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Wesley Jacobs

Glenn Lester

EN106

18 April 2021

Comparing and Contrasting eSports and Physical Sports Communication

Introduction

The concept of eSports is still fairly new, evolving as developers create more team-based

and competitive games. As the eSports scene gains popularity, though, one must wonder how

eSports team members communicate and how that communication differs from the

communication methods of physical sport teams. What is an eSports team and what qualities

does it possess that make it a discourse community? How does the environment and channel of

communication effect the team dynamic? Also, how do eSports team members incorporate

common communication methods in physical sports to a digital space? What are some methods

physical sports teams can take away from eSports teams and vice versa? This paper will answer

these questions through the following methods of research.

Methods of Research

This field of research has already been explored by Wanyi Tang in their article

“Understanding Esports from the Perspective of Team Dynamics”, where they find that eSports

teams use a combination of group cohesion, communication, and leadership to pursue their goals

(Tang). Guo Freeman and Donghee Yvette Wohn have researched eSports teams in their article

“Understanding ESports Team Formation and Coordination”, describing how eSports teams

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recruit their members (Freeman). These two sources alone clearly show that eSports teams are

discourse communities, using intercommunication and having thresholds of entry. With this

previous research and my personal experience, I believe I can better highlight the similarities and

differences of eSports and traditional sports as well as answer the questions I proposed in the

introduction. I’ll be actively participating in and observing team communication on the Rocket

League team to provide specific examples and connections.

Results

The first ever eSports competition was held in 1980 at Stanford University and was

focused around the game Spacewar! (Larch). 24 players competed in a tournament style fashion,

a pair of players going up against each other until there’s one supreme winner, winning a Rolling

Stone magazine (Larch). Compare this to today, where hundreds or thousands of players

compete against each other in games like League of Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, Fortnite,

Rocket League, and more, most of which holding tournaments, usually sponsored by the game’s

development company, with cash prizes. Out of these games, I want to focus on the more team-

based games and how the players communicate with each other within their discourse

community.

What makes an eSports team a discourse community, though? In John Swales’s article

“The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History,” he lists that a discourse

community has 8 qualities, but I’ll be focusing on the aspect of intercommunication among

members as well as specific lexis when discussing eSports teams. From my own experience, we

use specialized methods of communication that I’ll be covering later in this report. These

methods are something unique to eSports and is the main difference between it and traditional

sports. Without this communication, an eSports team likely wouldn’t be classified as a discourse

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community. Why isn’t an eSports team just a community, though? In a video titled Discourse

Communities by Florida International University, a professor of English states that a discourse

community is a community where members communicate either verbally or through text and

have formal discussions of a topic in speech and writing (00:00:39-00:01:44). On the Rocket

League team that I’m on, we do this actively while practicing/competing and when we have

coaching sessions to assess our skills. Essentially, an eSports team can be classified as a

discourse community

because there’s discourse.

To provide a better idea of how an eSports team communicates, specifically a Rocket

League eSports team communicates, I’m going to go through the communicative process of a

normal game with me and my teammates. For context, Rocket League is a 3D game where

rocket-powered cars try to put a ball into the other team’s net. If they do so, they get a point and

the ball is put back into the middle of the field and players are placed in specific spots for

kickoff. There’s also boost “pads” (gives around 1/8 of full boost) and “pills” (gives full boost)

to fill up a player’s rocket fuel or “boost”. At the very beginning, players say what they’re doing

off kickoff. The person on the left is typically the one that goes for the ball so they say “going”

or “on it”. Another person, which is different from team to team, says “cheating” to signify that

A typical eSports team setup

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they are going to follow up the kickoff in case the ball ends up staying in the middle of the field.

The last person says either “left” (if on left side of field), “right” (if on right side of field), or

“dropping” to signify that they’re going back and grabbing a boost “pill”. If the ball launches

toward the right side and there’s a person that said “right”, they can use their boost to catch up to

the ball and try to beat the other team, sending it to the opposing side. Throughout the game,

there’s other ways players communicate. If there’s one person on our team between the ball and

our net, we tell them that they’re “last”. That signals to them to try to “save” or “clear” the ball in

a way that gives time to their teammates so they can get to the net and act as a goalie. If a ball

could be hit by two teammates, one should say “I got it” or “challenging” to let the other

teammate know to hold off. If the ball is in the air and that same situation occurs, a player could

still say “I got it” or “challenging”, but it’s more informal to say “I’m up” because that signifies

the moment that you’re already up in the air, boosting toward the ball. If a teammate is trying to

get the ball past the defenders and is in a position to pass it to someone, their teammate should let

them know where they’re located by saying “mid” (middle of the field, in front of the goal) or

“across” (across from where the passing teammate is). It’s also beneficial to let your teammates

know if the other team is going to beat you to the ball or if you’re missing the ball. That way

they can adjust their positioning to accommodate for a losing situation. Another interesting thing

is that as the game goes on, the mentality of the team changes. If your team is losing,

communication between members starts to fade and players start to revert to old habits that

typically aren’t favorable for team play. They’re blinded by their anger and/or disappointment. If

your team is winning, though, you’re typically more confident and open to your surroundings

and other information as you aren’t blinded by that anger. It’d be quite interesting to go in-depth

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with psychological and mental states during gameplay, but that’s out of the significantly out of

scope for this report.

