelated to on-screen action, and demonstrates that much of the discursive practices this community engages in has far more to do with players' embodied and gendered identities than what they are doing, or capable of doing, in the game. "Sit Down With That Shit, Man!" In the first clip I examine here, 'Zero Hour', a team comprised entirely of young Black men (two of whom are NerdCorps regulars) are taking on an unidentified team. The clip was recorded during the June 2008 NerdCorps event, the best- 184 attended of the events I observed, and depicts the two teams playing each other as part of round-robin 4v4 play.65 'Focus', the player closest to the camera, engages in a two-minute trash-talking exchange of taunts and provocations with a player on the other team who is off-camera. The following is a partial transcript of their exchange: Focus: Suck on that! Focus: Sit down with that shit man! Other player: Are you winning? Focus: Sit down with that shit! [15 seconds later] Focus: You wanna play that buddy? Other player: I'm gonna play that cuz I'm winning - and I've already won a game. Where's your win? Focus: It's comin' baby, it's comin'. Other player: I'm waitin' for it, any day buddy. [90 seconds later] Focus: Oh baby ooooh baby! Is everybody dead? This transcript does not represent a full record of account of what is said over the three-minute clip, nor even a complete account of what these two participants say. Their dialogue is only part of a complex, multi-layered soundscape as players from both teams shout map call-outs. Their exchange of provocations is antagonistic, but not hostile; the participants seem more concerned with distracting and teasing, rather than provoking one another, and it stops abruptly as soon as the match ends. This 'trash-talking' is the most common deployment of put-downs and insults in my audio-visual record, and 65 It can be viewed online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_Banter.mov. 185 according to many players I talked to (as well as the NerdCorps organizers), it constitutes as legitimate a game play tactic as map call-outs. This almost playful verbal sparring between two opponents stands in contrast to the following account of two novice players being alienated through a dismissive exchange between two more accomplished NerdCorps regulars. "These Guys Have So Much Awareness" The clip I look at here, from the July 2008 NerdCorps event, involves Fatal Fantasy and her friend Burns, who are teamed up with two unfamiliar and novice young men, whom I had not seen before and did not see since 66 One of them is not visible in the camera shot. 'Mad Hatter', another NerdCorps regular, watches their round-robin team play. In the clip, both Fatal and Burns engage only sporadically in map call-outs, signaling an apparent lack of enthusiasm for, and disengagement from, a match. Their teammates appear to be silent the entire duration of the clip (though only one of them is visible). At the beginning of the clip, Fatal tries to coordinate the other two players, explicitly turning to look at them twice as she utters map call-outs. Halfway through the clip, Fatal shakes her head and exclaims that the match is the "Most epic choke I've ever seen, I kid you not", presumably in response to her team's struggles. Moments later, Mad Hatter comments, sarcastically, "Wow, these guys have so much awareness 66 This clip can be viewed online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_Exclusion.mov. 186 [referring to Fatal's novice teammates]". She replies by stating, "These kids? No they don't" (Figure 7.4). She appears to avoid looking their way for the rest of the clip. After the round comes to a close, someone off-camera exclaims, "You got raped guys, so hard", and Fatal shakes her head again.67 Figure 7.4. Mad Hatter, Burns and Fatal (from the left edge of the clip), disparaging novices. In my reading of this clip, Fatal distances herself both verbally and non-verbally from the poor play of the two inexperienced players. She replies to Mad Hatter's comment in a way that both alienates and infantilizes the two novices ("These kids? No they don't"), effectively positioning those sitting directly beside her as unworthy of any further direct contact. 67 Participants' frequent use of 'rape' to describe in-game events is an issue I hope to take up at a later time, by looking at its use both in other discourse communities as well as in wider youth culture. Such an exploration is beyond the scope of this chapter. 187 "Slap You Across the Throat" Whereas the previous clip depicts Fatal actively distancing herself from the poor play of her teammates, the next clip I analyze involves male participants marginalizing Fatal for reasons wholly extrinsic to her play - her female sexuality in a community in which women are not 'supposed' to game.68 The clip, from the August 2008 NerdCorps event, begins with Vik Vicious partaking in racialized and homophobic chatter, to no one in particular, during an otherwise quiet period of Free-for-AII play. Moments into the clip, he begins to yell "Suck my bird, nigga!" in a loud and deep voice, to no one in particular. Hopper, seated beside Vik, laughs, and Vik continues, "why can't you talk, is there a bird in your throat?", and again Hopper laughs ("bird" in hip-hop music is a euphemism for penis). Seconds later, Vik again yells, "Eat my bird, nigga!" more loudly, at which point Fatal Fantasy, seated several feet away with her back to Vik, leans back and looks at Vik until he catches her gaze, then turns back to look at her screen, shaking her head (Figure 7.5). Vik responds, "Oh what, you got a problem with that [Fatal]? I'll slap you across the throat", after which he comments, "No really, I don't hit girls".69 None of the other players around Vik or Fatal (including Hopper, Vik's teammate, who had laughed at the initial outbursts) seem to visibly or audibly respond to the exchange (see Figure 7.6 for my MAP of the exchange). 68 This analysis further illuminates Fatal's tenuous involvement in this masculinized community, discussed in the previous chapter. 69 This video can be viewed at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/ Chapter7_Vik_SuckmyBird.mov. 188 Shortly after, Vik resumes game-based talk with the other players in his row. I am in the shot, seated on the other side of the room, taking notes, and do nothing to either intervene or comment. Figure 7.5. Vik (on the left), to Fatal (on the right): "You got a problem with that?" Figure 7.6. A MAP charting the exchange between Vik Vicious (MM) and Fatal Fantasy (ID). 189 Instances of the kind of banter that begins this clip appear in about 100 of 400 clips in my audio-visual record. As in other contexts dominated by young males (Curry, 2002; Pascoe, 2007; Waitt, 2008), homophobic and misogynistic speech acts function to preserve male privilege and 'ownership' over competitive gaming. The reading of this exchange that I offer here, through MAP and explanation, is by no means definitive, but is instead one interpretation among many possible. Vik's outburst is encouraged by his teammate Hopper ("Glasses" in Figure 7.6), a younger but well-respected player, who laughs out loud after the first two remarks. His response to Fatal Fantasy, the only one to visibly censure his remarks,70 is to threaten physical violence against her, before assuring her (and the other participants, as well as the camera and possibly myself) that he doesn't "hit girls". His threat against her is certainly problematic, but so is his following claim that he doesn't hit girls; rather than subdue the threat, this comment re-emphasizes Fatal's gendered identity within a male-dominated space. Whereas Fatal's own reaction to Vik's banter maybe demonstrates her unwillingness to engage in the banter, as if it is beneath contempt, his response is to re-assert her gendered transgression. This has little to do with Fatal's gaming competence, as is the case with the novice players Fatal dismisses in the previous clip, and everything to do with the maintenance of a discourse that 70 African-Canadian NerdCorps participant 'Afroman', seated beside Hopper, seems to take no visible issue with Vik's use of "nigga". 190 problematizes Fatal's attempts at legitimate participation, on the grounds of her gendered identity. Affiliative Speech: The Name Game On frequent occasions at NerdCorps events, I noticed participants make reference to MLG's professional players (those with contracts to MLG or to its sponsors, such as Dr. Pepper) as well as other LAN tournaments. These 'affiliative' speech acts occur in over 40 audio-visual clips, and demonstrate players' familiarity with a domain of professional play, and in particular the personalities MLG markets as its star 'cyber athletes'. Through referencing these professionals, participants signal their inclusion in a broader community of competitive Halo 3 gamers, and demonstrate their familiarity with the personalities and play styles of star players. Sit Like Strongside In a clip taken from the May 2008 NerdCorps event, Fatal Fantasy and Shadow prepare for a round-robin 4v4 match against Reach's team.71 One of the organizers has set up a webcam in front of Reach and has told him he will be filmed during play (this is a different camera than my own; I am seated 10 feet away from the competition table). At the start of the clip, Shadow looks at Reach 71 This clip is online at http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7/Chapter7_LikeStrongside.mov. 191 and remarks, "Oh we play [Reach's] team? What a joke", and he and Fatal laugh. Reach, apparently more concerned with the webcam in front of him, says, "I've never played with a face cam on me. I'll just sit like this" and adjusts his position in the seat, leaning forward towards the webcam. Watching him, Shadow suggests, "Just sit like Strongside". Reach says, "Ok, like Strongside" and again adjusts his posture, slumping down in the chair. Shadow, still watching him, asserts "No, it's more like this": he spreads his legs wide, holding his controller over his crotch, and leans back in his chair and to his left, in an exaggerated slouch. Reach, not as slumped in his chair as Shadow, replies, "No, he leans over like this", inclining his torso to his right before returning to his initial position, seated forward and hunched over. Not only do these players invoke Strongside's name, they actually mimic his posture during play: slouched low in the chair, leaning to the side, in a posture that suggests aloofness and detachment.72 In mimicking this pro, whose public persona (as crafted through his interviews and Pro Player biography) is of a superbly skilled, nonchalant professional, both players are performing their affiliation with his persona and perhaps, by extension, with the kind of pro- gaming masculinity Strongside represents. That this exchange between them is initialized by the unanticipated presence of a webcam, and Reach's concern with how he should position himself in the "shot", makes this not only a performance 72 In my pilot study of a university campus arcade, I noticed many accomplished players at 1v1 fighting games such as Street Fighter adopt similar postures (Taylor, 2005). 