Play to the camera

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.

[1]  Anders Albrechtslund,et al.  The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment , 2002 .

[2]  Mark Andrejevic,et al.  Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy , 2010 .

[3]  B. Nardi,et al.  Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method , 2012 .

[4]  Gabrielle Durepos.  Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor‐Network‐Theory , 2008 .

[5]  Robert B. Everhart.  Between Stranger and Friend: Some Consequences of “Long Term” Fieldwork in Schools , 1977 .

[6]  Seth Giddings.  Playing with non-humans: digital games as technocultural form , 2005, DiGRA Conference.

[7]  Events and Collusions : a glossary for the microethnography of videogame play [ draft version ] Published in Games and Culture , 4 ( 2 ) April 2009 , 2016 .

[8]  Ricardo B. Duque,et al.  Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the Millennium , 2005 .

[9]  Jenny Sundén,et al.  Play as Transgression: An Ethnographic Approach to Queer Game Cultures , 2009, DiGRA Conference.

[10]  David S. Heineman.  Korea’s Online Gaming Empire , 2013, New Media Soc..

[11]  Christian Fuchs,et al.  Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet , 2010, Inf. Soc..

[12]  Eric Laurier,et al.  Natural problems of naturalistic video data , 2006 .

[13]  Celia Pearce,et al.  Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds , 2009 .

[14]  Bryan G. Behrenshausen.  The active audience, again: Player-centric game studies and the problem of binarism , 2013, New Media Soc..

[15]  A. Galloway,et al.  Gaming: Essays On Algorithmic Culture , 2006 .

[16]  Donna Harawy.  Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective , 2022, Philosophical Literary Journal Logos.

[17]  M. Borowy,et al.  Pioneering eSport: The Experience Economy and the Marketing of Early 1980s Arcade Gaming Contests , 2013 .

[18]  J. Stacey.  Can there be a feminist ethnography , 1988 .

[19]  J. Newman.  PLAYING WITH VIDEOGAMES , 2008 .

[20]  Rosalie H. Wax.  Field Methods and Techniques:Reciprocity as a Field Technique , 1952 .

[21]  A. Oakley.  Interviewing Women: an contradiction in terms? , 2013 .

[22]  Suzanne de Castell,et al.  Retooling play: dystopia, dysphoria, and difference , 1998 .

[23]  Suzanne de Castell,et al.  Re-Mediating Research Ethics , 2012 .

[24]  Thomas Smith,et al.  Live-streaming changes the (video) game , 2013, EuroITV.

[25]  C. Haig-Brown.  Choosing Border Work. , 1992 .

[26]  T. L. Taylor,et al.  Book Review: T.L. Taylor, Play Between WorldS: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. vii+197 pp. ISBN 0262201631, $29.95 hbk , 2007, New Media Soc..

[27]  John L. Sherry,et al.  Facilitating Game Play: How Others Affect Performance at and Enjoyment of Video Games , 2013 .

[28]  S. Giddings.  Events and Collusions , 2009 .

[29]  Jo Bryce,et al.  Gendered Gaming in Gendered Spaces , 2005 .

[30]  Rosa Mikeal Martey,et al.  Performing the Looking-Glass Self: Avatar Appearance and Group Identity in Second Life , 2011 .

[31]  Yogesh Kumar Dwivedi,et al.  Investigating the Research Approaches for Examining Technology Adoption Issues , 2005 .

[32]  Les Nelson,et al.  Introverted elves & conscientious gnomes: the expression of personality in world of warcraft , 2011, CHI.

[33]  Brent E. Harrison,et al.  Using sequential observations to model and predict player behavior , 2011, FDG.

[34]  M. Glazer.  The Threat of the Stranger: Vulnerability, Reciprocity, and Fieldwork , 1982 .

[35]  Nicholas Taylor,et al.  Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming , 2011 .

[36]  P. England,et al.  Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. , 1994 .

[37]  H. Knoblauch,et al.  Hubert Knoblauch, Bernt Schnettler & Jürgen Raab: Video-Analysis. Methodological Aspects of Interpretive Audiovisual Analysis in Social Research , 2006 .

[38]  Daphne Patai,et al.  Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography , 2016 .

[39]  Joseph A. Maxwell,et al.  Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach , 1996 .

[40]  Nina Wakeford.  Gender and the landscapes of computing in an Internet café , 2013 .

[41]  Sarah Pink,et al.  Doing Visual Ethnography: Images, Media and Representation in Research , 2001 .

[42]  Melanie Swalwell,et al.  Little Jesuses and * @ # ?-off Robots : On Cybernetics , Aesthetics and Not Being Very Good at Lego Star Wars , 2010 .

[43]  Patti Lather.  Research as Praxis , 1986 .

[44]  B. Thorne,et al.  Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School , 1993 .

[45]  Sean C. Duncan,et al.  Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds , 2008 .

[46]  Melanie Swalwell.  More Than A Craze: Photographs of New Zealand's early digital games scene , 2011, DiGRA Conference.

[47]  L. Roman.  DOUBLE EXPOSURE: THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST MATERIALIST ETHNOGRAPHY , 1993 .

[48]  Brett Hutchins,et al.  Signs of meta-change in second modernity: the growth of e-sport and the World Cyber Games , 2008, New Media Soc..

[49]  J. Harrison,et al.  Regimes of Trustworthiness in Qualitative Research: The Rigors of Reciprocity , 2001 .

[50]  Victoria K. Gosling,et al.  Game Scenes: Theorizing Digital Game Audiences , 2011, Games Cult..

[51]  L. Weems.  Unsettling Politics, Locating Ethics , 2006 .

[52]  M. Andrejevic.  The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance , 2002 .

[53]  D. Smith.  Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People , 2005 .

[54]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Institutional Ecology, `Translations' and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 , 1989 .

[55]  C. Sun,et al.  The Role of Onlookers in Arcade Gaming: Frame Analysis of Public Behaviours , 2011 .

[56]  K. Visweswaran.  Fictions of feminist ethnography , 1994 .