Sports, Society, and Technology by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789813291270
Publisher: Springer Singapore

Who’s Calling the Shots?

By way of conclusion, I want to gesture briefly toward two possible implications 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 sociotechnical 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, including 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 performance” 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 present 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 accident that the visualizations produced by these technologies look so much like those generated by SportVU or provided by LoL players via the interface’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.

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