Abstract
Electronic sports (e-sports) represents an increasingly popular and profitable array of organizations, communities, and sets of practices, all of which place tremendous value on audiences; for example, playing games competitively, in front of a crowd, represents the legitimization of gaming as spectator sport. This article reports on an audiovisual ethnography of a community of competitive gamers for whom the video camera became not so much a research tool but a promotional resource. Examining the transformations the camera enacted, both to the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and to participants’ embodied performances of competitive gaming, this article explores the central role played by recording technologies in the production of e-sports. It concludes by considering some of the intersections of surveillance, gaming, and emergent leisure practices – including the use of digital recording technologies to collect social scientific data, at a time when watching and being watched is increasingly pervasive, pleasurable, and problematic.
Keywords
‘Think of how many people are watching this’
Just before the start of the Halo 3 gold medal match between France and Canada at the World Cyber Games (WCG) 2008 Grand Finals, a member of the four-person Canadian team leaned forward in his chair and, looking at each of his teammates in turn, said ‘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 in front of a live audience of roughly 400 electronic sports (‘e-sports’) fans, with Samsung (which runs the tournament) broadcasting the event to the WCG’s streaming Web server, along with a number of journalists and videographers (and myself) recording the event. Taking center stage at the ‘video game Olympics’ (Hutchins, 2008), what marked these players’ emergence into an elite domain of professional competitive gamers was not only the promise of monetary reward (US$10,000 to each teammate on the winning team) but also the focus of the WCG’s globalized audience on their match.
E-sports involves the enactment of video games as spectator-driven sport, carried out through promotional activities; broadcasting infrastructures; the socioeconomic organization of teams, tournaments, and leagues; and the embodied performances of players themselves (Borowy and Jin, 2013; Harper, 2014; Taylor, 2012; Witkowski, 2012). Video plays a central role in the practices of e-sports communities and in the formation and promotion of its ‘brands’, whether individual players, clans, leagues, or tournaments (Taylor, 2012). Most major e-sports organizations such as WCG, Major League Gaming (or MLG, currently one of the most well-established organizations in North America), and the Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), as well as game companies such as Valve (makers of Defense of the Ancients 2), Blizzard (Starcraft 2) and Riot (League of Legends) engage extensively in media production practices that often deliberately invoke mainstream spectator sports as a way of delivering content to digitally mediated audiences. This content includes live tournament casts, interviews with players, replays and highlight reels of both online and tournament-based games, and promotional documentaries 1 – representing an increasing (and increasingly popular) range of video commodities through which to push e-sports to broader audiences.
Over the course of an 8-month audiovisual ethnography documenting the practices of a group of aspiring competitive gamers, I entered into this emergent industry in which video plays such a constitutive role, both as a researcher and, by virtue of my own use of a video camera, as a promotional resource for the organization and players I studied. For the competitive gamers in ‘Nerdcorps’, 2 the grassroots gaming organization with which I became involved, being watched – playing to an audience of spectators, either colocated or digitally mediated – legitimated their status as serious competitive gamers.
This article explores some of the epistemological concerns raised by my fieldwork with this group of competitive gamers, through acting as the NerdCorps videographer 3 and producing promotional materials for the organization and its players. I discuss how the conventional ethnographic concerns around ‘reciprocity’ (Glaser, 1982; Weems, 2006) and ‘reactivity’ (Maxwell, 2013) were transformed through my dual role as ethnographer and promotional videographer in this community. I also attend to the ways my own shifting role and priorities within this community – not only my duties as a videographer but my growing appreciation for participants’ skill and dedication – changed what, and how, I learned about the professionalization of digital gaming. In doing so, I hope to extend the rich ethnographic work of Sünden (2009), Pearce and Artemesia (2009), and Taylor (2006a, 2012) among others, who attend to the ways their own positionality shaped their interactions with participants; in doing so, their work untangles the complex relations between participants, researchers, virtual and physical contexts, and technologies through which ethnographic knowledge is produced. When applied to studies of competitive and professional gaming, the articulation of such an ‘accountable positioning’ (Haraway, 1988) can help build more nuanced understandings of the co-constitutive interplay enacted between players, spectators, recording technologies, and apparatuses, across an increasing range of ‘videoactive contexts’ (Shrum et al., 2005) associated with e-sports.
