eSports, Racist?
TL;DR: No, not exactly. Toxic, however? Oh, most definitely.
First, eSports? What the heck are eSports? Calm down, I know this seems odd. But, in a nutshell, eSports are basically professionally competitive video game circuits: League of Legends, Overwatch, DOTA2, CS:GO, etc. etc. eSports are notable not only because of the unique niche they’ve carved in the sporting entertainment world, but because how not unique that niche really is.
Estimates show that by 2020 eSports collectively will rise to an audience of about 600 millions viewers per year. For reference, the NFL recorded about 1.6 million viewers per game during the 2017 season. Take into account that there are 256 games in a season, and you have 409.6 million viewers over the course of that year. NFL television ratings fell 9.7 percent during the 2017 regular season, according to numbers registered by Nielsen. Why is that? How could the NFL, the most dominant sporting entertainment juggernaut the world has ever seen, be losing viewers while this seemingly small market is rapidly expanding? The obvious answer is that like soccer (or football for you non-Americans out there) eSports has a young, world-wide audience. As a matter of fact, youth have been drawn to eSports like no other sport in history. Garret Galloway, a student at Samford University echoed this sentiment in an article from November 2017:
“ The data shows the decline in the participation of youth in big sports to be strong. Strong to the point that, 50 years from now, the top sports in the world may not even be played with a ball. They will be played in an imaginary world through a television screen. To some this fact is fascinating, but to others it is dreadful. Either way, America’s youth is heading down a road that no other generation of America’s youth has been down before. The tide is rising in the world of eSports, and real sports are fading away.”
The growing rise of interest in the eSports world, for whatever reason, has to be concerning to the mainstream sports such as the NBA, NFL, NHL, MLS, etc. So much so, that they themselves are starting to take interest in creating their own teams.
But, like the NFL before it, eSports also has issues when it comes to racism. Before we talk about that, however, let’s briefly review one of the biggest human rights movement to come out of the NFL in decades: Kneel-gate.
… Kaeper-kneel? No, never mind.
All bad names aside, the days of Colin Kaepernick’s anthem kneeling are quickly, and unfortunately, becoming old news. However, the league still seems split on the movement. It’s been quite some time since Kaep last stepped foot on an NFL field. November 1st, 2015 was Colin’s last game, which was followed by his benching for the heavenly play of one Blaine Gabbert:
All sarcasm aside, from one quick look at these stats it would appear that Colin would have been the better option at QB for the 49ers.
Wrong.
Well, according to their front office at least.
“What does Kaepernick have to do with eSports, Aaron?” I hear you asking, to which I say, quite a lot actually. You see, Kaepernick told the media he chose to sit to protest the oppression of people of color in the United States and ongoing issues with police brutality. More specifically, he said this:
“I’m going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed,” Kaepernick said. “To me, this is something that has to change. When there’s significant change and I feel that flag represents what it’s supposed to represent, and this country is representing people the way that it’s supposed to, I’ll stand.
“This stand wasn’t for me. This is because I’m seeing things happen to people that don’t have a voice, people that don’t have a platform to talk and have their voices heard, and effect change. So I’m in the position where I can do that and I’m going to do that for people that can’t.”
His decision to sit during the national anthem drew criticism, though. Many felt and still feel it was disrespectful to the United States, its flag, and its military.
“I have great respect for the men and women that have fought for this country,” Kaepernick said. “I have family, I have friends that have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom, they fight for the people, they fight for liberty and justice, for everyone. That’s not happening.
“People are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That’s something that’s not happening. I’ve seen videos, I’ve seen circumstances where men and women that have been in the military have come back and been treated unjustly by the country they fought have for, and have been murdered by the country they fought for, on our land. That’s not right.”
Jerry Kamionowski discussed the very microagressions that led many to disqualify his protest in “Make It News”: Racist (Micro) Aggressions, the Lyrical You, and Increased Legibility in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. Quoting Lauren Berlant, he diagnoses “the apparently unconscious, instinctual, and somehow ‘routine’ exclusion of even upper middle-class black Americans from ‘consumer citizenship,’ a category which we would expect to designate one of the most colorblind ‘contemporary practices of social belonging’.” He makes these claims while discussing a scene in Part 6 where a black woman and a white woman are attempting to make a purchase at a store, only to be put through separate routines at the register. The point here is that the routine was unconscious and instinctual. In the NFL, this instinctual routine takes the shape of shifting the discussion from a humans rights issue, to a disagreement with the disrespecting of the military.
In eSports, racism takes a different shape.
While streaming on Twitch over the weekend, popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive commentator Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett let fly a racial slur and hoped a member of the community killed themselves. Cue the apology.
Jefferson Zahn summed up the reality of online gaming quite nicely:
For the millions of other online gamers, communication still remains a key component in the success of a team. Generally, there are two kinds of players gamers commonly come across: the friendly player and the toxic player. The friendly player is an enjoyable teammate who supports the team and remains calm when the team is struggling. On the flip side of the coin the toxic player, simply stated, can be viewed as a someone who constantly creates a bad atmosphere and interferes with the overall gaming experience. For example, a toxic player may vent his or her anger towards a player if the player fails to execute correctly. He or she may use insults and profanity as a way to convey his or her disgust. Whether the person had planned on doing it beforehand in an attempt to “troll” other people or end up snapping and exploding in a fit of rage, a toxic player is detrimental to the entirety of the community.
On a superficial level, toxic players may be “trolling” because of their nature. They think its fun to ruin the experience of others. In most scenarios, this is the case which unfortunately has no easy solution. However, a deeper analysis exhumes the buried unconscious as a potential source. M.S Tartakovsky reveals that a toxic person is often “deeply wounded and for whatever reason, they are not yet able to take responsibility for their wounding, their feelings, their needs and their subsequent problems in life”. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the toxic player attempts to resolve these conflicts by projecting them onto others, which in this case are the other players in the game.
The core difference between racism in traditional sports as opposed to toxicity in eSports is that the perfectly balanced utopia that eSports should theoretically offer its competitors — one where physical ability, gender, race, and religion provide no barrier to access — is easily hijacked. eSports has been affected by the phenomenon known as online bullying, to a point where many games have begun to implement honor systems to counter this growing wave of toxicity. Going forward, as more of our youth move towards these online mediums, it will be interesting to track the media attention on this issue.
eSports already falls under the radar while beating NFL viewership ratings. How will an unchecked ecosystem of racist toxicity, unbeknownst to the parents of the children playing, affect the children in question?
