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.