Watching the watchers: Studying game spectatorship
While some scholars insist that spectatorship has always been central to digital gaming (Borowy and Jin, 2013; Swalwell, 2011), accounts of how we watch others play lag far behind our understandings of play itself. This may be an artifact of a (perceived) need to differentiate gaming, as an inherently ‘actional’ medium (Galloway, 2006), from other forms of screen-based media consumption. Eskelinen and Tronstad (2003) typify this view, drawing a line between ‘passive’ forms of media including film and television and the ‘performative’ work of playing games. TL Taylor (2012) notes the anachronistic notion of audience passivity this view relies upon, a notion disproved by the ‘the intervention of scholars in the Birmingham school and later analyses of actual media engagement’ (p. 183). Citing the ‘productive flip’ cultural studies theorists undertook, she encourages games scholars to ‘ask what role spectatorship and audience have in constructing the play experience and gamer action’ (2012: 183).
Such a flip has already been initiated, due to the recent surge in popularity of e-sports, the rise of streaming video platforms such as Twitch.tv and the recognition that spectators have long been part of gaming culture, particularly in public spaces (e.g. see Alloway and Gilbert, 1998). Some scholars, including Gosling and Crawford (2011) and Newman (2008), seek to highlight theoretical continuities between game players and audiences for other screen-based media, arguing that gaming creates spectacles that players at once coauthor and watch. Others seek to empirically account for the agency of onlookers, suturing them into accounts of video game play in different contexts. Lin and Sun (2011), for instance, employ Goffman’s dramaturgical perspective to document the different ‘frames’ created through the interaction between games, players of varying skill levels, and spectators in an arcade setting, while Bowman et al. (2013) offer evidence, derived from social psychology experiments with Quake 3 players, that highly skilled players improved their in-game performances when playing for an audience. Smith et al. (2013) offer an analysis of the live-streaming service Twitch.tv, which offers spectators the chance to directly engage with players as they stream their play, adding a new twist to conceptions of the ‘active’ audience. 4
While these studies have begun to consider the intimate and often inextricable link between game players and game audiences, we have only started to undertake explorations of the integral roles performed by particular technologies and technological apparatuses for broadcasting play. How does the act of recording, and the presence of recording devices and platforms – whether at tournaments or in mundane, everyday play – alter players’ understandings of themselves and their gaming practices? In what ways are players’ subjectivities, communicative interactions, and play shaped by their own e-sports spectatorship, particularly as the industry traffics increasingly in the commodification of ‘star’ players’ personas? In other words, to what extent might we see e-sports spectatorship ‘schooling’ players in how to be (or act like) a professional gamer? This article engages these questions through a reflexive consideration of my video ethnographic fieldwork with a community of Halo 3 players conducted between 2008 and 2009, during a time when the North American e-sports scene (and MLG in particular) was struggling to articulate what professional game play entails and how it might best be marketed. 5
Moving targets
My audiovisual ethnography of a competitive Halo 3 community was carried out at the following three sites: monthly Nerdcorps events, held at a pub in downtown Toronto, Canada; the 2008 MLG Toronto Open; and the 2008 WCG Grand Finals in Cologne, Germany. The community comprised of approximately 20 Halo 3 players who regularly attended NerdCorps events in order to train for the far more lucrative MLG and WCG tournaments, corporate-sponsored events that promised prize money, sponsorship opportunities, and status as e-sports professionals 6 to winning teams. In addition to recording participants’ Halo 3 play as well as other, parallel activities at each event (playing other games, chatting during breaks, and watching one another play), my fieldwork also entailed detailed field notes, regular informal interviews with the NerdCorps organizers, and as I discuss below, a series of interviews that started off as conventional social scientific exchanges and ended up as promotional material.
The competitive games industry is incredibly dynamic and unstable (Taylor, 2012); sponsorships for teams and individual players are difficult to come by, player turnover is high, and even seemingly well-funded leagues such as the Championship Gaming Series rise and fall within the space of 2 years. These conditions make the North American e-sports scene a moving target for academic researchers, as is illustrated with the study outlined here. At the time I started my fieldwork, MLG had just recently held its inaugural Canadian Open, holding the event at a large convention center in downtown Toronto. According to the NerdCorps organizers, MLG leaned heavily on NerdCorps and other local, grassroots gaming organizations to drum up interest in the Canadian Open. This entailed giving free passes to the organizers to give away to community members in advance of the event, and in the words of one NerdCorps organizer, ‘poaching’ the club’s best players to form an MLG-sponsored Canadian Halo 3 team to compete against its stable of professional teams.
