UC Irvine

As the popularity and cultural import of professionalized competitive gaming has dramatically risen in the last decade, little humanistic research has analyzed how professional gamers optimize their play. Highly skilled players often pursue “frame-perfect” techniques, or actions timed to the one-sixtieth of a second. However, existing game scholarship tends to approach gaming temporality from the perspective of narrative theory, which has little to illuminate on this topic. My dissertation approaches the subject of time in competitive gaming not through narrative theory but through scholarship on media temporalities. The division of continuous experience into discrete snapshots is a familiar topic to both photography and cinema studies, which help elucidate the experience of optimized, perfected play in professional gaming.

The dissertation’s first chapter addresses the consequences of perfected gaming: when play is optimized to a frame-perfect extent, play ceases to be playful and instead becomes deterministic. The second chapter considers ways in which lag, inconsistencies, and buffers challenge the semblance of liveness and shared temporality in networked gaming and streaming. The third chapter pivots on the temporal preoccupations of high-stakes, perfected play by identifying a set of oppositional temporal experiences in games through queer theory.

The dissertation contributes to scholarship on games by investigating both the professional attention to micro-temporal play and strategies to recover what is playful about play even in this context of professionalization. Game studies generally and this dissertation in particular emphasize our need for humanistic values, such as playfulness, as technologies and markets urge us to live, work, and play optimally.