Institutionalisation in E-Sports

Abstract

Following its economic impact and rising popularity, ‘e-sports’ has become a theme within the academic debate on sports. The current discussion revolves around the definitions of sports provided by the philosophy and sociology of sports and how in turn, this can be adapted to e-sports. The premise of this article is the analysis of ‘institutionalisation’, which is claimed to be an element of modern sport. The governance and production aspects of e-sports will be the main focus where the nature of video games with their fractured production process, the lack of a monopolistic international organisation and its relative novelty will be emphasised. Furthermore, the shaky ground on which the term ‘institutionalisation’ stands will be touched on. It will conclude that the current debate on the recognition of e-sports as a sport may experience certain pitfalls if it does not solve the fundamental problems regarding institutionalisation and ignores the production process of video games and e-sports.     

The Intrinsic Value of Sport: A Reply to Culbertson

Leon Culbertson's recent contribution, ‘Does Sport Have Intrinsic Value?’ objects to the account of the value of sport as intrinsic value I had developed in my Sport, Rules and Values; in particular, as this occurs in my argument that the value of some sports resided in the possibility of their functioning as a moral laboratory. He identifies two accounts of intrinsic value; and shows that neither would fit my purposes seamlessly. He urges that my account of the place of normative reasons cannot generate intrinsic value: rather, the person whose reasons they are somehow imports that value. Yet he has misunderstood my particularist conception of values; and the place occupied by my contextualism – these, rather than a residual commitment to essentialism, are what generates an apparent inconsistency he identifies. But they also explain it away. As a result, much of his concern to find some exact account of the term ‘intrinsic’ is misplaced: we need to look contextually. Further, the project of my discussion was limited to showing, first, how the moral laboratory idea might explain the value of some sport (on the assumption that sport had intrinsic value); and, second, how failures of realisation of that intrinsic value might be traced to the distinction between motivating reasons and normative ones.     

Sport,nature and worldmaking

Many philosophers of sport maintain that athletics can contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the environments in which we live. It may be relatively easy to offer accounts of how athletes might acquire self-knowledge through sport; however, it is far more difficult to see how sport could add to the general understanding of human individuals, cultural frameworks or the material world. The study of sport as a way of worldmaking is helpful in understanding how sport can contribute to the pursuit of knowledge in such areas.

The position I present is based on arguments made by Gunter Gebauer in his 1993 presidential address to the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport, ‘Sport, theater, and ritual: Three ways of worldmaking’, and in my explanation and interpretation of Gebauer's position, I rely heavily on Nelson Goodman's Ways of worldmaking. Gebauer's work is focused on traditional sports, and he argues that such sports create worlds that represent fundamental attitudes and values of the cultures that produce them. I argue that alternative sports are well suited to create new and original worlds that instantiate value systems in opposition to mainstream culture. I argue further that nature sports such as climbing and surfing represent relationships between humans and natural features, and that such sports, as a subcategory of alternative sports, are in a position to create new and original frameworks that can help us to better comprehend our relationships with natural environments.     

Transmission Failure Explained1

In this paper I draw attention to a peculiar epistemic feature exhibited by certain deductively valid inferences. Certain deductively valid inferences are unable to enhance the reliability of one’s belief that the conclusion is true—in a sense that will be fully explained. As I shall show, this feature is demonstrably present in certain philosophically significant inferences—such as GE Moore’s notorious ‘proof’ of the existence of the external world. I suggest that this peculiar epistemic feature might be correlated with the much discussed phenomenon that Crispin Wright and Martin Davies have called ‘transmission failure’—the apparent failure, on the part of some deductively valid inferences to transmit one’s justification for believing the premises.     

Miracles in Sport: Finding the ‘Ears to Hear’ and the ‘Eyes to See’

Paralympic Games (PG), involving people with disabilities (PWD), are a manifestation of excellence in sport. They show that athletics performed by PWD counts as genuine sport. They also support a wider meaning of the term ‘health,’ understood not just like a utopian state of perfection, but like the ability to realize oneself in the projects and activities of one’s own choosing. Notwithstanding these virtues, PG—in their current form—may paradoxycally reinforce social prejudice against PWD. This is due to the fact that PG and Olympic Games (OG) are now two distinct events. In this article, I argue that PG should be integrated in the OG, just like women’s and ‘minor’ sports, because the separation of PG and OG indicates a morally arbitrary separation between people with and without disabilities. I also propose to remove the word ‘Para-lympic’ because it stigmatizes the sport performed by PWD as an appendix of ‘normal’ sport. Athletes with disabilities deserve special attention because they have special needs; but they also deserve an arena where their excellence is offered to the public, and this arena should not be different from that of normal-bodied athletes.     

