2021
Koskimaa, Raine; Välisalo, Tanja; Ruotsalainen, Maria; Karhulahti, Veli-Matti
Esports Transmedia Universes: The Case of Overwatch Book Section
In: Jin, Dal Yong (Ed.): Global Esports: Transformation of Cultural Perceptions of Competitive Gaming, pp. 149–165, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, ISBN: 978-1-5013-6877-6.
Abstract | Links | Tags: Electronic sports, Elektroninen urheilu, Monimediaisuus, Transmedia
@incollection{Koskimaa2021,
title = {Esports Transmedia Universes: The Case of Overwatch},
author = {Raine Koskimaa and Tanja Välisalo and Maria Ruotsalainen and Veli-Matti Karhulahti},
editor = {Dal Yong Jin},
url = {http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-202105203061},
doi = {10.5040/9781501368745.0014},
isbn = {978-1-5013-6877-6},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-02-22},
booktitle = {Global Esports: Transformation of Cultural Perceptions of Competitive Gaming},
pages = {149–165},
publisher = {Bloomsbury Academic},
abstract = {Over the years and recently in particular, various elements of esports have gathered piles of research from culture and economics to health and gender (e.g., Jin & Chee, 2008; Scholz, 2019; Szablewicz, 2016; DiFrancisco-Donoghue, 2019; Taylor & Voorhees, 2018; Witkowski, 2018; Kari et al., 2018). However, few have considered the role of transmediality as an explicit part of esport ecosystems—perhaps because of the strong tendency of both the industry and scholars to entertain esports as an extension to traditional sports (e.g., Kane & Spradley, 2017; Jenny et al., 2017; Hallmann & Giel, 2018) rather than part of fictional and narrative cultural lineages. In other words, transmedia studies have always been concerned with fictional and narrative cultural content in particular, and current esports research somewhat uncritically perceives the phenomenon as sports or sports-like to which fictional elements are trivial. In this chapter, our goal is to introduce transmediality as a core pattern that delineates esports design, play, and player-audience interaction on multiple levels. As a case study, we provide a cross-sectional analysis of the esports title Overwatch.},
keywords = {Electronic sports, Elektroninen urheilu, Monimediaisuus, Transmedia},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {incollection}
}
Over the years and recently in particular, various elements of esports have gathered piles of research from culture and economics to health and gender (e.g., Jin & Chee, 2008; Scholz, 2019; Szablewicz, 2016; DiFrancisco-Donoghue, 2019; Taylor & Voorhees, 2018; Witkowski, 2018; Kari et al., 2018). However, few have considered the role of transmediality as an explicit part of esport ecosystems—perhaps because of the strong tendency of both the industry and scholars to entertain esports as an extension to traditional sports (e.g., Kane & Spradley, 2017; Jenny et al., 2017; Hallmann & Giel, 2018) rather than part of fictional and narrative cultural lineages. In other words, transmedia studies have always been concerned with fictional and narrative cultural content in particular, and current esports research somewhat uncritically perceives the phenomenon as sports or sports-like to which fictional elements are trivial. In this chapter, our goal is to introduce transmediality as a core pattern that delineates esports design, play, and player-audience interaction on multiple levels. As a case study, we provide a cross-sectional analysis of the esports title Overwatch.