Playing Across Media: Exploring Transtextuality in Competitive Games and eSports

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
Egliston argues that competitive games like Valve's Dota 2 have become "dually played and surveilled" spaces, where professional broadcasts, spectator platforms such as Twitch.tv, and surrounding media blur the boundaries of the game itself.
02
Drawing on Gérard Genette's paratext framework extended into a broader concept of transtextuality, the paper proposes that guides, tournament broadcasts, and statistics platforms act as strategies that amateurs reconfigure as tactics, with professional play serving as a proxy for these paratexts.
03
The central claim is that amateur players draw game knowledge from professional broadcasts while also exerting reciprocal influence on professional play, so influence runs in both directions rather than purely top-down.
04
A quantitative analysis of archived Dota 2 hero pick rates from patch 6.81b (June–August 2014) found that amateur and professional pick trends during the June–July tournament period were strongly similar, though causation is not confirmed without qualitative follow-up.
05
At The Summit 1 LAN finals, the unconventional professional pick Phantom Assassin was already popular among amateurs, and amateur pick rates rose afterward, which the author reads as two-way strategy dissemination.
06
The paper concludes that broadcast play functions as a paratext shaping amateur practice and blurring the distinction between labour and leisure, a claim the author admits rests on a limited, opt-in dataset with incomplete professional records.
07
The bibliography cites reported viewership exceeding 20 million for The International tournament, illustrating the scale of the broadcast audience that the paper argues shapes amateur play.

Summary

Ben Egliston's "Playing Across Media" argues that competitive games such as Valve's Dota 2 have become "dually played and surveilled" spaces, where professional broadcast play, spectator platforms like Twitch.tv, and surrounding media blur the boundaries of the game itself. Extending Gérard Genette's paratext framework through a broader concept of transtextuality, the paper proposes that guides, tournament broadcasts, and statistics platforms function as strategies that amateur players reconfigure as tactics, with professional play serving as a proxy for these paratexts. The central claim is that amateur players draw game knowledge from professional broadcasts while also exerting reciprocal influence on professional domains.

The empirical basis is a quantitative content analysis of archived Dota 2 hero pick rates from patch 6.81b, covering June through August 2014. Amateur and professional pick trends during the June–July tournament period show strong similarities, which the author links to transtextual influence from broadcast eSports, though causation is not confirmed without qualitative follow-up. A third dataset from The Summit 1 LAN finals reveals that an unconventional professional pick, Phantom Assassin, was already popular among amateurs and that amateur pick rates rose afterward, which the author interprets as two-way strategy dissemination rather than purely top-down influence.

The paper concludes that broadcast play operates as a paratext shaping amateur practice and blurring distinctions between labour and leisure. The author acknowledges that these claims rest on a limited, opt-in dataset with incomplete professional records and call for further qualitative validation. Contextualizing the work, the bibliography draws on game studies and eSports scholarship and cites reported viewership exceeding 20 million for The International tournament.