Understanding Esports Teamplay as an Emergent Choreography: An Ethnomethodological Analysis

This study applies an ethnomethodological lens, enriched by Laban movement theory and dance-studies notions of choreography, to examine how competitive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) teams coordinate play in real time. Drawing on screen recordings of two geographically dispersed, all-male teams of Finnish-Swedish bilingual students, comprising 14 matches and roughly 16 hours of footage concentrated on the Mirage map, the analysis treats team movement as an emergent, situated accomplishment rather than the execution of pre-agreed tactics. The authors position this as a corrective to prior work that underexamined how players orient to the interconnectedness of their interactional resources.

The central finding is that choreography is collective and largely implicit. Round-opening plans are typically settled within a brief window of about fifteen seconds or rest on shared expectations, with no fixed leader, and all players share agency over the plan. Mid-round adjustments arise from situational contingencies, such as two players retreating to regroup after hearing flanking opponents. Coordination differs by side: Counter-Terrorist teams divide into key positions and react to callouts, while Terrorist teams use callouts to read the team's collective position relative to opponents. Callouts function as brief, urgent information-sharing devices that prompt immediate repositioning, as illustrated by a single callout that mobilized an entire Counter-Terrorist team.

The authors attribute this coordination to shared common-ground knowledge and argue that silencing players, including through harassment, degrades team performance. They also acknowledge clear limits on generalizability: the sample is homogeneous, recordings capture only participants' own screen perspectives, and the silencing effects of toxic communities on marginalized players restrict how broadly the communication findings apply.