192 of "being like Strongside", but an enactment as well of the media production practices through which players like Strongside become known to players. Videos of MLG tournament play often featuring close-ups of the players involved. In this clip, the webcam turns Reach's play into a media production and, in response, he and Shadow invoke one of the most popular and well-publicized personas made available through MLG's promotional videos. Through these and other instances of affiliative speech, as well as other 'name-dropping' practices (for instance, appropriating the gamer tags of professional players), these players are connecting their localized play to the lucrative world of professional e-Sports. Conclusion The categorization and interpretation of players' verbal interactions I offer in this chapter is, for the most part, a representative but not exhaustive sample of the communicative patterns I observed. I have excluded, for instance, the forms of communication employed by Halo 3 'coaches', participants whose function, from what I observed at MLG Toronto,73 is to take on the role of shouting map call- outs for the entire team, so that individual players do not have to. I also did not engage players' use of the term 'rape', and the issues the use of this term raises in a male-dominated community where women are most often positioned in supportive and sexualized roles. 73 My primary reason for not discussing the role of 'coaches' is because I only observed them at the MLG event I went to, and not at NerdCorps tournaments or the World Cyber Games, and only a minimum number of MLG teams actually included this role. 193 My analysis does, however, play up what I believe to be a crucial characteristic of the emergent discourse around professionalized Halo 3 play, expressed through the sentiment that "a silent team is a dead team": the expertise required to participate in this discourse not only involves game-based skill, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and a familiarity with the game formats and maps used in 'pro' events, but also the routinized call-outs of a codified speech system that both demonstrates and accomplishes successful team coordination. The communicative forms that I have defined as 'intrinsic' to play, then, are as much the repertoire for elite players as the ability to aim and fire while running or jumping, rapidly navigate virtual space, and memorize when and where on each game terrain certain power-ups appear. As my exploration of 'extrinsic' speech acts makes clear, however, map call-outs constitute only part of the ways players verbally participate in a pro- gaming discourse. Players' verbal enactment and regulation of a 'pro-gamer' masculinity seems as important to competitive Halo 3 play as the cultivation and execution of game-based competencies, including map call-outs. The interaction I examine between Vik Vicious and Fatal Fantasy clearly illustrates that affirmations of heteronormative masculinity are a significant part of this community's discursive practices. The forms of extrinsic speech sanctioned in this community, and deployed to marginalize particular players, demonstrate that the ability to perform professional gaming has as much to do with players' gender 194 as their abilities to beat each other in Halo 3. 195 Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play Overview My observations at NerdCorps events and at the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, and my conversations with players and NerdCorps organizers, illustrated the extent to which participants geared their play towards MLG events. The Generals deliberately catered to the competitive Halo 3 community by deploying the same virtual arenas and game settings in their events as those used at MLG tournaments. At the MLG event in Toronto, I was not surprised to see that interactions among players generally looked and sounded the same as I had observed at NerdCorps events, albeit within a much larger, more polished and corporatized venue.74 The Halo 3 tournament at WCG, on the other hand, involved players from around the world, representing different nations, cultures and linguistic backgrounds. I found that WCG Halo 3 play looked and even sounded remarkably similar to what I had seen at both NerdCorps and MLG events. Players' embodied actions, including the cadence, distribution, and content of their verbal interactions, how they sat, and their physical contact (or lack of) during and between matches, were similar to those I had observed and recorded at the North American events. 74 Regardless of venue and city, MLG layouts remain consistent: a 'main stage' facing a production booth and seating section, flanked by rows of networked televisions and Xbox 360 consoles. 196 This chapter accounts for these similarities by attending to the technological infrastructure of each event. Previous chapters chart how a 'pro- gaming' discourse is enacted at these competitive LANs, exploring how players perform professional Halo 3 play. Analyzing the technological apparatuses of each event, particularly through the deployment of actor-network theory, enables a fuller and more rigorous account of how competitive gaming is produced, in similar ways, across different regional, national and linguistic contexts. By exploring how a network of virtual and material technologies common to each event helps shape and 'format' the embodied work of competitive gamers, this chapter builds upon recent theoretical advancements in qualitative games studies: in particular, Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy's (2008) use of actor-network theory to analyze digital play as constituted by both human and non-human (technological, game-based) agents. I also take up and revise T.L. Taylor's (2006b) assertion that different games, and even different settings and configurations within the same game, generate different play practices and communities of players. My ANT-informed approach depicts how competitive Halo 3 play is shaped by similar technological arrangements, from game settings to seating, emphasizes the importance of mapping not only the virtual, but also the material linkages that connect the different LANs I studied. To carry out this analysis, I look at some of the constitutive elements of a technological apparatus common to each of the three sites I observed. These 197 apparatuses "frame" (Latour, 2005) the embodied actions and communicative resources of players, co-creating 'LANscapes' of elite, competitive team-based play that remain relatively homogeneous across seemingly disparate and disconnected contexts of play: from the cramped quarters of NerdCorps events in downtown Toronto, to the polished, highly-corporatized WCG convention hall in Cologne, Germany. The resulting depiction is of a digital gaming "technoculture" (Crogan, 2006; Penley and Ross, 1991; Simon, 2007a) where highly-specialized forms of play are prescribed not only by a gendered discourse around professional e-Sports, but also by an infrasctructure of material and immaterial technologies that regulate, and standardize, how participants interact with one another and the game. Theoretical Background T.L. Taylor's ethnographies of online gaming, first with a community of "hardcore" North American EverQuest players (Taylor, 2006a) and then with a group of European World of Warcraft (WoW) gamers (Taylor, 2006b), attempt to make sense of how a game's rule systems, sanctioned/regulated forms of player interaction and association, and design and appearance of areas as well as playable and non-playable (computer-controlled) avatars work together to configure players' individual and collective practices, behaviors and expectations. In her research with EverQuest players, for instance, she explains how her own 198 process of understanding socially-regulated play was shaped by her choice of character and its relatively isolated starting location in the massive virtual world (Taylor, 2006a, p. 15). She offers a more fine-grained analysis of this kind in her work with WoW, where she describes how differences in servers (how the game is 'hosted' online), between a North American server that disallows player- versus-player (PvP) combat and a European PvP-based server, as well as external, player-created software tools used by some more experienced player communities, structure fundamentally different ways of playing what is ostensibly the game. Building from these insights, Taylor urges games researchers to produce less "generalized theories" of digital (particularly networked) play, and more nuanced "case studies" of localized play communities - studies capable of making visible the differences in play, even around the same game, that are made possible by different arrangements of rules, game mechanics and software add-ons (Taylor, 2006b, p. 318). This insistence on granularity and detail offers a well-needed criticism of current research on play communities, particularly around MMOG's. At the same time, however, Taylor's analysis of WoW, like much research on MMOG's, remains primarily concerned with the virtual technologies involved in the structuring of play. A similar concern is shared by Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy, in "Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots" (2008). The authors' "micro-ethnography" of cooperative Lego Star Wars play is 199 an attempt to move beyond a "critical aporia" in games studies: the field is characterized on the one hand by formal analyses of games as media objects, research which often positions 'the player' as "abstract or notional" subject, and on the other by player-focused studies that configure games as simply the backdrop for play (Giddings & Kennedy, 2008, p. 14). Deploying this model, the authors map the various moments of being acted upon over the course of play, as they are compelled into certain courses of action by the different affordances of playable characters, pathways through the game's virtual spaces, and their own differing degrees of prior experience with the game. They conclude that their experience of digital play "was characterized by a rippling of control, affordance, and being-acted-on across the human and non-human agents" (p. 27). Like Taylor's work with WoW, Giddings and Kennedy's ethnography mostly ignores the material technologies that support and structure play, focusing almost exclusively on the game's virtual rules and mechanics. In the following account, I pay greater attention to the physical technologies consistent across the various LANs I attended; my attempt in doing so is to further extend, rather than rebuke these efforts at mapping the non-human agencies involved in digital play. 200 Technologies that Matter A potential pitfall in T.L. Taylor's (2006b) call for more case study diversity in studies of play communities is that we might lose sight of the globalized networks of communication, promotion, and capital that connect games and game players, particularly (but not exclusively) with regard to networked play. While T.L. Taylor's studies of MMOG's show that the same game can be played quite differently across varying local contexts, my own multi-site study yields an inverse insight: that play can look and sound the same across regional and linguistic differences, particularly where the technological infrastructure supporting/enabling play remains the same. In its focus on the non-human agencies at work in social phenomena, actor-network theory is not only capable of attending to the ways players are 'acted upon' by virtual agents, as Giddings and Kennedy point out; it is also capable of tracing these kinds of material and technological linkages that bind local sites together. In Re-assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (2005), Latour puts forward ANT, "an object-oriented sociology for object- oriented people" (p. 74), as a means of mapping the choreography between human and non-human, including material, actors. In Latour's view, the establishment and maintenance of "social" phenomena are made possible through delegating agency to non-human objects. Agency is therefore not a property of humans exclusively, but of a relation between humans and non- 201 human actors to which certain properties, powers and responsibilities have been delegated. As Latour says, "things" not only "determine" or "serve as backdrop for" human action - they "allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on" (Latour, 2005, p. 72). In this way, technologies not only mediate but prescribe certain forms of action. Latour (1992) uses the mundane and seemingly simplistic example of a door to illustrate these notions of prescription and delegation: a door does not just enable travel from one side of a wall to another, but its hinges, locks, doorknob, springs, and the material it is made of all contribute to how and under what conditions passage is made possible.75 Studies of digital play have begun to make use of this kind of analysis (Giddings, 2007; Giddings & Kennedy, 2008; Linderoth & Bennerstedt, 2007), but they have yet to do so with regards to the material apparatuses - the hardware, seating arrangements, desks - in which we play. Mapping LANscapes Associations of humans and non-humans, Latour notes, follow "structuring templates" (p. 196),76 material and immaterial blueprints that 'format' forms of work carried out across different locales. This section looks at some of the elements that constitute the "structuring template" of the LANs I attended: a 75 Please see Latour's "Where are the Missing Masses? Sociology of a Door" (Latour, 1992) for a more nuanced discussion (http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/050.html). 