Abstract
This article offers an illustration of Canada's first varsity esports program at St. Clair College in Windsor, Ontario. Collected through participant observation and interviews with esports student-athletes, the fieldwork conducted during this research shines a light on the demands faced by the varsity student-athletes of St. Clair College. Furthermore, it investigates the role of student-athletes in developing new institutions within the varsity esports field. The findings offer an illustration of practice and competition for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Fortnite, among other titles. Utilizing a conceptual framework adopted from neo-institutionalism, the author discusses instances of institutional agency expressed by participants, whereby players successfully altered their program requirements. The article contributes to ongoing discussions about barriers faced by those in North American varsity esports programs by illuminating their everyday experiences. It concludes with recommendations for Canadian varsity esports institutions aiming for a more equitable future for players.
Introduction
The Fortnite student-athlete standing next to me stood in awe of the row of gaming rigs before us, remarking on their high quality. He said they must contain at least a $1000 CAD graphics card alone. As we walked down the hallway, I noticed a trophy on display for this installment of the “Border City Battle”—St. Clair College had won the first two. As the teams donned their respective jerseys, we were called to a lower lobby for the opening ceremonies, which turned out to be in the college bar. Here, rival coordinators spoke proudly of the growth their two varsity esports programs had experienced.
Lambton and St. Clair College had brought five teams to compete in this tournament, including Super Smash Bros.: Ultimate (Smash Bros.), Hearthstone, Fortnite, League of Legends (LoL), and Rocket League. The tournament was structured somewhat like a track and field meet. Each game was played in a best-of-three with the winner scoring points for their college. For the Smash Bros. team, a round robin was established—each player taking a turn against one another—with winners advancing toward a final matchup. The program with the most overall wins took home the trophy.
This weekend, players were abuzz as victory came down to the Hearthstone teams who happened to be last on the schedule. Their games would break a two–two tie in the overall standings. When their teammates recognized this, they quickly made their way to the upper lobby. The entirety of the two programs gathered around couches in front of televisions that live-streamed the Hearthstone match with shoutcasters frantically adding play-by-play and color commentary.
A participant in my study noted that the stream itself was on a delay to avoid a form of cheating known as “stream sniping.” Behind the glass walls of the adjacent computer lab, we could see players reacting ahead of the results on television. An esports live stream generally provides the point-of-view of the players in the game, which, in the case of Hearthstone (a digital card game), allowed spectators to see a player's cards. If it weren’t for the delay, a team could access the information provided to audiences via the live stream and use it to their advantage in-game. This is “stream sniping.” It happens regularly to live streamers (Taylor, 2018) and is a significantly potent method of cheating in a game such as Hearthstone. When I asked the student why, they explained that Hearthstone is primarily based on information processing and strategy, as opposed to traditional sports, which—while highly strategic—demand more physicality. Another player put it this way: …in traditional sports you're usually face-to-face with your opponent in the same room or field area and there's contact. So, you have to (kind of) be able to keep up with what they're pushing towards you. Whereas in games, as long as you can outthink your opponent (for the most part) you'll probably win.
I did not know at the time, but I spent my remaining pre-COVID days alongside the student-athletes of St. Clair College's varsity esports program, known as Saints Gaming. From November 2019 to February 2020, I would visit their esports arena called The Nest on a near-daily basis. The room, named for their college mascot (the griffin), was a far stretch from what most would imagine as an arena. It lacked a scoreboard, grandstands, or a field of dreams. Instead, The Nest was a couple of old study rooms connected by an empty window. It contained rows of Alienware gaming computers, DXRacer chairs, team banners, and a live stream setup. Players informed me that they were due for a major upgrade, which would transform the outer atrium into a live event space with a broadcast stage, and while I admit I was initially skeptical, sure enough, they got just that. Two years later, St. Clair College announced the opening of the Saints Gaming Nexus—Canada's first esports arena boasting a five-on-five competition stage, three virtual reality spaces, and 72 gaming personal computers.
The third year of the program's existence was 2019. At the time, Saints Gaming rostered approximately 40 student-athletes across nine different esports titles. This study was completed alongside seven student-athletes who competed on the Smash Bros., Overwatch, CSGO, Hearthstone, LoL, and Fortnite teams. These participants were college students enrolled in various programs, including the new esports management and entrepreneurship diploma. They aged between 19 and 23 years old, and some had even moved to Windsor, Ontario, to compete for the program. Each one earned a base-value $500 CAD scholarship each semester to represent Saints Gaming in competition.
While St. Clair College already had a student-run esports club, Saints Gaming became Canada's first varsity esports program when it began formally representing the college in competition and offering administrative support, coaches, and scholarships to each of its players (Baker III & Holden, 2018). By 2019, another Canadian college in Sarnia, Ontario, had also begun offering its players scholarships: Lambton College. The two programs had a budding rivalry that was celebrated in “The Border City Battle” tournament. Club esports had also been gaining momentum across the country, including on the university campuses of McMaster, Ryerson, Toronto, and Waterloo. However, these institutions had yet to establish varsity programs.
