TY - JOUR
AU - Taylor,, Nick
AB - Abstract The rise of live-streaming platforms, and the related surge in popularity of esports, remind us that there is a politics of watching play. This article extends intensified scholarly interest in game spectatorship, offering a materialist consideration of the embodied work involved in spectating competitive game play. Most readily associated with the discursive alignments between competitive gaming and/as sport, the active camera mode used by esports competitors and “shoutcasters” facilitates analyzing the highly kinetic action of team-based combat in first-person shooters and multiplayer online battle arenas. Here, we draw from microanalyses of audio-visual recordings taken as individual participants spectated a Dota 2 match. Examining the cognitive and perceptual competencies they draw from, we argue that participants are incorporated into apparatuses of perception associated with militarized optical media. While at a discursive level esports spectators may be watching sports, at a material level they are playing with the logics of drones. During the Second World War, while still a child, I experienced firsthand the fierce flight of strategic bombing and, later, witnessed a series of land battles in the company of a former artillery liaison officer, a survivor from the ‘14-18 war who taught me how easily a tested mind could cut through such a subliminal barrage, could locate and materialize in space the atmospheric dimensions of a battle, and could anticipate what the different parties intended to do. To cut a long story short, my old friend jubilantly described the scenario of a battle which I, being a newcomer, saw only as its special effects. (Virilio, 1989, pp. 61–62) Arteezy has vision of Ember Spirit from his creeps, and can see that the hero’s Flame Guard, which blocks magic damage, has just expired. Because Arteezy knows the timings of Flame Guard—20 second duration on a 35-second cooldown—he knows that there’s a 15-second window where the Ember won’t have one of his primary defensive tools. Arteezy can also see that Ember starts walking back to the Radiant-side (probably to farm the ancients), rather than jumping to his Fire Remnant—a greedy, fatal error on the part of Ditya Ra. In short, Arteezy knows exactly where the Ember Spirit will be in a few seconds time. (Partin, 2016) What do World War I artillery officers and journalists covering the esoteric but massively popular competitive game Dota 2 have in common? This is not (just) the setup to a bad joke: it is the opening salvo in a theorization that views key forms of video game spectatorship as a contemporary extension and refinement of the kinds of militarized, technological vision described by the late cultural theorist. Where Virilio’s anecdote illustrates the transformations in perception wrought by optical techniques for visualizing, and thus controlling, a battlefield, the in-depth analysis of “one of the best Dota 2 plays of 2016” (Partin, 2016, np) describes the effects of such transformations as they migrate across different domains: here, the booming market for spectating competitive, action-based games (esports). Like Virilio’s “old friend,” a veteran of artillery combat, the esports journalist (Will Partin) is capable of abstracting pattern and order (a scenario) on what appears to the untrained eye to be special effects: the random play of light and noise. At stake, for those who play and watch Dota 2 and similar esports (such as League of Legends), is no small measure of fame and wealth: 2018’s prize pool for The International, Dota 2’s major annual tournament, was $25.4 million dollars (most of it crowdfunded by players; Rose, 2018). Our contention is that contemporary forms of video game spectatorship, such as those carried out by spectators of Dota 2 and similar multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), embody in new technocultural forms the same logics Virilio sought to describe in mapping the development of optical technologies over the course of the 20th century: namely, the capacity to see without being seen, to manipulate representations of physical reality, and to tease out the concomitant effects on human perception, which he described succinctly as a “deadly harmony” between “the functions of eye and weapon” (Virilio, 1989, p. 83). In succinct terms, our central goal with this work was to ask what cultural politics are in play as Dota 2 spectators learn to see scenarios amidst all the special effects of a frenetic match. To address this question, we report on a mixed-methods study of Dota 2 spectatorship. First, however, we discuss existing scholarship on the links between the military, digital play, and esports spectatorship. Video games, like cinema, are rooted in histories of military techniques that were developed to extend, augment, and transform our perception and cognition: specifically, radar (Crogan, 2011), wargaming (Deterding, 2009), and computation (Lenoir & Lowood, 2005). In addition to the well-documented ideological synergies between the entertainment industry and the military-industrial complex (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Stahl, 2006) we have seen some coming to terms with the perceptual changes wrought by game play, particularly (though not exclusively) with regards to intensive play with first-person shooters (Ash, 2013; Moore, 2012; Witkowski, 2012). While this work has opened up productive avenues of theorization around the cultural politics of play—specifically regarding the kinds of affective conditioning intensive gaming compels and the militarized logics of perception, cognition, and action this conditioning supports (Crogan 2011)—play is far