The Potential For Deep Play In DotA

The assigned literature for the lecture on Performance and Audience elaborated upon the manner, in which the player can use the cybernetic feedback loop between the state machine and the ergodic agent in order to establish an embodied aesthetic expression. In the article The Role of Onlookers in Arcade Gaming Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun would for instance conduct an ethnographic examination around the embodied or mimetic player performance surrounding a number of dance games within the Taiwanese arcades such as Dance Dance Revolution and Para Para Paradise. However, both Henry Lowood’s article It’s not easy been green as well as Christian McCrea’s article Watching Starcraft, Strategy and South Korea were on the other hand more concerned with the strategic interface performance surrounding real-time strategy games at major e-sports tournaments. During the presentation the group therefore decided to present two different case studies in the form of Defence of the Ancients (DotA) and Guitar Hero, which allowed us to highlight as well as somewhat problematize the ontological division between the embodied and the strategic performance within game studies. Building upon the discussions as well as the observations from the lecture the group will within the following blog-post then attempt to utilise Clifford Geertz’s influential concept of deep play in order to understand the cultural implications as well as spectacles surrounding the contemporary computer game phenomenon known as DotA.

The DotA franchise originated from a player-created custom-map made for the popular real-time strategy game Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos from Blizzard Entertainment. In DotA the overarching objective for the player revolves around the destruction of the opponents’ so-called Ancients, which should be understood as a group of heavily guarded structures located somewhere in the opposite corner of the map. The members from each team must both utilise a number of powerful heroes, who gain additional experience points, skills and as abilities throughout the course of the game, as well as a variety of computer generated units, or creeps, in order to annihilate the opponents’ structures. Before entering the actual battleground the player must however choose between the 102 different heroes inside the game, with each possessing a number of unique abilities that can be leveraged in different strategic ways during the hectic battle scenarios. One could argue that the DotA computer game affords an enormous space of possibilities for strategic performance, since the members from each team can combine the unique strengths as well as weaknesses of the 102 heroes to conduct powerful meta-strategies. Furthermore, the balanced gameplay mechanics and the enormous space of possibilities have spawned a dedicated player community around the influential custom-map for Warcraft III, and the game was likewise played at both local LAN-parties as well as major e-sports tournaments around the world.  

In 2009, one of the designers behind the DotA mod decided to release a commercial computer game for Microsoft Game Studios called League of Legends, which attempted to perfect the successful competitive playing formula found within the original game. Furthermore, the influential computer game publisher Valve decided to hire the other designer from the original DotA game back in 2006, and he has, during the last five years, been working together with a small programming team in order to create DotA 2, which will be released on the Steam service later this year. In order to promote the upcoming game, Valve decided to host an enormous e-sport tournament called The International at the Gamescom conference 2011, in which sixteen of the most skilled DotA teams from all over the world competed against each other for a cash-price of one million dollars. While the original DotA map mainly was driven by the dedicated player community, where the different users for instance could post ideas for new heroes or items on the surrounding online forums, the successful formula behind the game has today evolved into a major commercialized product and spectacle with titles such as League of Legends and DotA 2.

The DotA phenomenon is a relevant case study in the light of the readings discussed in class, both by its scale, as mentioned above, and by its peculiarities that differentiate it from the StarCraft example discussed by McCrea and Lowood. The concept of deep play, as coined by Clifford Geertz and used by McCrea, seems to be a good starting point for the analysis of DotA as an e-sport, in which performance and audience assume extreme dimensions. The high stakes involved, both in highly commercialized professional matches as in amateur competitions, are not only a consequence of the meta-structure designed to organize competition, but actively serve as the enhancing “means and devices” to the exchanges of meaning in the play of the game. A match involving teams from distant countries in a launch event of the new game (DotA 2) after a decade of waiting and with one million dollars at stake lends itself easily to chronicling and a certain notion of epic, of larger-than-life events. As in the StarCraft example, as described by McCrea, the game certainly stands in the intersection between spectacle, fan culture, narratives of class and cultural values.

However, DotA is not as localized as StarCraft is. The association of StarCraft with the place where it found most widespread adoption, South Korea, does not bind DotA to any specific country. In McCrea’s discussion of StarCraft, the scale and boundaries of framing StarCraft in the Korean context is useful in making connections with the situated historical and socio-cultural values at play in the game. How can a game with a global but not concentrated presence be analysed through this deep play concept? The scale and spread of DotA show that the game is successful in engaging large and diverse player communities, but how to understand the reasons behind this similar meta-structure? These questions probably could only be answered by further research, but they are important points of consideration.

Another aspect of DotA that differentiates it from StarCraft and might be relevant is the player organization involved in its gameplay. The dominant player organization in StarCraft has an individual focus, while DotA is mostly played as a team game in which collaboration and proper communication are required to function well in a competitive level and famous performances are remembered by the teams that made them, not individual players. The creation and maintenance of these micro-social structures is a demanding and usually long process, through which bonds and relationships are created around the game and through it. Training and competing in a team necessarily adds a whole range of intra- and inter-group dynamics which are at play in the performance of the game, in which the transitions between strategy and tactics and the fluidity of their hierarchy has to be negotiated and coordinated in a group. Going back to the deep play concept, these dynamics add to the migration of status onto the game and help to raise the stakes involved higher, catalysing more meaning into the performance of the game.