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Fandom culture and identity in esports
Abstract and Figures
Esports offer a new and unique opportunity for fans. Not only can fans watch professional players, but they can experience the game directly as players themselves. In this paper, we explore esports fan identity at the intersection of viewer and player in Overwatch, League of Legends and FIFA forums, considering a spectrum and influence of geek to sports orientation. We explore differences and similarities between these esports fandoms in regard to expression of knowledge, identification with professional players, and the search for legitimacy. These groups generally use knowledge and skill to demonstrate legitimacy, as a form of (sub)cultural capital. Fans display concerns about where they fit in regard to both traditional sports and other esports. However, whereas in traditional sports, outgroups are defined as membership in rival teams, in esports, outgroup status is conferred to casuals. Esports fandom is tribal in the sense that it is a method for fans to display tribal affiliation as “real” game players against the newer, lower level players.
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... Skill and knowledge can be considered the foundations of the competitive gaming community (Anderson-Coto, Tomlinson, Collado & Squire, 2019). Even esports viewers employ their in-game experience and thereby presumed expertise to exclude certain participants in the fan community. ...
Since the launch of the first web browser, the early-nineties was dominated by a view of the Internet as a utopian space for identity play and community building. However online platforms are currently not utopian environments where people can be a anyone or anything they want. This thesis discusses how these online platforms continue to be shaped by the identity categories we inhabit in offline contexts. Here, I view identities as multiple yet parallel, somewhat stable but simultaneously renegotiated and changing with social context. Additionally, the focus is on what characterized the identities that the participants construct rather than the identity categories they inhabit. The overarching aim of the thesis is twofold: a)to explore what frames identity construction online and how the youth participants (co)construct identities on online platforms as well as b) to discuss methodological implications for employing screen recordings in an ethno-case study within educational research. The aim is approached through the following research questions:
RQ1. What frames the possibilities for identity construction online?
RQ2. How is the participant identity (co)construction shaped by these frames?
RQ3. What are the practical ethical challenges with employing ethnographic methods when conducting research on identity (co)construction online?
This thesis is a qualitative case study informed by ethnography, or an ethno-case study. Case study as a methodology focuses on an immersed understanding of a phenomenon trough a specific case and can offer insight into how previous research and empirical data are connected. Both case study and ethnography focus on a participant’s perspective of a phenomenon and use varied forms of data collection. However, in ethnography, more emphasis is put on extended periods of time in the field and gaining insight into this phenomenon from multiple contexts, whereas a case study can be more limited in terms of time and researcher immersion into the field.
Here, the research questions are answered through insight into two cases. The first is ethnographic and thereby spanning a longer time period, with multiple sources of data and where research immersion spans both online and offline contexts. The second is framed as an ethno-case study and thereby employs ethnographic methods on a specific case yet is shorter in timespan than the first and where the data collection primarily focuses on the online context.
The first case, Textmöten, was an ethnographic research collaboration focusing on exploring how students in upper secondary schools in Finland used mobile phones in school. The data consisted of video recordings of students during their school day, during lessons as well as breaks, and at the same time as there was a recording of their mobile phones. The application that allowed the mobile phones to be recorded was student controlled, and the students were thereby in control of the material being recorded. During a total of 18 days, the data was collected between the spring of 2015 to the autumn of 2016 at two different Swedish language upper secondary schools with a total of seven students (of age 16-18 at the time). In addition to the video recordings as well as the recordings of the mobile phones, five of the seven students were interviewed.
The second case, esports in education, was conducted in collaboration with a Swedish language vocational school with an esports programme in Finland in 2017-2018. The aim of the project was to explore online gaming through players that took their play seriously. Seven students (of age 17-18 at the time, all identifying as male) playing CS:GO took part in the study by sharing screen recordings of their in-game matches (ten matches and almost six hours in total) and by taking part in interviews (seven in total). The focus students volunteered to participate in the study through a teacher. The design of the study was dependent on the students’ engagement due to the physical distance between the researchers and participants. Regular meetings, held at their school, functioned as interviews and were recorded.
The thesis focuses on three of the platforms the participants engaged with; Instagram, Tumblr (case 1) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (case 2). The results show that the participants identity (co)construction online was framed by both the platforms technical affordances as well as the online and offline communities they were part of. Additionally, their identity (co)construction was characterized by visuality, community and diversity. The practical ethical challenges revolved around maintaining participant integrity in terms of; a) gaining informed consent from players that became co-observed, b) defining privacy online during the analysis as well as in the published results and c) portraying participants accurately despite stakeholder interests.
