University of California, Irvine Frame-Perfect: Temporalities in Competitive Gaming Matt Knutson School of Humanities, Ph.D. in Visual Studies 2020 Dissertation committee: A. Braxton Soderman, Assistant Professor (adviser) Victoria Johnson, Associate Professor Bonnie Ruberg, Assistant Professor Paul Dourish, Professor Copyright Chapter 3 © 2018 Game Studies. All other materials © 2020 Matt Knutson. Table of Contents I. List of Figures iii II. Acknowledgements Page v III. Vita vi IV. Abstract viii V. Introduction 1 VI. Ch. 1: Perfectibility’s Dystopia 45 VII. Ch. 2: Approximate Precision: Complicating the Frame and Liveness 79 VIII. Ch. 3: Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Temporality in Gaming 136 IX. Conclusion 158 X. Bibliography 173 XI. Ludography 192 ii List of Figures Introduction Figure 1: Mario knocks Fox off the stage Figure 2: The Super Smash Bros. Melee character select screen Figure 3: Marth frame data in Melee Chapter 1 Figures 1-4: Armada performing a jump-cancel as Fox Figures 5-13: Fox’s options and Marth’s responses Figure 14: A “dirty flowchart” Figure 15: Time-lapse motion efficient study of someone at work Figure 16: Image from “Kadano’s perfect Marth class” Figures 17-19: Three consecutive frames of PewPewU’s pivot F-smash against Hungrybox at Apex 2015 Figure 20: PewPewU’s F-smash connecting with Hungrybox Figures 21-23: Three consecutive frames of PewPewU’s Marth performing a pivot Figures 24-29: Mang0’s movement at Genesis 2 Figure 30: Mang0 shooting a laser at offstage Taj Chapter 2 Figure 1: Still of the QTE arcade game from Shenmue’s YOU Arcade Figures 2-5: Tech chase sequence, Sheik vs. Fox Figures 6-7: Tech chase and outcome Figure 8: Dolphin Emulator logo Figure 9: Screenshot of Dolphin interface Figure 10: Setting the buffer in Dolphin netplay Figure 11: Marth edgeguarding Fox Figure 12: Rocket League game capture, Oceania server Figure 13: Screen grab of gameplay from North America on an Oceania server Figure 14: A client prediction of where the ball is going Figure 15: A replay of exactly where the ball went Figure 16: A browser window including Mang0’s stream, its title, the chat, and other information Figure 17: A VOD screengrab of Adrive’s Wonder Trade giveaway Figure 18: A VOD of Adrive’s stream at the moment of trading Figure 19: LSV’s stream during a MOCS tournament game with a 10 minute stream delay Figure 20: LSV’s stream without 10 minute additional delay Figure 21: Visualization of lag between chat experience and LSV’s broadcast of the chat through Twitch Figure 22: Icymate’s Twitch Plays Pokemon capture iii Chapter 3 Figure 1: Reaching the bottle with the crate Conclusion Figure 1: Games Done Quick 2016 speedrun by duckfist of Mega Man 2 “any%” Figure 2: Mang0’s Fox hovers momentarily in the startup to the firefox animation Figure 3: Mang0 surprises Mew2King by pointing the firefox directly at him iv Acknowledgements This work was supported by UCI’s School of Humanities Dean’s Fellowship, as well as a graduate student researcher position at UCI’s Graduate & Postdoctoral Scholar Resource Center. Chapter 3 was previously published in the journal of Game Studies (December 2018). I’d like to thank my adviser Braxton Soderman, as well as my committee members Vicky Johnson, Bo Ruberg, and Paul Dourish for their countless efforts reading, discussing, and informing my work. I should also thank my partner Emily for her constant support and our children, Autumn and Quentin, for keeping me on my toes. Many mentors have generously provided me their time and insights, in particular Aaron Trammell, Kristen Hatch, Allison Perlman, Fatimah Tobing Rony, and Bliss Lim. My cohort members Ben Kruger-Robbins, Finley Freibert, and Tavleen Kaur all read early versions of this work and provided me with helpful suggestions, particularly Ben’s advice to read about queer temporality, which led me to the idea at the heart of chapter 3. Many other peers in the Visual Studies, Anthropology, and Informatics programs at UCI have influenced my research, especially Amanda Cullen, Jason Reitman, and Stephen Rea. Finally, I’d like to offer a special thank-you to Mark Deppe and his staff at UCI esports, including Kathy Chiang and Damian Rosiak, for being generous with their time and enabling me to pursue streaming practice alongside my scholarship. v Vita EDUCATION 2020 Ph.D. in Visual Studies, UC Irvine 2014 M.A. in English, Boston College 2009 M.Ed. in Secondary Education, University of Minnesota Twin Cities 2007 B.A. in English, University of Wisconsin Madison PUBLICATIONS Refereed Journal Articles 2018 “Backtrack, Pause, Rewind, Reset: Queering Chrononormativity in Gaming,” Game Studies, December 2018 Conference Proceedings 2020 “Living By the Code: Drafting and Enacting Community Guidelines for a More