Over the course of my fieldwork, I was able to observe how MLG’s establishment of a Toronto event on its annual Pro Circuit (which lasted until 2010) effectively hooked the NerdCorps community into MLG’s larger network of both on- and off-line Halo 3 tournaments. Many NerdCorps members began attending other events on the Pro Circuit, the club itself quickly adopted MLG’s rule sets for competitive Halo 3 play, and the organizers ceased setting up other games during their events (with the exception of Dance Dance Revolution, to be played during breaks in Halo 3). Once MLG started coming to town, NerdCorps was reoriented away from an inclusive, leisure-driven gaming community toward a more serious club concerned with priming Halo 3 players – predominantly young, White males – for the ‘big leagues’.
Shortly after I completed my fieldwork, NerdCorps ceased to exist as an organization, and the organizers moved on to focus on their families and jobs, and the players, to postsecondary education. While MLG ran as a primarily console-based, first-person shooter (FPS) league during this fieldwork (Taylor, 2011), it no longer includes Halo 3 or the more recent Halo 4 in tournament play. The league has since shifted almost entirely toward computer-based games such as Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, which carry broader appeal to audiences in Europe and Korea, where e-sports is significantly more established (Jin, 2010).
Given the instability of the conditions in which I conducted this fieldwork, the ensuing discussion operates as a snapshot of a scene in flux; it is a partial ‘reassembling’ (Latour, 2005) of the NerdCorps community as it negotiated and participated in the professionalization of digital play over the course of a year. The argument I advance here is not only an account of this transformation, however, but a reflexive consideration and theorization of the recording technologies that made this reassembly possible; it is, as such, an attempt towards a ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway, 1988) of professional game play. As I argue below, my own involvement with NerdCorps in my capacity as club videographer may have not simply just coincided with the club’s attempts to ‘go pro’; it may have actively propelled these efforts, insofar as my videographic work on behalf of the club emulated the video genres produced by MLG and other e-sports organizations.
Reciprocity: Giving back to gamers
Key to this narrative is the ethnographic concern with reciprocity – how, when, and what to ‘give back’ to study participants. This concern animated my fieldwork, compelling me toward activities that were far more recognizable as promotional work than as conventional ethnography. While reciprocity is rarely mentioned in studies of gaming communities, 7 it comes up consistently in accounts of ethnographic fieldwork in other contexts. Tracing the notion of reciprocity from the 1970s and 1980s on, Lisa Weems (2006) characterizes conventional understandings of reciprocity (via Glaser, 1982) as ‘the exchange of favors and commitments’ (p. 997). In this classic model, ‘exchanging favors’ between researcher and subjects is a means of generating trust and goodwill, thereby securing better data from otherwise obstinate ‘informants’ (e.g. see Everhart, 1977; Wax, 1952). Weems follows critiques by earlier critical feminist ethnographers (particularly Harrison et al., 2001; Lather, 1986; Stacey, 1988; and Visweswaran, 1994), in arguing that this conventional approach to reciprocity reproduces inequalities between the researcher and the subject, as the researcher has far more to gain from her interactions with participants than vice versa.
As a means of redressing the exploitative legacies of conventional social science, feminist and postcolonial ethnographers began, in the 1980s and 1990s, to articulate and put into practice radically retooled notions of reciprocity in their research with marginalized groups (e.g. see Bloom, 1997; Haig-Brown, 1992; Roman, 1993). Their work represents reciprocity as an ethical imperative, driven by the recognition of the legacies of abuse and exploitation that thread through the history of social scientific research, particularly with oppressed populations. 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 compelling when working with marginalized groups. Less well developed are understandings of what ‘giving back’ could or should look like in work carried out with privileged populations – communities whose members enjoy similar (or greater) degrees of socioeconomic, institutional, or cultural power than that of the researcher.
In undertaking my research with NerdCorps, a community predominantly made up of straight, middle- and upper-middle class males with similar kinds of socioeconomic privilege as my own, I had little to give back in my capacity as a university researcher. In order to work with them, I had to frame my involvement in ways that aligned with their expectations and needs. Having run the club for several years, the NerdCorps organizers (two White, college-educated men in their 30s with regular ‘day jobs’) were accustomed to negotiating mutually productive partnerships with other groups; at various times, they had entered into collaborations with other competitive gaming organizations, local video game retailers, charitable organizations, and so on, always with an eye toward promoting the club.
