Ontology and Interdisciplinary Research in Esports

This paper argues that a critical realist ontology can provide a meta-theoretical foundation for interdisciplinary research on esports, which the author contends is currently fragmented across disciplines such as business, sport science, psychology, education, law, and sociology. Drawing on the work of Roy Bhaskar and extended by theorists including Margaret Archer, Dave Elder-Vass, Andrew Sayer, and Christian Smith, the paper outlines core commitments of critical realism, namely ontological realism, epistemic relativism, judgmental rationality, and cautious ethical naturalism. It frames these through the concepts of materialism, causation, and emergence, positing that social and natural reality consists of stratified layers in which objects, structures, and people interact to generate increasingly complex phenomena.

The central claim is that esports possesses ontological depth, meaning that existing epistemic frameworks often lack the theoretical resources to produce context-dependent explanations, particularly for "wicked problems" such as whether esports qualifies as a sport. To address this, the paper proposes situating esports research within a stratified ontology spanning physical, psychological, social, and cultural orders, and within the structure-agency-culture framework. It treats esports as an open system and identifies recurring analytical errors in the literature, including voluntaristic accounts of agency, deterministic accounts of structure, and elisionist accounts of embodied practice, which the author describes as conflationist tendencies.

The paper is primarily a theoretical and conceptual contribution rather than an empirical study, so it presents no survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its evidential basis consists of a review of published esports scholarship spanning roughly the late 2000s to 2023, drawing on bibliographic references across multiple disciplines. The author notes that the research field is expanding rapidly, citing prior reviews that identify its fragmentation. The paper concludes by proposing an adaptive approach to esports research that integrates biological, psychological, and cultural data into a more holistic account, while acknowledging that its framework is intended as a foundation rather than an exhaustive model.