Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the maintenance and care work that professional esports players perform with and on their gaming setups. By exploring the affective relationship these gamers maintain with their machines, the work will also highlight the importance of socio-materiality inside gaming.

Paper long abstract:

In our digitalised societies (Floridi, 2015), gaming forms an expanding part of our working and leisure activities (Castronova, 2006; Dovey & Kennedy, 2006). This spread was further consolidated by the emergence of esports, or (professional) competitive gaming, and live streaming as extremely influential entertainment phenomena (T. L. Taylor, 2012, 2018). Although the socio-material aspects of these practices have been only recently brought into focus (Apperley & Jayemane, 2012), scholars have already highlighted how gamers are embedded in networks of material and digital actors (e.g., N. Taylor, 2022), which shape the meanings and practices of play (franzò, 2023). However, there is a lack of studies revealing the complex maintenance and care practices gamers and other professionals set forth to keep their peripherals operating. Thus, this work relies on archival and ethnographic data to unpack the affective relationship that competitive gamers, i.e., pro players, build with their gaming setups. As a matter of fact, pro players not only carefully care about the hard- and soft-ware components they use for performing, but constitute aspirational models shaping the aesthetic and material imaginaries surrounding computer games. By directly observing players' intimate and backstage gestures with their machines, this work unveils the depth of socio-material bonds that lie behind esports practices, where human and non-human actors are constantly engaged in mutual re-negotiations and influence to perfectly fit each other and obtain peak performance.