76 Latour is quick to point out that "structuring templates" themselves are produced through "local", "face-to-face" interactions, giving the example of an architect planning the layout of a classroom (p. 196). 202 blueprint generated out of practical considerations, limited resources, technological requirements, and agreements around which rule sets and configurations to use, collectively realized by game developers, tournament organizers and promoters, and players. From an ANT perspective, these LANs are "concatenations of actors" (Latour, 2005, p. 58) that string together game settings and rules, players, televisions, consoles and other equipment together into networked, competitive play. I work outwards from a brief consideration of the Halo 3 game settings and formats used at competitive LAN's, to an account of how material artifacts supporting LAN play were organized at each event. Together with the 'pro- gaming' masculinity I look at throughout this dissertation and the rules of conduct each event enforces, this network of actors produces stable terrains in which players' bodies, including how and when they can move, touch one another, leave their seats, and speak to one another, are tightly constrained: as a result, play largely looks the same across these different LANscapes. Gameplay Specs Virtual agencies in player-versus-player (PvP) Halo 3 play are built into its map design, weaponry, game formats, and rule settings,77 all of which can be customized along certain pre-determined coordinates. Players and tournament 77 Unlike Seth Giddings' (2007) analysis of Advance Wars 2, which focuses on the behaviours of the computer-controlled characters players must face off against, player-versus-player Halo 3 has no overt/personified 'agents' of this kind. 203 organizers can choose which maps are used, which weapons players start with and what other weaponry and 'power ups' such as camouflage and added damage reduction are made available over the course of play, objectives and victory conditions (the most common in Halo 3 being "Slayer" in which two teams compete to see who gets the most "kills" against one another, either within a set time limit or to a certain number of kills), whether players can wield two weapons at once ("dual wield" - disallowed at every event I attended), and number of players per team (Halo 3 allows up to 16 players in a map at once, but again, I only saw 4v4 play at larger tournaments, with some 2v2 as 'warm ups' at NerdCorps events). Advance settings include considerations like the how long power-ups last, how long it takes for players to 're-spawn' after they are killed, and even how much damage particular weapons inflict. The game settings for a particular event, or even for certain game formats, read like the 'specs' for a complex technological system: like other forms of highly-technologized work, they require and presume a high degree of literacy with a codified/specialized system of meaning (Kress, 2003; Lanham, 1994; Lankshear, Gee, Knobel, & Searle, 1997). For competitive Halo 3, settings are saved as a single file that can be uploaded and downloaded for activation on players' Xbox 360's, making it possible for settings to be easily accessed, shared, and deployed by hundreds of thousands of players. MLG's settings, detailed at 204 http://www.mlgpro.com/content/page/192918/Official-MLG-Halo-3-Settings-v6, served as the template for play not only at MLG Toronto, but also at NerdCorps and WCG. That MLG's settings were the primary configurations used at each event I attended made this version of the game, quite literally, the "only game in town" for the (global) community of competitive Halo 3 gamers. It prescribes which tactics and skills are of particular value, compelling from players the development and refinement of highly-specialized "micro" competencies: aiming and shooting while jumping, "leading" shots (i.e. aiming at a point where players anticipate their target to be), shaving valuable milliseconds off of re-load times, executing multiple kills with minimal ammunition,78 and performing and responding to precise, timely map call-outs. Soundscapes By the time I attended the MLG Toronto Open, I had observed six monthly NerdCorps events (March to August 2008) and had noticed the extent to which organizers and players positioned these events as training grounds for MLG play, rehearsing the same tactics, using the same map call-outs, and employing the same game specifications, formats and arenas as at MLG tournaments. Attending the WCG Grand Finals, however, I was surprised by the extent to 78 For instance, a highly coveted skill with the sniper rifle is taking out multiple opponents with a single shot. By exploiting brief milliseconds where opponents' are lined up in a row, such as when players are weaving back and forth (strafing) down a narrow corridor, a single well-timed sniper rifle shot can pierce through multiple opponents' heads, killing them all. 205 which I could understand verbal communications among the many non-English speaking teams in the Halo 3 tournament. I not only heard and watched non- English-speaking teams employ English-language map descriptors, but I also noticed that map call-outs were uttered in similar ways and at similar times: the content, as well as cadence and occurrence of call-outs, remained largely consistent despite linguistic differences between teams. The similarities in terms of what players said as they uttered map call-outs illustrates the degree to which players from different linguistic backgrounds a set of English-language descriptors, developed by a primarily English-language/North American community, in their team-based play of a game published exclusively in English. These parallels can be accounted for by looking at the patterning of competitive Halo 3, as played by the teams I observed. Map call-outs signal to players the location of power-ups, weapons, and opponents; the majority of strategies I observed from teams at each tournament revolved around securing or defending locations where power-ups, weapons and opponents re-spawn. Since both the MLG game settings and the use of consistent game arenas mean that patterns of where and when weapons, and power-ups appear on the map, similar patterns in how and when map call-outs are employed might be expected in so far as players from different cultural or linguistic backgrounds are similarly familiar with particular maps, constituting another way that players are, in the sense ANT talks about, 'acted upon' by the game. In other words, similarities in 206 what, when and how players utter map call-outs arise from sets of game specifications and maps that are consistent across different LAN tournaments.79 (X)Boxed-in bodies Despite the stark differences in the scope and semiotics of the venues I attended, the technical organization I saw at the LANs remained the same. Medium-sized TV screens (27") are perched on rows of tables, each with an Xbox 360 attached. With the single exception of NerdCorps' brief stay at the Rumble Room, where the entire LAN was organized along the single long, narrow bar, rows of game terminals (TV's and 360's) face each other, permitting opposing teams to physically confront one another during play, separated by the screens and consoles. Tables are placed in tightly spaced rows, the game terminals are similarly spaced tightly along tables. The cords, powerbars, modems, and routers required to power and connect terminals clump in the middle of tables, resting either on the ground beneath the tables or, at NerdCorps events, partially on the tables. With the exception of NerdCorps events, where there was very little spectatorship except during the finals, spectators are 79 This insight might account for North American success at the Halo 3 WCG tournament, where the Canadian and American teams, neither of which have placed in the top 8 at MLG tournaments thus far, placed 1st and 3rd respectively. As one journalist explained in conversation to me at WCG, Halo 3 is far more popular among 'pro-gamers' in North America than it is in Asia and Europe, where there are already significant competitive gaming communities around StarCraft and Counterstrike, respectively (Fieldnotes, November 9, 2009). It may be that European and Asian competitive Halo 3 gamers are still catching up to their North American counterparts in terms of their competency with the game ad, as importantly, with MLG game settings. 207 separated from the play area by structural barriers (stanchions and/or walls). Figures 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 show photographs of the LAN layout at NerdCorps, MLG Toronto, and WCG, respectively. Figure 8.1. NerdCorps LAN. 208 Figure 8.2. MLG Toronto Open LAN. Figure 8.3. Halo 3 LAN at the WCG Grand Finals. 209 Hardwired Play The close proximity of players to screens and to each other is a product, partially, of limited space, though the expansive floor of the 2008 MLG Toronto Open suggests that the layout of the venue alone does not account for the tight spatial constraints of all the LANs I attended. To a significant degree, the lengths of the cables involved in setting up a LAN - RCA cables, ethernet cables, and especially, power adapters - delimit how far apart game stations (and players) can be (Figure 8.4 depicts the mess of wires and cords required for Xbox 360 LANning). The relatively short length of power cables in particular, and the arrangement of power outlets (and electrical circuitry),80 fairly rigidly prescribes how far apart game consoles can be spaced. Another association of wires and bodies concerns the rule, at all the LANs I attended, against players' use of wireless Xbox 360 controllers. While players were invited (and required, in most cases) to bring their own controllers, the rules at each site required the use of wired controllers, which connect to consoles via USB cables. Because wireless controllers can be assigned to any console in range, their use can significantly tamper with and slow down the organization of a LAN. Here, a hardware affordance with regards to Xbox 360's - the ability to assign any wireless 80 Xbox 360's use substantial amounts of power (as General Electric described to me, running two consoles on a single electrical circuit will blow most "average" home or business circuits); mapping the electrical circuitry required for large-scale Xbox 360 LANs might provide further insight into the technological constraints of LAN play and subsequent implications for players' embodied performances. 