Literacies at Play in a Youth-Led eSports Team: Affective Conditions, Ontopower, and the Digital Media Arts

• In Event: Learning From Arts-Centered Communities: Possibilities for Educational Justice and Organizational Transformation

Abstract

This paper analyzes how one group of adolescents (n = 15) used their literacies over one year to build a sense of collectivity in an eSports team they founded in their neighborhood’s youth centre in Montreal. Beyond athletic training in competitive videogame-play, the team involved youth in digital media arts practices including designing a team logo and producing live streams of tournament play for Twitch.tv. Youth served by the drop-in centre, including study participants (ages 12-17), live in an economically disadvantaged area of Montreal and are members of racialized minorities. Analysis focuses on how youth used their literacies to build and maintain a sense of collectivity and of collective value for their voluntary participation in weekly practices and tournaments, especially through moments of affective intensities, which are the focus of our analysis.

Although most research on youth literacies, gaming, and eSports focus on the socially situated use of multimodal discourse in specific communities of practice (Reitman, et al., 2019) our analysis extends to the role of affect in the emergent social life of team, or how team members used language and multimodal discourse in their talk and across online platforms to move each other through emotionally fraught situations of disappointment (e.g., a team member quitting and also disparaging the team and its purpose) and anger and resentment (e.g., a game system being stolen and the team members themselves being suspected by the centre staff). Using video and online ethnographic data reduced to moments such as these, we therefore contribute a socially situated portrait of the affective conditions and related affective use of literacies in a digital arts-based, informal learning context.

Further, and to understand the role of power in developing these affective conditions, we draw on Massumi’s (2015) concept of ontopower, developed from Foucault’s (1998) notion of biopower. Ontopower illustrates how states mobilize irrational senses of a nebulous future threat to affect and control citizen’s lives and bodies in the present. Similarly, we document how youths’ affective expressions of language and multimodal discourse responded to the conditions of ontopower in which they felt: (1) surveilled as threats themselves around expensive eSports equipment, (2) devalued in their videogame play, which was seen as a threat to their economic futures by some parents and the team member who quit, and (3) controlled and limited by these irrational conditions for their play maintained by adults’ mobilization of ontopower.

Implications extend to theorizations of literacy and the uses of literacy as socially situated in affective conditions. Attention to the affective conditions of literacy use is limited, as are analyses of affective conditions in informal learning settings such as the art-based settings described by researchers in this panel. Yet, as our analysis shows, attention to affective conditions in these environments is essential to their sustainability, and to addressing how irrational movements and mobilizations of ontopower can constrain youth’s opportunities to learn, grow, and play, as well as inspire youth to use their literacies in pushing back against such mechanisms of control.

Authors

• Christian Ehret, Vanderbilt University

• Luka Ciklovan, McGill University