When I first met the organizers in early 2008 to propose my research, we discussed working together on a ‘zine about the local competitive gaming scene’, and I suggested contributing academic research on the educational and social benefits of gaming. The organizers seemed interested at the time (possibly out of courtesy), but my follow-up e-mails to them in the weeks after met with no response, and my work as a university-based researcher seemed to hold little relevance to their aims of building their organization’s profile. Months later, I e-mailed them again to request a meeting, after noticing that their Web site featured an underdeveloped section for video clips. When we met a second time, I presented some video production I had done in the past and offered to contribute to the club any audiovisual data I took, as well as my video editing skills, in exchange for their support of my research project. The organizers brought me on as the club’s new videographer.
Camera as boundary object
In entering into this collaboration, I was able to leverage my access to a video camera and my prior experience conducting audiovisual research. As the organizers 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, they introduced me to players as the ‘new videographer’ associated with my university; while my institutional affiliation was made clear, and I fully disclosed my research interests to all the participants I encountered, the organizers 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-identification as videographer, my video camera acted as a ‘boundary object’ (Star and Greisemer, 1989), an artifact and/or technique that has ‘different meanings in different social worlds’ but that is stable and ‘recognizable’ across local contexts (p. 393). Boundary objects are key ‘means of translation’ between social worlds, enabling forms of work valuable both within and across 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 audience building normally associated with professional e-sports. The camera thereby allowed me to traverse the boundary between academia and a relatively privileged community of competitive gamers.
Shooting games
Approaching the video camera as boundary object – a tool simultaneously for the cultivation of ethnographic knowledge on competitive gaming (alongside field notes, questionnaires, and secondary texts) and for the production of promotional materials – allows an articulation of where and how these two objectives came into conflict. That said, at no point in my fieldwork did I explicitly choose to be ‘researcher’ instead of ‘videographer’, or vice versa. Rather, fieldwork consisted in constantly negotiating and prioritizing the expectations and rules of these two communities. In what follows, I highlight the differences and tensions between my obligations as the organization’s videographer and the requirements and expectations around normative audiovisual fieldwork.
Working the angles
The most immediate distinction between these two roles and their attendant relations, epistemologies, and outcomes is in competing notions around where the camera should be and what it should be doing at any given time. In the tradition of video ethnographic work, I had drawn from at the start of my research, the main advantage of video recording is its ability to document ‘naturally occurring’ activity and to minimize the researcher’s influence on recorded phenomena (Knoblauch et al., 2006: 11). From this perspective, the camera is regarded as a tool that is at once less intrusive than other forms of researcher presence and is capable of documenting a more granular and comprehensive record of ‘what happened’ than other, more conventional written and/or audio-based data collection (Laurier and Philo, 2006). 8
Following this tradition, my initial approach was to set the camera up on its tripod in a corner of the long, narrow space where NerdCorps held its monthly events or between two of the four rows of tables that divided the space, and point it at the participants, switching camera positions perhaps three to four times over the course of the 6-h events. The underlying motivation was to allow the camera to be as unobtrusive as possible while documenting the rhythm and pace of these events – long periods of setting up, dealing with technical issues, hanging out, and quiet playing either individually or in small groups, punctuated by bursts of excited chatter, yelling, and other indications of high affect during team matches. This set up reflected my interest in the ways players communicated to each other both during and in between bouts of play.
In retrospect, this was not only reflective of an ethnographic concern with the embodied and material aspects of digital youth cultures (following the work of Bryce and Rutter, 2005 and Wakeford, 1999 among others). It was also an artifact of my belief that to understand how players negotiate the professionalization of competitive gaming, game-based events are of secondary importance to the ways players interact with each other – as if the social aspects of competitive play can be so easily separated from the sociotechnical (Behrenshausen, 2013; Giddings, 2007).
Players themselves prompted a shift in the ‘angle’ I was taking, both technically and theoretically. Where my initial expectations about what to focus my camera on were shaped by video ethnographic traditions, their expectations about the possibilities and affordances of a video camera at their events were shaped by video genres that promote professional e-sports players and events, produced and circulated by MLG and other e-sports organizations. During the second and third events I attended, players approached me several times to ask why I was filming them and not directing the camera at the action on-screen. These questions were asked in the context of my relationship to them as club videographer and they speak to a very different conception about what makes competitive gaming compelling than my own academic interests.
