Spotlight | Comparative Media Studies/Writing
Online gaming
Sociologist T.L. Taylor studies the subcultures of online gaming and the nascent world of online e-sports.
"The crowd stands and cheers. The exhausted, triumphant winning team is handed its trophy, which the captain lifts while the rest of the players raise their arms in victory.
This sounds like the scene after, say, a basketball tournament. But it’s also an increasingly familiar tableau in the world of e-sports, where teams compete in popular online games, such as “StarCraft II” and “Counter-Strike,” in front of fans. Indeed, e-sports even has its own version of the Olympics, the World Cyber Games.
“In the crowd, there is a real collective experience of spectating some kind of new digital sport,” says T.L. Taylor, an MIT sociologist who studies the culture of computer gaming.
