E-sport, spectatorship, technicity: Examining broadcasts of videogame expertise and impacts on play experience

Abstract

This thesis investigates an intersection of broadcasting and watching videogame performance (over internet-based platforms, such as Twitch.tv), and the play of videogames. My focus is the broadcast of professional gaming, or electronic sport (e-sport), a now salient aspect of contemporary videogame culture. Through a case study of Valve Corporation’s game Dota 2 (2013) and its e-sports scene (drawing on empirical material from my own viewing and play experience, interviews and player data analytics), I stage an inquiry into the status of ‘everyday’ videogame play with, through and amidst broadcast e-sport. Particularly, I am occupied with examining how spectators of e-sport shape habitual capacities or skills in their own play (by variously engaging with broadcasts of expert performance). I consider these skills and habits in terms of the space and time produced by human bodies using gaming technologies, mobilising the post-phenomenological philosophy of Bernard Stiegler to guide my analyses. Drawing from studies of games, media and technology, this thesis advances the argument that while game experience traverses bodily and material domains (a perspective sustained in studies of games for some time), we also need to take seriously how objects outside the context of a player-software-hardware ‘circuit’ might intervene in play. I contend that broadcast e-sport apprehends the complex processes of virtuosic play, which can then become enfolded into the mundane encounters that ‘everyday’ players have with videogames. Taking seriously the materially specific ways that e-sports frame expertise, and how various ways of doing or being emerge from this framing for those who watch, is something which no research to date has examined, and represents an original contribution to knowledge. This case study has broader value in offering a helpful epistemological model for challenging dominant formulations of how players form habits and accumulate skills in videogames. In the current literature, limited study has been done on the ways that the experience of play is shaped by the ancillary practices and objects outside the material context of the game. By looking at the contemporary site of broadcast e-sport, I am providing a more complete account of the practices and experiences of skill building around extrinsic game material.