What drew me to the field was an interest in how Canadian varsity esports programs would develop and institutionalize while under the rigid structures of the postsecondary education system and traditional varsity athletics. With its unique relationship to embodiment and technology, at the surface, esports appears to hold a radical potential. A game studies scholar and a preeminent researcher of esports, T.L. Taylor, has argued that esports represent an important opportunity to rethink and challenge our cultural norms and understanding of sports and athleticism (2015). Until recently, North American varsity sports had struggled with issues pertaining to the exploitation of student-athletes’ labor. Furthermore, the sporting world continues to grapple with serious cultural issues, including but not limited to sexism, toxic masculinity, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia.
In the context of the above institutional constraints, this project sought to understand the demands placed on student-athletes and the limits of their agency to effect institutional change. Notably, institutions are both common social practices and organizations deriving value from structure and rules—thus forming a diffuse web of demands affecting varsity programs from the macro (e.g., game publishers) to micro (e.g., competitive community) levels. I estimated that esports’ radical potential may be limited by its stakeholders’ ability to acknowledge and dismantle gaming culture's White-hetero patriarchal history from within. However, I remained hopeful that its institutional nascence promised an opportunity to work from a clean slate. I entered the field with broad ethnographic research questions designed to let student-athletes shape my inquiry. These questions were: How do student-athletes perceive the demands of their involvement in varsity esports? And, in what ways, if at all, do student-athletes have agency in the development of the organization?
The answers to these questions are important and timely, as they may help bolster our understanding of how institutions are built within existing structures and illuminate the student-athlete's role in the process of institutionalization. Research into early varsity esports programs in the United States explores the roles of program administrators in this same process (Pizzo et al., 2019). This research centered on student-athletes in an ethnographic approach aimed at addressing one of the research gaps identified by Pizzo et al. (2019), following the work of Harris et al. (2022), only in a Canadian context. Ultimately, the study found an international system within which student-athletes showed a promising ability to affect institutional change, as well as a conscientious understanding of the cultural difficulties esports faces.
Varsity Esports in North America
Since 2020, three edited collections have been published containing similar accounts of varsity esports (Hoffman et al., 2023; Jenny et al., 2024; Jin, 2021). However, thick ethnographic details of the players’ experiences are sparse. This section will overview of the rise of varsity esports through the research that has already been conducted in the American context. I want to acknowledge the dearth of information on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Canada. Thus far, researchers have largely endeavored to describe varsity esports activity (Harris et al., 2022; Hoffman and Seifert, 2022; Kauweloa, 2021; Kauweloa & Winter, 2019; Taylor, 2020), its governance and organizational structures (Baker III & Holden, 2018; Keiper et al., 2017; Pizzo et al., 2019; Suggs, 2022), and potential barriers or issues (Black & Gray, 2022; Cote et al., 2023; Taylor & Stout, 2020; Wilson et al., 2024) in the United States. Considering this, note that in this paper, the terms college, university, and postsecondary institution/education are used interchangeably.
Esports began on North American campuses alongside the development of the first computers. In 1972, Stanford University students were the first to compete in esports as they played Spacewars! on an early mainframe (Kauweloa & Winter, 2019). For many years, what followed would be largely local, community-driven organization of esports competition, such as local area network (LAN) parties. Esports began to professionalize in the 2000s and 2010s around what Taylor (2018, p. 136) refers to as the third wave—defined by digital platforms, media entertainment, and harnessing tournaments as media events. In this timeframe (2014), Robert Morris University became the first postsecondary institution in America to offer scholarships for esports student-athletes. By 2017, Saints Gaming was launched at St. Clair College, becoming the first program of its kind in Canada.
At their outset, the validity of varsity esports programs was the subject of debate on campus. The programs were critiqued by many (including the participants in this study) who questioned whether esports were a sport; whether they ought to fall under the varsity umbrella; and whether esports student-athletes were indeed athletes. While this may have been due to esports’ novelty, these questions still burden the Mexican esports scene, where gaming culture clashes with traditional athletic assumptions (Flores Obregón, 2018). Game studies researchers have explored the nature of these debates on student-athletes’ identity formation (Kauweloa & Winter, 2019)—a crucial element of professionalization and institutionalization. They found that players affirmed the nature of esports as serious leisure, combining elements of work and play towards honing a skill and a potential career path (38).
Varsity esports programs mirrored the dual identity of student-athletes, forming around one of two departments: student affairs or athletics (Pizzo et al., 2019). They would later polarize between computer science and varsity athletics. Esports share a significant overlap in demographics with computer science, where programs can be used as recruitment tools.
