121
© The Author(s) 2020
J. J. Sterling, M. G. McDonald (eds.), Sports, Society, and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_6
The Numbers Game: Collegiate Esports
122
players do not move (they do), do not sweat (they do), or do not train their bodies (they do). These arguments have been refuted elsewhere, pri- marily through the groundbreaking work of TL Taylor (2012) and Emma Witkowski (2012); my goal is not to rehash these arguments, but to build from them.
The account I offer here draws equally from Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on sports and from posthumanist media theory.
The former acknowledges the agency of non-humans in contemporary sport, including the increasing role of statistical data in transforming the ways elite athletic performance is measured, assessed, and consumed. The latter provides a robust set of concepts for articulating the role of various media in these transformations, specifically via the notion of media tech- nologies as “instruments” which do not simply record and measure, but shape the conditions of possibility, for the phenomena with which they are associated. I entwine these together as theoretical grounding for an ethnographic study of a highly competitive collegiate LoL team, showing how the team’s activities are enabled by a game that is built, from the ground up, to record data—data which is made freely available to players of all skill levels.
In offering this account, I hope to both extend and problematize the recent interest in esports on the part of researchers and practitioners in the growing field of sports analytics. This interest is indicated by the attention given to esports at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (McMahan 2017), “the” gathering for those whose stock in trade is the quantification of athletic performance—the scouts, manag- ers, owners, technicians, analysts, coaches, trainers, and (occasionally) athletes who “perceive their professional assignment as intimately bound up with fine-grained statistical knowledge of athletic performance”
(Yarrow and Kranke 2016, p. 445). It is not at all coincidental that esports is surging in popularity at the same time as major sports leagues and organizations are intensifying their efforts at “datafication”, defined here as the conversion of social action into quantitative information (van Dijck 2014). Likewise, consumers of conventional sport increasingly do so through statistically driven platforms, including video games and fan- tasy leagues. And of course, a vibrant subset of sports scholarship consid- ers the social implications of datafication in sport—which, while it
N. Taylor
123
precedes the widespread advent of digital media (Guttmann 1978), is becoming far more widespread and agential via new technologies for the automated storage, processing, and transmission of digital data (Colás 2017; Millington and Millington 2015; Puerzer 2002; Yarrow and Kranke 2016). In light of the transformations wrought by this “big league” push into automated datafication, esports offers sports scholars a compelling glimpse of what athletic performance looks like when it unfolds in digital environments that are already instrumented for data collection, from the ground up; if anything comes natural to esports, it is data.
I begin with a brief review of esports research that views sport and esport in terms of their continuities, rather than solely in terms of differ- ence, so as to consider both in terms of how they are instrumented. Here, I mobilize the STS-driven notion of “media instruments” to explore how formalized sports (including esports) engage in different ways and to dif- ferent degrees, in techniques of measurement, standardization, and increasingly, automated data recording and analysis. I then offer a brief description of LoL, currently the most popular esport in the world (Taylor 2018a), and I survey the current state of collegiate esports. This is a heterogeneous and dynamic terrain of intensifying professionalization, drastically diverse degrees and forms of institutionalization, and ad hoc techniques for recruitment, training, conditioning, and preparation that are often jealously guarded by individual teams.
Forming the core of this chapter is a description of the practices carried out by members of the competitive LoL team at NCSU. I examine the ways these players have learned to incorporate data provided by the game into their training and preparation regimes, over three years of being together in a relatively stable formation. This allows me to consider the ways data collection and analysis media form the “conditions of possibil- ity” (Packer 2013) for their careers as elite competitive gamers—that is, the ways data constitute the epistemological grounds on which these players understand themselves and shape the kinds of work they carry out. I focus specifically on their use of statistical and video data, and the kinds of athlete-as-analyst subjectivity that the devices, platforms, and practices associated with this apparatus make possible. By way of conclu- sion, I gesture to the overlaps between this apparatus of esports datafica-
The Numbers Game: Collegiate Esports…
124
tion and the military’s persistent push toward more powerful techniques for visualizing combat. This situates my concerns with the instrumenta- tion of esports in a broader cultural politics, while acknowledging a fur- ther layer to the already rigorously interrogated connections between sports, the military, and digital play.