Nicholas Taylor

Stand by Your Man An Examination of Gender Disparity in League of Legends

Although video gaming is becoming a more widespread activity beyond its historically core demographic of young males, participation in competitive gaming remains largely male dominated. Addressing this issue, this research examines the experience of female players in one of the world’s most popular games, League of Legends. Two studies—one qualitative (with 15 participants) and the other quantitative (with 16,821 participants)—confirm that although female players accrue skill at the same rate as males, there remains a dearth of female players in this community. Moreover, those females who play with a male partner are less confident in their skills and often focus on supporting their partner’s advancement, not their own. This work suggests that one way to address the gender gap in gaming is to better understand and improve the social dynamics within popular games.

Alienated Playbour Relations of Production in EVE Online

This article explores the play practices of EVE Online industrialists: those primarily responsible for generating the materials and equipment that drive the game’s robust economy. Applying the concept of “immaterial labor” to this underattended aspect of the EVE community, we consider the range of communicative and informational artifacts and activities industrialists enact in support of their involvement in the game—work that happens both in game and crucially outside of it. Moving past the increasingly anachronistic distinctions between digitally mediated labor and leisure, in game and out of game, we examine the relations of production in which these players are situated: to other EVE players, in-game corporations, the game’s developer, and the broader digital economy. Seen from this perspective, we consider the extent to which EVE both ideologically and economically supports the extension of capital into increasing aspects of our everyday lives—a “game” in which many play, but few win.

Play to the camera Video ethnography, spectatorship, and e-sports

Electronic sports (e-sports) represents an increasingly popular and profitable array of organizations, communities, and sets of practices, all of which place tremendous value on audiences; for example, playing games competitively, in front of a crowd, represents the legitimization of gaming as spectator sport. This article reports on an audiovisual ethnography of a community of competitive gamers for whom the video camera became not so much a research tool but a promotional resource. Examining the transformations the camera enacted, both to the practice of ethnographic fieldwork and to participants’ embodied performances of competitive gaming, this article explores the central role played by recording technologies in the production of e-sports. It concludes by considering some of the intersections of surveillance, gaming, and emergent leisure practices – including the use of digital recording technologies to collect social scientific data, at a time when watching and being watched is increasingly pervasive, pleasurable, and problematic.

Now you’re playing with audience power: the work of watching games

ABSTRACT As electronic sports (e-sports)—the configuration of competitive videogaming as spectator sport—surges in popularity, industry organizations such as Major League Gaming (MLG) continue to experiment with techniques for capturing, and capitalizing on, the work of watching play. This article critically considers these techniques of “audiencing” by comparing observations of two MLG tournaments, in 2008 and 2012, situating them within broader cultural, technological, and economic transformations in the competitive gaming landscape. Even as games continue to be lauded as “participatory” media, this account shows a shift within some e-sports contexts towards rebuilding, rather than blurring, the boundaries between content producers and audiences.

Re-Mediating Research Ethics: End-User License Agreements in Online Games

This article is a theoretical and empirical exploration of the meaning that accompanies contractual agreements, such as the End-User License Agreements (EULAs) that participants of online communities are required to sign as a condition of participation. As our study indicates, clicking “I agree” on the often lengthy conditions presented during the installation and updating process typically permits third parties (including researchers) to monitor the digitally-mediated actions of users. Through our small-scale study in which we asked participants which terms of EULAs they would find agreeable, the majority confirmed that they simply clicked through the terms presented to them without much knowledge about the terms to which they were agreeing. From a research ethics standpoint, we reflect upon whether or not informed consent is achieved in these cases and pose a challenge to the academic research community to attend to the socio-technical shift from informed consent to a more nebulous concept of contractual agreement, online and offline.

Introduction: Masculinity and Gaming: Mediated Masculinities in Play

This introduction to the edited volume Masculinities in Play demonstrates that gaming constitutes one key site in a broader apparatus of contemporary governmentality reconstituting and reconfiguring our (ever-precarious) understandings of masculinity and manliness. The chapter first situates the volume at the intersections of game studies, masculinity studies, and cultural studies before providing a framework for theorizing masculinity as an apparatus that provides not only the symbolic resources but also the material and institutional conditions that enable masculine subjects to shape their selves in relation to games and their attendant technologies, practices, and contexts.

Outside the Lanes: Supporting a Non-normative League of Legends Community

This chapter reports on an ongoing ethnography of a campus-based League of Legends (League) gaming club. Deliberately addressing League’s reputation for toxicity between players, particularly along lines of gender and sexuality, the club’s leaders work to provide a space where inclusivity—articulated in terms of both skill level and social position—is championed. The authors document their attempts to enact a “safer space” for competitive gameplay and consider how a diversity of activities and skill levels helps support inclusion. At the same time, this chapter argues that this work is carried out primarily by women and people of color, re-creating problematic conditions in gaming cultures more broadly in which intensive play is supported by the labor of marginalized (and often invisible) people.

Not So Straight Shooters: Queering the Cyborg Body in Masculinized Gaming

Piqued by instances of homoerotic aggression in both online and physical contexts of play, this chapter explores the potentially queering aspects of gaming between straight white men. In contradiction to hegemonic masculine ideal of an impermeable and agential male body, players’ bodies are played upon by pulses of affect originating from the game and/or from the bodily/machinic exertions of other players’ button mashing.

Queer Game Studies: Young But Not New

Much like the spectrum of queer identities, perspectives, and lived experiences that players and designers embody, academic work that examines the intersection of gender, sexuality, and games is both diverse and growing broader by the day. The medium of games, digital or otherwise, is relatively new, and it has grown and changed alongside a global culture that has struggled with a burgeoning understanding of queerness. This introduction argues that while work in this field is perhaps young, it is hardly “new”; the queer study of games, and the study of queer games, is part of a tradition with a rich history. It introduces the broad perspectives found in the volume, which tackle queerness in play from numerous angles, discussing the ways in which a wide range of topics nonetheless intersect meaningfully.

Handcrafted gameworlds: Space-time biases in mobile Minecraft play

In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition (PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad’s notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players’ bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.