PhD Fallone: Multimodal construction of team cohesion and relational work on a professional e-sports team

Online video games have boomed in popularity over the past 20 years. These games have gained steam both in the public eye, and now increasingly in the academic world. While many linguistics scholars have examined the games’ community building aspects, as well as virtual identity building, few have yet to look at the fast-growing professional e-sports (electronic sports) scene. This leisurely activity has evolved into a competitive industry with professional sponsorships, organizations, large prize pools, and expansive fandoms. As such, e-sports is an exciting new site for academic inquiry. Much of esports research lies in the domain of sports psychology, computer science, and team management, but little in the realm of linguistics, and specifically socio-pragmatics. This research project aims to fill the gap in that research.

Looking at the widely popular game League of Legends, this research analyzes the multitude of multimodal semiotic resources at the players disposal. Combining computer mediated communication, gaming, and sports research, I use multimodal discourse analysis to examine how players co-construct team cohesion and manage relational work in game. The data consists of in-game video and audio recordings, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic field notes. I hope to identify and understand moments of failure and success, how players react to and manage these moments while in game, and how the multitude of communicative resources are utilized to accomplish this. I will also use relational work and identity theory to further examine how the players reactions to gameplay and teammates failures or successes reflect larger gaming discourses of toxicity and cooperation. League of Legends in particular is known to be a game rife with negatively marked online behaviors such as flaming and trolling, which are not conducive to team cohesion and bonding. Almost all professional players are recruited from the casual play community and as such are familiar with the toxic community. How these behaviors are managed and overcome when cooperation and sociability becomes crucial to their success is an important question I pose. In looking at the European context as well, with players coming from a variety of linguistic backgrounds, using English as their team language, is an intercultural communicative aspect under inspection. Competitive players juggle voice chat, in game visual signals, as well as their embodied avatars, to coordinate teamwork and relational management. The complicated nature of this communication reflects larger discourses about the evolving melding of online and offline realities.