Professionalised competitive digital gaming or ‘esports’ has grown to a point where millions of dollars are being awarded in competitions watched globally by tens of millions of viewers. Previous analyses of the phenomenon have examined the role(s) of labour in esports performed by various actors – players, tournament organisers, sponsors, game developers – but these have yet to be unified into a ‘big picture’ of esports labour, especially when considering the relationships between the labour performed by different esports actors. In this paper we therefore present a comprehensive overview of the labour that different actors within the emerging Esports ecosystem perform, and how they intersect and influence each other in order to contribute to the existence of this highly contemporary phenomenon. In doing so we show that the rapid growth of Esports has created new labour processes and forms of work, transformed existing ones, yielded new career options, and tremendous profits to be made by a range of involved actors. Esports’ emerging position as a major global industry both within gaming and within contemporary media more broadly demands close attention to its work, its workers, and who is winning and losing in this dynamic media space.
The skirmish between game engines Unity and Unreal presents a new front in the platformization of cultural production. This article argues that such programs are “platform tools.” They enable amateurs and professionals to not only build content for platforms but also “lock-in” industry ideologies in the ideation, production, implementation, and distribution of digital creative work, resulting in a homogeneity of developers, practices, and products. The Unity engine’s history, features, and place in the game production pipeline makes it a paradigmatic “platform tool.” Findings from 90 interviews with VR enthusiasts show that Unity set the boundaries or “rules” for developers’ everyday activities and, despite enthusiasm about the medium’s potential, compelled them to create content which conformed to popular gaming genres and standards.
Research questions: To tackle the idiosyncrasies associated with esports online spectatorship, the study was designed to: (a) develop the Motivation Scale of Esports Spectatorship (MSES) and (b) identify what motivates people to watch esports in an online environment.
Research methods: In phase 1 of the study, qualitative data were collected from 8 semi-structured interviews and online open-ended surveys (n = 207). Phase 2 implemented a series of quantitative components to test the motives identified in phase 1 and develop the MSES on two samples of esports online spectators. Exploratory factor analysis (n = 671), confirmatory factor analysis (n = 638), and structural equation modeling analysis (n = 638) were performed to validate the MSES.
Results and findings: Skill improvement and vicarious sensation were the unique motives that emerged in the esports context. Distinct perspectives were found regarding skill appreciation and socialization opportunity. Friends bonding, competition excitement, competitive nature, entertaining nature, dramatic nature, and game knowledge were found to mirror the motives of traditional sport consumers.
Implications: The study made an initial attempt to provide insights for scholars and practitioners to understand the fast-growing esports consumer market. This study contributes to a growing body of sport spectatorship literature by being one of the pioneering esports studies to investigate how the integration of interactive and immersive experiences (e.g. first-person view, chat room, and personality streams) impact esports spectators’ motivation and behaviors.
We examine two ‘producer-oriented’ audio distribution platforms, SoundCloud and Bandcamp, that have been important repositories for the hopes of musicians, commentators and audiences that digital technologies and cultural platforms might promote democratisation of the cultural industries, and we compare their achievements and limitations in this respect. We show that the emancipatory elements enshrined in SoundCloud’s ‘bottom-up’ abundance are compromised by two elements that underpin the platform: the problematic ‘culture of connectivity’ of the social media systems to which it must remain integrally linked, and the systems of intellectual property that the firm has been increasingly compelled to enforce. By contrast, it seems that Bandcamp has been relatively stable in financial terms while being at odds with some key aspects of ‘platformization’, and we explore the possibility that some of the platform’s apparent success may derive from how its key features makes it attractive to indie musicians and fans drawn to an independent ethos. Nevertheless, we argue, even while in some respects Bandcamp acts more effectively as an ‘alternative’ than does SoundCloud, the former is also congruent economically and discursively with how platforms capitalise on the activity of self-managing, self-auditing, specialist, worker-users.
Accompanying esports’ explosion in popularity, the amount of academic research focused on organized, competitive gaming has grown rapidly. From 2002 through March 2018, esports research has developed from nonexistent into a field of study spread across seven academic disciplines. We review work in business, sports science, cognitive science, informatics, law, media studies, and sociology to understand the current state of academic research of esports and to identify convergent research questions, findings, and trends across fields.