Inclusive Esports Environment,” UC Irvine Esports Conference 2019 Book Reviews 2020 “Review: Intermedia Games: Games Inter Media (2019),” American Journal of Play HONORS AND AWARDS 2020 Graduate Student Research and Travel Award, UC Irvine School of Humanities 2019 Graduate Student Research and Travel Award, UC Irvine School of Humanities 2013 Henry Blackwell Prize for essays in cultural studies, Boston College 2007 Graduated with honor from the University of Wisconsin Madison GRANTS AND FELLOWSHIPS vi 2017 Research Fellowship, The Strong Museum of Play, Rochester NY 2014-2019 Dean’s Fellowship, School of Humanities at UC Irvine 2013 Teaching Fellow, Boston College 2012 Academic scholarship, Boston College CONFERENCE ACTIVITY Papers Presented 2020 Queerness and Games Conference, “He/She/They: The Risks of Being Outed on Stream” (conference cancelled due to COVID-19) 2020 Dreamhack Anaheim, “Varsity and Beyond: Administrators and Athletics,” panel discussion 2020 Society for Cinema & Media Studies 2020 annual conference, “‘Golden Age’ Pros: An Archival Study of the Pre-History of Esports” (conference cancelled due to COVID-19) 2019 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference, “The Distributed Ethos of Melee Netplay” 2019 UCI Esports Conference 2019, “Living By the Code: Drafting and Enacting Community Guidelines for a More Inclusive Esports Environment” 2019 Game Developers Conference 2019, “Diversity and Inclusion in Esports: Where It Is, Where It’s Going, and How It’s Being Done” 2018 Society for Cinema & Media Studies 2018 annual conference, “Buffered Time: Connected Asynchronicity on Twitch” (presented remotely) 2017 Society for Cinema & Media Studies 2017 annual conference, “Frame Perfect: Optimization in the Micro-Temporality of Skillful Play” 2016 Subjected to Play Conference at University of Southern California, “Playing Roles: Games as Sites of Identificatory Performance” 2016 Extending Play Conference at Rutgers University, “Frame Perfect: Optimization in the Micro-Temporality of Skillful Play” 2016 The SOCIAL Conference at Boston University, “Algorithm and Architecture: The Persistence of Disciplinarity in Informatic Control” 2016 Significations Conference at California State University – LA “Raster Romance: Compulsive Heterosexuality in the 1980s Arcade” 2015 Media Fields Conference at University of California – Santa Barbara, “The Dehumanized and the Nonhuman: Empathetic Play in Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please” vii Dissertation Abstract Frame-Perfect: Temporalities in Competitive Gaming Matt Knutson Visual Studies Ph.D. University of California, Irvine (2020) Committee chair: A. Braxton Soderman As the popularity and cultural import of professionalized competitive gaming has dramatically risen in the last decade, little humanistic research has analyzed how professional gamers optimize their play. Highly skilled players often pursue “frame-perfect” techniques, or actions timed to the one-sixtieth of a second. However, existing game scholarship tends to approach gaming temporality from the perspective of narrative theory, which has little to illuminate on this topic. My dissertation approaches the subject of time in competitive gaming not through narrative theory but through scholarship on media temporalities. The division of continuous experience into discrete snapshots is a familiar topic to both photography and cinema studies, which help elucidate the experience of optimized, perfected play in professional gaming. The dissertation’s first chapter addresses the consequences of perfected gaming: when play is optimized to a frame-perfect extent, play ceases to be playful and instead becomes deterministic. The second chapter considers ways in which lag, inconsistencies, and buffers challenge the semblance of liveness and shared temporality in networked gaming and streaming. The third chapter pivots on the temporal preoccupations of high-stakes, perfected play by identifying a set of oppositional temporal experiences in games through queer theory. The dissertation contributes to scholarship on games by investigating both the professional attention to micro-temporal play and strategies to recover what is playful about play even in this context of professionalization. Game studies generally and this dissertation in viii particular emphasize our need for humanistic values, such as playfulness, as technologies and markets urge us to live, work, and play optimally. ix Introduction It’s a Wednesday night in Madison, WI, in 2006, and I’m walking to “Mound House,” my buddies’ off-campus place on Mound Street. Like most of the college town, their second- story apartment smells faintly of cheap beer and stomach acid. We’re there to play Super Smash Bros. Melee (just “Melee” for short), except