Tensions of Growth in Collegiate Esports: Legitimacy, Affinity Spaces, and UNM Esports

Introduction

Esports has quickly amassed cultural relevance (Steinkuehler, 2020), but it is not always clear how a particular institution or group of people can best move forward in articulating their potential shared interest and organize their efforts. Whether we are considering how to capitalize on latent interest within our local community, to identify a new varsity sport, or to create some other institutional alignment under say student services, there seem to be many approaches to growing esports at the collegiate level (Pizzo, Jones, & Funk, 2019). A great deal of the collegiate organization around esports happens within the context of varsity athletics (Funk, et al., 2018; Keiper et al., 2017)). Within broad efforts to consider the establishment of esports as a varsity sport, we have one path to both participation and legitimacy for such groups. But there is a lot of variation in how and why the activities of esports are being commingled with higher education (Reitman, et al., 2020, Summerly, 2020) and this gives the individual enthusiasts who are looking to organize local activity around esports a lot to think about. Possibly the largest theme is the tension that exists between the typical nature of game communities as fluid and permeable affinity spaces and the hierarchical, formal organizational structures maintained within universities.

Many of the spaces that are set up around esports do not begin life as varsity sports, or culturally resemble the sport cultures, even though this is the most common way to institutionalize esports within a university, whether or not this happens specifically within the athletics department (Pizzo, Jones, & Funk, 2019). Gaming cultures are the result of grassroots movements, small communities that have sprung up based on shared interests in relation to the monolithic game publishers. From the outside these spaces seem far from the trappings of scholarships and branding we normally associate with collegiate athletics. The circumstances and eventual histories of these small idiosyncratic organizations may in the end play a large role in how esports becomes institutionalized within higher education, and if esports plays a role even remotely approaching that of prior collegiate sports, significantly altering the institutional realities of colleges and Universities themselves.

Much of the literature describes the growth of esports within colleges as a process of institutionalization, where formal structures already in place at universities and within athletics especially (e.g., coaches, staff, facilities, scholarships, branding, national governance) are put in place to support esports organizations. There are plenty of discussions about whether athletics will have esports, who else might, whether NCAA or similar governance is a good idea, and similar issues of organizational governance. But all these discussions are in terms of how esports will try to fit into these existing molds. Will a male dominated sport sound like a Title IX nightmare to athletics departments? Will the NCAA’s statute of amateurism accommodate the prize money and other monetization realities in esports already? Will team players need to maintain the same GPA as their old sport counterparts?

What seems to be missing, is much discussion of how this fundamentally informal and distributed cultural form will fare under institutionalization, or how appropriate such a model is for games that are constantly changing at the whims of their players and publishers. So, in this paper, we would like to consider what it can look like to be leading these efforts from within, within a position of leadership for a broader local esports group trying to make it bigger within a university.