210 controller to any Xbox 360 console - is expressly forbidden at Halo 3 LANs. In turn, the rule mandating users to physically connect their controllers to their console producing a further constraint upon players' embodied actions, limiting how far away from the console they can sit (and as a result, how close to one and other they must sit. Figure 8.4. Wires and cords at an Xbox 360 LAN. This material 'blueprint' is arguably as limiting with regards to players' embodied movement as the game settings are with regards to players' in-game actions: movement, motion and play in both the 'virtual' and 'real' spaces of competitive Halo 3 play are constrained along rigidly-prescribed routes. This organization of bodies in narrowly confined spaces also seems to generate a bodily discipline and self-regulation among participants (Foucault, 1979). In these intensely homosocial spaces, young males' close proximity to one another is 211 strongly "policed" in order to maintain and re-affirm participants' heterosexual identities (Martino, 2000). At each event, participants negotiated the tight physical boundaries of the LAN apparatus by positioning themselves in ways that minimized intrusion into each other's spaces; their default posture during play seemed to be leaning forward in their chair, elbows resting on knees, head and neck craned towards the game terminal. Participants reached across one another's bodies only to point at on-screen events unfolding on another teammate's screen, or to high-five one-another after a victorious round. On rare occasions - after a particularly heated or significant match, such as in the latter rounds of MLG play, and upon Final Round's victory at WCG - I observed participants briefly getting up from their seats to hug one another or pat each other's backs, as well as to mock or shake hands with their opponents. Losing teams seemed to touch less often, usually in the form of re-assuring pats, fist- bumps, or fives. As this analysis suggests, the postural immobility (punctuated by brief periods between play, involving usually celebratory touching and relaxation of a rigidly-held posture) that characterizes competitive Halo 3 play is not only a product of the attentional demands of fast-moving, 'high stakes' action, but also of the material conditions of an apparatus that brings male bodies into close (and, from the point of view of heteronormative masculinity, potentially 'unsafe') proximity. These forms of 'safe' or sanctioned physical contact at competitive 212 gaming tournaments can be seen as "technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) - forms of self-regulation and bodily discipline in the service of a gendered subjectivity - that the "structuring template" deployed across different Halo 3 LANs elicits from participants. Rules of Conduct The 'blueprint' for LAN organization I look at here also includes the rules of conduct NerdCorps, MLG and WCG enforce governing participants' behaviour. These rules (MLG's are online at http://www.mlgpro.com/2009-Pro-Circuit- Conduct-Rules) all prohibit touching LAN hardware (TV's, console's, connectivity equipment) - the only exception being that players can adjust their TV's volume, so long as they do not turn it up past a certain level.81 MLG and WCG also prohibit arguing with and ignoring the instructions of tournament referees. The only significant difference in rules of conduct between WCG and MLG is around taunting and mocking opponents. At MLG events, a certain amount of trash- talking is sanctioned, even invited: it is part of an attempt to connect the event to North American spectator sports, where trash-talking between players is often a celebrated accompaniment to competition. MLG draws its lines at what it calls "excessive" use of vulgar language and taunting, as well as physical abuse (or 81 For theories that connect gaming to the cultivation of technocultural competencies (for instance, Simon, 2007a), this rule forbidding players' touching the technological infrastructure, much less re-tooling it - and players' general acquiescence towards this rule - might be significant. 213 the threat of) between players. The many outbursts I saw at MLG Toronto, where victorious teams leapt out of their seats to yell or laugh or point at opposing teams, were all within the range of 'acceptable' behaviour. WCG, however, enforces strict rules prohibiting any kind of taunting, as part of its attempts at ensuring a degree of "Olympism" (Hutchins, 2008) and fair play. Players are not even allowed to stand up between rounds. In the semi-final Halo 3 match between France and Netherlands, one of the French players left his seat to point derisively at a player on the Dutch team following their first-round win: the entire French team was penalized by awarding the Dutch a victorious round (the French went on to win and play Canada in the finals).82 With the exception of WCG's prohibition of celebration/standing up, however, the rules of conduct between MLG and WCG were largely the same, and largely superfluous; as I demonstrate, much of the work for regulating bodily discipline was delegated to the technological layout of events. For instance, the barriers separating participants from spectators (stanchions at MLG, short walls at WCG) embody and enforce the stated rule at each event prohibiting spectators from entering the play area. Similarly, the lengths of cords and wires require players to manage themselves in relation to the close proximity of other (male) bodies. While the differences in their rule sets may reproduce significant cultural 82 T.L. Taylor (2009), in her account of prior WCG tournaments, examines the enforcement of rules for Counterstrike and Starcraft tournaments. She comes to the conclusion that far from being 'hard coded' into the game, rule formation is a contingent and dynamic process of negotiation among players, organizers, referees, and technologies. 214 differences between MLG and WCG, particularly around what kinds of celebration are sanctioned and what kind of 'competitive spirit' encouraged, they prescribe very similar rules around how and when participants can interact with spectators and with the material equipment. Like other elements of the shared 'blueprint' for competitive Halo 3 play (game settings and the technological apparatus), these codes of conduct constrain players' performances along narrow channels. Conclusion In their look at Counterstrike play, Rambusch, Jakobsson, & Pargman (2007) show that regional differences in "play styles" disappear at the elite level of play showcased at LAN events like the World Cyber Games (p. 162). They do not, however, account for this homogeneity. My analysis suggests that such (alleged) differences - and even, to a significant degree, differences in players' linguistic backgrounds - largely disappear among elite players because of a standardization of material and virtual technologies across the local contexts where professional play is carried out, at least in this study. In this chapter, I have developed this insight with regards to competitive Halo 3 play by accounting not only for the 'virtual' agencies at work in LAN play, but for the material agencies as well. These sets of non-human actors make up a "structuring template" for competitive Halo 3 play that produces important 215 similarities and overlaps in terms of the skills and embodied work demanded of participants across different LANscapes. Here, I outline one possible implication of this analysis, which concerns the limits of studying gaming communities as 'local' play contexts, as if the material and discursive terrain did not also extend to other local sites. 'Glocal' Play Thus far, accounts of the non-human agencies at work in game play have stopped short of accounting for the material actors involved. My study broadens this methodological lens by engaging in a consideration the material conditions of play in and across different LAN tournaments. As groups of Halo 3 players gather at local, national and international events to engage in 'professional' competitive gaming, the similarities not only in what they play but how, as well as in how they communicate with one another both verbally and non-verbally, can only be fully accounted for by examining the configurations that connect the virtual and material technologies common across these sites. While this insight is not intended as the basis for the kinds of generalized accounts of digital play that T.L. Taylor (2006b) cautions against, it does problematize her assertions about the unpredictability and heterogeneity of localized gaming cultures (Taylor, 2006b). In the view I offer here, a degree of homogenization across 'local' sites, what I describe as the formatting of players' embodied performances, is made 216 possible in so far as the same technological agencies are deployed, enacting what Latour (2005) calls a "redistribution of the local" (p. 193). Latour argues that normative sociologies mistakenly account for similarities across local contexts by referring to some "underlying" and abstract edifice, thereby setting up an unproductive dichotomy between local interactions and the "global" forces that shape them (Latour, 2005, p. 194). Instead, actor-network theory maps the empirically traceable linkages between particular contexts, each of which are at once local by virtue of occurring in specific times and places, yet also global in so far as they "overflow" with agencies coming from outside that time and place (p. 196). By pointing to a shared technological blueprint for formatting the different LANscapes in this study, this chapter demonstrates the importance of identifying and making sense of the degrees to which and ways in which, particularly for communities engaging in such highly-technologized practices, non-human agencies can format and render stable the embodied work carried out by participants across different locales. In doing so, this study lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for explorations of digital gaming communities whose networked play moves beyond normative binaries between real and virtual, local and global. 217 Conclusion Throughout this work, I traced a localized network of competitive Halo 3 players, organizers, venues, and technologies, and followed its organizational and interpersonal connections to larger-scale national (MLG) and international (WCG) 'e-Sports' tournaments, where attempts at transforming play into a spectator sport are most visible. Since the conclusion of my fieldwork, the associations constituting this localized network - i.e. the relationship between the NerdCorps Generals, the community of competitive Halo 3 players they cultivated, and the relatively stable venues where they met to carry out their 'training grounds' for elite Halo 3 play - have largely dissolved. NerdCorps has moved to a new venue that cannot support the technological infrastructure of an Xbox 360 LAN, while the players I describe as NerdCorps regulars have begun to organize private LAN parties at one another's homes. This dissolution is part of a broader pattern of shifts, re-configurations and failures that took place from the start of my fieldwork in February 2008, to September 2009, when I concluded my writing. Like the dissolution of NerdCorps' Halo 3 LANs, some of these changes have a direct bearing on the community I worked with. These include MLG's cancellation of its Toronto Open, after only two Toronto events; the emergence of the Professional Gaming League (PGL), a Canadian-based series of tournaments that roughly mimic MLG's tournament structure, albeit on a much smaller scale 218 (http://www.progamingleague.ca/); and the decision by the World Cyber Games to drop Halo 3 from its Grand Finals. These represent, for the players I followed, shifting (and overall, diminished) opportunities for their pursuit of 'pro' play. More general transformations in the e-Sports landscape over the same period include the failure of the Championship Gaming Series, an organization that had staked itself on the viability of gaming as spectator sport (Kane, 2008; Kollar, 2008), and the folding of the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL),83 the first PC-based gaming league to offer rewards to its 'cyber athletes' (and the first to describe players as such). While these failures did not immediately affect the organizers and gamers I studied, they demonstrate that the discursive and material positioning of gaming as spectator sport, in North America at least, is by no means a given.84 Instead, the North American e-Sports industry's ongoing struggle to find a mass audience - despite goals to make competitive play "the next Texas hold'em" (Kane, 2008; Kollar, 2008) - illustrates the extent to which organizations like MLG continue to cater to a 'niche' market for the consumption 83 The CPL has since been re-launched, in collaboration with Chinese online competitive gaming service SGamer, as an e-Sports league focusing on the more robust and well-established competitive gaming market in Asia (http://thecpl.sgamer.com/News/Detail/33030). 