Watch to win? E-sport, broadcast expertise and technicity in Dota 2

Abstract

This article analyses how broadcasts of electronic sport (e-sport) condition the gameplay practices of those who watch. Extending and deepening a limited body of past work, I conduct this analysis through a post-phenomenological perspective, adopting Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technicity. Stiegler provides a useful theorisation of how technical forms carry significant implications for the human, whose status is always already technical. As Stiegler sees it, adopting new advancements or changes in technical forms conditions human experience and behaviour profoundly. Mobilising this post-phenomenological view, I examine how players, through the prism of broadcast e-sport, negotiate the temporal, corporeal and technical aspects of their own gameplay. To do this, I draw upon findings from a wider research project about e-sports broadcasts in Valve Corporation’s popular game Dota 2, showing how various complicated and sometimes antagonistic entanglements emerge from the assemblage of e-sports broadcasts and the gameplay of its viewers.