from the only thing we do with games (or that games do with us). Games are also modified, hacked, critiqued, traded, and, crucially, watched. This article builds upon intensified scholarly interest in game spectatorship (see, for example, Boluk and LeMieux, 2017; N. Taylor, 2016; Taylor, 2018), offering an empirically driven and theoretically grounded consideration of one particular form of spectatorship, prevalent in broadcasts of highly popular, team-based, competitive games (esports), including Dota 2 and League of Legends (League). In the “free camera” mode we examine here—specifically that of Dota 2’s robust spectatorship software client—the spectator maneuvers a camera around the virtual arena, often riding along with particular player-characters (“heroes”) and seeing the game from their point of view and/or scanning particular locations and points of contestation. The free camera is used by player-spectators to better understand the game’s hyperkinetic, complex action, and by esports broadcasters to narrate unfolding events to “the folks watching at home,” whose numbers often those of rival mainstream sporting broadcasts (Casselman, 2015). With this in mind, we asked: what are the cultural analogs of these spectatorial activities? What are we doing when we watch competitive video games in this way? While spectatorship of competitive games is discursively linked to sports (T.L. Taylor, 2012), we argue that it has its material origins in the optical media of warfare. Drawing from the work of Paul Virilio (1989), optical media afford both ways of seeing and knowing: perceptual, technical objects. Building from Foucault (1977), Virilio considered the god’s-eye view of panoptical-inspired media, in which various technical capacities facilitate the capture and transmission of visual data. These media are not just seeing machines, but also veritable knowing machines, with multiple sensory and perceptual affordances, revealing data for the other components of the apparatus to translate for operators and spectators who are engaging in the embodied work of knowledge production of the battle space. Rather than consider military drone operations as the reduction of warfare to a video game, we consider the scopic reduction of drone operations within video game play. Moving beyond the enigmatic (and increasingly clichéd) figure of tyrannical spying machines hovering above the playground, this approach considers the cognitive and material shifts resulting from a particular type of vision operating under such logics: not directly overlaying a militaristic ideology on video game play, but examining the materially situated drone logics reconfiguring instrumentalist modes of perception. Engaging these intersections between domains of sport, military, and gaming, the practices of Dota 2 spectatorship we document here are discursively linked to a sports industry that has long traded in militaristic ideologies and promoted the rhetorical/discursive normalization of militarism in sport (Butterworth & Moskal, 2009). In addition, these practices are materially linked to militaristic modes of perception, data capture, and analysis. In this nexus, the Dota 2 spectator stands (sits?) as a paradigmatic figure: synthesizing numerous streams of visual and informational data, at once both above the fray and an integral part of the esports machine, they are operators of an emergent form of optical media that plays, in equal measure but in different ways, with militarized sport and digitized warfare. This formulation is germane to MOBA games like Dota 2 and League: combat-driven games with robust spectator modes and god’s-eye (or, more accurately, drone’s-eye) perspectives, though our analysis is not necessarily confined to them. As we argue here, approached discursively, these MOBA spectators may be watching sports, but approached in terms of the kinds of perception that Dota 2 spectatorship enacts, they are doing drone operation. These modalities of watching and doing are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. Spectatorship and games Spectatorship has long been a vital aspect of gaming. Accounts of early arcades (Kocurek, 2015; Tobin, 2014) and domestic game play (Flynn, 2003; Simon, 2007) remind us that the line separating player from spectator has always been fuzzy, if not momentary. More recently, the rise of competitive, spectatorial game play, together with the development and widespread diffusion of online platforms for streaming live game play (most notably, Twitch.tv), has transformed video game spectatorship into a lucrative commodity (Taylor, 2018). Competitive, spectatorial game play—or esports, a term that denotes the industry’s strategic, contentious, and ambivalent relationship to conventional, professional sports (Hutchins, 2008; T.L. Taylor, 2012)—encompasses a loose network of games and game developers, media platforms, production companies, leagues, clans, sponsors, audiences, and players, collectively invested in the legitimization and commodification of gaming as a mass spectator sport. To take one recent example, the 2016 International, the world championships for Dota 2, featured a prize purse of over $20 million U.S. dollars and was played to a sold-out Key Arena in Seattle and to tens of millions of online spectators (Hancock, 2016). Central to the continued growth of esports is its continued push for new spectators: a challenge which has, historically, proven difficult to overcome, despite its recent successes. This challenge has often been framed in technical terms; with its ubiquity across a range of devices, from consoles to personal computers to tablets and smartphones, online streaming is regarded as a breakthrough