The intersection of technical skills and athletic talents leveraged by esports athletes highlights much of the day-to-day experience. Competition in tournaments and leagues presents flexibility for students as they often occur online and offline, necessitating digital platforms and broadcast media either way. As varsity esports competition has largely been reshaped as a media event, it requires production skills and additional labor. This labor is often drawn from student-athletes or student-volunteers and multipurposed as experiential learning. Participating in digital media work helps constitute the third side of an esports player's identity as a content producer. Researchers (Harris et al., 2022; Taylor, 2020) have explored how students’ labor outputs (including journalistic articles, live streams, and graphics) were used to legitimize the value of varsity esports programs within their institutional setting.
In the United States, traditional varsity athletics are legitimized by the governance of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The Canadian equivalents are University Sports (U Sports) and the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association. Varsity sports governed under these organizing bodies are structured by traditional sports institutions. For example, at the time of my investigation, the NCAA had not yet allowed student-athletes to earn profits via their name, image, and likeness (NIL), on account of the “spirit of amateurism” it sought to uphold (Baker III & Holden, 2018). This spirit was that varsity student-athletes should be amateur athletes representing their college and compensated with an education. However, esports student-athletes have always been able to profit from tournament winnings and NIL. As such, varsity esports have not been governed under such organizations in either country.
In 2019, the NCAA reviewed the case of varsity esports and decided not to take it under their umbrella of governance, over Title IX 1 gender equity concerns and the violent nature of some games (Suggs, 2022). Just before my time with Saints Gaming, governance of varsity esports was established by an international organization called the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE). Similar to the NCAA, 2 this governing organization spanned the United States, with a small foothold in Canada. St. Clair College was NACE's initial Canadian foothold, which has since expanded across campuses in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and further afield in Mexico.
The organization of varsity esports has been of interest to sports management scholars (Keiper et al., 2017; Pizzo et al., 2019), who are interested in the potential benefits of incorporating esports into intercollegiate athletic departments. Keiper et al. concluded that they may increase revenue, diversify the sporting population, and ease compliance with Title IX. Whereas Pizzo et al. (2019) explored varsity esports through the lens of institutional work, citing early challenges including gender equity concerns (25).
Their concerns are familiar to game studies scholars who have paid close attention to challenges the field faces (Cote et al., 2023). Gaming (and by extension, esports) has long suffered from gatekeeping and toxic geek masculinity, privileging cis-heterosexual White men (Gray, 2020; Trammell, 2023). An early and significant study by Taylor and Stout (2020) identified a two-tiered gender divide in collegiate esports—driven by the rush to professionalize the field with intensive investment. Program directors eager to field winning teams prioritized recruiting talent from the professional ranks over developing from within their institutions. In doing so, they foreclosed the opportunity to diversify the talent pool from their own vibrant campus. Tapping the existing talent pipeline only furthered the games industry's disenfranchisement of women, people of color, and other gender minorities from opportunities in gaming and varsity esports (462).
To understand this divide, Wilson et al. (2024) worked carefully alongside players, coaches, administrators, and student workers (venue personnel, graphic designers, and broadcasters), illuminating more-or-less-than visible hurdles to equity. They found that certain barriers are visible to and readily identified by esports participants, including gender, race, and socioeconomic inequality. (In)visible barriers included less “seen” or disregarded limitations such as disability, neurodiversity, and veteran status. Wilson et al. (2024) concluded that nonplayer stakeholders in the field were well-positioned to effect change by making literal (and digital) space for marginalized identities.
Space may be found at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Game studies scholars Black and Gray (2022) have noted the ways in which varsity esports have been used to amplify HBCU leadership within the field, while acknowledging deep-rooted racism in connection to gaming, esports, and traditional sports in the United States. They note that the introduction of esports to HBCUs had the positive impacts of increasing enrollment, innovating curriculum, and giving intentional space in gaming and esports to Black students. Fletcher (2020) explores this further, asserting that the lack of diversity in professional gaming is not merely due to toxicity, but a notable color line. The fields of gaming and esports suffer from high precarity, low unionization, and a belittlement of playful and digital labor—which are viewed as less serious and less real, respectively (Fletcher, 2020).
Neo-Institutionalism as Critical Conceptual Framework
One goal of this research was to better understand how institutions shaped varsity esports programs developing within the structures of higher education in Canada. Importantly, institutions are not limited to organizational structures within academia but include the culture and industries of traditional sports and gaming. This article shares the conceptual framework of neo-institutionalists Pizzo et al. (2019), who conducted a similar study with American collegiate esports program directors—calling for future work to center stakeholders, including students, alumni, and boosters. Neo-institutionalism is a sociological field related to business, economics, political science, and organizational studies. Here, institutions are generally understood through two definitional lenses. I adopt the following definitions of “institutions,” including an organization infused with value that provides shared rules and typifications (Selznick, 1957; Barley & Tolbert, 1997, as cited in Nite et al., 2019). This first definition may be used to refer to varsity programs, colleges, and universities at an organizational scale.
