Watch to win? E-sport, broadcast expertise and technicity in Dota 2

Abstract

This article analyses how broadcasts of electronic sport (e-sport) condition the gameplay practices of those who watch. Extending and deepening a limited body of past work, I conduct this analysis through a post-phenomenological perspective, adopting Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technicity. Stiegler provides a useful theorisation of how technical forms carry significant implications for the human, whose status is always already technical. As Stiegler sees it, adopting new advancements or changes in technical forms conditions human experience and behaviour profoundly. Mobilising this post-phenomenological view, I examine how players, through the prism of broadcast e-sport, negotiate the temporal, corporeal and technical aspects of their own gameplay. To do this, I draw upon findings from a wider research project about e-sports broadcasts in Valve Corporation’s popular game Dota 2, showing how various complicated and sometimes antagonistic entanglements emerge from the assemblage of e-sports broadcasts and the gameplay of its viewers.

‘Seeing isn’t doing’: Examining tensions between bodies, videogames and technologies ‘beyond’ the game

“…To reiterate briefly, the aim of the broader project from which this article draws was to examine the relationship between video broadcasts of Dota 2 esports play and the playstyles and skill levels of Dota 2 esports spectators. The main theme emerging out of this project’s findings was that the permanence of esports broadcasts in and around Dota 2 worked as a technological intermediary, shaping the structure of player action and directly informing how players engage with Dota 2 (see Egliston, 2019). This was not, however, always conducive to playing skilfully.…”

“…Within the limited research around this area, one fruitful direction taken by scholars of esports has been to examine how esports broadcasts work as technological intermediaries that shape users’ action and perception within the context of their own everyday videogame play. Recent research suggests, for example, that a popular way for players of videogames to build skill is by watching video broadcasts of esport – a point made in game studies (Taylor, 2012: 236; Taylor and Elam, 2018: 254), media studies (Egliston, 2019), sociology (Brock and Fraser, 2018) and human–computer interaction (Cheung and Huang, 2011). 1 Extended outward from their original locus in the professional arena, the techniques and strategies of esports players and teams are emulated by esports audiences in their own everyday play of the same games.…”

“…1 Extended outward from their original locus in the professional arena, the techniques and strategies of esports players and teams are emulated by esports audiences in their own everyday play of the same games. Through the real-time selection, processing and presentation of information about the esports event – remediating many of the techniques of traditional sportsmedia (such as replays, commentary, analysis and statistical recaps, see Egliston, 2018) – esports, for many, represent a site for better understanding and developing sensitivity to the dynamics of high-performance play and, moreover, for habituating esports playstyles and strategies into their own bodily facilities (see Egliston, 2019). 2…”

“…In contrast to existing accounts of skill, which tend to focus on developmental aspects, finitude here focuses on these specific moments of tension within a wider process of skill development. Understanding finitude as the moments of dissonance between player, broadcast video material and gameplay is expected to be particularly fruitful given the scope of existing inquiry on esports spectatorship and viewer skill, which tends to focus on skill change over time (and, moreover, on skilling, rather than deskilling) (see Egliston, 2019). In addition, my specific attention to moments of unskilled performance is especially significant in the context of the claim that different levels of skilled performance are – phenomenologically speaking – very different activities, characterised by different relations between bodies and technologies (see Dreyfus, 2004).…”

“…More specifically, this article contributes to existing scholarship about the ‘negative’ embodiments that emerge in videogame play – including discussions of failure, anger and fatigue (see Apperley, 2009; Ash, 2013; Keogh, 2018; Kirkpatrick, 2009; Sudnow, 1983; Taylor, 2012). In addition, this article helps flesh out understandings of how material ‘outside’ the game shapes players’ embodied relations with the game (of which there has been limited academic attention to date; see Egliston, 2019; Ash, 2012a; Hodges, 2017). This is especially important if we are to take seriously the popular perspective that videogame play is a distributed ‘assemblage’ of various human and nonhuman parts (see Taylor, 2009), specifically, that material beyond the played game is a taken-for-granted way that many people engage, feel and think about games (see Consalvo, 2007; Kirkpatrick, 2015).…”