Abstract
This chapter reports on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a collegiate digital gaming team, participating in a North American network of intercollegiate competition in the massively popular online game, League of Legends. The study parallels, and is woven into, a period of intensive investment in the burgeoning scene for competitive, broadcasted video gaming (esports) between postsecondary institutions. Dozens of universities and colleges in the United States and Canada now offer scholarship programs, training facilities, nutritionists, and coaches for elite competitive gamers. Operating within this context of rapid institutionalization and professionalization, the team I have been following has developed ad hoc sociotechnical practices for getting better that demand close attention from scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and sports. Situating their approach to data collection and analysis within broader histories of technical instrumentation in professional sports, collegiate sports, and professional esports, I argue that these players productively incorporate and hybridize the roles of athlete and analyst that are often kept separate in other sports domains. The chapter concludes by considering the implications of this hybridization, at a time when the interconnected domains of video games, sports, and the military are increasingly invested in the capacities of networked digital media to translate embodied performance into “moving dots”.
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Notes
- 1.
In my understanding, and as of early 2019, only the United States and Canada yet have formalized infrastructures for college-based esports, with the highest concentration of activity in the United States. For these reasons, this analysis is primarily focused on the American collegiate esports scene.
- 2.
This is an admittedly awkward construction, meant to include those team-based, competitive, and often (though not always) professional sports most often associated with leagues such as the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL and organizations such as FIFA and the NCAA.
- 3.
While these are all rich sites of analysis, a comparison between collegiate esports and each of these adjacent domains is outside the scope of this chapter. My main contrast is therefore to professional North American sports associations, as these currently represent the most visible instances of automated data analysis in the sports world. For accounts of the practices and politics of data in professional esports and elite amateur sports, respectively, see Partin (2016) and Comeaux (2018).
- 4.
As dramatized in the Hollywood film Moneyball (based on the book by the same name), “sabermetrics” refers to the statistical optimization of baseball management. Articulated before the widespread advent of digital datafication, sabermetrics made use of a long-standing collection of (and fascination with) statistics in professional baseball (Lewis 2004). This pre-digital datafication was made possible by the baseball scoreboard and fueled by the publication and trade of baseball cards, arguably a precursor to the consuming of statistical data via contemporary fantasy sports (Burton et al. 2013).
- 5.
SportVU originated as a missile-tracking system for the Israeli military (Hickey 2012), a connection I return to in the conclusion.
- 6.
The popular team-based shooter Overwatch, published by Activision-Blizzard, forms another interesting comparison to Riot’s open-data policies. Activision-Blizzard has taken drastic steps in reducing the data available to third-party organizations. As Will Partin (2018) explains, this has less to do with their ostensible goal of preserving “competitive integrity” through regulation of its API, and more with ensuring that Blizzard maintains control over Overwatch data—likely, so they can monetize it.
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Taylor, N. (2020). The Numbers Game: Collegiate Esports and the Instrumentation of Movement Performance. In: Sterling, J., McDonald, M. (eds) Sports, Society, and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_6
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