Paralympics and the Fabrication of ‘Freak Shows’: On Aesthetics and Abjection in Sport

Two years before the opening of the Paralympic Games in London in 2012, the British TV network Channel 4 launched a campaign called Freaks of Nature. As part of the campaign they produced the short film Meet the Superhumans by director Tom Tagholm. The film became an immediate success, but was also criticised for portraying the Paralympians as ‘freaks’ and for reducing the Paralympics to a ‘freak show’. But was it wrong to describe the Paralympics as a ‘freak show’? Is there even a point of using the term ‘freak show’ in relation to sports? There might be, and that is what I am discussing in this paper. To be more specific, I am proposing that the term ‘freak show’ can challenge and destabilise common aesthetic views in sport, simply by the adding of abject dimensions to the athletic performances. From this one can claim that the Paralympics reconnects to the freak show-tradition of the past. And that, in itself, can have a moral and political impact.     

The Geopolitics of Gulf Sport Sponsorship

ABSTRACT

The names of two major Gulf airlines, Qatar Airways and Emirates, have saturated the European football scene for many years, sponsoring some of the most prominent European teams and FIFA itself. These state-backed airlines are also active in motorsports, rugby, cycling, tennis, golf, cricket, and equestrian sport, while several prominent Gulf elites and royal family members have recently taken over major sports franchises in Europe and elsewhere. How should we understand these far-reaching sponsorship agendas in the Gulf? What can they tell us about the politics and ethics of international sport on the Arabian Peninsula? Moving beyond the general readings of Gulf sport sponsorship as an exercise in ‘soft power,’ this article shows how these deals are strategic nodes for diverse actors in the Gulf and in the international sporting community to advance various interests: personal, political, financial, and otherwise. Informed by a critical geopolitics lens that questions the coherence of the ‘state’ as an actor, I ask what it means to say that ‘the Gulf’ sponsors sport, and more specifically investigate the relevant actors behind these sponsorship deals. To do so, this article examines regional and global political economy through a focus on three Gulf airline sponsors, Emirates, Etihad, and Qatar Airways, and three elite sports sponsors—the UAE’s Sheik Mansour, Qatar’s Nasser bin Ghanim Al-Khelaïfi, and Sheikh Nasser of Bahrain. By decentering ‘soft power’ approaches to sport that unduly emphasize the ‘state’ as an actor, this article suggests a more grounded approach to the geopolitics of sport in the Arabian Peninsula, which simultaneously acknowledges the complicity of Western actors and institutions in the rise of Gulf sports sponsorship deals in the past decade.     

Nietzsche,Sport, and Contemporary Culture

The word ‘sport’ next to Nietzsche’s name may raise eyebrows among many Nietzsche readers. ‘What an odd pairing?’ one may ask. We prefer Nietzsche and arts or something from the domain of the Geist. Sport is embedded in mass culture and Nietzsche detests anything that has to do with masses; fandom, an important part of sport culture, is nothing Nietzsche would look at favourably but call it a manifestation of the herd instinct. Besides, clubs and sports organizations control this sporting culture through political and economic apparatuses. On the other hand, modern sports, far from producing higher types and the overhuman, appeal to the lowest common denominator, the person on the street and all athletes are equal. All of these objections notwithstanding, one may still speak of a sporting spirit that embodies play, ecstasy in the sense of Dionysian, inventiveness, agonism, grand spectacle, festivity, a specific type of aesthetics and a form of askesis of the body, and a specific outlet for enactment of active justice and a Gestalt of power relations. Playfulness and game-making are crucial in sports, and play is key to Nietzsche’s thought. Sport is a form of letting go, losing oneself in the game, and can be construed as a field for Dionysian forces. Agonism, a significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, applies to all competitive sports. Furthermore, sport constitutes one of the major types of spectacles in our age. Finally, sport belongs to the regime of the body, a form of askesis, which Nietzsche would have supported as opposed to the ascetic idealism. In what ways do Nietzsche’s ideas on interpretation shed light on sport and its various aspects as listed above? What hermeneutic tools do we have to interpret sport as a field of culture? These were the guiding questions for this essay.     

