Recasting Collegiate Esports: Independence and Interdependence of University Twitch Streamers (original) (raw)

The Fandom Frontier: Understanding the Limitless(?) Potential of Collegiate Esports Fans

Digital Games Research Association DiGRA, 2023

Collegiate esports has expanded rapidly in the United States, with over 200 programs founded countrywide since 2014 (Bauer-Wolf 2019). Students increasingly participate in collegiate esports as players, broadcasters, and support staff, while university faculty and staff take on administrative and organizational roles. With this seemingly limitless expansion, research focused on collegiate esports has grown accordingly (e.g., Hoffman, Pauketat, and Varzeas 2022), addressing an array of questions regarding student esports athletes’ campus role (Schaeperkoetter et al. 2017), whether esports qualify as intercollegiate sport (Jenny et al. 2017; Walton, Lower-Hoppe, and Horger 2020), and how programs engage student labor (Harris et al. 2022). Research has even discussed how to build programs effectively (Pizzo, Jones, and Funk 2019), and how to address concerns about diversity, inclusion, and Title IX, the U.S. law mandating gender equity in educational institutions (N. Taylor and Stout 2020; AnyKey 2019). Still understudied, however, is fans’ role in the collegiate esports environment. This cohort is key to understanding the limits of competitive gameplay on campuses, as they can legitimize programs to university administrations. Studies of professional esports recognize fans’ role in tournament attendance and spectatorship, and in supporting esports players, teams, and brands (Pizzo et al. 2018; T. L. Taylor 2012), but less research focuses on their collegiate-level counterparts.

Navigating the iron cage: An institutional creation perspective of collegiate esports

International Journal of Sport Management, 2019

Esports are becoming increasingly popular at U.S. colleges and universities (Jenny, Manning, Keiper, & Olrich, 2017). Currently, collegiate esports programs are spread primarily across two departments (i.e., athletics, student affairs), with athletics often highlighted as their most viable home (Bauer-Wolf, 2019). While athletic departments provide important alignment opportunities for emerging esports programs, they also face complex institutional environments that complicate the integration of novel activities (i.e., esports). Through the lens of institutional creation, the purpose of this study was to understand how key actors within athletic and student affairs departments strategically integrated esports. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 university department directors from athletics (n = 10) and student affairs (n = 6). Findings indicate directors from both athletics and student affairs adopted similar institutional creation strategies that emphasized alignment with traditional sport, but dissimilar challenges related to external regulatory control and stakeholder perceptions. The discussion highlights the theoretical importance of institutional language and provides recommendations for the future management of collegiate esport.

The Limits of Influence: Negotiating the Hegemony of Game Companies in Collegiate Esports in The U.S

Digital Games Research Association DiGRA, 2023

This study explores game companies’ power and hegemony within the playing field of US collegiate esports. Built on interviews with players, university administrators, tournament organizers and game companies, our work highlights how collegiate esports provide a vital lens for seeing how game companies, institutions and players set game culture. As the field is trying to find its footing on campuses, fundamental questions of political (regarding policies of tournaments), structural and cultural control remain unclear, particularly when game publishers own intellectual property rights and organize tournaments within which colleges compete. In this field of unequal power relationships, hegemony of game companies emerges at different moments of policy, structure, and culture.

Esports buffs: the perceived role of fans and fandoms in U.S. collegiate programs

Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 2024

Introduction: Collegiate esports—organized competitive gaming—has expanded rapidly in the United States, drawing in student players, broadcasters, and support staff, as well as university employees. Universities have invested financially in esports, hoping to capitalize on gaming fandom to attract prospective students and enhance campus community integration. Little research, however, addresses collegiate esports fandom in depth. Methods: Drawing on thirty-one in-depth interviews with collegiate esports players, student workers, program directors, and administrators, this article investigates how collegiate esports participants perceive and discuss their fans. Results: We identify three central themes related to fans in the dataset: discussions of fans’ role in the collegiate esports environment, comparisons between esports and traditional sports fans, and concerns about the underutilization of fans within collegiate esports spaces. Subsequently, we theorize these themes through existing research on professional esports and traditional collegiate sports fandoms, as well as through the concept of “fan labor,” or how the productive work of fans provides value to the nascent industry. Discussion: This article thus not only specifically explores how collegiate esports programs are normalizing fan labor as an essential part of their practices, but also questions who benefits from this relationship and how. Investigating collegiate esports fans as an under-researched group additionally provides a new perspective on how fan labor integrates with media industries more broadly.