Obligated as I was to produce promotional material for the club’s Web site and YouTube channel that would showcase its top players and portray it as a suitable venue for other serious Halo 3 players, I soon modified my camera work to be more mobile and game play focused, particularly during team matches, so as to capture the more spectacular feats of game-based virtuosity and competitive drama. Doing so required a greater appreciation for those gaming moments that players themselves regarded as significant – something I had to learn not only by attending more closely to their game play but also by watching MLG’s highlight videos and tournament replays. In other words, I had to become a more proficient spectator in order to fulfill my role as a videographer and, ultimately, to better understand the community of competitive gamers with which I worked. 9 Over time, as my own appreciation and enjoyment of competitive Halo 3 grew, and as my understanding of the embodied and communicative skills required for elite play deepened, distinctions between what was ‘good for ethnography’ and ‘good for videography’ diminished.
‘We’ll make you famous’
Alongside my video recordings of participants’ interactions and play, my role as videographer also transformed how I was able to interview players. The traditions of ethnographic research in which I had been trained eschew conventional social scientific interview approaches – characterized as the extraction of data from ‘subjects’ through the use of formalized questioning techniques – in favor of more open-ended, dialogic exchanges. In this tradition, rooted in the feminist work of Oakley (1981), Lather (1986), Smith (2005), and Visweswaran (1994), interviews are reciprocal exchanges of narratives and reflections through which knowledge is co-constructed rather than obtained.
The interviews I was able to conduct with NerdCorps participants were guided by concerns for reciprocity and giving back, following the feminist modes of interviewing referenced above. They were carried out as much to benefit interviewees, in their attempts to establish themselves in a broader network of competitive Halo 3 players, as they were to advance my own understanding of competitive gaming. The tag line used by NerdCorps on its YouTube channel and Web site, after all, was We’ll Make you Famous. In order to accomplish this, however, we modeled them after a genre of promotional ‘pro’ gaming videos, particularly those published by MLG that were most popular with players at the time, rather than the traditions of qualitative research in which I had been trained.
From interviews to profiles
The following account illustrates this shift. My first interviews with NerdCorps players, during an event in March 2008, 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. I sat by them, asking questions about players’ experiences with Halo 3 and trying to engage them in an open-ended conversation about competitive gaming, while an organizer stood off to the side. Their short answers and lack of eye contact (with the camera, the organizer, and 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 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 event (May 2008), the organizers suggested we reconfigure interviews to loosely emulate ‘MLG Pro Player Features’, 10 a format with which participants were more familiar. At the organizers’ suggestions, the list of questions I had initially arranged were modified 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 Halo 3 upward of 30 h a week. These questions asked about players’ favorite Halo 3 weapons, the types of grenades they found most useful, maps and game types they preferred and/or excelled at, and which installment of the Halo franchise they most enjoyed and why. Similar to the MLG Pro Player Features, we also asked players to recount their most memorable competitive gaming experiences, 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. Posted with participants’ written consent on YouTube and linked to from the NerdCorps Facebook page, these interviews 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 e-sports enthusiasts, including other NerdCorps attendees. Before being posted online, I showed the videos at NerdCorps events, where interviewees could request edits, reshoots, and omissions, giving them significant control over whether and how they were represented.
For the gamers involved, the interviews seemed to be a way for them to carry out identity work by recounting their experience with competitive Halo 3 play – how they got into it, their tournament experience up to that point, and what they were 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 having an audience. Several participants used the videos as opportunities to address an imagined audience of e-sports enthusiasts, either playfully or seriously; one young male participant gave a shout out to ‘all his fans’, while a female participant sent a greeting to friends she hadn’t seen for some time. Adopting this ‘profile’ format for interviews meant that I was able to reciprocate to the community in a way that participants recognized as useful, albeit in a format that differed radically from conventional understandings of ‘reciprocal’ research.
At the same time, because the interview questions, format, and interviewees were regulated by the NerdCorps organizers and by the video genre 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, socioeconomic backgrounds, 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; in this respect, then, my researcher activities were relegated to the temporal and spatial margins of competitive gaming events.
