*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Summary Sentence: No summary sentence submitted.
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Nick TaylorSpeaker:
Nick Taylor
Title:
Now You’re Playing With Audience Power: The Work of Watching Games
Abstract:
The emergence of high-definition, accessible live-streaming services has led to a surge in online spectatorship for competitive (and other forms of) digital play. Major League Gaming (MLG), long regarded as a console-driven e-sports organization, now boasts a ‘mass’, globalized audience for its live-streaming broadcasts of competitive play in Starcraft 2 and League of Legends. This talk compares two MLG tournaments (one in 2008 and one in 2012) from the perspective of spectators and the kinds of activities they undertook at these events. The different forms of audience labor at these events indicate at least a partial re-entrenchment of conventional divisions between media producers and spectators – even as platforms such as Twitch.tv point to emergent forms of participatory spectatorship. In drawing out this tension, this talk invites consideration of the following questions: what is the ‘work’ of spectators in (and for) the e-sports industry? What socio-economic and socio-technical forms is this work taking across different contexts? What are the implications for the ongoing transformation of gaming into spectator sport?
Bio:
Dr. Nicholas Taylor (http://nickttaylor.net/) is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. His work applies critical, feminist and socio-technical perspectives to experimental and mixed-methods research with digital gaming communities.
Recently, this includes an educationally-focused ethnography of League of Legends players, micro-ethnographic analyses of play in Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and design-based research of a game design curriculum for non-programmers.
He also co-directs the CIRCUIT Studio (http://circuit.chass.ncsu.edu/), a collaborative makerspace and digital media research lab at NC State.