At the subject-level, an institution may be defined as “more or less taken-for-granted repetitive social behavior that is underpinned by normative systems and cognitive understandings that give meaning to social exchange and thus enable self-reproducing social order” (Greenwood, Oliver, Sahlin, & Suddaby, 2008, as cited in Nite et al., 2019, p. 380). This second definition is more useful for referencing the norms of daily life under larger organizational institutions.
Part of the initial conception of this project was a hypothesis that there would be a tension between new institutions surrounding esports and existing institutions structuring varsity athletics. The cause of this tension was estimated to be the complexity of esports as a cultural phenomenon, struggling for legitimacy as a sport. While a definitional debate is outside of the scope of this paper, I follow the traditions of the ethnographic research paradigm by lending participants the authority to define their own worlds. While some students reported feeling that they were not participating in sporting activities, many reported that they did indeed and challenged what a sport can be. Saints Gaming participants framed their feelings toward esports in relation to institutions and cultural imaginations of traditional athletics, identifying the crux of the debate. In relation to the social norms structuring sports, gender, videogames, and broadcasting, their fit within existing college institutions seemed tenuous. Pizzo et al. (2019) explain this as partially due to how varsity esports were shaped to fit traditional sporting models in American colleges—where program directors frequently pitched esports to existing varsity or computer sciences departments—wherein they fundamentally challenge the established norms of sports and athleticism.
The neo-institutionalist lens lends clarity and structure to this investigation of esports’ tenuous institutional legitimacy and what is known as the “paradox of embedded agency.” This point of contention has required institutional theorists to develop several conceptual approaches to understanding how actors shaped by institutions can find the cognitive space to enact change upon said institutions—that is, to be “institutional entrepreneurs” 3 3 (Battilana, 2006, p. 658). To do so requires institutional work, that is, to create, maintain, or disrupt institutions. The paradox structures the question of how nascent varsity esports institutions may shape and challenge the existing traditional sports and education institutions they are forming within. To do so, they contend with the pressure of institutional isomorphism—a constraining process wherein an organization in a field is forced to resemble others facing the same set of environmental conditions (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). These conceptual and theoretical lenses were instrumental in identifying patterns in my data and provided answers to my research question pertaining to athletes' agency within the Saints Gaming.
Research Methods and Analysis
To break ground researching Canadian varsity esports, I chose to follow Taylor's (2015) lead and implement an ethnographic-style study of the St. Clair College program (a.k.a. Saints Gaming). I say ethnographic “style” because this study does not have the longitude to be considered a traditional ethnography. Through interviews and participant observation, I have generated thick descriptions of the program's institutions; how they have come to be; the ways in which they affect players’ work; and the role players have in creating, maintaining, or disrupting said institutions.
During fieldwork, seven face-to-face, semistructured interviews were conducted. Data collected from interviews are considered invaluable to any ethnographic study, but according to Boellstorff et al. (2012, p. 92), on their own, they are not enough to constitute a legitimate ethnography; they must be used in conjunction with participant observation, which helps clarify the relationship between what participants say and do. I conducted semistructured interviews, which allowed for variation in questioning and more “give and take” between interviewer and interviewee (Reid et al., 2017, p. 149). Furthermore, interviewing works together with participant observation, forming a feedback loop in which participant observation helps identify topics to focus on in further interviews and vice versa. A unique opportunity to implement this feedback loop was seized during gaming interviews (Shaw, 2015), where a semistructured interview was conducted while playing alongside student-athletes in Super Smash Bros. and Fortnite, allowing for deeper knowledge sharing in the context of their esport.
After fieldwork, I began expanding upon, analyzing, and referencing fieldnotes and artifacts using Braun and Clarke's (2006) thematic analysis. Due to the small size of the program, the researcher's presence alongside participants in the field, and the public nature of the participants’ activities, maintaining the privacy of participants from peers and administration would be unlikely. Efforts have been made to protect the team's strategies as well as the privacy of participants. My approach was to anonymize field notes and withhold sensitive data from this report. The risks involved in participating were explained to players in person and through informed consent forms.
Significantly, as a middle-class White, cis-heterosexual male researcher, I match the description of the “default gamer” in both gaming culture and the industry (Gray, 2020). Due to my positionality, building rapport with many research participants came with little friction, and my presence in the field—even as a researcher—was often unquestioned. To conduct critical research, I remained focused on how the experience of the default gamer unfairly privileges him, and on the institutions that maintain said privilege. My goal was to describe these institutions from my positionality so that others may relate through their own and contribute to the greater project of combining perspectives with those of marginalized players presented in critical game studies research conducted by queer, nonbinary, Black, BIPOC, and indigenous scholars. Together, we may build a deeper understanding of institutional marginalization and contribute to reforming the field for more democratized access to esports.
