eSport and the Human Body: foundations for a popular aesthetics

Abstract

Notable philosophers of sport have rejected connections between videogames and sports throughout the past decade. This paper argues against an arbitrary identification of sporting activity with exhaustion and resistance. It reviews work in cognitive science and sociology that locates sporting potential in distributed cognition and team-based cooperation. Then it connects that work to an expanded discussion of the aesthetic issues raised by Henry Lowood's talk “Players Are Artists, too” at the Art History of Games Symposium. This introduction to the application of sports aesthetics to eSports revisits Lowood's major theoretical sources to expand upon the problems they raise for videogame performance. It argues that there are obstacles to the popular appreciation of eSporting aesthetics separate from the particular interests of archivists and expert spectators. And it suggests that different eSports present different sets of problems, producing multiple avenues for the advancement of aesthetic refinement in eSports broadcasts.