Selling the stars
In addition to helping devise the questions I asked in these profile videos, the organizers also took on the work of soliciting interviewees for me, based on who they thought would offer the most compelling or entertaining answers, who had the most dynamic or ‘camera ready’ personalities and who would best represent NerdCorps as offering fun and challenging experiences for seasoned Halo 3 players. We can perhaps read in these solicitations a trend that often happens less explicitly in ethnographic research, the process whereby particular members of a community are made more visible, held up as more representative of the community and its practices than other, marginal members (e.g. see Thorne, 1997). More often than not, the players that took part in the profiles were clean-cut young men (and one woman) with ‘well-rounded’ lives outside of gaming – meaning, mostly, they participated in athletics and/or had romantic partners. These participants were most capable of occupying (or at least conveying) the hypermasculine subject position that MLG had begun to craft around its own star players: the same image of the charismatic, athletically inclined straight (most often White) young male that Kane (2008) and Taylor (2011) identify as central to the North American e-sports industry’s efforts to sell competitive gaming to broader audiences.
Performing professionalism
Exploring how players themselves adapted to my presence as a videographer is key in understanding the role my fieldwork played in the professionalization of this community. Embedded in this account is an attempt to move past conventional notions of reactivity in audiovisual research, defined (and measured) as discrete instances where subjects react to/acknowledge the camera’s presence (see, for instance, Knoblauch et al., 2006: 11). Instead, in keeping with recent scholarship on the ubiquity of digital recording technologies and surveillance practices in our everyday lives (particularly the lives of young people), I consider how participants appropriated the camera toward something they recognized, via their consumption of e-sports, as professional gaming. Operating within e-sports’ broader discursive framework in which spectatorship denotes status, I argue that the camera helped elicit from participants certain embodied arrangements associated with pro gaming; for example, intensive, codified communication, dramatization of in-game events and outcomes, and, from many participants, a kind of hypermasculine posturing.
‘Acting natural?’
Over the duration of my fieldwork, participants seemed unconcerned, even comfortable, toward my presence with a video camera. There are few instances in the audiovisual data from these events of participants looking at the camera 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. 11 What is as likely is that ‘acting natural’ – 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. Shrum et al. (2005) account for this possible outcome in their explanation of the ‘videoactive context’, a stage on which researchers, participants, and video recording technologies engage collaboratively in the coproduction of an audiovisual record. 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 and Philo, 2006). The camera might also elicit performances from participants that emphasize what they construe as their natural (or ideal) behavior, what they regard as safe to show, and/or, importantly, their understanding of what the researchers’ objectives are or should be. In such cases, participants’ actions in front of a camera might be read as a kind of embodied ‘ventriloquation’ (de Castell and Bryson, 1998) of appropriate behavior.
The concept of videoactive context offers a framework through which to consider how I not only recorded but altered participants’ performances of competitive play, in a way that directly contributed to the club’s attempts at ‘professionalizing’ their players. From this perspective, the lack of explicit reactions to my camera activity might be read as part of their performance of elite competitive play; indeed, it is rare to see professional gamers visually acknowledge recording devices and apparatuses during e-sports broadcasts. For these players, pursuing success within a competitive gaming industry that equates ‘being watched’ with status and skill, acting aloof toward the recording of their play might be one way in which they align themselves with the professional Halo 3 players whom many of them watched (either online or at MLG tournaments), referenced, and otherwise emulated.
It may be productive to see in this behavior a kind of retooled ‘Hawthorne effect’, initially devised to account for increases in factory worker productivity under conditions of observation (Landsberger, 1958). While the theory has since been undermined, the possibility that participants ‘play up’ to the camera might have renewed currency in competitive gaming (not to mention other domains, such as mainstream professional sports), where having an audience is equated with skill and proficiency. Similar arguments are advanced, albeit from different methodological perspectives, by both Bowman et al (2013) and Lin and Sun (2011); the former demonstrating that highly competent Quake 3 players perform better when they are aware of an audience and the latter describing how virtuoso Dance Dance Revolution players in a public arcade seem to excel in front of onlookers.
Although NerdCorps offered little in the way of monetary rewards for its top players, my videographic activity afforded opportunities for players to gain audiences and the attended legitimacy that spectatorship confers. 12 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 (Witkowski, 2012), a discourse many players were familiar with partially, if not primarily, through the professional gamer videos that the organizers and I emulated in shooting and producing NerdCorps promotional material.
