Embodied involvement in virtual worlds: the case of eSports practitioners

Abstract

eSports practice designates a unique set of activities tethered to competitive, virtual environments, or worlds. This correlation between eSports practitioner and virtual world, we argue, is inadequately accounted for solely in terms of something physical or intellectual. Instead, we favor a perspective on eSports practice to be analyzed as a perceptual and embodied phenomenon. In this article, we present the phenomenological approach and focus on the embodied sensations of eSports practitioners as they cope with and perceive within their virtual worlds. By approaching eSports phenomenologically, we uncover ways in which its unique forms of virtual involvement overlap with as well as differentiate themselves from traditional structures of embodiment.

Keywords:

• eSports
• phenomenology
• embodiment
• sensation

Notes

1. Due to the focus of this article, we exclude from our use of the concept of eSports (and gaming) such games as Hearthstone and similar card and board game simulators, focusing instead on real-time and fast-paced games where, we argue, the embodied aspects of the performances are closely tethered to the successful enactment of the game involved (we here refer to such games as Counter Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends, DOTA 2, StarCraft II, et cetera). It should be stressed that this is not a rejection of the excluded games as eSports practices as such.

2. As an example, the League of Legends finals in 2013 amassed 32 million viewers—roughly 5 million more than the FIFA World Cup aggregated the following year .

3. In this context, unless otherwise specified, whenever we refer to phenomena as virtual, this is meant to designate phenomena pertaining to the virtual worlds of eSports practice. We therefore use the term to direct the reader to a certain range of phenomena, not to imply that these phenomena are necessarily of a less actual, real or immediate nature; something we return to in Part 3.

4. ‘Mechanics’ is the term generally used in the world of competitive gaming to designate the physical skills of a player. It commonly refers to a player’s ‘speed, accuracy, ability to multitask, and efficiency’.

5. Intentionality, in short, refers to the fact that what sets consciousness or subjectivity apart from everything else (and things as such) in the world is its essential directedness; its aboutness. Consciousness is best understood not as another object amongst objects in the world, but as that for which the objects, people and the world are given. However, this should not be misunderstood as if it is thereby claimed that all conscious experience is necessarily intentional (Crane 1998; Gallagher 2017, 66).

6. ‘Ideally’ here pertains to the fact that this bracketing of is a method that is never ‘finished’, but a constant directedness towards the experiential, essential structures pertaining between subject and world.

7. Nor does this exclude the possibility of our body sometimes being jointly experienced as subject and object, for instance, as evidenced by the research of Ravn (2016).

8. This insight is closely aligned with the enactivist insistence that perception is something ‘we do’ (Noë 2004, 1–2).

9. For Merleau-Ponty, praktognosia extends from our more complex skills and perceptions all the way down to our senses, because even sensory meaning is tethered to the body subject adopting particular bodily ‘attitudes’ (ibid., 219, 341).

10. For more on the topic of haptic feedback in gaming (see Chang 2002; Deng, Chang, and Zhang 2013).

11. Granted, with certain forms of hardware (like console controllers), haptic cues like vibrations do play some part in the virtual experience.

12. ‘MOBA’, short for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, is a very popular and widespread real-time strategy action gaming format, where two teams of typically five players fight each other in an effort to siege down and destroy the opposing team’s base’s main structure.