This study explored and evaluated the dimensions and consequences of esports online spectator demand. In doing so, we identified preliminary dimensions of esports online spectator demand based on semistructured interviews and online open-ended surveys. Findings resulted from the qualitative study were adopted as the foundation to develop the Scale for Esports Spectator Demand (SESD). To validate the SESD and assess the impact of the SESD factors on consumers’ cognitive and behavioral outcomes, a sample of esports online spectators (N = 1,309) responded to a survey containing the SESD, which was randomly split into two halves, with one half for an exploratory factor analysis and the other half for a confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling analyses. A total of 32 items under eight SESD factors were confirmed. While demand factors including commentary features, player characteristics, event attractiveness, and schedule convenience have been found in traditional sport contexts, chat room, streamer traits, stream quality, and virtual rewards appeared to be unique in esports. All eight SESD factors, excluding schedule convenience, were significantly predictive of one or more of the outcomes associated with esports consumption.
This editorial introduces this special responsive issue on “platform surveillance.” We develop the term platform surveillance to account for the manifold and often insidious ways that digital platforms fundamentally transform social practices and relations, recasting them as surveillant exchanges whose coordination must be technologically mediated and therefore made exploitable as data. In the process, digital platforms become dominant social structures in their own right, subordinating other institutions, conjuring or sedimenting social divisions and inequalities, and setting the terms upon which individuals, organizations, and governments interact. Emergent forms of platform capitalism portend new governmentalities, as they gradually draw existing institutions into alignment or harmonization with the logics of platform surveillance while also engendering subjectivities (e.g., the gig-economy worker) that support those logics. Because surveillance is essential to the operations of digital platforms, because it structures the forms of governance and capital that emerge, the field of surveillance studies is uniquely positioned to investigate and theorize these phenomena.
Electronic sports (esports) offers a novel case study in how antitrust analysis should approach multi-sided markets that rely on the ability of numerous entities to access intellectual property (IP). A game publisher's IP in its game allows for permissible monopolization, but also creates opportunities for anticompetitive IP misuse. Tournament organizers, teams, players, broadcasters, spectators, and advertisers all need access to publishers' IP to participate in esports markets. As publishers vertically integrate into the downstream market for esports content in their games, they rationally seek to minimize competitive pressure from other entities in the market. A publisher can do this by using its IP monopoly in its game to dominate the downstream esports market in its game by, for example, refusing to license broadcast rights to independent tournament organizers. This Note argues that in order to promote consumer welfare through market competition, antitrust law should restrict game publishers from using IP rights in their games to monopolize the downstream esports market for those games. Because multi-sided markets which rely on access to IP and blur the lines between producer, intermediary, and consumer are likely to grow, the stakes for effective antitrust analysis in these markets will only continue to climb. Part I introduces the esports industry and overviews how antitrust law can be used to shape more competitive markets for the benefit of esports consumers. Part II provides an economic analysis of esports in order to define antitrust-relevant esports markets in which enforcement could be appropriate. Part III outlines the structure of a tying claim against publishers that use their IP monopoly over their games to acquire or maintain a monopoly over esports content produced with their games. Part IV contends that a publisher's IP rights should not insulate it from liability for downstream anticompetitive behavior. Part V argues that antitrust enforcement would be superior both to the creation of an independent esports governance body, because such enforcement would facilitate market solutions rather than top-down rulemaking, and to the creation of a fair use exemption for esports, because such an exemption would be comparatively overbroad.
Despite the rise of esports over the last decade, to date there is little effort to coordinate research related to the subject. This special issue attempts to address this gap by presenting a diversity of research exemplars from scholars both within and outside the United States The articles included herein were culled from the top peer-reviewed papers presented at the first annual Esports Research Conference (https://uciesc.org) held October 2018 at the University of California, Irvine, attended by more than 200 academic researchers and esports industry professionals. Together, the collection of articles represents the range of theoretical, methodological, and thematic perspectives in contemporary esports research.
The global phenomenon of eSports has experienced exponential growth in recent years, gaining interest from the media, sports and technology industries. Being born digital, global and agile, competitive gaming appeals to a young and emerging audience, and therefore the management of businesses within the eSports industry requires a unique strategy. Presenting a short history of the industry and an overview of its various stakeholders, the author explores how important governing principles have emerged to culminate in a business model network. An insightful read for scholars researching innovation, eBusiness and strategy, this book takes a pioneering approach and examines potential implications for the future of eSports.