By way of conclusion, I want to gesture briefly toward two possible impli- cations of this analysis. The first concerns how we make sense of esports in terms of the kinds of work it entails of participants, and the kinds of subjectivities it affords. While still acknowledging the rich and complex sets of connections between sports and esports (some of which I have addressed), it might be worth asking what other domains of sociotechni- cal activity esports draws from. I have sketched out the figure of the
“athlete- as-analyst” here, as a way of describing the NCSU LoL team; but it may be that their work has less in common with athletics than it does with other domains involving statistical and audiovisual analysis, includ- ing military intelligence and scientific knowledge production. In this regard, it is telling that none of the players on the NCSU team will likely continue their involvement in esports after they graduate; but what will likely “stick” are the capacities for, and orientations toward, research and analysis that they have cultivated over three years.
This leads to a second implication, one that further problematizes the instruments and associated logics that transform “movement perfor- mance” into “moving dots”. Perhaps more so than either digital games or sports, the military-industrial complex is heavily invested in technologies for automatically tracking—and thereby predicting and controlling—
choreographies of kinetic bodies. It is well beyond the scope of this pres- ent work to chart the manifold connections and shared histories between the games industry and the military (see, for instance, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009; Stahl 2006) and between the military and sports (e.g. see King 2008; Schimmel 2017). Nonetheless, it is instructive that SportVU, the first technology to fully instrument professional basketball arenas, began as a missile-tracking system. This is no anomaly; related technologies like SitAware (https://www.systematicinc.com/), for instance, aim to provide military commanders and analysts with “god’s eye” views of battlefields via a combination of networked location-based sensors and video surveillance (similar to what the NFL uses) that would give them the capacity to deliver orders from a safe location. It is no acci- dent that the visualizations produced by these technologies look so much
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like those generated by SportVU or provided by LoL players via the inter- face’s minimap: each transforms human action into “moving dots”. That these instruments—what Donna Haraway, decades ago, called “god tricks” (1988, p. 583)—should be as readily deployed for warfare as for pleasure and play tells us much about the cultural values of contemporary mediasports.
Notes
1. In my understanding, and as of early 2019, only the United States and Canada yet have formalized infrastructures for college-based esports, with the highest concentration of activity in the United States. For these rea- sons, this analysis is primarily focused on the American collegiate esports scene.
2. This is an admittedly awkward construction, meant to include those team-based, competitive, and often (though not always) professional sports most often associated with leagues such as the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL and organizations such as FIFA and the NCAA.
3. While these are all rich sites of analysis, a comparison between collegiate esports and each of these adjacent domains is outside the scope of this chapter. My main contrast is therefore to professional North American sports associations, as these currently represent the most visible instances of automated data analysis in the sports world. For accounts of the prac- tices and politics of data in professional esports and elite amateur sports, respectively, see Partin (2016) and Comeaux (2018).
4. As dramatized in the Hollywood film Moneyball (based on the book by the same name), “sabermetrics” refers to the statistical optimization of baseball management. Articulated before the widespread advent of digital datafication, sabermetrics made use of a long-standing collection of (and fascination with) statistics in professional baseball (Lewis 2004). This pre- digital datafication was made possible by the baseball scoreboard and fueled by the publication and trade of baseball cards, arguably a precursor to the consuming of statistical data via contemporary fantasy sports (Burton et al. 2013).
5. SportVU originated as a missile-tracking system for the Israeli military (Hickey 2012), a connection I return to in the conclusion.
N. Taylor
141 6. The popular team-based shooter Overwatch, published by Activision-
Blizzard, forms another interesting comparison to Riot’s open-data poli- cies. Activision-Blizzard has taken drastic steps in reducing the data available to third-party organizations. As Will Partin (2018) explains, this has less to do with their ostensible goal of preserving “competitive integ- rity” through regulation of its API, and more with ensuring that Blizzard maintains control over Overwatch data—likely, so they can monetize it.
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