Digital communication is crucial to the success of an eSports team. As a member of an

eSports team myself, I can say that many teams use an application called Discord to talk to each

other. On Discord, a server can be created that has both text and voice channels, typically having

names that describe its purpose. For example, a team could have a

Discord server with text channels focusing on overall announcements, a

general chat, a channel specifically for sharing images, and more. For

voice channels, they can have a channel they use specifically for

competing and another channel for casual play or practice. When using

voice channels, players typically wear headphones to hear both their

teammates and the game that they’re playing clearly. Unfortunately, this

isn’t as efficient as talking out loud because there can be a delay

depending on your connection. If it’s really bad, it can take up to a

Rocket League Field Rocket League Kickoff Positioning

Discord Channels

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second for your teammates to hear what you said. In most cases, though, they should receive

your message in less than a tenth of a second. This method communication is drastically different

from how physical sport team members communicate. In “Communication in Sports Teams: A

Review”, Andrew Ishak details that sport teams "engage in unique types of signs and actions

during a game," (Ishak, 19). These nonverbal methods of communication just aren’t possible in

an in-game setting. Instead of using nonverbal communication, eSports players have to either use

high-content words and phrases to inform their teammates of their situations or upcoming

actions. Some games offer quick chats and pings to share information with teammates as well. In

Rocket League (a game about rocket-powered cars playing soccer), you may use the quick chat

“I got it!” to signify that you’re going for the ball on kick off by pressing buttons on your

keyboard or D-Pad in a specific order. In Fortnite (a battle royale game where teams fight to the

death until there’s one left standing), you can double click the middle mouse button while

looking at an area and it’ll place a pin marked as a warning on the map. These nonverbal forms

of communication may seem like it makes playing the game more difficult, but over time these

methods eventually become muscle memory. eSports teams may not be able to physically

express themselves with facial expressions and body gestures, but they can use applications and

built-in game mechanics like pings and quick chats to express themselves instead.

Outside of the channel of communication, eSports team members and physical sport team

members communicate and take in new players in very similar ways. In a journal by Wanyi Tang

titled “Understanding Esports from the Perspective of Team Dynamics”, they describe that

“group dynamics plays a critical role in team performance for esports in a similar way it does for

traditional sports” (Tang). Think about it, if one of your teammates in a game of Fortnite (the

battle royale game) goes off on his own and fights people without letting his teammates know,

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they’re going to struggle. That teammate is likely going to get eliminated from the game and

now the team is down a person, reducing the overall likelihood of survival. The same goes for,

say, a game of Soccer. If a player is constantly on the ball, refusing to pass to teammates, the

other team will capitalize on that and try to steal the ball away from them. In order to work as a

team, there need to be group dynamics. A player has to unload some of their responsibilities to

their teammates so that the entire game isn’t on the weight of one person. In Guo Freeman and

Donghee Yvette Wohn’s article “Understanding ESports Team Formation and Coordination”,

they find that amateurs “did not mean simply playing for fun like casual players. Rather, these

amateur players were quite serious about eSports and ‘enjoyed putting enough effort in to

continually improve their gameplay” (Freeman). Presumably, these players would be put on a B

or C team as they aren’t the “cream of the crop”, similarly to how a traditional team would have

multiple teams varying in skillset. There are many other similarities, but these are the big ones

that put into perspective just how similar traditional sports and eSports are.

Discussion

As one can see, eSports and physical sports have many similarities and slight differences

in terms of their communication methods, which is quite surprising considering the amount of

prejudice surrounding eSports. Instead of treating them as separate, why not have eSports and

traditional sports adopt ideas from each other, though? Would it be beneficial to physical sport

teams to where a headset or earbuds like eSports teams might in order to get clear, unfiltered

communication? What about eSports members being able to see each other’s faces with a live

web-cam feed so that they can communicate through physical means as well? A research paper

that explores these ideas are sure to yield some interesting results.

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Throughout writing and research processes of this paper, I learned quite a bit about

discourse communities. I initially thought that a discourse community could be any group or

community that shares a common interest. That’s incorrect. A discourse community is a

community of people with shared interests and goals and pursues those interests and goals by

talking with each other and going through discourse. This can be done through writing, talking,

and even digital means like I described when covering the eSports communication environment.

Something I failed to cover when describing discourse community in the results portion of my

paper is that not all eSports teams are discourse communities. If the team solely meets up to

practice and to compete, there’s no discourse going on. In order to be a discourse community,

that team would have to have meetings and discussions outside of playtime to learn how they can

improve and figure out what changes they could make to their methods.

Future Research

After all the research I’ve done, I’ve developed several questions that I’d like to see the

answers to but couldn’t find myself as it was outside the scope of this paper. Some questions that

further research could answer are as follows:

- Is there a correlation between how much time team members spend together outside of

practice and how quickly they improve?

- Are there any benefits to having an eSports team play in the same space rather than

different spaces? Would the decrease in latency lead to faster, more efficient

communication?

- How does sport spectatorship affect team performance? Does the pressure of impressing

fans or meeting standards result in worse gameplay?

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- Are eSports players more receptive on social media then physical sport players? Are they

more willing to share their personal lives?

Works Cited

Freeman, Guo, and Donghee Yvette Wohn. “Understanding ESports Team Formation and

Coordination.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), vol. 28, no. 1-2, 2017, pp.

95–126., doi:10.1007/s10606-017-9299-4.

Ishak, Andrew W. “Communication in Sports Teams: A Review.” Communication Research

Trends, vol. 36, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 4–38. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=127070132&authtype=sso&c

ustid=083-900&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Larch, Florian. The History of the Origin of ESports, Ispo.com, 22 Jan. 2019,

www.ispo.com/en/markets/history-origin-esports.

Wanyi Tang. “Understanding Esports from the Perspective of Team Dynamics.” Sport Journal,

July 2018, p. 1. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edo&AN=131066369&authtype=sso&c

ustid=083-900&site=eds-live&scope=site.

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Swales, John M. “The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History.” CF

37: The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History, Composition

Forum, 2017, compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.php.

Writing FIU. Discourse Communities. YouTube, YouTube, 5 Aug. 2019,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRFjwnziJp8&ab_channel=WritingFIU.