Kinds of chance in games and sports

While talking about sports (and games) we use such expressions as ‘random victory’, ‘winning by accident’, ‘skill against luck’, ‘chance (fortune) favours the better player’, etc. Unfortunately, chance-related notions that occur in these expressions are not well defined—their meaning is vague and it is not clear whether they refer to one or many different phenomena. Because such phenomena play an important role in sport, from the viewpoint of the philosophy of sport it is necessary to give a systematic account of this topic. Although the works of De Wachter, Simon, Dixon, Breivik and Loland contain many important insights, there is still a room for further research in this field. The author tries to establish a typology of phenomena that could generally be called ‘chance-phenomena’, which however, should be precisely distinguished. As such the primary task is to present an analysis of several different kinds of chance in sports. In constructing this typology the author uses both the distinction between different kinds of games (performative vs. kinetic) as well as analysis of structure of a game (four constitutive elements: players, constitutive rules, material substrate of the game and the world of the game). The most important method used is phenomenological analysis, especially Ingarden-style analysis. These kinds of ‘chance-phenomena’ are: aleatoriness, chaos, irregularity, imprecision and arbitrariness. The paradigm cases of each kind of chance are discussed. The genesis and functions of the respective phenomena in sports and games are also shown, as well as their position in the structure of the game. Such analytic work should precede any solutions of the chance vs. skill problem, or other problems concerning chance in sport. As a test of usefulness of the provided distinctions, the author considers the veracity of the judgements expressed in such sentences as ‘Fortune favours the better player’.     

Does Doxastic Justification Have a Basing Requirement?

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe that P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e. the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one's belief is based on an epistemically appropriate reason. This demand has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification, as well as to defend phenomenal ‘conservatism’ and other views besides. In what follows, I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that, even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal ‘conservatism’. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and I show why this needn't raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification's basing demand seemed to raise.     

Sports and ‘Minorities’: Negotiating the Olympic Model

This paper studies ‘minority’ initiatives to organize sports games. A meta-analysis of published data in the literature identifies the formal appearance taken by each of these initiatives under the Olympic model. But it also conduces to build a number of indicators to answer a series of questions about their logic and strategies. All the initiatives studied are based on an ambivalent posture that, while based on the denunciation of a discriminating space, claim access to it. By an astonishing paradox, ‘non-normative’ actors are driven to reclaim a model that, under cover of Universal, aims to establish a norm that is situated and dated. In practice, they use two types of strategies: a strategy for participation in the Olympics to transform them into a space which represents a fight against exclusion, or a strategy to create alternative events. Whatever the strategy, these initiatives are implemented according to their objectives. Differentiated in their forms—participatory or autonomy—they are also in their purpose. The comparison of these initiatives shows that ultimately, beyond strategies and logic inherent in different social, historical and organizational contexts, the mobilizations of the actors reveal the same ambivalence about the sports model conveyed by the Olympic institution.     

Pursuit of Bodily Excellence: Paul Weiss’s Platonic (Religious) Imagination of Sports

Almost thirty years ago, Warren Fraleigh wrote that Paul Weiss’s intellectual contribution to the philosophic study of sport was like a tributary, converging with others to eventuate in numerous scholarly colloquia, a new academic society, new courses and curricula, articles and books. Paul Weiss contends in Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry that sport is a pursuit of bodily excellence. Weiss tells a story about bodily excellence; it is a bodily good that can be realized in the practice of sport. His metaphysic and teleology provide the content and context for his philosophy of sport. For him, sport bodies speak or give voice to a particular metaphysical tradition that I argue is problematic. Weiss’s metaphysic and teleology swallow and sublate sportive bodies and the concomitant goods intrinsic to embodiment and the practice of sports. The net effect is dematerialization and depersonalization of bodily performances and personal identity, respectively. More recently, Feezell and Dombrowski advance theses about sports with Weiss as their primary interlocutor, if not foil. What I put forth travels a different path than Dombrowski and Feezell in that I plumb Weiss’s narrative arc, Platonic imagination and metaphysic, more extensively as it tells a certain story about human embodiment, and thus, grounds his ideal of excellence.     

