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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. The History, Culture and Sociology of Sports
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspor.2024.1410929
This article is part of the Research Topic Esport and Sport Fandoms View all articles

Esports Buffs: The Perceived Role of Fans and Fandoms in U.S. Collegiate Programs

Provisionally accepted
Amanda C. Cote Amanda C. Cote 1*Md Waseq Ur Rahman Md Waseq Ur Rahman 2Maxwell Foxman Maxwell Foxman 2Andrew Wilson Andrew Wilson 2Brandon C. Harris Brandon C. Harris 3Onder Can Onder Can 2Jared C. Hansen Jared C. Hansen 4
  • 1 Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States
  • 2 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, United States
  • 3 University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States
  • 4 RMIT University Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Collegiate esports-organized competitive gaming-has expanded rapidly in the United States, drawing in student players, broadcasters, and support staff, as well as university employees. Universities have invested financially in esports, hoping to capitalize on gaming fandom to attract prospective students and enhance campus community integration. Little research, however, addresses collegiate esports fandom in depth. Drawing on thirty-one in-depth interviews with collegiate esports players, student workers, program directors, and administrators, this article investigates how collegiate esports participants perceive and discuss their fans. We identify three central themes related to fans in the dataset: discussions of fans' role in the collegiate esports environment, comparisons between esports and traditional sports fans, and concerns about the underutilization of fans within collegiate esports spaces. Subsequently, we theorize these themes through existing research on professional esports and traditional collegiate sports fandoms, as well as through the concept of "fan labor," or how the productive work of fans provides value to the nascent industry. This article thus not only specifically explores how collegiate esports programs are normalizing fan labor as an essential part of their practices, but also questions who benefits from this relationship and how. Investigating collegiate esports fans as an under-researched group additionally provides a new perspective on how fan labor integrates with media industries more broadly.

    Keywords: collegiate esports, Fans, Fan labor, free labor, audience commodity, qualitative research, in-depth interviews

    Received: 02 Apr 2024; Accepted: 23 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Cote, Rahman, Foxman, Wilson, Harris, Can and Hansen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Amanda C. Cote, Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.