The Rise of E-sports and the Spectacularisation of the Play Space

Abstract

What this piece of writing labours to do is examine what it means for people to watch play in the form of e-sports. E-sports are the media products that present a highly spectacularised space for the spectatorship of competitive professional videogame play. E-sports turn videogame play into a show, a performance of technical skill from the players on stage in an environment enhanced by music, lighting and a crowd of enthusiastic spectators. This is achieved not only by altering the physical space of e-sports, like the tournament venue, but also by altering the digital spaces of these games to better facilitate for the 'show' of play. The spectacle of e-sports is not purely reliant on structural alteration of the spaces of competitive play; the spectator is an integral part of the spectacle because their involvement is what triggers the spectacle. There are ethnographic elements to this research as I am a participator in e-sport culture. The first part of this thesis attempts to grasp e-sports by finding what produces it, identifying the two main ingredients that compose it. Professional videogame play being the first and how people have managed to engage with videogames on a serious level. The second ingredient being the culture of spectatorship that has developed around videogames and the different ways people watch videogame play. Then part 2 of the thesis attempts to render the phenomenon of e-sports by comparing it to the mediation of traditional sports and then examining more closely the spectacle of play that has developed within e-sports and the how it functions socially. What this research shows is that the sportification of videogame play, through e-sports, takes place in how we mediate and watch it. Also that the spectacle that develops within the spaces of e-sports is bound to the rituals, habits and social sensibilities of the dominant surrounding culture of young males.