technology, providing content creators (from major esports leagues to individual players) with a relatively inexpensive, robust infrastructure for attracting and maintaining new audiences. That said, the challenge is also sociocultural and, we would argue, perceptual: for example, how do you make something as obtuse and complex as a five-on-five match in Dota 2, one of the most popular entries in the relatively recent genre of MOBAs, intelligible to new spectators, much less compelling? Dota 2 forms a useful case study here, as it is a notoriously difficult game to play, much less watch. Each match involves a battle for territorial supremacy on a constrained map between 5 “heroes” representing the “Dire” and 5 representing the “Radiant,” with these faction names evoking the game’s Tolkienesque lore and aesthetic (see Figure 1). Matches typically last 1 hour. Team bases are placed on opposite ends of the map, separated by environmental obstacles and resources, navigable via three “lanes”: pathways which are flanked by turrets belonging to either team that will automatically fire on enemies. Players have their choice of 117 playable heroes (as of early 2019; more are added regularly), each with their own strengths, weaknesses, and abilities. Teams vie for advantage by directly engaging each other in skirmishes and by competing for resources scattered over the map (“farming”) which enable heroes to “level up” (advance in power) and to purchase items and equipment. Players and spectators alike view the map from an extended third-person perspective, and can maneuver the camera around the map, much like a drone over an “undifferentiated” field of operations (Andrejevic, 2016). As this brief account suggests, the game is fantastically complicated, and in between the strategies and roles associated with each hero and the combat and farming mechanics—both of which are constantly updated by the developer and are collectively referred to as the game’s “meta” (Donaldson, 2015)—Dota 2 can take years to learn, much less master. This, in addition to a robust apparatus for viewing previously played matches that is built into the game’s client, makes it a compelling site for exploring the perceptual work involved in watching competitive play. Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Dota 2 map diagram (Purge Gamers, n.d.). Figure 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Dota 2 map diagram (Purge Gamers, n.d.). The discursive alignment between professional, competitive gaming and conventional spectator sports, and the implications of this alignment for issues of gender and racial inclusivity in competitive gaming, have been well-documented (Taylor, Jenson, & de Castell, 2009; T. L. Taylor, 2012). We are more concerned here with the perceptual ramifications: what are we doing when we engage in esports spectatorship? What broader logics and epistemic transformations are we participating in? Returning to Virilio’s anecdote, under what conditions does it become possible for Dota 2 spectators to perceive the scenarios at work in the “atmospheric dimensions” of its hyperkinetic, fantasy-themed battlescapes, when the untrained eye sees nothing but special effects? Our study undertook a granular analysis of participants’ activities as they individually watched the same Dota 2 match, and the ways they made use of various tools provided by the game client to make sense of the game’s unfolding action. These tools included a choice of camera mode: automatic, in which an algorithmically driven camera shifted between heroes and map areas to show the most compelling points of action (Phang, 2014); player, which followed a specified, individual hero; manual, in which the spectator had full control over the camera’s area and level of zoom; menus, which allowed spectators to monitor pertinent game statistics in real time; and the ability to jump to different points in the match timeline and to replay action in fast forward, slow motion, and reverse. In keeping with an attempt to take seriously the embodied work of watching others’ play (Taylor, 2016) and the apparatuses through which this work becomes possible, intelligible, and productive, our case study of spectatorship in Dota 2 considered the ways in which spectators are conditioned into modes of perception that embody particular kinds of militaristic logics. As we argue, the Dota 2 spectatorship we documented induced performances that sounded like sports spectatorship—relying on well-worn tropes of “the underdog,” “the comeback,” “the turning point,” and the “bad play,” utterances that discursively associate this complex, fantasy-themed team game with conventional spectator sports—and at the same time, worked like drone operation. Crucial to our account here are deliberate comparisons between participants with differing levels of expertise with the game and genre; we were interested in understanding what competent, trained Dota 2 spectatorship entailed, and the epistemologies it participated in. Watching the watchers: Documenting Dota 2 spectatorship We employed an experimental methodology, primarily informed by microethnographic studies of game play (Giddings, 2009). We audio-visually recorded participants’ engagements with Dota 2, and then analyzed the granular, moment-to-moment choreography of actions both on- and off-screen. Where microethnography in game studies has conventionally been used to unpack the density of seemingly mundane moments of play, our study aimed at the kinds of work involved in certain forms of game spectatorship. Recruiting via local subreddits, social media, campus-based bulletin boards, and subsequent snowballing, we invited 50 participants to a campus-based research studio. We