![]() ![]() In the cases of both offline and online live spectatorship, humour is both emergent and ephemeral. This unusual predicament necessitated the rapid development of digital tools aimed at fostering audience engagement, among which were many designed to capitalise on the emergent nature of humour-related events unfolding live during the stream. The latter followed an online-only format, with players, commentators and viewers participating remotely from their homes. Of these two, the first tournament was forced to make last-minute changes to its formula and simply did not permit spectators to enter the Spodek arena in Katowice, Poland. Both IEM and DreamHack occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic and thus followed a different format. ![]() It is crucial to note that only the WCS StarCraft tournament allowed on-site presence of the audience. As such, I will concentrate on only one game, StarCraft II (Blizzard Entertainment 2010, 2013, 2015), as exemplary of the dynamics that could be found in many other eSports titles following the online streaming method of live coverage. It treats them as vantage points for further analyses concerning humour in eSports, especially in its most popular iteration of a mediated ludic spectacle. The chapter focuses on game-related events which unfold simultaneously in the physical space of eSports arenas and in the digitally mediated space of. The majority of the data has been obtained during live broadcasts on the streaming platform the official channels used as a source for this study provide both visual and text data, with VOD services enabling the analysis of chat messages according to time stamps. The material for this chapter was gathered during 20’s three major eSports events: the 2019 StarCraft II World Championship Series (WCS), Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) Katowice 2020, and DreamHack SC2 Masters 2020: Season Finals tournaments. This chapter looks at one of such platforms-, and a selected group of three large-scale events broadcast through its channels. The globalised eSports media system provides platforms for expressing a wide variety of humour-related cultural and social commentary, whose scope often exceeds the game-related discourses. This study aims to contribute to the existing work on humour in the digital public sphere, focusing especially on phenomena which transgress the boundaries between the physical and digital space Although there are studies that cover areas such as audience engagement (Dux 2018) and the social aspect of communication tools available during live broadcast (Recktenwald 2016), so far little to no attention has been devoted to the topic of the arguably crucial role of humour in stimulating both online and on-site participation during streamed large-scale eSports events. The following inquiry aims to address the research gap not only in eSports studies, but also in the research of game spectatorship more generally. The main focus of this chapter is the analysis of the humour that occurs in the space between the in-game content and its reception by the audience of a particular streaming media channel. ![]()
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