84 This is quite a different story than in Korea, where there are two television channels devoted to PC-based competitive Starcraft gaming (MBC Life, http://www.mbcgame.co.kr/, and Ongamenet, http://www.ongamenet.com/). As well, World Cyber Games are a Korean-run company, and Korean teams have dominated the Grand Finals since WCG's first event (http://www.wcg.eom/6th/history/ranking/ranking_wcgrank.asp#01). These differences in the popularity of gaming as spectator sport encompass differences between platforms, games, media institutions, and 'target audiences' between a North American e-Sports industry and its Korean counterpart. 219 of televised gaming, involving audiences made up primarily (and paradoxically) of competitive gamers themselves. This ongoing uncertainty over the legitimacy of competitive gaming and its viability as a sports media commodity, one with broader appeal beyond its player base, resonates with the tensions I discussed in my introduction regarding the 'professionalization' of an activity that has conventionally been associated with participatory recreation. These uncertainties are played out at a localized level in my following account of the termination of NerdCorps' Halo 3 events, which coincided with the conclusion of my fieldwork. After the Final Round Following the 2008 World Cyber Games Grand Finals, the association between NerdCorps and its community of 'regulars', including members of Final Round, came to an end. In a brief discussion with the team after their WCG gold medal match, Vik, Cutty and Cobra made it clear that they thought they had 'outgrown' NerdCorps, claiming that as "world champions", they expected to receive lucrative sponsorships upon their return to Canada.85 Furthermore, Cutty and Vik told me they and other NerdCorps regulars resented the organization for continuing to charge an entry fee, while offering only a small prize purse. 85 Since I concluded my fieldwork, Final Round has placed in the top-16 of two 2009 MLG Open events, and Vik and Cobra won the World Cyber Games Pan-American 2-person team Halo 3 tournament in Mexico (the game is not included in the 2009 WCG Grand Finals in China, presumably because of its lack of popularity in Europe and Asia). They have yet to be sponsored, however. 220 According to Vik, he and his peers in the Toronto competitive Halo 3 scene simply "make their own" LANs now (Fieldnotes, November 9, 2008). As for NerdCorps, they have not done a Halo 3-focused LAN tournament since the October 2008 Ironside Inn event. Instead, they have moved to a new venue, the "Gamma Bar", where they have been testing out different kinds of events involving a variety of games and consoles. They now run weekly family- oriented events called "Game On @ Gamma", featuring 'retro' games and consoles, as well as rhythm-based games like Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. They have also collaborated with Toronto-based PC gaming organization 'Zero PING' (http://www.zeropingevents.com/index.php) in running large-scale LANs featuring both PC and console-based gaming. At the first Game On event I attended in December 2008, Error told me about his "disappointment" with NerdCorps Halo 3 regulars and in particular, Vik Vicious and other members of Final Round, whom he characterized as "disloyal" to an organization that had initially brought them together and provided them with invaluable training for competitive LAN play. In the same conversation, he and General Electric both expressed weariness at the Halo 3 pro-gaming scene in general; not only to the players they worked with, but the pressure to conform to Major League Gaming's rules and settings, and the expensive and unreliable 221 technological configuration required for Xbox 360-based LANs.86 At the time, the Generals told me that 'Game On' events represent a more enjoyable and rewarding experience for them, a chance to introduce gaming to new communities of players (including parents and young children), instead of catering to a fickle and entitled group of competitive gamers. At play in this disassociation (and dissatisfaction) between NerdCorps and the community of local Halo 3 pro's are two conceptions of the subjectivities, pleasures and opportunities afforded by playing with other people in shared physical space. On the one hand, Final Round's pursuit of Halo 3 success and eventual victory, as well as their comments to me afterwards, epitomize 'professional' play: an activity that is exclusive (to the male 'athletes' capable of elite competition), spectatorially-driven, hyper-masculine, and promising lucrative rewards. In this view, LANs like those offered by NerdCorps are sites for the rehearsal and regulation of highly-specialized competencies; as 'training grounds' for elite play, they offer a close approximation of the layout and atmosphere of competitive tournaments, where connections between consoles are unfettered by 'lag' and where, as one player said, "I can see all my bullets hit" 86 As I describe in Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play, the multiple Xbox 360's involved in a Halo 3 LAN require significant sources of electricity: a typical electrical circuit cannot handle more than 2 360's. Also, the consoles are notoriously unreliable. Depending on the survey, "failure rates" (the percentage of newly-purchased systems that suffer malfunctions within the first year) for 360's are estimated at anywhere from 23.7% (SquareTrade — https://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_Xbox360_PS3_Wii_Reliability_0809.pdf) to 54.2% (Game Informer - http://gamespot.com/621559). 222 (Fieldnotes, March 2008). On the other hand, in NerdCorp's recent decisions to move away from competitive Halo 3 tournaments and towards more 'family- oriented' events is a view of play as 'recreation': inclusive, participatory, and perhaps slightly less masculinized. LANs represent opportunities for social interaction, for experimenting with new games and game formats, and for inculcating novice players into the pleasures of gaming in a shared physical space. The division between 'recreational' and 'professional' conceptions of digital play signaled by NerdCorps' decision to drop out of competitive Halo 3 gaming does not represent a rigid dichotomy. The 'Varsity e-Sports League' (VESL: see http://www.thevesl.com/), for instance, runs a series of online tournaments and LAN events in which university-based clubs compete against one another for institutional 'bragging rights'. As an informal, non-profit, club- based association of amateur enthusiasts, the VESL seems to represent a different discursive positioning of competitive play as 'sport': less like pro football, perhaps, and more like bowling or Ultimate Frisbee. Even with the VESL, however, the possibilities for a more inclusive model of competitive gaming is overshadowed by the e-Sports industry and the opportunities it presents for 'professional' play: on the FAQ page of its website, the VESL identifies participation in "major tournaments, similar to the CPL and WCG" (http://www.thevesl.com/about-us-faq/about-the-vesl/what-does-the-vesl- 223 do.html). As these invocations of 'pro' tournaments indicate, the VESL's organizers seem to position amateur competitive gaming in similar ways to NerdCorps' Halo 3 tournaments: as training grounds for entry into the elite and exclusive world of pro-gaming. In the previous chapters, as I have charted the regulation and standardization of communicative norms, gendered subjectivities, and technological infrastructures across different Halo 3 LANs, I have offered an in depth ethnographic case study of how the 'professionalization' of digital gaming is carried out, considered, from that standpoint, how the emergent e-Sports industry appears to be engineering this transformation through attempting to position gaming as mainstream, spectator sport. I now offer a brief summary of the theoretical innovations, missed opportunities, and directions for further research that this work presents. Theoretical Steps "Gender-based Play" My dissertation builds on and extends two recent theoretical developments in games studies scholarship: the first concerns gendered studies of gaming that approach digital game play as a series of terrains, where inequities around who gets to play games, with whom and for how long, and for whom games are made, are often organized around (and reproduce) existing gender identities and 224 hierarchies. These "sociocultural" studies of gaming (de Castell and Jenson, forthcoming), move away from conceptualizing gender as a monolithic binary (as in Walkerdine, 2007), or as the effects of differing physiology (as in Graner-Ray, 2004), and instead understand gender as sets of power imbalances enacted in different ways across different material and discursive contexts. My work attempts to leverage a similar understanding of gender, and does so in an effort to make the gendered experiences of those women who actually participate in the professionalization of digital play 'visible'. In "Where the Women Aren't" in particular, I depict the material and discursive conditions that the few women who do game - in the case of my study, Fatal Fantasy - have to negotiate. I situated Fatal's tenuous positionality in the community alongside the casual misogyny practiced by male participants, as well as the overtly sexualized opportunities for 'legitimate' female participation. I portrayed her as balancing the hyper- masculinized play demanded of participants at Halo 3 tournaments (and excelling at it in some instances), with a hyper-feminized subject position that she carried out with male participants (and myself) in-between play: she must be 'one of the boys' while at the same time, be a 'good girl', i.e. not a lesbian. Such a characterization, I believe, follows de Castell and Jenson's insistence that games studies proceed with more subtle and finer-grained gender analyses of how players take up and perform gender: analyses that open up, in their words, "the range of possibilities for gender-based play" - generating, for instance, "far more 225 nuanced accounts of feminized male play or masculinized female play" (de Castell & Jenson, forthcoming). At the same time, in emphasizing the embodied work of players, my work reasserts the extent to which bodies matter in the performance of digital play. Fatal's involvement, like the 'hardcore' gamers T.L. Taylor discusses in EverQuest (2003, 2006a) and World of Warcraft (2006b), demonstrates that women can and do play games conventionally coded as masculine, can beat boys at their 'own' games, and take pleasure in doing so. How bodies do come into play, however, are as sites for the re-inscription of gender-based difference and inequality: for instance, how Vik can re-emphasize