The Literacies of the Esports Ecosystem, edited by Hannah R. Gerber, is a timely, important installment in studying the esports phenomenon. Gerber has assembled a talented group of international contributors who help to further capture for readers an increasing fascination with the rapidly expanding and regenerating world of competitive gaming and its literacy practices both in and out of school settings. Fittingly, the book’s chapters come to us from an eclectic collection of authors who represent a variety of perspectives and participation from different professional contexts. Teacher educators interested in digital learning, literacy studies, and technology integration join interdisciplinary scholars in higher education, spanning the fields of management, marketing, economics, psychology, and more. And yet, the backgrounds and expertise of our authors transcend traditional notions of academic spaces altogether, with contributions from technology integrationists, social media consultants, solutions advisors, gaming industry experts, journalists, and entrepreneurs. This variance in voice and vision not only makes for a fresh, captivating snapshot of numerous esports stakeholders and angles, but it also informs with each chapter a fascinating implementation of different theoretical lenses, methodologies, and research designs. Moreover, the convergence of multiple thinkers with multiple modes of inquiry from multiple fields and epistemologies, appropriately embodies the sheer force of esports as a social and cultural lightning rod. The powerful draw of esports, its connectedness, its limitlessness, is on full display throughout the text. And in attracting a divergent community of researchers, authors, and readers, this book serves as a brilliant reminder of why so many of us, gamers and non-gamers alike, originally were compelled to understand the esports arena either from within or from a distance.
This book offers not only the latest, most comprehensive collection of scholars to date who are right now tracking the many diverse aspects of the esports universe as they play out in digital spaces across the globe, but it also represents for digital literacies researchers a significant opportunity for reflection on how far the field of esports research has come. The evolution of esports as an exciting branch of digital literacies research has coincided with an explosion of school-affiliated omnipresence and popularity through classroom-based incorporation in curriculum and instruction, K-20 institutional-sponsored competitive teams, extracurricular clubs, and undergraduate and graduate degrees in higher education. In true sociocultural fashion, the rapid rise of
As the professional community home for many scholars invested in esports research, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recently published its revised definition of literacy in a digital age, reiterating that literacy practices “are inextricably linked with histories, narratives, life possibilities, and social trajectories of all individuals and groups” (para. 2). This guidance suggests that any approach to literacy practices, including how to teach about them and how to assess them, requires educators to consider that aptitudes and skills through which students demonstrate literate knowledge and meaning-making are in perpetual iteration alongside society’s relationship with technology (Harvey & Marlatt, 2020). Further, any commitment to designing and executing culturally responsive literacy learning experiences must be grounded in the social contexts and digitized spaces through which students interact and communicate (Gay, 2010). Esports researchers’ assumptions about the myriad ways in which knowledge is demonstrated align directly with NCTE’s call for educators and scholars to prioritize the integration of digital literacies because contemporary learners generate multimodal meaning-making systems via texts and technology (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Studies in digital literacies have evolved as an important branch of multimodality, which Kress (2000) framed as a way to understand how traditional conceptions of literacy as exclusively print-based and hand-written inadequately represent meaning-making, and multiliteracies, which Cope and Kalantzis (2000) theorized as a way to understand cultural experiences of communication through various platforms and modalities. The New London Group (1996) also framed multiliteracies to conceptualize the future of teaching and learning, which must be inseparable from digital interaction. This early work in multimodality and multiliteracies launched innovative reimagining of digitized curriculum and instruction (Alvermann, 2005), social semiotics (Kress, 2010), and reflective digital pedagogies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). And while early iterations of digital literacies research offered an abundance of substitution studies, where web applications and digital tools could provide adequate replacement for historically standard
Literacy researchers found in video games an expansive set of lenses through which the decision making, knowledge construction, and communication of their players could be used to understand contemporary learners, and the content, features, and project-based objectives of the games themselves could enhance engagement in academic tasks (Gee, 2003). Video games have increasingly occupied the curriculum and pedagogies of educators because of the high levels of participation they invite from students, and they continue to draw the interest of scholars because of the digital spaces they facilitate, through which discourse and literacy practices can be reexamined and redefined in real time (Marlatt, 2018). Digital literacies scholars have leveraged video game studies to promote culturally and linguistically responsive techniques (Rowsell et al., 2016), demonstrate the impact of multimodal play on scholastic growth (Lewis Ellison & Solomon, 2018), connect subject matter with contemporary world events (Price-Dennis et al., 2015), and prioritize engagement even amidst high-stakes assessment (Portier et al., 2019). Certain multi-player mode, participatory video games such as Minecraft, Fortnite, League of Legends, Rocket League, and more, have offered interactive focal points for scholars to investigate literacy practices of players in both social and academic settings (Marlatt, 2020). With video game incorporation becoming a common component of classroom activity across numerous subjects and skill foci, the last decade’s rise in popularity of competitive gaming has made esports a natural fit for K-12 schools and universities, and a lodestar for digital literacies researchers (Gerber, 2017). Esports research has arrived as the current culmination of our interdisciplinary, democratic interest in video games, literacy practices, and digitized learning.
These seven chapters offer glimpses into literacy practices at play across the entire ecosystem of esports. Myriad methodological approaches shape the various inquiries, including ethnographic case studies, conversation analyses, and longitudinal autoethnography. Multiliteracies, culturally relevant computing, impression management, and situated cognition are some of the theoretical frameworks through which important questions are asked and significant outcomes are sought by our authors. And the multiple research sites, diverse settings, and various esports stakeholder populations featured in these studies
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