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Masculinity’s New Battle Arena in International e-Sports: The Games Begin

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Book cover Masculinities in Play

Part of the book series: Palgrave Games in Context ((PAGCON))

Abstract

While e-sports fans and participants claim that digital play can subvert traditional conceptions of masculinity, offering alternative narratives of worth not as reliant on the physical body, it is becoming clear that competitive video games are still reinforcing certain toxic behavioral and linguistic patterns, particularly along ethnic boundaries. This chapter focuses on League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game whose recent, international tournaments have been rife with antagonistic confrontations extending beyond the computer screen. The persistent East versus West dynamic, and the accompanying rhetoric that at once dehumanizes and effeminizes the perceived “enemy,” are symptomatic of a cultural friction rooted in notions of masculine superiority.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While it is certainly considered a badge of honor for a North American team to defeat a European one (and vice versa)—fans can become quite heated—community discussions indicate that there is a compulsive desire among Western players to ensure that there is no East Asia versus East Asia World final. See my section, “Man versus Goliath.”

  2. 2.

    The professionalization of competitive gaming has encouraged the development of a masculinity that is not as reliant on physical prowess and athleticism. In Chap. 2 of Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (2012b), T.L. Taylor writes that “overt demonstrations of physical activity” have traditionally intersected with masculinity, but that this status quo is being challenged by digital play (36).

  3. 3.

    My general methodology aligns with Norman Fairclough’s textually oriented discourse analysis as found in Discourse and Social Change (1993) and focuses on the intersections of speech and (sociocultural) practice. Bourdieu’s text, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (2010), is particularly relevant when we consider the ambivalent rhetoric directed toward minority gamers, discourses that dictate what is and isn’t appropriate to admire in players and play marked by otherness.

  4. 4.

    Video game interactivity does not just encompass the technical ability to modify digital environments, but the player’s potential to participate in the creative process. Player feedback influences “patches,” software updates that can fix bugs and introduce new content. Characters can be “nerfed” (weakened) if they’re considered too powerful, lore can be rewritten in response to cultural critiques, and mechanics can be refined to balance the play. Unlike other forms of art, video games are dynamic and participatory, allowing players to access and create certain types of knowledge that developers could not have predicted (Take Dwarf Fortress [2006], for example, an indie simulation game whose emergent gameplay leads to infinite scenarios and outcomes), and which scholars cannot understand based only on distant observations of game and gameplay. This is especially true in terms of competitive gaming, where players dictate metagame trends and the nature of the competitive sphere. Without the same type of physical barriers present in other sports, e-sports fans can be both viewers and players, as much drivers of competitive gaming as professionals, sponsors, and game developers are.

  5. 5.

    “eSports, although intellectually demanding, also rely on physical skills. Within eSports the demand for rapid and accurate coordination between the hand and the eye stands out as a gainful skill” (Jonasson and Thiborg 2010, 290).

  6. 6.

    As Michael Newman noted in “The Name of the Game is Jocktronics” (2015), “Video games developed in these early years into a form of boy culture, drawing on a tradition of masculine play and leisure-time amusement” (25). Although competitive video games are still fighting for mainstream recognition and respect as skill-based sports rather than cheap simulations of one, their underlying relationship to the formation of adolescent masculinity was never in question.

  7. 7.

    For the integrity of this historical record, and to best represent the choice that is implicit in handle names, I have decided to preserve the commenters’ original usernames. Handle names are self-constructed representations of these gamers, constructs they defend and maintain in pseudo-anonymous, but incredibly public, domains. They are as much a part of the threads as their posts’ contents.

  8. 8.

    Transcribed from the same thread (Skiipie 2016) in chronological order.

  9. 9.

    Emphasis mine.

  10. 10.

    My transcription of this thread does not include a lengthy detour into size as various Redditors argue whether Le’s compact build enables him to do what “Banana_Fetish” might find difficult.

  11. 11.

    Yomee Lee’s article, “From Forever Foreigners to Model Minority: Asian American Men in Sports” (2016), describes how the “model minority” stereotype reinforces “ideological assaults on Asian American men as effeminate, emasculated, and androgynous de-sexualized uni-dimensional caricatures” (24).

  12. 12.

    Eum notes that Japan’s lack of interest in e-sports parallels the stagnation of the US market.

  13. 13.

    See Edward Said’s scholarship on orientalism and imperialism.

  14. 14.

    Interestingly, the image of automatons has long been present in gaming controversies. “Scripters”—players who illegally utilize code/third-party programs to cheat—are an unavoidable element in most multiplayer games, competitive or otherwise. Cheats can range from auto-leveling an account, auto-farming (i.e. accumulating gold and resources while the player is absent), or modifying accuracy and predictive abilities (this is most common in competitive games). Having played against a few scripters myself in League, I can say that it is a prevalent and frustrating problem. Lisa Nakamura’s article, “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft” (2009), discusses the racialized antagonism directed at “gold farmers,” players who sell curated, game accounts in return for physical currency. In these cases, however, the racism stems from player beliefs that cheaters are only ever morally bereft Asians. On the other hand, League of Legends players who do not script and are still compared to “bots” encounter a form of racial bias that targets their masculinity and denigrates their skills.

  15. 15.

    To be clear, the relationship between North American and European fans is (playfully) contentious. It is considered somewhat shameful for a European team to make it further in a tournament than a North American one, and vice versa.

  16. 16.

    “Ching chong” is both a specific insult directed toward those of Chinese descent and a general insult directed toward any (East) Asian who might be Chinese.

  17. 17.

    Users can “upvote” Reddit posts to indicate their interest/approval, which in turn is converted into an approval rating (the number of upvotes versus downvotes). A post has reached a wide audience if it receives upvotes (or downvotes) in the upper hundreds and low thousands.

  18. 18.

    For more on the “dynamic nature” of e-sports (Taylor 29), see Raising the Stakes.

  19. 19.

    Game servers maintain a specific version of a multiplayer game world, shared only with other members of that server.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Lily Zhu

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  1. Lily Zhu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Nicholas Taylor

  2. Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Gerald Voorhees

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Zhu, L. (2018). Masculinity’s New Battle Arena in International e-Sports: The Games Begin. In: Taylor, N., Voorhees, G. (eds) Masculinities in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90581-5_13

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