Player Power: Networked careers in esports and high performance game livestreaming practices

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2018

In this article, we explore the ongoing negotiations and tensions involved in creating high-performance play and livestreaming practices, produced through assemblages of creative networked actions between individuals, institutions, infrastructures and communities. From speedrunning communities to esports leagues, expert game cultures offer key cases to explore the conventions of expert gameplay, the politics of digital play itself and the formation of networked careers. These include performances (on/off screen, by players and spectators), ownership/governance (of the game, of third-party organizations and products), and the expressions of player rights. Specifically, via two case studies, we look at how two veteran franchises – Valve Corporation’s Counter-Strike and Nintendo’s Super Mario – have engaged with the moving foundations and expressions of co-creation practices made by those engaged in high-performance networked careers of play.

Facilitating Collegiate Esports: Limiting and Legitimizing Competitive Gaming

Digital Games Research Association DiGRA, 2023

The global phenomenon of esports (or competitive gaming) unquestionably continues to grow. However, spaces, facilities and infrastructure remain understudied. Using U.S. collegiate esports as a microcosm of the broader industry, our work addresses perceptions of facilities, equipment, and infrastructure through in-depth interviews with teams, administrators and game makers in order to demonstrate how material conditions meaningfully limit expectations of what constitutes competitive play. We find that while administrators and players legitimize gameplay through their official facilities, the ad-hoc historical foundations of collegiate and professional esports push against institutional desires. This research therefore begins to reveal a picture of collegiate esports facilities that are still highly reliant on gaming norms and social capital, rather than trying to challenge the limits of competitive digital play.

Current Status and Key Topics in Esports Research (Chapter 2.2, Routledge Handbook of Esports)

Routledge Handbook of Esports, 2024

Esports research encompasses a vast array of interdisciplinary foundations and investigates a diverse range of research questions concerning various aspects of the ecosystem. Research on esports addresses broad social and economic questions, organizational and institutional level concerns, and individual-level factors related to participants and fans. As an emerging context with broad application, esports researchers are drawn from a wide array of academic fields, employing theoretical and methodological approaches native to their disciplinary home. This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of research on esports, including its historical development, the diverse disciplinary and contextual perspectives it encompasses, and the possibilities for future research. Key highlights include: 1) A brief review of the history of esports research, 2) A high-level overview of esports research as a multi-disciplinary field, 3) An analysis of the evolution of the number of esports publications per year over the last 20 years, 4) The introduction of the “Esports Research Matrix,” which organizes existing and future esports research into 10 major field categories based on research scope, perspective, and domain, 5) A discussion about the various designs and methodologies used for esports research, and 6) A brief assessment the current state of esports scholarship.

The Risks and Rewards of Collegiate Esports

International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations

As participation in electronic sports (esports) continues to expand globally, colleges and universities are considering how such competitive video gaming might impact recruitment, retention, and the overall student engagement experience. This mixed-methods study focuses on the perceptions of college students in both the United States and Italy regarding the esports phenomenon. A compilation of the research findings from two case studies compared and contrasted themes associated with the benefits and risks to college students participating in esports. The findings highlighted the notion that even during challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the college students in this study were still driven to invest their time in esports play. However, the risks such as those of addiction, health impairment, and social isolation may outweigh the perceived benefits to game play. Included are critical considerations and policy recommendations for campus esports programs as well as future ...

Esports Clubs’ Work in Media Spaces: Distinctive Features

Current Issues of Mass Communication, 2020

On 7 May 2015, the term “esports” was officially added to one of the most extensive online English dictionaries “Dictionary.com.” The dictionary gives the following definition of the term “esports”: “competitive tournaments of video games, especially among professional gamers” (IGN, 2015). The history of esports began in the late 20th century with the game Quake, which allowed users to play together through a LAN or internet network. Since then, a tremendous number of new esports leagues have emerged. Every year, game publishers promote esports disciplines; create a media space around them, and make competitively oriented games, creating an active audience. The popularity of computer-based esports grows each year at an increasing speed. Therefore, it is not surprising that the traditional for typical sports (football, basketball, volleyball, etc.) model of interaction between professional players (esports athletes) and sports clubs (esports organizations) emerged quite rapidly. This...

No reason to LoL at LoL: The addition of esports to intercollegiate athletic departments

2017

The electronic sports, or eSports, industry has grown into a multi-million dollar industry. The significant growth of eSports can be seen far beyond the participation numbers and spans from eSports' events being hosted in major arenas and televised on ESPN. Most recently eSports were added to intercollegiate athletic departments. Though eSports has gained a lot of momentum economically and in popularity, academic research and study in the area of eSports is still in its infancy. This paper presents: (1) a brief history of eSports, (2) a further developed definition of eSports, (3) eSports size and market scope, (4) and provides an overview of eSports in intercollegiate athletics to date. The main goals of this paper are to create awareness around the economic growth of eSports and shed light on the potential positive implications of adding eSports to intercollegiate athletic departments. Boosting participation numbers, revenue generation, and creating diversity within an athletic department are all considered in this paper.