DAY THREE: no choice but to replace our dreams
Let’s talk about money.
One side effect of following Will Partin on Twitter is a vague paranoia that underneath everything I love is a platform that is trying to exploit the labor of individual and unorganized actors that do not realize they are directly contributing to their own exploitation.
Or, maybe more simply, more reductively: cash still rules everything around us.
I don’t know if it speaks to the youth of the fandom or the youth of the undertaking that I feel like conversations among esport fans seem so unrealistic about money — and more specifically, about the need for it. In League of Legends, this manifests to me most obviously when we talk about player salaries. We mock the veteran who trades in his increasingly impossible dreams of international dominance for a healthy salary. But we also mock the players who complain about how hard they have it. “You get paid money to play video games,” we sneer. “Suck it up.”
Which, I get it. In fact, I take back how I started that last paragraph; this is a pervasive problem in sports in general. Just Google something like “sports and purity and money” and you’ll see tons of headlines on just this. “Don’t muddy college sports with money.” “What happened to the purity of sports?” “Sports have become about being paid well and not about playing well.” There’s a double-edged sword in the professionalism of professional gaming, one that has been around since the beginning of professions, period. When it comes to things that seem like higher art (painting, photography, poetry, sports), we like to confuse suffering with purity. All sports is masochism: when we suffer for it, then and only then do we deserve joy. The noblest artist — the purest athlete — is the poor suffering one, who does it for the love of the art and the love alone. I once told my photography teacher in college that I believed I couldn’t be called an artist because I hadn’t suffered enough. “That’s a very romantic way of looking at it,” he said, laughing (or maybe he had meant, a very Romantic way of looking at it).
But god, a painter or an artist or a writer or a progamer still lives in this world. They need money as much as anyone else to survive.
In October IWillDominate, despite saying he wasn’t going to put any particular person on blast, decided to put NA pros on blast by saying they didn’t deserve our sympathy because, instead of devoting all their time to playing league, they were playing Fortnite:
There’s so much here to parse. What does one have to do to deserve sympathy? How do we know when someone “gives it their all”? This on top of all the discussion in 2018 of player burnout, in a year when it had become increasingly clear that season after season of nonstop practice and play had taken its toll on some of the most successful players to ever touch the game. “It remains distasteful to find LoL pro-players dedicating so much time on Fortnite, especially during important stages of LoL competitions,” one writer wrote in response to Dom’s tweets. “Pros should be expected to dedicate all of their time to LoL in vital periods of competition.” One can’t help but see in this a morality play, a twinge of the “deserving poor.” Why should a pro who can’t win worlds be paid all this money, if he is not trying his absolute best every waking moment? How does a pro who cannot show you results and cannot show you suffering earn his keep?
The funny thing is, as a lawyer, I really, really get it. Mine is a very conservative and Conservative profession, one that loves to make its participants suffer for it. I deserve the bad hours, the verbal abuse, the stress, the unreasonable deadlines — because I asked for it. Because it’s my job. Because I get paid for it. As if we actually believed we lived in a world where those who work the hardest are the best paid. As if what I earn is my worth, and thus I should earn my worth.
After all, that’s only fair.
Humans develop a sense of fairness early in life, where it continues to motivate almost everything we do in a social context, from work to play to relationships; there’s an argument that a dislike of being unfairly disadvantaged and advantaged is engrained in “Western” norms. Some of the most explosive debate that came out of the Overwatch League this year was about how to treat players with a documented history of boosting, and I’m not too proud to admit that my feelings on the matter cleave along an axis of fairness.
After he was hit with a 30-game suspension for account-boosting, Fusion’s Sado wrote an apology letter to Philly’s fans, in part trying to explain his actions. “I felt pressure to bring in money to my family to help support them. … The money I received for [boosting] helped me contribute to my family’s financial situation. I could have tried other ways to make money that did not hurt other players, but I did not step back and consider the morality of my actions. I only thought about the financial gain boosting would bring to me and my family.”
Sado wasn’t the only OWL pro to try to contextualize his boosting; in April, one of the hottest debates was between Fissure and OGE. Fissure had called OGE out for boosting, and OGE had called Fissure out for not understanding his situation. By which he meant, really, his financial situation:
The part of me that rejects the narrative that progamers must suffer nobly and purely, that there is anything respectable about waiting for the great machine of capitalism to recognize you and give you money for your labor, the part of me that wants to cry out that Blizzard cracking down on boosters is also a way to protect their own property and their own exploitation platform of esports and gaming, wants to cast OGE and Sado as the victims. I sympathize. We all do things for money. Boosting is no victimless crime, but I don’t think a criminal record of petty theft should ban someone from being in public office, so why do I draw this line for boosters?
But the part of me that admires pros like Recry who do find ways to support themselves besides boosting, the part of me that understands that crimes are molded by the society in which they are criminalized, that understands the outrage of pros like Fissure, can’t move on from the fundamental unfairness of it all. It’s not that I’m romanticizing their sacrifices. I wish they didn’t have to sacrifice at all. But I know they did suffer and that they did sacrifice. I just want it to have meant something, for that suffering to be a badge of honor that means they earned their place. I just want it to have been worth it.
I wish I could close this entry with a pithy statement, or a proposal on how to move on, on how to synthesize these contradictory feelings. But money is a double-edged sword, and it cuts me, all the time. I live in its contradictions. I judge people along its unfair axes, because that too is how I am judged.
I’ll just let Will Partin end this post too:
Someone tell me how to do better. Someone tell me how to stop wanting to put a dollar figure on suffering, how to reward hard work, how to value someone for their sacrifices in a way that is fair.
Someone tell me how to make esports worth it, for the people who play, and for the people who watch.
(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)