deliberately sought participants who represented a range of levels of expertise with Dota 2, and with this genre of games more generally. All participants were between the ages of 18 to 34, and all but two were male. We attribute this gender imbalance to the broader masculinized culture of games in this genre (Ratan, Taylor, Hogan, Kennedy, & Williams, 2015) and to our recruitment among a largely male-dominated computer engineering department. Procedure Individually, 50 participants were invited to an hour-long session that began with reviewing and signing an Institutional Review Board–approved informed consent form. Each participant watched the same pre-recorded Dota 2 match, and was encouraged to narrate their unfolding understanding of the match (the consistent prompt we used was “What is happening now?”). Using open broadcaster software, which enables the synchronized recording of a webcam and screen, we recorded their verbal utterances, physical postures, and in-game actions (moving the camera, opening and closing menus) as they spectated the match. Half (25) of the participants were asked to write a short (250 word) summary of the match, pitched at someone with a similar skill level and game knowledge to their own. As reimbursement for their time, participants were offered a $20 (U.S. dollars) gift card for an online retailer. What follows is an overview of how participants with varying levels of experience engaged with and made sense of the Dota 2 match. Observations We were interested in connecting our participants’ actions and utterances to broader formations of game-based expertise, and to the apparatuses of power/knowledge of which these are an expression and extension. To do so, we divided our participants into three groups: those who were regular, active Dota 2 players; those who were not Dota 2 players, but regularly played League, a similar MOBA; and those without any MOBA experience. First, we draw from the 250-word summaries of the game that 25 of our participants were asked to produce following their observations. We then turn to participants’ uses of observational tools built into Dota 2’s replay system: specifically, we aggregated the time each participant spent in the three available camera modes (automatic, manual, and player-focused), and their time spent consulting real-time statistics relating to economics (how much in-game currency each team was producing), hero builds (how players on each team were developing their heroes), and match (how many kills each team had registered against their opponent and how many resources they controlled). Discursive expertise: (E)sports talk Across the 25 game summaries we collected, sports-related terminology appeared throughout, regardless of participants’ levels of experience: themes such as “the comeback,” “shifts in momentum,” “individual vs. team play,” and “the underdog” provided readily available discursive lenses for the game’s basic contest for territorial supremacy between two teams, regardless of how knowledgeable the individual spectator was. That said, the more novice participants in our study seemed to make greater use of sports metaphors to describe the action, and (understandably) made little use of the proper names, often referring to the Dire side as the “red team” and to Radiant as the “green team,” for example, in reference to the colors used to denote each team’s movements on the game’s mini-map. According to one novice, “red” was able to “turn the tide” midway through the match; according to another, the match was “a tale of two halves,” with red able to mount “a successful comeback” after a weak start, due to their superior “teamwork.” Novice participants also relied on militaristic metaphors (often indistinguishable from sports metaphors), with one participant noting that “red team led a massive assault against the green team and clinched victory out of what seemed like a one-sided fight in the beginning.” League players were able to draw from their grasp of the shared mechanics between the two games to offer more granular accounts of the game. Several League players, for instance, pointed out that the Dire side made a more concerted effort at farming early in the game than the Radiant team, laying the foundation for more power-ups and stronger heroes as the match progressed, despite Radiant’s apparent early advantage in one-on-one fights. Sports-related tropes about the underdog Dire team mounting a comeback gained slightly less purchase in what appeared, to more seasoned MOBA players, as an early and sustained mismatch in the game’s underlying competition for resources. Other League players made no mention of the match’s economic statistics, but focused instead on players’ or teams’ successes and failures in carrying out specific strategies at specific points in the match. One participant, for instance, did not use Dota 2–specific names, but nonetheless offered the following nuanced analysis: “red team was getting caught off during team fight, but their carry started split-pushing the top and bottom lane, forcing the green team to defend instead of utilizing their early advantage”: here, “carry” referred to a specific role in MOBA play delegated to capturing enemy turrets in the more contested lanes. As expected, Dota 2 players’ summaries were more granular still, and made abundant, and more frequently evaluative, references to specific players and team strategies. One participant, for example, drew on their knowledge of the game to outline more optimal strategies for pivotal players, writing “I think if Chen [a Radiant hero] had ganked more, and pushed at least 2 towers early, they would have had an even stronger lead that they could snowball off of and