‘Mystic Atheism’: Julia Kristeva's Negative Theology

Abstract

This article examines Julia Kristeva's paradoxical concept of a ‘mystic atheism’. It falls into three parts. First, it briefly surveys Kristeva's psychoanalytic account of Christian theology in Au commencement était l'amour (1985). Secondly, it assesses Kristeva's analysis of the Christian mystical tradition from Teresa of Avila to Angela of Foligno in such works as Le féminin et le sacré (1999) and the three volumes on Le génie féminin (1999-2002). For Kristeva, Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the transition from theology to psychoanalysis: what she locates within the work of the female mystics is a so-called ‘mystic atheism’, that is to say, an affirmation of an other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it. Finally, the article offers some critical comments upon Kristeva's own ‘mystic atheism’: I argue that—like much negative theology—Kristeva's psychoanalysis remains ontotheological in form and that this dimension expresses itself in a problematic tendency to anthropomorphize the other within. In conclusion, I will suggest that Kristeva's ‘mystic atheism’ ultimately remains within the theological tradition it seeks to call into question.     

Perceptual Justification and Warrant by Default

As I use the term, ‘entitlement’ is any warrant one has by default—i.e. without acquiring it. Some philosophers not only affirm the existence of entitlement, but also give it a crucial role in the justification of our perceptual beliefs. These philosophers affirm the Entitlement Thesis: that an essential part of what makes our perceptual beliefs justified is our entitlement to the proposition that I am not a brain-in-a-vat. Crispin Wright, Stewart Cohen and Roger White are among those who endorse this controversial claim. In this paper, I argue that the Entitlement Thesis is false.     

The logic of epistemic justification

Theories of epistemic justification are commonly assessed by exploring their predictions about particular hypothetical cases—predictions as to whether justification is present or absent in this or that case. With a few exceptions, it is much less common for theories of epistemic justification to be assessed by exploring their predictions about logical principles. The exceptions are a handful of ‘closure’ principles, which have received a lot of attention, and which certain theories of justification are well known to invalidate. But these closure principles are only a small sample of the logical principles that we might consider. In this paper, I will outline four further logical principles that plausibly hold for justification and two which plausibly do not. While my primary aim is just to put these principles forward, I will use them to evaluate some different approaches to justification and (tentatively) conclude that a ‘normic’ theory of justification best captures its logic.     

Book Reviews

Subjective measures of well-being—measures based on answers to questions such as ‘Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?’—are often presented as superior to more traditional economic welfare measures, e.g., for public policy purposes. This paper aims to spell out and assess what I will call the argument from directness: the notion that subjective measures of well-being better represent well-being than economic measures do because subjective measures (and subjective measures alone) are direct measures of well-being. My main thesis is that the argument begs the question against proponents of economic measures: it is based on a premise that they reject and that is no less in need of justification than the conclusion of the argument, namely, the proposition that well-being is constituted by subjectively experienced mental states. If subjective measures can be defended as valid measures of well-being at all, I will maintain, it is because they are (imperfect) indirect measures of well-being.     

Sporting Integrity,Coherence, and Being True to the Spirit of a Game

Abstract

The term ‘sporting integrity’ is widely used in the normative assessment of sports. The term, however, suffers from a lack of conceptual precision. Alfred Archer’s ‘coherence-view’ of sporting integrity goes a long way to help clarify what ‘sporting integrity’ actually means and the specific institutional and individual obligations that it generates. Archer argues that ‘sporting integrity’ essentially means that the constraints athletes face ‘cohere’, in the sense of applying consistent inefficiencies between athletic competitors. For example, those who use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) are less constrained than those who do not use PEDs, and thus PED use undermines sporting integrity. This paper presents the argument that over and above competitive coherence, sporting integrity means living up to the ‘spirit’ or ‘ethos’ of a game. The implications of this view are that a sport could have ‘coherent’ competitive constraints and still lack sporting integrity; additionally, a sport could have ‘incoherent’ competitive constraints and still demonstrate sporting integrity. These implications are drawn out relative to the three specific cases that Archer uses to illustrate his coherence view; namely, PED use in professional cycling, ‘tanking’ in Olympic badminton, and the prospect of allowing the Rangers Football Club entrance into the Scottish Premier League without playing through and first winning/qualifying in the lesser leagues.     

Games and Fiction: Partners in the Evolution of Culture

In this essay, I argue that the time is right in the philosophy of sport to follow the lead of systems thinking and emphasize the contextual embeddedness of sport, not its distinctive characteristics, least of all any claims for metaphysical independence. Accordingly, I analyze similarities between two cultural conventions—namely, literature (in particular fiction) and games—through the lens of evolution. I argue that common roots can be observed in games and fiction when looking at them structurally, semantically, and socially. I suggest that both games and fictional storytelling were adaptive in similar ways and that both preceded what is arguably the capstone cultural achievement of formal language.