Fatal's tenuous positionality in a male-dominated and masculinized community by reminding her, myself, and the other players around him that he doesn't "hit girls". Vik's assertion that girls cannot participate in competitive play because they lack the testosterone functions in the same way. Professional gaming, in other words, is a practice through which players' sexed bodies become gendered. My study re-asserts the centrality of the body to explorations of digitally mediated play in other ways. As I demonstrate in Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team", the full significance of speech acts can only be grasped when examined as one mode in complex choreography of verbal and non-verbal performances: or, as my use of the Multimodal Application Program makes clear, as one 'channel' in a semiotic score of communicative meaning. This emphasis 226 on the corporeal aspects of digital play is in alignment with a tradition of feminist studies of technology (Balsamo, 2000; Haraway, 1988, 1991; Plant, 1997; Wjacman, 1991), and of'virtual' spaces in particular (Stone, 1991, 1999; Wakeford, 1999), which asserts that our engagements with digital technologies are always already colonized by 'real life' subjectivities and power relations. With the exception of some feminist games scholarship (de Castell & Bryson, 1998; Kennedy, 2002; Sunden, 2003), the insights gleaned from this tradition have largely gone unnoticed in the field of games studies. This has produced substantial research on digital game play, and on Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMO's) in particular, which seems far more concerned with displaying what happens in 'virtual' worlds than with interrogating the networks of bodies, technologies and capital that make these experiences 'matter' (Taylor, 2008). Like the socio-cultural studies of gender and gaming mentioned above, I hope that my work with NerdCorps begins to map these networks, and in particular the largely unexplored terrains of competitive gaming. ANTs on a LAN The other theoretical push I have tried to accomplish in this dissertation research concerns the application of actor-network theory (ANT), and in particular its elevation of non-humans (artifacts, other animals, technologies, beliefs and ideologies) to the status of 'actors' in accounts of social phenomena. Non- humans, including artifacts, technologies and other animals, are not simply the 'backdrop' to social interactions; in this view, human action is shaped and made possible by non-human agents, to which have been delegated the task of prescribing, framing, eliciting and enabling certain forms of action and prohibiting or discouraging others. The work of an ANT-based account is therefore to trace the associations between human and non-human actors in a network, so as to more fully and more accurately map the relationships between and among them. ANT is particularly productive as a means for studying highly technologized practices. So far, in studies of digital play (Giddings, 2007; Giddings and Kennedy, 2008) it has been used to chart the distribution of virtual agencies in single- or two-player games: how players are taught, compelled or coerced by a game's geographies, non-player characters, rule systems and avatar functionalities into certain behaviours, actions and dispositions. Games, as Giddings and Kennedy suggest, "configure their players" by allowing progression "only if the players recognize what hey are being prompted to do, and comply with these odd instructions" (Giddings & Kennedy, 2008, p. 14). Throughout this study, but in particular in Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play, I try to frame agency as not simply a property exclusive to players, but instead a process of acting and being acted upon that is distributed across players, virtual rule settings, avatars, and arenas, the discursive construction of 'e-Sports' and attendant visions of masculinity, and the material infrastructure of events. From 228 this perspective, I looked at professional Halo 3 play as a practice that involves and makes use of such a highly regulated (and standardized) coordination of wires, bodies and their gendered/racialized identities, game play settings, communicative forms, televisions and consoles, seats, and tables. This application of ANT to my analysis of local, national and international Halo 3 LANs led to the insight that play largely looks and even sounds the same from one event to the next, as a standardized configuration of virtual and material technologies formats players' bodies and interactions with one another in ways that remain stable across temporal, spatial and linguistic boundaries. Furthermore, the professionalization of play is not caused by any one agency or organization: rather, the specialization, regulation, and inclusion of particular subjectivities, skill sets, and settings that characterizes professional Halo 3 is a result of associations made and articulated between and among these various actors. This analysis may prove helpful in conducting studies of competitive play at other venues and around other games, and, in so far as it emphasizes the linkages that connect 'local' contexts across space and time, positions ANT as a useful framework for cross-cultural analyses of pro-gaming. 229 Missing Pieces Racialized Identities In reporting on the lack of opportunities for women in competitive gaming, I contribute to research that documents the ongoing gender-based inequities in the production and play of digital games. While I was able to chart the limited (and sexualized) subject positions available to female players, mothers and 'booth babes', however, I only did so in relation to a group of male participants that I portray as a more or less homogeneous mass. A richer and more nuanced account of the gender disparities in competitive gaming needs to take into account the complex intersections of gender with race, class and age, intersections which produce hierarchies and divisions within as well as across gender differences. Such an analysis could offer important contributions to current understandings of race and masculinities as they relate to both sports (Carrington, 1998; Dyson, 1993; James, 2005) and gaming (DiSalvo et al., 2009; Everett, 2005; Leonard, 2006). An exploration of race-based masculinities in competitive gaming, for instance, might address the differing degrees to which the performance of a hyper-masculinized 'pro-gaming' subject position matters to players from different racial and class backgrounds, and might also be able to demonstrate whether, where, when and how they perform this subject position 230 differently. In investigating the different ways male participants invest in the discursive relationship between gaming and sport, and exploring how they 'do' pro-gaming, research on race, masculinities and competitive gaming could contribute substantially to theorizations of how and where race matters to digital play, as well as where and how it is elided - work that arguably lags behind, both in scope and nuance, compared to investigations into gaming and gender (DiSalvo et al., 2009). Gamers' Lives Outside of LANs Following players from NerdCorps tournaments to, first, the 2008 Toronto MLG Open, and then to the 2008 World Cyber Games in Cologne, enabled me to trace the competitive Halo 3 play across local, national and international venues, and from small-scale events discursively positioned as 'training grounds' to the tournaments at which this training paid off. This multi-site exploration afforded crucial insights into the progressive 'professionalization' of Halo 3 play - namely, that it consists largely in the regulation of certain narrowly-construed and highly- specialized competencies, forms and functions of communication, gendered subject positions, and layouts of virtual and material technologies, formatting interactions among participants and technologies in similar ways across different 'local' contexts. 231 Over the course of my fieldwork, however, I did not undertake any sustained or in-depth exploration of players' day-to-day lives: how their varying degrees of commitment to pursuing professional play affected their everyday experiences, and their relationships with other participants as well as friends, family and peers outside of competitive Halo 3 play. I involved participants in audio-taped interviews, but as I noted in Chapter 5, these interviews were configured less as 'research' and more as 'promotional material', with questions relating to participants' play practices and preferences rather than their lives outside of competitive Halo 3 play. In a similar way, I attained a sense of what NerdCorps LAN events offered players in comparison with online play: greater similarities to large-scale LANs like MLG, face time with teammates, and a more reliable technological infrastructure, for instance. Beyond recordinig what participants said in informal conversations about their play at home (i.e. that most practice Halo 3 upwards of 30 hours each week), however, I did not carry out explorations of what their home-based play consists of, what it looks and sounds like, when they play and for how long, and with whom they play. Such an exploration might entail asking, for instance, how players discursively position online play at home in relation to their aspirations for and involvement in larger-scale tournaments; whether they rehearse particular communicative norms more or less in online play than at LANs; how fluid their associations with other players or teams are when playing 232 online; and whether/how often they employ game types, settings, and weapons that are not used in LAN play. In other words, because I chose to focus exclusively on LAN-based play, I was less concerned with the extent to which players participate in the discursive construction of Halo 3 as sport in their online, home-based gaming, which generally accounts for far more of their play time than their participation at LANs. Such an exploration of players' day-to-day competitive gaming practices might reveal much about how, when, and under what material and discursive conditions the practices I associate with the professionalization of play takes place (i.e. the regulation of rules, settings, gendered subectivities, and communication), and to what degree the unique aspects of LANs - for example, physical proximity, gaze, and unobstructed connections between consoles - come into play in whether and how players perform 'pro' gaming. Further Directions Cross-game/cross-platform/cross-culture As I noted in the literature review, research into competitive LAN tournaments is minimal: this represents an opportunity to begin building the kind of diversity that T.L. Taylor, writing about the state of MMO research (2006b, p. 318), sees as the necessary foundation for more generalized understandings of play practices and processes. My work marks the first focused, ethnographic case study of a 233 competitive gaming community in North America, and as such, might serve as a starting point for comparative case study analysis of other competitive gaming communities, whether involving different games, gaming platforms, or nations and cultures.871 am eager to learn more about T.L. Taylor's work, for instance, with competitive Counterstrike gamers in Europe (Taylor, 2009), representing a more established community and e-Sports industry, with greater and more diverse opportunities for player sponsorship, than the North American scene. Similarly, an ethnography of South Korea's competitive gaming scene, which predominantly features 'real-time strategy' titles such as Starcraft and Warcraft 3, would offer productive grounds for comparison between an emergent and tenuous e-Sports industry in North America, and an industry in South Korea that boasts mass audiences for televised competitive gaming.88 Comparisons such as these could begin to generate a broader understanding of what is at stake in the professionalization of digital play - whether, for instance, the emergence of a globalized e-Sports industry signals the ossification of male privilege around a new 'pro' sport and a diminishment of gaming as a recreational and participatory activity, or whether the growth of gaming spectatorship might somehow stimulate 87 Over the course of my fieldwork, comparisons of this kind were readily offered up by participants themselves (often in the interest of presenting particular gamers as more masculine, more active, and more 'athletic' than their counterparts. 