Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming

Authors

  • Nicholas T Taylor

Keywords:

e-Sports, Halo, gender, World Cyber Games, Major League Gaming

Abstract

This paper draws from an audio-visual ethnography of a North American community of competitive Halo 3 players, documenting the similarities in players’ embodied and verbal performances of professional gaming, across local, national and international events. I demonstrate that mapping the material landscapes of an emergent ‘e-Sports’ industry in North America is central to understanding the highly constrained gender subjectivities associated with and performed through competitive video game play. Applying actor-network theory to an analysis of the technological infrastructure common to each e-Sports event I attended, I show how elite team-based Halo 3 gaming becomes homogenized and standardized through the collective work (and play) of actors both human and non-human, virtual and material. This approach provides a methodological means for identifying and accounting for continuities and similarities across disparate contexts, linkages made possible by a shared apparatus for networked, co-situated competitive gaming. One of the effects of this apparatus is to bring young and predominantly male bodies together in close proximity, eliciting embodied performances of competitive digital play that are at once hyper-masculinized and deeply homosocial.

Author Biography

  • Nicholas T Taylor

    Nick Taylor is a Post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Education at York. His research interests include educational game design, research methodologies and online gaming, and new media-based pedagogies. In his thesis, Nick explored the emergent domain of North American ‘professional’ gaming, following a group of young competitive Halo 3 players as they went from local, to national, and international tournaments, in which digital play is aggressively marketed as spectator sport. Nick is currently involved as project manager on a multi-site study of MMO players and their relationships with their games, their avatars, and fellow players.

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Published

17-03-2011

Issue

Section

Special Issue: Women in Games

How to Cite

Play Globally, Act Locally: The Standardization of Pro Halo 3 Gaming. (2011). International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 3(1). https://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/article/view/130