Will the real faker please do a shoulder roll? Bodies, labor, and ideology in esports

Abstract

Esports and the broader professionalization of playing video games demonstrates the neoliberal project's continuing expansion across new horizons. By transforming leisure into labor and extracting value from play, major gaming and digital media companies extend the commodity life of video games beyond the sale of the games themselves and into the actual play and even spectatorship of the games. As these companies continue to reframe the actual playing and watching of video games as product, the physical performance of the players' bodies becomes increasingly troublesome, a physical disruption of the media corporations' digital feedback loop.