win the game.” Several of these participants still maintained the use of sports metaphors, couching their evaluations in overtly sports-related terminology; one Dota 2 player, for instance, wrote, “I would have to give Luna MVP of the match due to her constant good decision making when it came to her teammates losing fights.” The combination of sports-related tropes with terminology developed for a particular game or genre, particularly as applied to evaluations of highly specific player actions and game events, is a hallmark of “shoutcasting,” the genre of play-by-play commentary developed for esports (T.L. Taylor, 2012). We think it possible, therefore, that the discourse employed by Dota 2 players in these summaries (and to some extent, the League players as well) is reflective of their familiarity not just with the game/genre, but with conventions of esports broadcasting more generally. In this respect, in producing these summaries, they engaged a discourse that they were familiar with not just as game players, but as spectators: they were “doing” shoutcasting, albeit in a different modality. Shoutcasting itself has become central to the rapidly expanding esports industry, and it is not surprising to see participants mimic shoutcasting tropes—which, themselves, appropriate conventional sports themes—in their interpretive work. We now turn to the epistemological/perceptual work that this discursive framing relies upon. Perceptual expertise: Faster than a speeding algorithm The summaries by experienced MOBA players that involved nuanced assessments of player and team strategies reflect a mode of spectatorship that is better able to cut through the noise of the game’s frenetic activity and perceive underlying patterns of data and movement. These participants were more intensively attuned to the mechanized logics of perception required to effectively read the game (Ash, 2013). We offer two illustrations of the differences between more and less attuned spectators, drawing on our aggregated data, which represented participants’ manipulations of the game’s camera and modes and statistical overlays. Camera modes Figure 2 shows the percentage of time each group of participants spent in each camera mode, based on the total duration of the replay. As it illustrates, Dota 2 players used the free camera for almost 75% of their observations, compared to 58% for League players and 33% for novices. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Camera modes used by novices, League players, and Dota 2 players. Figure 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Camera modes used by novices, League players, and Dota 2 players. According to Phang (2014), whose work has attempted to unpack the logics of Dota 2’s proprietary automatic camera algorithm so as to address its perceived limitations, the automatic mode tracks areas where “unit activities”—individual hero movements, attacks, skill uses, and damage dealt and taken—are most intense. It is a reactive algorithm, jumping around the map to sites of heavy “unit activity,” such as a skirmish, a kill, or an assault on a turret, milliseconds after the activity begins. If we approach the Dota 2 automatic camera as an enactment of “drone logic,” in which a distributed sensor array covering the Dota 2 map records all game play events and then “automates the sensemaking process” (Andrejevic, 2016) to show spectators the hottest and busiest action moments after it starts, we can better understand Phang’s concern with its apparent limitations: busy does not necessarily mean interesting or significant. This drone apparatus, like most others, operates according to logics of quantity; it is, as Andrejevic (2016) asserted, “post-hermeneutic.” Seen in this light, Dota 2 players’ extensive manual camera use became a way for them to overcome the reactive, reductively quantitative logic of the automatic camera. The manual camera became, in the hands of adept player-spectators, a predictive, anticipatory instrument. These participants outpaced the automatic camera in their drive to locate sites of not just actual, but potential intense activity: they out-droned the algorithm’s drone logic. Menu use Complementing and extending Dota 2 players’ deployment of the active camera was their greater use of the software’s real-time statistics, available via a drop-down menu in the top left corner of the interface, entitled “Game Stats.” The three sub-menus we saw our participants use displayed economic data (particularly related to how much gold each team had farmed), hero builds (which particular abilities and power-ups each player had chosen for their hero), and match statistics (primarily displaying the level, number of kills, and number of deaths for each hero). On average per participant/session, Dota 2 players had the economic data open on-screen for almost 8 minutes: almost 3 minutes longer than League players (Figure 3). Novices did not access the economic data at all. Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Time spent in menus by novices, League players, and Dota 2 players. Figure 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Time spent in menus by novices, League players, and Dota 2 players. As we alluded to above, this data provides participants access to a statistically driven understanding of Dota 2 (which side can buy more powerful items for their heroes) that does not fit as easily into the underdog/comeback tropes that novices used to describe the match. Despite the Radiant side’s early edge in kills, the economic statistics showed the Dire side out-farming their opponents early on. This data allowed viewers to make inferences and evaluations about players’ logistical prioritizations and operations. This engagement with the game’s mathematical substrata is in keeping with a mode of sociotechnical gaming practices that scholars (following players themselves) refer to as “theorycrafting”: the pursuit of “optimal set[s] of strategies” for game play, often employing “statistical analysis and mathematical modeling” (Paul, 2011, paragraph 1) to overcome particularly daunting game challenges. Theorycrafters seek to understand, and thereby exploit, a game’s computational and algorithmic structures, and often do so through data analytic tools and techniques that make use of the massive array of networked sensors that game developers increasingly build into their projects. We are certainly not presuming that the Dota 2 players in our study relied on these same tools in their own play; rather, we could see in their attention to statistical data the same attempt to comprehend the match’s underlying computational dynamics, and to see past the representational special effects in order to grasp the scenario in play. This theorywatching, in part, allowed these participants to be more precise and anticipatory—more drone-like—than both their counterparts and the game’s own automatic camera algorithm. They were incorporating, processing, and responding to more data. Drone theory in play At this point in our analysis, we want to zoom out for a moment and consider what it means, theoretically, to link Dota 2 spectatorship to drones and drone logics. As we have demonstrated, our account of game spectatorship extends existing conversations regarding the “militainment complex” (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009) and the close relationship and shared lineage between video games and technologies of warfare. Gaming practices, such as spectatorship, also illuminate the underlying epistemological shifts occurring. (Packer and Reeves 2013, p. 310) noted that “evolving logics of enemy detection, recognition, and response are bound up with media-specific modes of observing and knowing,” suggesting the inherent media imperative in shaping such practices. (Virilio 1994, p. 59) considered this evolution in logics as the “automation of perception” and the “innovation of artificial vision,” as they relate to increasingly complex weapons technologies focused on identification of the enemy or, more accurately (and subtly yet powerfully distinctive), the identification of a target. The optical media involved in target recognition and response, then, afford both ways of seeing and knowing: perceptual, technical objects. Similar to Virilio’s consideration of the god’s-eye view of optical media, (Andrejevic’s 2016, p. 21) theorization of military, police, and commercial media alike from the perspective of drone logics involved “the deployment of ubiquitous, always-on networked sensors for the purposes of automated data collection, processing, and response … treat[ing] the drone as an avatar of the emerging logic of increasingly passive interactivity.” We extend this theorization to video game spectatorship, in a case where the embodied work carried out not only representationally mirrors the work of drones, but also exemplifies the perceptual and cognitive shifts of “droning” media. Because “drones do not monitor ideology, they track sequences of correlation as proxies for chains of affect and effect” (Andrejevic, 2016, p. 37), the representational aspects at play of concern in this work—those shaping the cultural politics of spectatorship—center on the sensory aspects of the gaming assemblage that occur on a different level than making sense of narrative: command inputs involving aural, visual, and haptic cues; the processing of this data; and the resulting translation of that data into emerging cues that continue the feedback loop. Additionally, the imperative of speed and accuracy attunes both technical and human bodies in the assemblage to the affordances of the entire system, in which continuous developments intend to remove the noise of technical lag and human cognitive processes. The militaristic parallel to these increasingly automated processes has its roots in early cybernetics, where “cybernetic tools and methods, which involved statistical methods and fast, mechanized computing methods … [were] a fundamentally agonistic calculus of tactical moves and countermoves” (Crandall, 2005, p. 3). Moves and counter-moves become dependent on anticipation, which is perceptually and discursively trained through iterative presentations of the present and the future in the battlespace, “between the animate (the living subject) and the inanimate (the object, the seeing machine)” (Virilio, 1994, pp. 59–60). This kind of “synthetic vision” ushers in a new permutation of so-called reality, in which the presentation of real-time events occurs through data transmission (Virilio, 1994, p. 60). For Virilio (1994, p. 70), “it is a war of images and sounds, rather than objects and things, in which winning is simply a matter of not losing sight of the opposition.” Virilio’s (1977) earlier claims in outlining dromology–the logics of speed–also considered the importance of slowing down the enemy, as much as speeding up the friendly attack. Regarding the concern of spectatorship, time-axis manipulation (Kittler, 1999) of game play, in which the recorded matches can be manipulated and re-analyzed further without concern for in-the-moment observation, occurs as spectators (re)watch matches to reflect on the game play, when not watching a livestream. In this sense, slowing down and speeding up the presented reality shapes the future occurrences of play. This kind of organization at a distance, or “organise[d] distance,” is facilitated by the issuance of