Esports Fandom and the Collegiate Student-Athlete Experience: Active Audiences and Spectatorship

Background

Traditionally, sports are a type of physical activity that includes cooperative and collaborative efforts between individuals engaging in a game, or zero-sum competitive challenge. Now, a new type of less physical sport has started to become increasingly popular: electronic sports or eSports, defined as competitive video gaming (Burroughs & Roma, 2015). Although many have debated whether competitive video gaming is a real sport, its popularity has proven to make more money (CNBC, 2019), maintain active spectatorship (Burroughs & Rama, 2015; Edge, 2013; Payne et al, 2017) and develop a collaborative community within the eSports franchise (Caroline, 2011; Nardi, 2008). Esports players, or gamers, have established their status, skill, and community through online gaming platforms and the help of gamer-spectators, the fans. Even amateur players have become gamer celebrities. ESports has the innate experience for all users to be involved in some way, whether watching passively or actively participating within the platform. In fact, Shaw (2015) asserted that eSports can’t exist without its fandom. Online gaming “simply cannot function without a measure of activity and involvement beyond that which is required in other media” (2015, par. 6). Through the collaborative efforts of gamers and their fans, eSports supplies the means of gratification, community building, and information seeking when actively involved in the gaming process.