Racing with the industry: an interview on motorsports, esports, livestreaming and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The following interview discusses two paradigmatic media sports cases during live sports lockdown in 2020. Producing online tournament responses to the COVID-19 cancellations of live events, the IndyCar First Responders 175 race and the W Series esports league both turned to esports livestreaming. Under this transition, themes of safety, gender equity, risk, and rules emerged as key topics surrounding the current and future state of esports within media sports ecosystems. As discussed by Garth Midgley (founder of GOATi Entertainment and lead developer of 22-Racing Series), Abe Stein (senior strategist with the Sports Innovation Lab), Gina Miller and Jo Diamond (Communications executives, W Series), and Emma Witkowski (senior lecturer and esports academic), these cases exemplify ascending issues in sports quick transition to online esports and networked livestreaming solutions, shoring up media sports under lockdown.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 Professional sports that rely on structural arrangements between sports and media institutions for the survival of the sports form are media sports (Giulianotti 2005).

2 Like esports, liveness and online liveness is foundational to modern media sports big-budget livelihoods, as Couldry conjects ‘[l]iveness—or live transmission—guarantees a potential connection to shared social realities as they are happening.’ Online liveness occurs not from a single screen or producer, but simultaneously through the shared participation in live, or close-to-live, transmitted events (Couldry 2004, 355–359). TL Taylor’s work on livestreaming discusses the power of live events with esports broadcasters, who note that esports and sports liveness is the key to “survive the disruptions the industry faces” – a harbinger of the COVID-19 lockdowns that impacted on traditional sports leagues shortly after (Taylor 2018, 144).

3 Only the W Series was conducted as an email interview and did not participate in the live discussions (two sessions of two-hour interviews, recorded and transcribed) due to time zone issues with participants based in North America, Australia, and the UK.

4 In their study on place and virtual motorsports racing, Daniel Paiva identities the clear rules in non-professional player cultures, highlighting that “When racing or trying to get a fast time around the track, it is vital to follow the official trajectory, which is predefined. Not doing so is seen as “cheating” and it is not an acceptable behavior” (Paiva 2015, 158).

5 Thomas Henricks’ work on orderly and disorderly play exemplifies the challenges here. Orderly play adheres to the descending meaning of rules and (institutional) cultures of participation, while disorderly play is ascending in action ‘help[ing] people comprehend the meaning of orderly activity. It articulates the parameters of proper behavior … Disorderly behavior serves the function of reminding a group of its cherished values and establishes the specific social responses to those who violate such standards’ (Henricks 2009, 35). As these events deconstruct themselves from centralized bodies and centers of production, values conflicts continue to rise.

6 See Zacny (2020).

7 See Collantine (2020).

8 Susan Leigh Star (1999) lends a useful framework here relating to the different phenomenal experience of a playing field’s infrastructures. She writes ‘One person’s infrastructure is another’s topic, or difficulty’ (p. 380). In the IndyCar case, the playing field itself becomes a topic as soon as Norris is accused of a poor play. The playing field shifts from a familiar and recognisable infrastructure for the professional race car drivers (orderly play) towards a topical problem (disorderly play) for sim-racers, one that stymies expert execution, assumed or authentic.

9 Sponsorship embeddedness in motorsports extends to unique uniforms for press conferences, as discussed in Finn (2021).

10 Where microcelebrity under a media studies lens is well discussed (Senft 2008), esports microcelebrity has alternate tie-ins to expertise, online liveness, networked effects, and entertainment, with specific challenges relating to individual player and high-performance team development, sports gambling, alongside of managing team revenue sustainability (Witkowski 2019).

11 See earlier works on collapsed contexts within networked publics in Marwick and Boyd (2011), alongside of Nick Taylor’s insightful work on the shifting infrastructures and orientations towards esports event audiencing and livestreaming (Taylor 2016).

12 See Giulianotti 2005 and Taylor 2018.

13 See scholarship on the impact of parasocial relationships in the monetisation of sports fandom (Thompson 2019).

14 Digital games ethnographers have explored these tensions, revealing a range of techniques and tactics addressing meaning making (beyond the game software and situation) and ascending and descending rules of play (See Gray 2013) on the tactic of ‘resistance griefing’ by structurally disempowered player in everyday game space, and Taylor’s (2006) ethnography in EverQuest, which tackles the situated acts of optimization and community acceptance feeding meaningful rules of participation (pp. 45–51).

15 Sal Humphrey’s addresses this border work, noting that ‘digital games negotiate a constant struggle for legitimacy … games are not seen as serious. They are still seen as marginal to mainstream culture … Yet, they can be seriously tied to the cultural production of values and norms’ (Humphrey 2019, 832). See also TL Taylor’s (2012) reference to geek and gamer masculinities in esports.

16 The spectacle of deviance is a well discussed topic from World Wrestling Entertainment to goal celebrations in football. In games research, the “performance spectacle” is a well-documented facet of the gameplay experience from casual to high-performance player settings (See Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 116).

17 About the playful choice, Jacobellis said ‘Snowboarding is fun. I wanted to share my enthusiasm with the crowd’ (cited in Jenkins 2006, para. 18).

18 Delegitimization is a key thought here, as esports more broadly looks to regulate and stabilize around, for example, elite level event management, gambling and corruption. Pagenaud’s actions and the like are a reminder of the instabilities surrounding an otherwise emerging media sports sector which bookmakers are expanding into to increase their resilience” (Nosal and Lopez-Gonzalez 2021, 417).