Findings
My time spent with the student-athletes of Saints Gaming revealed four general demands on their time: practice, competition, community development, and education. Due to the scope of this research project, I was unable to directly observe or discuss educational experiences with participants—aside from the terms of their NACE contract, which stipulated the grade point average they were required to maintain. My understanding of these “demands” was that they are something that one is made to confront, for example, things that one finds difficult, makes one tired, worried, etc. During thematic analysis, I found that the demands on varsity esports student-athletes stemmed from requests with authority, economic pressures, and social pressures—each within its own context and originating from within and outside the program. This section will provide an overview of student-athletes’ experiences with demands related to practice and competition. It will also include a discussion of where participants expressed agency in the development of institutions shaping these demands.
Practice
In Saints Gaming, each team was mandated by the program to hold practice at least once a week, although some players informed me that this was not strictly upheld. Nevertheless, practice was the most consistent demand on their time and energy. The style of practice varied from team to team and in the level of structure or institutionalization.
For instance, Smash Bros. and Hearthstone practices appeared relatively unstructured, much like jam sessions, with students gathered around a single screen, scrimmaging, joking around, and keeping up a technical conversation regarding their gameplay. This is not to say that social institutions were not developed around Smash Bros. training, rather that they contrasted with the more normative institutionalized practices of the LoL team, which resembled an educational classroom or laboratory. The LoL team could be found in The Nest, lined up before rows of monitors, each taking notes on pen and paper between matches. Aside from Smash Bros., it was common for most teams to attend in a hybrid format, with some players and coaches physically present in the Nest while others participated remotely. Unanimously, players felt that practice was necessary, although opinions varied as to how frequently it should be scheduled.
The typical practice consisted of four activities: scrimmage, solo play, reviewing game footage, and discussing game mechanics and strategy. While gameplay was largely competitive, there were significant moments when players would slow down their play. Smash Bros. players would do so when practicing an “alt” character—a substitute to their main character used to gain an edge or a more favorable matchup over an opponent's main character. When practicing with alts, participants would request their teammates slow down the pace of play or perform attack combos so they could learn to counter them. When possible, players would also resort to solo play. For example, Fortnite players would practice the fundamentals of their game in a noncompetitive single-player mode or leave the game entirely—logging into a community-built resource. These participants used community-built “edit courses” in Fortnite, which were designed to practice their basic building mechanics. They also trained their aim in a separate game called KovaaK 2.0: The Meta,6 which was built for practicing first-person shooter fundamentals.
All participants would review their fundamentals by studying gameplay video on demand (VoD) from live-streamed competitions on YouTube or Twitch. Fortnite players also had access to “tapes,” which were recorded in-game during competition and allowed them to review the match from any player’s perspective, including opponents. Additionally, players studied each other's play. One participant likened this to traditional sports, saying: Most of us will watch videos and streams of professional players so we get their opinions on things and then you can combine a bunch of different opinions. Technically in a way you can call that studying the game. We also do it for entertainment, so it's something we would be doing anyway. […] It's similar to also watching professional sports. So, if you watch hockey and you see a play, you might want to try that with your team, but you're going to be watching hockey anyways. Right? It's your favourite team so, you're just going to watch them no matter what.
Their discussions often centered on the evolving metagame, which was defined by a Hearthstone participant as a community-sourced best practice or what most competitive players are using as the most optimal ways to play. Every game has a metagame or “meta,” although the frequency of shifts in the meta varied between titles (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017). Players would discuss these shifts using colloquialisms such as “nerf” and “buff,” referring to something being made less or more effective, respectively. The competitive player community migrates between different meta practices and loadouts (combinations of game elements, e.g., weapons and armor) via many small changes and sometimes large shakeups in response to updates and expansions to the game.
The demands of metagaming do not originate from within the program, but are present in the wider gaming community (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017; Paul, 2019). In this way, just as basketball is still a sport when played on the street, esports exist naturally wherever players compete within the structures of formalized competition—such as skill-based matchmaking. However, whereas casual players can ignore metagaming and participate in esports, institutionalizing metagaming as an everyday practice in collegiate esports training makes these demands a distinct necessity.
Smash Bros. participants would frequently “lab” the game (experimenting with it like in a laboratory) by testing the efficacy of mechanics before and after updates and expansions to understand precisely how they differed. In some games, the meta would change subtly and frequently, occupying much of the team's conversational space during practice. In others, such as CSGO, the meta was quite stable, but when changes were made, they were dramatic, necessitating serious strategizing.