long-range commands, and in military history these signals included, among others, “signal flags, multicoloured pennants, schematic emblems … replac[ing] faltering vocal signals” (Virilio, 1994, p. 6). As with other forms of digital media, video games collect, store, and process data to facilitate the commands and addresses that signify particular occurrences of strategic or tactical importance, such as the various visual and aural components of esports matches taking place that affect the players’ and the spectators’ camera movements. On the ball: Monitoring the intersections of military/sport/video games The logics of military apparatuses thus trickle down into the shaping of perception in a presentation of events, and our observations demonstrate that the work of video game spectatorship is materially and perceptually constituted in a similar manner to military drone operations. Such practices of spectatorship begin to make more explicit the connection between these media-technical assemblages and other realms in which drone logic is being made manifest. The data from our study of Dota 2 spectatorship illustrate “the patterns of influence that emerge from upstream data collection and downstream targeting of influence,” in which “the signature pattern is more important for the decision-making process than is personal identification” (Andrejevic, 2016, p. 35). Adept Dota 2 spectators analyzing matches engage in a form of pattern recognition that relies little, if at all, on individual, subjective characteristics, but rather on the algorithmic modes of calculus carried out by the camera and the statistical overlays that are filtering and translating for the human perceptual apparatus. The camera facilitates observational and effective roles for the observer, particularly in the case of the active camera and the attuned player operating under mechanized logics of perception, as the game play assemblage offers less time for the player to make inferences, and therefore they must quickly hone in on the events that have the most impact on success. Essentially, this system expands the repertoire towards which a directed camera algorithm is capable of responding. Discursive engagements with esports, and with shoutcasting in particular, are made possible through drone-like predictive monitoring and data collection that make trained spectators more efficient than the game’s built-in camera algorithm. The overarching technical-discursive regimes in militarized technologies situate the more informational, perceptual, and epistemological in the trajectory of militaristic perception. The expert player, then, is attuned to the attentional and physical demands of this system, with their body conditioned towards ever more efficient responses, expressed as “twitch reflex” and “actions per minute,” in which milliseconds matter (Moore, 2012; Taylor & Elam, 2018; Witkowski, 2012). Attunement is also operationalized in a specific form of spectatorship that demonstrates an informational expertise: not so much a capacity for play, but a capacity to recognize patterns and make predictions and inferences. In this way, theorycrafting and related modes of knowledge produced through attunement to the statistical calculus of the system facilitate a kind of expertise at a distance. Proficiency with the mechanics of the game play assemblage is not necessarily a factor in this form of expertise, in which being good at watching games constitutes mastery over perception within an observational, yet still target-oriented, assemblage: theorywatching. As the work of “customizing and targeting necessarily become[s] the product of automated processes of data collection, analysis, and response” (Andrejevic, 2016, p. 35), processes in and practices of video game spectatorship more directly mirror the enactment of drone operations. Our study comes at a time when drone racing is heralded (much like esports) as a 21st-century sport (Greenwood, 2015), and when the military is turning to sports leagues to learn their techniques for analyzing massive amounts of audiovisual data produced by drones (Chamayou, 2013). We can shed light on further points of productive contact and resonance regarding audiovisual presentations of (virtual) combat and material arrangements of analysts/operators among the military, sport, and esports: for example, the related technical systems with which drone pilots and Dota 2 players and spectators alike engage during operations, including displays, input devices, feedback mechanisms, and so forth. As we have demonstrated, similarities also extend to the terminology employed to describe events taking place on the screen. However, our concern lies in the epistemologies these arrangements produce (and reproduce). For instance, the instruction in some sports to “call the ball” to avoid confusion and the announcement of “I’ve got the ball” to avoid collision are shared by pilots landing on aircraft carriers. A pilot on approach is asked by the Landing Signal Officer to “call the ball,” referring to the orange ball visualization on the Optical Landing System, to which the pilot replies “I see the ball” or “I’ve got the ball” if they indeed have the visual. From that point, the pilot and Landing Signal Officer trade data to ensure the pilot’s correct approach as the plane touches down on the carrier. Again, the particular terminology is a surface expression of the underlying epistemologies at play. Another example is the directionality that governs movement on the battlefield/field of play: data is collected, analyzed, and fed back to friendly forces to indicate the location of friendly and hostile forces in order to determine the course of action against an opponent, enemy, or