Play, Gamers’ Cultures,
and the Blind Spot of E-Sport
The emergence of playing communities is not a new phenomenon limited to
computer games. They can be found in a lot of other contexts too, for example,
chess or bridge clubs or pencil and paper role-playing communities (see Pearce
2009 , 3). However, digital networks allowed new forms of playing communities to
appear on the spot, and while some of them are only extensions to nondigital forms
of play, others offer completely new forms of experiences (see ibid., 5).
Referring to the world of computer games, we have to differentiate between the
whole community of computer game players, the gaming scene itself, and those
communities alluding to a single video game, a whole genre or special way of playing
(see Geisler 2009 , 146–147). In this context, common phenomena are, for
example, massively multiuser online role-playing games (MMORPG) (like World
of Warcraft , Lineage , Everquest ), LAN 2 gaming, and of course e-sport. 3
Regarding studies and published articles, in this context, it seems quite striking
that most researchers have focused on MMORPGs, which are apparently especially
interesting from a more sociological background. 4 Among them are – to name but a
few – the ethnographic orientated works of Celia Pearce ( 2009 ) , who accompanied
a group of the Uru-Diaspora (players whose original game world had been closed
and who had to migrate to other virtual worlds), those of T. L. Taylor ( 2006 ) , who
has explored the world of Everquest from a player’s perspective, or the huge survey
studies of Projekt Massive (see Seay et al. 2003 ) or Nick Yee who has done research
on Everquest ( Yee n.d.b ) as well as on World of Warcraft ( Yee n.d.a ) .
Research questions in this context mainly address social issues, for example,
questions of in-game cooperation (Smith 2005 ; Lin et al. 2003 ) , confl icts and their
management (Smith 2004 ; Siitonen 2009 ) , the establishment and maintenance of
norms in player communities (Verhagen and Johansson 2009 ) , role theory (Boudreau
2005 ) , or the formation of social relationships (Yee 2009 ) . Based on the four player
types Richard Bartle discovered in the context of multiuser dungeons (MUDs)
2 LAN = Local Area Network.
3 Empirical evidence for the impact of online gaming on adolescents’ media usage can be found in
Keilhauer (Chap. 20 ).
4 Further examples for the study especially of World of Warcraft can be found in Hemminger and
Schott (Chap. 25 ); Wolf (Chap. 35 ).