The Hearthstone team was observed practicing for a rapidly changing meta as the developer, Blizzard Entertainment, released new content each week in what they called an “adventure format.” This was a prominent instance wherein institutions structuring the video game publishing industry influenced the program. For most games, shifts in the meta were dependent on a developer's business model. For example, the adventure format resulted in major changes to the meta each week. They would do this by watching professional players’ VoDs to observe which new playing cards and custom decks were successful in weekly tournaments. This would inform how they practiced in scrimmages. When asked what the varsity program offered them in terms of opportunities or benefits, a CSGO player remarked on the benefits of professionalization and learning from high-skill players.
One participant explained that the value of practice time was the opportunity to learn from their teammates and shared that they desired more practice time. An Overwatch player stressed that team bonding was a key to success and felt that more practice was needed, but not properly incentivized by the program through scholarships. They felt that it was a difficult financial decision to invest more time in practice when they could be at work, suggesting the $500 CAD scholarship should be doubled. When asked how reasonable they felt their workload was, a member of the Smash Bros. team said that: If it was spread out over multiple days it would help for essentially like, I don't know the way to word this but like, hammering stuff in. If you're taught something at practice on Wednesday and—since Thursday's (community-run) tournaments are optional—you just don't apply it until Monday, it's going to be gone. Every night at practice it would be: “Can this night be over? Can this night be over? Can this night be over?” And it's like: “Why are you playing something you don’t like anymore?” But then, take a month off the game after the semester ended. I came back to it, and I felt revitalized.
Competition
The format of most varsity esports competitions ranged somewhere between the experiences of the Super Smash Bros. and Hearthstone teams. This was due to the way competitions were structured, ranging from the grassroots organization of the Smash Bros. community to the developer-run competitions of Hearthstone. Nintendo, the developer of Smash Bros., had largely left varsity esports alone. Participants suggested Nintendo envisioned their game as a party game and thus provided little support for the esports community—although they acknowledged the addition of an in-game training mode. Yet they argued that Nintendo had only ever interfered in the community—shutting down competitions to protect their intellectual property. Conversely, Blizzard Entertainment exemplified the industry's most involved approach to varsity esports, choosing to protect its intellectual property by contracting a third-party (the now-defunct TESPA) to establish its own league. The competition formats of the CSGO, Fortnite, Overwatch, and LoL teams fell between these poles.
Aside from the Border City Battle, I observed Smash Bros. student-athletes’ competition at four events, including a tournament held in Detroit, Michigan, called Frostbite and The University of Waterloo Arcadian (The Arcadian). Additionally, they participated in two events hosted at St. Clair College called XMAS LAN and Smash Class (which was held weekly and considered a baseline quota for weekly competition in Saints Gaming). These competitions ranged in their level of organization, but all could be described as grassroots. Smash Class was run entirely by student-volunteers with the support of the varsity program, which provided The Nest and its live stream setup so the event could be broadcast.
One player frequented the Smash Class event, which, like most Smash Bros. competitions, was an open tournament that allowed for anyone to sign up and compete. The open tournament format was unique to varsity esports in comparison to traditional varsity sports, which are typically restricted to league play. At this event, as with all Smash Bros. events, players milled about rows of tables—with monitors, Nintendo Switch consoles, and controller adapters—meeting with scheduled opponents. They connect their peripherals (typically Nintendo Switch Pro Controllers or Nintendo GameCube Controllers and headphones) before adjusting the settings to their liking, sharing a few quick words, and beginning a match. This Smash Bros. student-athlete explained to me that with certain fighters, listening to the game audio was necessary to help predict the timing of attacks. Alternatively, some players listened to music on their phones to help control their tempo of play and sometimes attack off-tempo to throw off their opponent. This would be made tricky by the noisy environment of the competition floors.
Smash Class was a small event (regularly around 40 attendees), neatly organized into a bracket displayed on a screen behind volunteers collecting entry fees for participation. Players were ranked in leagues based on local competitions such as this one. The Smash community was enmeshed in a network of online forums and Discord servers. When tournaments were completed, the organizers would upload the results on websites such as braacket.com, smash.gg, or smashladder.com (also known as Anther's Ladder). Saints Gaming athletes frequently attended small tournaments to boost their local ranking and earn a higher seeding in large tournaments out of town. At each tournament, one student's goal was to advance far enough to play on the live stream, which typically featured important matches between ranked players. They felt they played better on stream and considered it one of the benefits of Saints Gaming—providing the opportunity to play in more competitive tournaments and build their personal brand. Larger tournaments such as Frostbite and The Arcadian attracted more viewers and stronger competition, as well as bigger sponsors and prize pools.
Winning Smash Class typically paid $50 CAD, the Arcadian's top prize was $400 CAD, and that year Frostbite had a total prize pool of US$12,800 (which the winner would take the majority of). One participant explained that The Arcadian payout equated to a paycheque from their former part-time job at Tim Hortons (a Canadian café franchise). They expressed that they would have liked to keep their job to help manage their student debt, but felt the varsity program was too limiting on their time and flexibility.