19 This point highlights contextual regional distinctions in esports, where budgets are sustained for some esports disciplines and leagues in major regions as high performance teams, versus esports in minor regions where elite level esports are mostly delivered on short term and precarious budgets.

20 A review of Ninja’s book summarises this well, “… it’s more a piece of branded content than it is the form we’ve come to know as literature” (Stephen 2019).

21 Abe Stein refers to hybrid esports as that ‘slippery space between esports and media sports [particularly around a simulated title such as motor-racing/iRacing or football/FIFA]. The hybrid suggests that as traditional sports become more digital they will take on more of what esports has and does’.

22 ‘Pasha Biceps’ and Ninja are just two of many examples of esports players working towards a media empire underpinned by livestreaming, identity, and competitive play (Witkowski 2019).

23 See MacNamee (2020).

24 The W Series esports events during 2020 offers us a vision of how women’s spectator sport was involved and transformed alongside of the fast-paced shifts occurring under the pandemic across mostly men’s competitions as livestreamed sports and esports. It is a significant series. The capture of and discussions surrounding those livestreamed W Series events across media networks (from organizers, athletes, and fans), is as TL Taylor notes, a reminder of the value of qualitative knowledge production in women’s sports and leisure practices in order to understand cultural patterns and preferences (Taylor 2018, 191). Without the W Series intervention, those preferences and patterns surrounding a women’s media sport turned esport would be lost.

25 Exploring the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on women’s sport from the standpoint of elite women athletes, Bowes, Lomax, and Piasecki (2021) identify how many sportswomen experienced a reduction of opportunity, visibility and support during the pandemic (equipment, media, equitable restart of their event). Unlike these findings, the drivers in the W Series drivers received continued support as a women’s only organisation, and in the switch to an online mediated tournament, they maintained sports presence, achieved through existing technological relationships with esports via sim racing practices (as a regular training tool in motorsports).

26 Stefy Bau was the first woman to compete in professional supercross and motocross open events.

27 See Esports Bar (2021).

28 When the W Series announced its switch to an esports league under the pandemic live sports lockdowns, Formula 3 driver Sophia Floersch retorted ‘Come on, that’s a joke? Segregation behind a computer. Girls, eSports is 100% gender neutral. SO many esports events where girls & boys can participate. For FREE. What a marketing stuff. Bitter truth.’ https://twitter.com/SophiaFloersch/status/1258428918295601152.

29 The International Working Group on Women & Sport (IWG) identified five areas of concern under COVID-19 (IWG 2020), including the areas of ‘resources’ and ‘structure’. Regarding resources, the IWG signals ‘that money and resource may be taken out of women’s sport … to support men’s sport … or women’s development may be put aside, as “not a priority” due to budget”’. This issue has not come to pass for the W Series, evidencing the structural benefit of running an independent women’s sporting organisation during COVID-19, where the W Series is the primary product. Under the issue of ‘structure’, the IWG claim there is a “risk that the sector may seek to “re-build” what was previously there, rather than “re-imagine” [and] become more inclusive of diverse communities.’ Research shows that high performance players, representing a minority group, have multifaceted issues of online harassment and abuse (in-game, on-platform, at event), major deterrents leading to shortened athletic/esports careers particularly and reducing the motivation to continue into a managerial or executive future with the sport in question (Taylor 2012). Here is where esports in media sports is a significant topic, requiring ongoing qualitative study from within these rebuilding sectors.

30 Addressing the value of women-only initiatives, Sundén comments ‘separatism is not … about exclusion, it is not about those who are not there, but about gaining strength collectively as a subordinate group’ (quoted in Humphreys 2019, 835). This orientation to power is reflected in remarks made by W Series CEO Catherine Muir-Bond on structural empowerment [addressing pricing constraints], noting ‘what we don’t want to do is let a prodigious talent fall through the net at a very early stage, because she simply can’t get the money even to get into Ginettas or Formula 4-type cars.’ www.autosport.com/fwd/news/152323/female-f1-driver-to-come-soon-says-w-series-ceo.

31 See TL Taylor on fostering new markets in esports and sports (Taylor 2018, 196–97).

32 This is a compelling point positioned against scholarship on virtual motorsports viewership and its rate of decline (IndyCar less so than F1) in online fan engagement during COVID-19 event transitions to esports (See Tudor 2020, 16).

33 Where pricing, norms and rules heavily govern the asphalt track and safety space of driving (motorsports crashes are very expensive, and the norms and rules underpin towards driver safety), it is the architecture of the race (due to disparate esports racing norms), erasure of direct impact pricing (no car-crash repair), and fuzzy rules (or rather, low penalties for rule breaking) that change the tone of the race for the field of drivers (See the four modes of cyberspace in Lessig 1999).

34 In Humphreys 2019, 839.

35 www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfDV_PsRWnQ

36 While many professional men’s sports were quick to involve esports activations to fill the live sports void, women’s media sports mostly abstained from esports solutions. Women playing sports professionally was a notable absence in 2020’s networked media sports landscape.

37 For comparison, Bietske Visser’s (W Series driver) high-end sim-racing set-up costs approximately $7,500 AUD. By comparison, Lando Norris’ F1 practice sim-racing set-up costs upward of $35,000 AUD.