88 Please see Dal Yong Jin and Florence Chee's (2008) "Age of New Media Empires: A Critical Interpretation of the Korean Online Game Industry" for an insightful, albeit brief discussion of the popular and largely mainstream pro-gaming scene in South Korea. 234 a more widespread, mainstream interest and participation in competitive digital play. My findings are situated in a tension between two competing and concurrent transformations in digital play. The first is signaled by the popularity of 'casual', rhythm-based, and kinesthetic gaming, and is beginning to open digital play to new audiences and new pleasures. The other is represented by the emergence of the e-Sports industry and its colonization of competitive gaming - particularly at LAN tournaments - as a site for the cultivation of a new, 'professional', spectator sport, and the highly-specialized subjectivities and practices it entails. In North America, the professionalization of play still largely occurs at the margins of mainstream gaming: as the recent missteps and failures of North American e-Sports organizations demonstrate, the industry is a long way off from realizing its goal of a popular, mass market for the televised consumption of competitive play. Nonetheless, my work with a Toronto-based network of competitive gamers and organizers provides timely insights into what this professionalization entails. At a discursive level, it consists in a problematic delimitation of who can play, as competitive LAN gaming - already a thoroughly masculinized practice - is aligned with a professional sports industry, one which continues to be deeply conservative (even reactionary) in its gender politics, and which continues to serve as a bastion for male privilege. The emergent e-Sports 235 industry symbolically connects gamers' (male) bodies to hyper-masculinized notions of athleticism, competition and elitism with regards to professional sports, deploying a tenuous and absurd construction of gamers as 'cyber athletes' towards the discursive positioning of professional play (and its rewards) as the exclusive domain of male bodies. This makes it possible, for instance, for a player to insist that female gamers cannot compete with men on an equal level in competitive Halo 3 because they lack the testosterone. At a physical and material level, this research shows that the professionalization of digital play, in the particular iteration I followed, consists in the standardization of highly specialized competencies, as well as dispositions. Players' interactions with each other both in the physical spaces of LANs and in Halo 3's 'virtual' arenas are regulated and homogenized, such that it became possible, for instance, to understand what the Portuguese players at the World Cyber Games Halo 3 finals were up to in-game just by listening to their map call- outs. To the extent that it is possible to extrapolate from this study of a community in such a state of transformation, the professionalization of Halo 3 (as well as other games I did not examine: Counterstrike, Starcraft, FIFA Soccer, John Madden Football) appears to represent a significant cultural shift in the values, rewards, and pleasures associated with digital play. This shift may not be unrelated to the concurrent 'opening up' of play represented by the Wii, rhythm 236 games, casual games, and so on. As the earlier rise of spectator sport in North America makes clear, the 'professionalization' of recreational activity has not only meant that most of us are confined to the spectatorial margins of sport, but that the winners and losers involved in this shift most often fall along gendered lines. This ossification of male privilege might be particularly relevant in the merging of sports and gaming, two conventionally male-dominated domains. 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First-person shooters began with Doom in 1993, and since that highly successful game about a space marine battling grotesque aliens, has remained largely associated with militaristic and/or science-fiction themes and narratives. Much has also been made, because of their violent mechanics and representations and the immediacy of the first-person perspective, of the alleged connections between first-person shooters and acts of 'real life', particularly teen-related, violence (for critical analyses of these connections, see Schott, 2008; Thomson, 2002). 263 LAN Local area networks are groups of computers or game consoles connected together in the same physical space, often for the purpose of connected gaming. Connected together directly (commonly via ethernet cables and through a central server/router) instead of over the Internet, LANs significantly reduce the 'lag' associated with online gaming: the variable and volatile lapse in response time between a user's input and its in-game execution. MMOG MMOG's are personal computer or gaming console-based digital games in which multitudes of players simultaneously log in to the same online virtual world and interact with each other via their in-game characters. MMOG's are characterized by the persistent quality of their virtual spaces: unlike traditional video games, where the virtual world a player experiences lasts only as long as their computer program or game console remains running, these persistent virtual worlds remain 'active' constantly. There is often, but not always, a monthly fee for play. The most popular, currently, is World of Warcraft, boasting over 11.5 million individual subscribers (as of December 2008; see http://us.blizzard.com/en- us/company/press/pressreleases.html?081121). See Julian Dibbell (2007), T.L. Taylor (2006a, 2006b), and Nick Yee (2006, 2008), for more notable accounts of the 'inner workings' of primarily fantasy-themed MMOG's. 264 RTS Real-time strategy games are another game genre highly popular at many competitive gaming tournaments (particularly in South Korea, where competitive Starcraft play is the focus of two television channels, MBC Games and Ongamenet; see Jin & Chee, 2008). Most RTS games feature top-down perspectives on a virtual environment that remains invisible until revealed by the player (or players, in competitive play). Players harvest resources, raise structures, generate new minions, and so on through designating specific tasks to specific classes of units: some can only harvest resources, some can only build, some can only attack enemy units/structures. Unlike turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, players compete in 'real-time' against human- or computer-controlled opponents for colonization of the environment and, ultimately, conquest and destruction of the other player's headquarters. Popular RTS games include Warcraft III and Starcraft, both of which are also featured at WCG Grand Finals. Professional Gaming Organizations This is an annotated list of some of the more notable e-Sports organizations that I mention in my thesis. 265 Championship Gaming Series The CGS was an e-Sports league that closed in 2008 after two seasons. The league was the first to have a player draft, where general managers of teams representing different North American (and in the second season, global) cities picked players to compete in different racing, combat, and first-person shooter titles. Under this more systematized and centralized team management system, each team was mandated to have at least one female player. In Game Boys, written shortly after the launch of the CGS and published shortly after its demise, Michael Kane (2008) suggests that the league - backed by cable television networks - signifies the ascendancy of e-Sports to the ranks of legitimate professional spectator sports in North America. Cyber-athiete Professional League The CPL was founded in 1997, and is largely recognized as the first 'professional' gaming league - the first, that is, to frame gamers as 'athletes' and offer prize money for tournament success. Tournaments featured first-person shooter PC-based games, most prominently Counterstrike. The league shut down in 2008 for financial reasons, but in the summer of 2009 was relaunched as an Asian market-focused e-Sports league (http://thecpl.sgamer.com/News/Detail/33030). The documentary Frag (Pasley & Tossey, 2008) explores the North American PC-based e-Sports industry by following two of the CPL's young stars, Jonathan Wendel and Rafik Bryant, 266 through the 2006 season. Ongamenet Ongamenet is one of two major South Korean cable television companies that specialize in broadcasting competitive gaming tournaments (the other being MBC), focusing primarily on RTS games such as Warcraft III and Starcraft. As Dal Yong Jin and Florence Chee (2008) report, the success of Ongamenet and MBC point to the mainstream popularity e-Sports enjoys in South Korea, where it is regarded as a legitimate spectator activity and its star players as celebrities (Jin & Chee, 2008, pp. 48-49). This popularity is in stark contrast to the North American e-Sports industry's ongoing, and often unsuccessful attempts to legitimate pro-gaming as mainstream spectator sport. Professional Gaming League The PGL (http://www.progamingleague.ca/index.php) is a Canadian-based competitive gaming organization that runs sporadic Halo 3 tournaments around eastern Canada. 267 Appendix B: Tournament Details This appendix explains the physical layout, game configurations, competition structures, as well as other games featured, at each competitive gaming site I attended. NerdCorps Number of events attended: 9 Date(s): Monthly events from March 2008 to January 2009 Other Games Halo 3 was the only game featured for competitive play, but during warm-up and in between rounds, participants also occasionally played Halo and Halo 2. During the 2 months when the event was held at the 'Rumble Room', a larger venue than the Ironside Inn, organizers also set up (for 'recreational' play) Super Smash Brothers on a Nintendo Gamecube and Rock Band on an Xbox 360. Physical Layout LANs at the Ironside Inn were set up on two wide tables. Each table had four 27" televisions (two facing one way, two facing the other) and four Xbox 360's. This set-up allowed a maximum of eight players for each table (two per television/console setup), 16 players in total; at the few Ironside Inn events with 268 more than 16 participants, those not playing would either sit in chairs or on cushions positioned along one wall, or would temporarily leave the cramped space until their turn came up. At the two Rumble Room events, all eight game stations were positioned along the nightclub's long, curved wooden bar. Halo 3 Game Formats, Settings, and Maps NerdCorps events used MLG game settings, and matches were played on many of the same maps featured at MLG tournaments (Guardian, Construct, Narrows, and The Pit). Teams competed in best-of-three matches. The first and third rounds consisted of "Slayer" play, in which the first team to amass 50 kills against the other side wins. The second round was a "King of the Hill" game, in which teams must fight for and maintain control over a designated part of the map that shifts at regular intervals; the first team to control the 'hill' for 250 total seconds wins. Team finals, which featured a best-of-five match format, involved three "Slayer" rounds, one "King of the Hill" round, and one round of "Capture the Flag", in which teams must retrieve a flag stationed at the opponents' side of the map, and return it to their own side (made more difficult as players carrying the flag cannot use their weapons and receive more damage per attack than non- flag-carrying players). 