target. Sport often involves the movement of teams back and forth across a fixed field, and spectatorship frequently relies on cameras capturing events from multiple angles, either stationary, swiveling to follow the action, or overhead to capture a wider view. Similarly, the cameras in Dota 2 and similar games rely on the overhead view, with the capability to move around the map in order to follow multiple events occurring simultaneously, in a drone-like view following the logics of eyes in the sky, able to react quickly to dynamic environments and situations. Closer to drone operations than many sports practices, Dota 2 matches have no singular object of focus and, therefore, often operate without the same level of predictable directionality seen in sport, in which, like with pilots landing on aircraft carriers, one follows the ball. Though other events are occurring around the area of operations, the perceptual frames are focused on a point of interest and the resulting camera angles and perspectives reinforce regularized frames of reference, even when the ball isn’t in motion. As such, the overhead cameras may cause disorientation without a mode or modes of determining the target of focus and/or overlaying a discursive framework of intelligibility on the data, and this is often where the expert spectators come into play. As (Andrejevic 2016, p. 35) said, “it is control over the ability to make sense of this data that becomes the source of power,” and the attuned Dota 2 assemblage reflects the ability to “surpass not only the human limitations on sensing and sensemaking, but on response time, and response specificity.” Like the televisual sports apparatus of broadcasters and expert analysts providing commentary on plays, esports shoutcasters occupy analogous roles in translating on-screen events to audiences in order to make the action intelligible. However, since the modes of perception that they draw from are drone-like, the discursive expression involves sports tropes and terminology, while the material/perceptual expression involves “making this militaristic thing look like sports.” This practice is also part analytical data processing, in order to generate particular assessments, predictive in the fixed temporality of the match, but also to produce future knowledge, informing the increasing automation of perception through which response time and specificity are improved. Like the practices within military tactical operations centers, such assessments feed more and more data into the system in order to more efficiently coordinate and carry out activities on the battlefield. Mirroring the “‘kill chain’ of twenty-first-century autonomous missions: find, fix, track, target, engage, assess” (Packer & Reeves, 2013, p. 327), the increasingly automated perceptions of Dota 2 spectators, shaped by the media-technical arrangements in which they are embedded, are actualized and discursively enacted through the work of watching play. This work is the kind of dual translation—discursive and perceptual/material—that the apparatus of esports broadcasting carries out: making fantasy-themed combat intelligible as sport while also (and in conjunction with) engaging the logics of military drone operations. Drones are in the business of observing, monitoring, collecting, and translating data and, more egregiously, “taking people out” on whatever geographical location is deemed a battlefield (Packer & Reeves, 2013, p. 323). However, video game play, especially the rather exemplary forms of spectatorship and the active camera we examined here, is in the same business, although the stakes do not necessarily involve the end of human lives or the violation of territorial sovereignty. In fact, one might argue that, rather than having any sort of mastery of the system, it’s the other way around, and “a sense of mastery is generated … where the spectator is infused with an artificial sense of control over the machine” (Crandall, 2005, p. 1). The automation of perception, we argue, is occurring through the drone logics informing video game play, and spectatorship is a subsuming or integration of human sensory and perceptual capacities toward “the automation of response,” leading to “the automation of targeting and strike” (Andrejevic, 2016, p. 23). Virilio’s “lost dimension” asserts the end of politics in a world of increased speed and virtual realities (Virilio, 1983). To follow this notion, if there are cultural politics to spectatorship, it is in their absence: in the conditions through which the human body becomes another part of the servomechanism through which processes occur; the subject as an effect of the assemblage. However, a politics remains within the apparatus, in the power/knowledge formations that give rise to emergent epistemological shifts in modes of representation, taking deep root in the logistics of perception. These modes are, according to (Andrejevic 2016, p. 38) “endowed with a role in the formation of potentially useful patterns from the data,” patterns which he says “are not explanatory, but actionable.” In this actionable world, power is still invested in shaping the capacities of various apparatuses, and the power of drone logics is “one in which logics of remote sensing, networking, distributed ubiquity, mobility, and automation coalesce” (Andrejevic, 2016, p. 29). 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TI - Above the Action: The Cultural Politics of Watching Dota 2
JF - Communication, Culture & Critique
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcz033
DA - 2002-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/above-the-action-the-cultural-politics-of-watching-dota-2-ItqOn6Eoej
DP - DeepDyve
ER -