Conclusion
Returning to the moment at the outset of the gold medal Halo 3 game at WCG, the Canadian player’s comment ‘think of how many people are watching this’ affirms the significance competitive gamers assign to having an audience. 13 Playing to spectators not only is central to players’ perceptions of what constitutes professional gaming but it is key to the legitimacy and popularization of this emergent industry (Harper, 2014; Taylor, 2012). In this context, being featured in promotional videos and on tournament broadcasts not only represents but bestows a degree of status; in carrying out promotional video work for this community of competitive gamers, I was directly implicated in the association between spectatorship and professional play. To conclude, I briefly explore some of the implications of this analysis for our understandings of emergent forms of digitally mediated leisure and communication, and the complexities, challenges, and opportunities associated with their study.
The work of watching
Situating this videographic study of an underground e-sports club within the broader transformations and ruptures e-sports has undergone in the last 5 years is highly instructive. There is now a global audience for e-sports, made possible by the surging popularity of specific games as well as by the emergence of high definition, live-streaming Webcasts. Since the time of this study, MLG – once regarded as ‘the’ premiere venue for console-based and FPS-focused e-sports – has shifted almost entirely to PC-based strategy games. The organization boasted six million ‘unique viewers’ for their online broadcasts of tournament play in 2013, far outpacing even its 2010 figures (data for 2008–2009, the period covered by my fieldwork, is unavailable; http://www.majorleaguegaming.com/news/mlgs-growth-in-2013). As impressive as MLG’s efforts to drive spectatorship have been, they represent only a fraction of the current audiences for e-sports. The League of Legends 2013 World Championships boasted 32 million viewers (McCormick, 2013), while Twitch (http://www.twitch.tv/) attracted 45 million viewers per month in the same year (http://www.twitch.tv/year/2013).
The rise of Twitch.tv and League of Legends, and the recent success of the significantly retooled MLG, demonstrate the lucrative economic potentials of gaming spectatorship (however imbalanced those economic rewards may be; see Taylor, 2012). Contextualizing my work with NerdCorps within this larger trajectory toward the monetization and massification of gaming spectatorship, it becomes apparent that our accounts of digital play need to be grounded in more robust understandings of the broader practices, infrastructures, and industries within which play unfolds. The co-constitutive relationships between players, games, platforms, recording devices and spectators – relationships that in some form or another have always been there, but are intensifying and becoming more pervasive – makes narrowly formalistic and reductionist accounts of digital play increasingly untenable. As recent game scholarship has noted, digital play involves complex sociotechnical assemblages (Giddings and Kennedy, 2008; Taylor, 2011); as I have done here with regard to this account of the videoactive context enacted by my camera work with NerdCorps, it is time we take seriously not just the role of spectators but of spectatorial technologies and platforms in and across these assemblages.
Reciprocity, redux
While video recording technologies (cameras, as well as screen recording software) are certainly well suited to document the ‘circuitry’ of players’ embodied, communicative, and on-screen activities (Giddings, 2009), there are a range of other emergent digital technologies used by gaming communities that offer compelling data collection opportunities for researchers. These include player-created additions to games (typically graphical user interface enhancements but also new in-game objectives and areas; Martey and Consalvo, 2011), user-generated forums (Steinkuehler and Duncan, 2008), and publicly available databases of in-game avatars (Harrison and Roberts, 2011; Yee et al., 2011). These tools grant players forms of ‘lateral surveillance’ (Andrejevic, 2005), where they can monitor each other’s activities, typically toward the coproduction of successful play (Taylor, 2006b). Used by researchers, however, these technologies often enact ‘periscopic’ research practices (Taylor, 2008), where players are unaware of and incapable of consenting to (or opting out of) social scientific studies in which their recorded behaviors become data.
Discussions of whether and how these research practices are regulated by ethics review boards, and how players themselves perceive these issues, have been covered elsewhere (Chee et al., 2012). Also at issue in this ongoing digitization of player behavior, which I have addressed here, is whether research on players, using tools that are integral to their practices, actually benefits players themselves. At a time, when critical communication and cultural studies theorists are interrogating the uses of digitized data to monitor, monetize, and manipulate our networked interactions (Andrejevic, 2010; Fuchs, 2010; Galloway, 2006), a renewed attention to the classic question, ‘who benefits from this research?’ seems appropriate. The study of a small group of competitive gamers that I report on here, and the practical and epistemological issues involved in giving back to this community, is intended to both reassert and problematize concerns around reciprocity, under sociotechnical conditions where the rewards of social scientific research are often, and increasingly, one sided.