Narratives, identity and community in esports

ABSTRACT

The commercial and social ascendance of esports has become a source of considerable organisational, industrial, experiential and identity-based concern for those inside and outside the digital gaming field. Indeed, one major concern for self-identifying ‘gamers’ around the world is the extent to which the logics of professionalisation, spectacularisation and rationalisation that pervade contemporary esports will unsettle existing identities within the gaming community. In this study, we draw upon the theories of Paul Ricoeur to provide a narratological analysis of the stories gamers tell themselves about themselves on the social media platform Reddit—and in so doing explicate the politics of inclusion and exclusion imbedded in these stories. We investigate how story-narrative is utilised to mark boundaries in rhythm with, or in opposition to, the commercial, cultural and identity politics which gamers perceive are infiltrating the online gaming field. Based on our analysis, it becomes clear that Reddit users actively use the medium to promote a dominant politics of gender- and investment-based inclusion/exclusion. We conclude with a discussion on the complexities of digital community identity and the challenges seemingly democratic media technologies such as Reddit present for those seeking to promote egalitarian and inclusive spaces of digital play.

KEYWORDS:

• Community identity
• digital storytelling
• narratological analysis
• social media
• esports

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the United States, a number of university athletic programs have in the past three years developed university-sponsored competitive video gaming teams. Operating under the same budget as their competitive NCAA football, basketball, and baseball teams, esports teams at Robert Morris University, University of California, Irvine, Columbia College, Maryville University, Southwestern University, University of Utah now compete in online and in-person tournaments around the United States (Hindin et al., (in press)).

2. From one perspective, the case has been made that esports as an increasingly significant cultural and economic formation merely represents the commercial ‘sportification’ of video games. From this view, by bringing video game play into the stadium environment and broadcasting live events to a mass audience, game companies and their event-making partners have successfully replicated the model commonly utilised by the National Football League, English Premier League, or National Basketball Association (Cunningham et al., 2018; Heere, 2018). However, the context of esports cannot be reduced to a shallow understanding that high-profile competitive gaming is merely an off-spin of traditional sport. Rather, technological advances, along with new spatio-temporal dynamics enabled by virtual space and digital social practices, have begun to mediate and alter organisational structure and human interaction on a level that suggests an increasing complexity in the interpretation of activities and processes (re)constituting different social and cultural formations in esports.

3. Unlike diegesis, which for both Aristotle and Ricoeur refers to ‘narration,’ mimesis is intended to simultaneous summon that which exists (in structure, in history, in language, in systems of meaning, or in the ideological blanket) but also that which can be brought into being. Ricoeur’s theorisations lead us to a figurational sequence, whereby the imitation-representation-enactment modality acts with a Janus-face – referring in the present to the past so as to make the future.

4. As such, we look not necessarily to locate ‘real world’ identities (and identity politics) in stories of and about the virtual (esports) realm, but rather to examine how stories about the virtual actually mediate the possibilities of being and belonging in the digital environment. Hence, we look not only at the narrative as the calling or summoning of that which exists (Genette, 1980), where the world is subordinated to language, but toward a digital world where the symbol is both the referent and the world itself. Put differently, we are not primarily looking at the discursive representations of the identities people form in the world, but at how semi-anonymous authors ontologically frame who can exist – and how existence and belonging can be expressed – in esports ‘medialities’ (Günzel,2012).

5. Ryan uses this anecdote to illustrate such an articulation:

6. Reddit is not only a text-based virtual space for information exchange; it more serves as a cultural platform through which esports participants not only share their own interest and experience in games, but further recreate language and valorise values to reconstruct a distinguished identity (Massanari, 2017). The number of comments of each post is changing at any given time as new comments might be added and existing comments might be deleted by the narrators or Reddit administrators.

7. All posts cited and analysed herein were published on Reddit and publicly available – and only are anonymous to the extent that the author chose a non-associable username/moniker. Given the user-narrator acknowledges the public nature of their posts in the Reddit User Agreement, it is common qualitative research practice to analyse such media discourse (Reddits, tweets, etc.) without author’s consent. In the case where the Redditor used an identifier such as their real name or pseudonym, we used that identifier in the text analysed here.

8. For example, Chou used his past nostalgic anecdote to respond to an audience’s question about the future growth of the game as an esports.

9. For example, one audience member asked what essential resources are required for the growth of the game and the development of a professional team:

10. Many other stories that shared similar characters and plots – such as a passionate gamer working as a volunteer stenographer to translate broadcasters and analysts’ comments in League of Legends tournaments for players with hearing impairment (Chewmomo, 2017), a talented student overcoming mental illness through accomplishing tasks and titles in League of Legends (PhiDX, 2018), and a once medical school student initiating esports business and becoming a founder of a professional Overwatch team (Heflamoke, 2018) – constitute an ‘engaging and inclusive’ online narrative space for ‘young, passionate, intelligent, well-educated and entrepreneurial’ gamers.

11. ‘Soyboy’ is a pejorative term used in online communities to refer to men who lack masculine qualities.

12. We also noted in our analysis that there is a limited repertoire of available representations and stories. To wit, both the language (‘MAGA,’ ‘soyboy,’ ‘noob,’ etc.) and the story form ([auto]biographical) developed across the Reddit threads tended to share many common qualities. It is certainly the case that many of the contributions to the Reddit discourse were contingent on the narrator’s experience and social/cultural location – whereby the extent and nature of any given repertoire of narratives available for appropriation is culturally specific. As such, and perhaps most importantly, this study revealed the extent to which narrators – whose identities are distorted or made anonymous – are willing to utilise hate speech to promote a dominant identity politics.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hanhan Xue

Hanhan Xue is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University. Her research interests include international business of professional sport organisations, sporting events/stadiums and urban development, as well as esports.

Joshua I. Newman

Joshua I. Newman is Professor of Sport, Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University. His research focuses on the political (geopolitical, biopolitical, cultural politics, political economics) dimensions of sport and the active body.

James Du

James Du, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sport Management at Florida State University. His research interests include consumer behavior, consumer psychology, and marketing in sport and leisure.