What I found most notable about competition under the Smash Bros. team was the physical presence of fans, which was either missing from other formats or embodied online in live stream chats. Frostbite was a “supermajor” competition (considered prestigious among the community and featuring an outstanding prize pool and level of competition). It featured more of the cultural trappings of a fan convention, including a vendor alley, a “bring your own computer” hall, and card tournaments. Supporters and competitors brushed shoulders, wearing esports jerseys, cosplay, and streetwear. Most memorably, the live audience contributed to the atmosphere with roaring cheers and tense murmurs in response to action on the main stage just as frequently well as the side tables.
Toward the opposite end of the spectrum, competition for the varsity Fortnite team took place in a highly organized digital streaming format, wherein fandom was entirely digitally mediated. The Fortnite team played in two concurrent leagues/events: an in-game weekly tournament run by Epic Games called the Cash Cup, and another by Collegiate Star League (CSL) (later known as NACE Starleague and, at the time of publication, Playfly Esports). While Cash Cup was an open tournament, the CSL required both participants to be members of the same accredited college or university with a physical address. At Saints Gaming, Fortnite was played in pairs, and so long as one teammate was present in The Nest, the administration was satisfied. Taking advantage of the game's network connection, players could compete in a hybrid format, with one teammate at home. The teams would compete in the above tournaments while streaming live on the Saints Gaming Twitch channel.
On Fortnite competition days, The Nest would be filled with three separate teams. Two teams of players and their coach, as well as a volunteer team of student-broadcasters. Due to the broadcast nature of their esport, Fortnite players (e.g., CSGO, Overwatch, Hearthstone, and LoL) work alongside the broadcast team to ensure their gameplay is presentable and communication is captured. A player relayed to me that they often compete among 50 colleges or universities at once, and each team has a designated coordinator who communicates with CSL organizers to join the correct game lobbies and report results. In this case, the competition simultaneously included higher education institutions across the United States and Canada, which was unique to varsity esports. Much of the competition came from American varsity esports teams, making the program very reliant on the networked nature of esports and American institutions.
Amidst this competition, a Fortnite player shared that while they wished their team could scout the opponents for strategies and tactics, they did not. The problem was partially logistical—it would take a great deal of time to do so—and partly due to the fact that when they are in-game, there is little to differentiate players from each other until after a fatal encounter when one's username will at last be displayed in the kill feed (an informational text feed that informs players when others are eliminated). For this reason, competition in Fortnite was relatively anonymous. Furthermore, knowing their competition would not change the strategy, the team began a round of competition. During play, their communication involved a constant negotiation of the strategy with their teammate, including loot to pick up, structures to build, and whose actions were whose (relative to throwing grenades, building structures, and engaging opponents in a firefight). After winning or being eliminated, players could spectate their competitor's screens using in-game tools. They would also send their own gameplay footage to themselves for immediate or later review.
To win in CSL's Fortnite league, the teams would need to make the playoffs by placing in the top eight during the regular season. The winners would earn US$10,000, with half that amount awarded to second place, and a quarter to third. This being a duos competition, the players would split their tournament earnings, which still translated to a significant payday in Canadian dollars.
Monetary rewards could go far, regardless of the team a player is committed to. When asked about tournament travel, a Smash Bros. participant told me that: It's very hard for me as a broke student to travel to outside tournaments. […] If someone comes into the Windsor Smash Discord and says: “Hey we've got a tournament going on in Waterloo, do you want to come?” I’m like, “Well, how am I going to pay to get there, how am I going to pay the entry because it's a larger event.” I really–really want to, but I'm not going to be able to. But the team sends us to those events. That, in terms of opportunity is amazing because Smash in particular, it's very–very offline based so, whatever experience you can get off your local scene, that's what you're going to get.
Institutional Agency
During interviews, players were asked about their fit within the organizational hierarchy and how the program benefits them, versus what they give in return. Two players described a shared instance of institutional agency, wherein student-athletes affected institutional change in the program. They described a debate between players, coaches, and administration over a line in their contract that would have stipulated that players live-stream on the Saints Gaming Twitch channel for a minimum of 10 hours per week. The players argued against this, saying, “No, because we can't stream our practices. We're coming up with strats [strategies], and then it's out to the public, and it's not a strat anymore.” They felt that streaming games was enough already and that the program wanted them to make content. The player expressed: You can stream our games, which they do, but then you want us to do more content than that? It's like: “Well, we are already practicing; we’re already playing our matches; I have a job; I have school; I don't have time. I'm not signing a contract that says I have to stream for five more hours on top of that.” And so, changes like that—I feel like—you have to talk to your players about.