269 Competition Structure NerdCorps tournaments began with a free-for-all (FFA) tournament, where players were placed in 'pools' of four. Each pool played every other pool in a single fifteen-minute match, in which each of the eight players involved competed against one another for the most total kills. At the end of round-robin play, each players' total number of kills were tabulated. The two players in each pool to amass the highest totals then competed in a final to determine the overall FFA winner. Team competition at NerdCorps tournaments featured round-robin play; finalists for the team tournament were determined by overall wins/losses and, in the event of a tie, by least individual rounds lost. Finalists competed in a best-of- five round match. MLG Toronto 2008 Number of events attended: 1 Date(s): August 22-24, 2008 Other Games Aside from the large Halo 3 competition (consisting of over 500 players), MLG Toronto also featured smaller team-based competitions for Gears of War and Rainbow Six: Las Vegas, two other Xbox 360-exclusive shooting games. Physical Layout 270 The MLG Toronto Halo 3 LAN had 4 rows of 4 tables, each table supporting 8 televisions (22" flatscreen) and 8 Xbox 360's. There were 128 game stations in total, capable of supporting 256 players at a time, or 32 simultaneous 4v4 matches. Halo 3 Game Formats, Settings, and Maps MLG Toronto used the game settings, formats, and maps as the NerdCorps Halo 3 LANs I attended; NerdCorps organizers deliberately emulated MLG configurations in their own events. Competition Structure For the Halo 3 competition, teams competed in double-elimination play: if a team lost once, they were placed in the "Loser's Bracket", and if they lost a second time, they were eliminated from the tournament. In the finals, the winner of the "Loser's Bracket" faced the winner of the "Winner's Bracket". Matches followed a best-of-three structure; this changed during the quarterfinals through to the finals, when matches were played as a best-of-five. World Cyber Games Number of events attended: 1 Date(s): November 5-9, 2008 271 Other Games There were fourteen games in total featured at WCG 2008. Games for the Xbox 360 included Halo 3, Need for Speed, Project Gotham Racing 4, Guitar Hero 3, and FIFA 08. Of these, Halo 3 was the only team-based game. Games for the PC included Carom 3D (an online billiards game), Starcraft(a science fiction- themed real-time strategy game), Warcraft 3, Command and Conquer 3 (a military-themed real-time strategy game), Age of Empires (a history-themed real- time strategy game), Counterstrike (the only team-based PC game at the event), and Red Stone, a Korean role-playing game. Asphalt 4 was the only mobile phone-based game at the tournament. Physical Layout The WCG Halo 3 tournament took place in a walled-off area of the event's convention hall reserved for games rated 'mature' (18 ages and over). Security guards stood at the entrance checking participants' identity. About one half of the area was dedicated to Counterstrike play, made up rows of stations each with 10 identical, networked PC's for 5v5 team play. Past the Counterstrike LAN was a stage area consisting of a row of bleachers facing a raised platform underneath a single cinema-sized screen. Diagonally-facing rows of computers and consoles/tv's stood on stage, for marquee 18+ game matches (including the Halo 272 3 tournament semi-finals and finals). Three separate commentator booths were positioned behind game stations, underneath a large screen. On either side of this central stage was a small bank of PC stations for 1 on 1 Command and Conquer 3 play, and a larger and more crowded station for Halo 3 play, made up of two 4v4 stations (allowing for two matches at a time). Waist- high white walls surrounded both of these play areas, separating players from spectators. Halo 3 Game Formats, Settings, and Maps The WCG Halo 3 tournament used the same settings and maps as the other events described here. Unlike NerdCorps and MLG, competition between teams only involved a single fifteen-minute "Slayer" match. The team with the most kills after fifteen minutes won. Competition Structure Twenty teams competed in the Halo 3 tournament, separated into four pools. Each team played every other team in their pool once. At the end of this round- robin portion, the first-ranked team from one pool played the second-ranked team from another, to determine the four semi-finalists. Semi-final and final matches (best-of-three "Slayer" matches, instead of a single round as in the round-robin portion) were played (and broadcast live on the WCG website) on the 18+ area's central stage. 273 Appendix C: Consent Forms 276 2008 MLG media release form (accessed October 19, 2009, from http://media.mlgpro.com/site/forms/2008_MLG_Appearance_Release_Parental Consent.pdf): 277 278 Contact Pbcme No.: Dated; 279 Appendix D: Spectatorship and Production Learning to Watch Prior to the MLG Toronto Open 'Championship Sunday', I had not seen a televised, commentated broadcast of Halo 3 play. Though I have played through most of the Halo franchises (often going through the storyline mode, with a friend, on the easiest difficulty setting), I had trouble at NerdCorps events following the complex, even convoluted action of a typical 4v4 game, and the relationship between their codified and condensed communication and the actions onscreen. I had even more difficulty de-coding MLG and WCG broadcasts of Halo 3 play, in which action unfolds across eight players' screens, and broadcasts flip quickly from one player's screen to the next, often with little indication either from the broadcast's graphical overlay or from the commentators. Significant and/or sensational highlights are shown in slow- motion after the match is decided. At MLG Toronto, I was not yet well-versed in Halo 3 strategy, map layouts, or the composition of particular teams, and found the play-by-play action unintelligible. Watching Final Round mount their improbable comeback against Netherlands - after which they became increasingly more confident and coordinated with each match - marked a turning point in my own appreciation for 280 and enjoyment of elite Halo 3 play. After months of watching players' compete, and in a context in which a degree of my own nationalistic pride as well as my emotional connection with Final Round was most certainly in play, I found myself not only better understanding their play (to the extent that I was able to make sense of and explicate their strategies), but actively taking pleasure in watching them compete. My growing enjoyment as spectator also affected how I approached video recording. Prior to WCG, at NerdCorps events and MLG Toronto, I deliberately focused more on players' faces, postures and gestures rather than on onscreen action. At WCG, however, and particularly during Final Round's play in the semi- finals and finals, I increasingly focused on filming on-screen action, only panning to players after particularly spectacular or dramatic kills, or in between rounds. In a way, as my appreciation for competitive Halo 3 spectatorship grew, my own video production began to mimic the shooting strategies of MLG and WCG broadcasts. I began shooting, in other words, from the perspective of an engaged e-Sports spectator - a shift in my own production of 'data' that marked my enculturation into a position of informed spectatorship. This shift in how and what I shot in my audio-visual recordings of competitive play, as I became more knowledgeable about Halo 3 over the course of my fieldwork, might represent is the extent to which competitive game play is, and may very well remain, a 'niche' activity, despite the e-Sports industry's attempts 281 over the years to market it as a mainstream sports media commodity. The action involved only makes sense to those who have either played the game competitively or have, as I had, invested significant amounts of time into watching and unpacking the game play. In his journalistic account of televised Counterstrike tournaments, Michael Kane (2008) argues that e-Sports organizations like MLG and WCG face significant challenges around making televised play accessible to audiences of non-gamers, or even casual gamers - and that despite these attempts, the audience for televised gaming still largely consists of competitive gamers, those already schooled into a pro-gaming discourse. 282 Appendix E: Annotated List of Referenced Video Clips The following is a list of urls for the video clips from my audio-visual data record referenced throughout this dissertation. Chapter 6: Where the Women Aren't http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6_BoothBabes.mov This clip shows two promotional models for the Asphalt 4 game area at 2008 World Cyber Games Grand Finals. They pose on either side of the sports car where two competitors sit, side by side in the car seats, playing Asphalt 4 against each other. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6_Fatal.mov In this clip from the May 2008 NerdCorps event, Fatal Fantasy demonstrates her assertiveness and leadership. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6_StatusMom.mov http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6_StatusMom2.mov These two clips, from the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, depict Status' Mom, her son's team's 'cheerleader', encouraging her son and his teammates; they appear to take no notice of her. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter6_Vik_SuckmyBird.mov 283 In this clip from the August 2008 NerdCorps event, Fatal non-verbally expresses annoyance at Vik Vicious' homophobic and racialized banter; he replies by 'jokingly' threatening her. Chapter 7: "A Silent Team is a Dead Team" http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_Banter.mov This clip, from the July NerdCorps event, shows one participant in the foreground engaging with an opponent (offscreen) in verbal 'sparring', as they exchange taunts. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_BeLoud.mov Taken during the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, this clip depicts one NerdCorps regular urging his peer, whose team has just lost a round, to "be loud" in his map call-outs. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_Exclusion.mov In this clip from the June NerdCorps event, Fatal verbally and visibly disassociates herself from the poor play of her two novice teammates. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_LikeStrongside.mov During this clip from the May 2008 NerdCorps event, Reach, Fatal and Beans compare and emulate how MLG pro 'Strongside' sits during play. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_OMGitsChip.mov 284 Here, the captain of an American team at the 2008 MLG Toronto Open performs quick successions of map call-outs, deployed in both 'assertive' and 'directive' speech acts. http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_Reach_1.mov http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/Chapter7_Reach_2.mov In these two clips from the 4v4 finals of the March 2008 NerdCorps event, Reach acts as a kind of motivational coach for his teammates, who do not seem to listen. Chapter 8: LANscapes of Play http://contagion.edu.yorku.ca/Nick/NerdCorps/ Chapter8_PortugueseHalo3.mov Here, the Portuguese Halo 3 team at the 2008 World Cyber Games Grand Finals verbally communicate during a match. Much of their communication employs English-language map call-outs.