A second occurrence of the players’ institutional agency was described by a participant who noted that they had similarly advocated for the right to play and practice from home. When asked, they described the instance: We had to fight a lot to play from home. They wanted us there a lot, but we had to explain to them there's just not enough room for five people to sit on one side [of The Nest], and then, you have another team playing taking up just as much room on the other side. And it just led to a lot of … an uncomfortable setting and then that's when, again like, people get mad. […] But they can still stream the games when we're at home, and I don't think they realized that for a while and then they finally like, “okay.” [Our coach] voiced the concerns that we had and then fought for us all for a little bit, and then they're like: “Okay it's fine.”
Limitations
Noteworthy limitations to this research include its narrow scope of just one Canadian varsity program. Furthermore, Saints Gaming's program consisted of approximately 40 students across nine esports teams, and my recruitment efforts attracted only seven student-athletes on six teams. Additionally, Saints Gaming's chosen esports titles will change with the rise and fall of the popularity of esports games, meaning new games may become popular and necessitate different demands. Future research will benefit from covering the experiences of players at more institutions, playing different games.
My time in the field was also relatively short for ethnographic research, lasting only a semester. Future research would benefit from more longevity. Stakeholders to this research may value detailed investigations into esports educational programming, curriculum, and pedagogy—for the participants in this study were, after all, student-athletes.
Conclusion
This article has presented ethnographic findings collected alongside varsity student-athletes in the early days of Canada's first varsity esports program. Interviews and observational fieldnotes revealed patterns that may be interpreted as the demands placed on these student-athletes during their practice and competition. Furthermore, participants described two occurrences where they had successfully expressed agency to affect change in the program's initiatives surrounding live-streaming and practice/play-from-home mandates.
During practice, the demands on student-athletes largely stemmed from authority and social pressures, originating both within and outside of the program. One participant poignantly illustrated important economic demands when discussing the balance of their time investment. On the surface, the program's authority required players to practice each week as was mandated in their contracts. However, a less obvious demand stemmed from the complex requirements of the game systems they worked so hard to master. Furthermore, isomorphic pressure or influence from traditional sports was often referenced in relation to practice, as players sought to emulate and orient themselves as legitimate varsity athletes through structured practice, strategizing, and revision. Aside from the Smash Bros. participant, others were socially beholden to teammates, which also necessitated their time, attention, and efforts.
In competition demands largely stemmed from sources of authority and economic pressures. The varsity program, NACE, and various leagues made demands stemming from financial needs, which necessitated the use of broadcasting technology such as Twitch. Players were very cognizant of the value they provided the program by making themselves visible to spectators. They also expressed the economic pressures they faced as students whose labor is divided across academics, varsity sports, and part-time jobs. These institutions required conformity to various customs such as contracts, bylaws, and competition rules. Much of the demands on student-athletes during competition stem from the games themselves, which necessitate an exceptionally high level of systems understanding, effective communication, and intense focus. Social pressures are not to be ignored, as participants described the need to advocate for themselves and to work as a team.
Considering the challenges the varsity esports field faces when striving for positive changes in gaming and sports culture—such as increasing diversity, reducing toxicity, and equalizing access to opportunities—this research illustrates two instances of institutional agency expressed by student-athletes. Despite institutions in content creation that necessitate an always-on (camera) approach, players in Saints Gaming were successful in negotiating against a live-streaming clause in their contracts, which would have required them to broadcast a minimum number of hours per week on the program's Twitch channel. Additionally, players negotiated against institutions common to traditional sports, which would necessitate their physical presence at the program's facilities for practice and play, which is made unnecessary by gaming's network capacities. This positive change increased accessibility for students struggling to meet the demands of balancing work, education, and esports schedules.
Still, players advocated for a larger role in decision-making alongside the program's administration and coaches. Participants in this study displayed a strong understanding of the demands facing themselves and the institutions structuring varsity esports. Program administrators and NACE officials should embrace their players’ expertise and grant them a stronger voice in program development.
Finally, during its nascency, Canada's first varsity esports program was somewhat reliant on the collegiate esports institutions and infrastructure of the United States. Players on Saints Gaming's Smash Bros. team appeared to benefit from local grassroots scenes more than others. However, the program broadly relied on the heightened exposure, investment and logistical support of American leagues and tournaments. Furthermore, in the absence of equivalent Canadian esports governing bodies, Saints Gaming enrolled as a NACE institution. As with many Canadian industries, the varsity esports field was integrated with their U.S. counterparts. Student-athletes at Saints Gaming enjoyed the benefits of geographic proximity to the U.S.– easing travel for competitions– and the institutional affordances of NACE. However, when envisioning a more equitable future for Canadian varsity esports, one must also account for the risks inherent to the field's integrated nature– its reliance on American investment and cooperation, and the significant influence of American cultural insitutions and governance.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Vincent Mazerolle, Susan Bryant, and Max Ganzon for their support and guidance, and Georgia Scholl for her helpful feedback.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.