This is a test essay for formatting experimentation
Live, in-person esports events are loud. I was reminded of this on a sweltering August afternoon in 2023 as I entered the Prudential Center – home of the New Jersey Devils hockey team in Newark, New Jersey. As at most League of Legends esports events, I was immediately handed a small plastic package which would, when opened and the contents inflated, become the thundersticks that are a quintessential part of the soundscape of this esport. As I found my seat, I thought back to attending the League of Legends World Championships at Madison Square Garden the previous fall. At one day of the tournament, the roar of the crowd and the beating of the thundersticks had been so loud that the players couldn’t hear their teammates’ communications during the games – even with the noise cancelling headphones they all wore. This was only a distant memory by the point when, many hours later, the Prudential Center was filled with a roar of its own. Under the dimmed arena lights, we looked past the figures of the players at their computers on the stage and stared up instead at the massive screens hanging from the ceiling. We watched as, with one explosive teamfight, Team Liquid took Game 4 over NRG in convincing fashion. It was all tied up, two games to two. Barely audible over the cheering of the crowd, the commentators signed off with a shout of “We’re going to Silver Scrapes!” And sure enough, only a few seconds later, the familiar sound of dubstep filled the room.
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From the radio to virtual reality, changing music technologies continue to fan anxieties around the near-mythological category of “the live.” There is now a robust scholarly literature demonstrating how events and cultural products may be made to appear or feel live even when they are not. The live as an object is split in these instances from liveness as an experience. Philip Auslander’s work on MTV, for example, demonstrated how pre-recorded videos are technologically and aesthetically embellished with what he called “the live-effect” (Auslander 1999:108), making them feel live even when they are not. Many of us in music, performance, and media studies are now well accustomed to analyzing how the trappings of liveness are sutured onto non-live events. This splitting of what feels live from what is actually live – of the phenomenology of liveness from the ontology of liveness – opens up inquiry in the opposite direction too, however. When what feels live is split from what is live, we are presented not just with situations where the feeling of liveness can exist without live events, but also live events that can exist without the feeling of liveness. Esports, I will argue today, offer perhaps the clearest example of exactly this type of situation. In-person esports events are commonly referred to in the community as “LANs,” short for “Local Area Network” - this nowadays refers to any esports competition where the competitors are all gathered in the same space with an audience looking on. Esports LANs do not automatically or passively produce the feeling of liveness, leading to situations where liveness must be grafted onto esports events purposefully and systematically. Sound is one of the main methods through which this process happens. By attending to the most famous musical spectacle in esports, Silver Scrapes, we can better understand not just the place of music and sound in esports but also the nature of music and liveness in highly mediated environments more broadly.
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Before we begin, a quick disclaimer. I am not interested in this paper in arguing whether the “live” is or is not a coherent or useful category, nor am I interested in discussing the ontology of live performance. Given the limited time we have today, I am pushing these questions to the side in order to focus on the relationship between live performance and its sensorial and affective trappings, which I refer to in this paper as “liveness.” In this paper I take for granted that there is such a thing as the “live,” and I provisionally define live performance as requiring both temporal synchronicity and shared physical space. This is a porous and partial definition, but it will serve our purposes for the limited time we have here today.
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League of Legends, one of the most popular video games in the world, was launched in 2009 – and by 2011, the game’s first professional esports competitions were held. In the fourteen years since, League of Legends has become by some metrics the world’s largest esport with numerous professional, semi-professional, collegiate, and amateur leagues around the world. Its largest international LANs draw millions of viewers and have prize pools in the millions of dollars. Of particular interest is the immense importance of music to the entire League of Legends ecosystem. League of Legends’ in-house music studio is extraordinarily prolific and popular, producing music ranging from collaborations with high-profile pop artists to virtual and augmented reality concerts. Given the high production value and popularity of concerts such as these, it is even more remarkable that a song like Silver Scrapes has become the de facto anthem for League of Legends esports and arguably the most recognizable song and audience performance practice across all esports. Silver Scrapes, after being purchased from a pay-to-use online music library, was first used as filler music at the 2012 League of Legends world championships, serving only to fill otherwise empty sonic space when there were technical issues during the broadcast. Silver Scrapes immediately skyrocketed in popularity, quickly graduating from broadcast filler music to occupy a place of prominence at the most high-intensity moments of the largest professional tournaments. Nowadays, Silver Scrapes refers not only to the song itself but also to the contexts in which it appears. The League of Legends esports matches with the highest stakes are always played as best-of-5 series. This means that the first team to win three individual games wins the match, and occasionally leads to circumstances where a fifth and final game needs to be played with both teams tied at two individual game wins apiece. It is at the conclusion of the fourth game in such a series, with the teams tied 2-2, that we go to Silver Scrapes. Silver Scrapes, in its current dual meaning which references both the song and the situation of a best-of-5 series going all the way to five games, is a vector for the most emotionally charged moments of this global community. It is in those most intense moments - when two of the best teams in the world are evenly matched and players’ careers and legacies come down to one last game on the stages of the world’s biggest stadiums – when emotions are running at their highest and the electricity in the room is palpable: this is Silver Scrapes.
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Before going any further, some context is necessary. At their core, esports are practices and communities of competitive video gaming – whether amateur or professional, in-person or virtual, hyper-local or globally distributed. There is nothing that categorically separates “esports” from “video games”; more than a static object, the term “esports” describes a way of interfacing with video games. Esports evolved from participatory events in the 2000s to spectator events in the 2010s – which, not at all coincidentally, was the same time that video game streaming platforms like Twitch began to flourish. Esports today are unimaginable without Twitch. Professional esports leagues broadcast their matches on Twitch; esports pundits stream their commentary on Twitch; professional esports players stream their practice on Twitch. In combination with social media and messaging platforms such as Reddit and Discord, Twitch represents the media ecosystem through which esports cohere. To put it simply: with only a few exceptions, esports exist almost entirely within this digital media ecosystem and do not require the sharing of physical space between participants. In-person esports matches are typically few and far between, reserved for the highest-stakes events a few times a year. Most fans will never go to a live esports match, and most matches played by professional esports players will involve the teams connecting from separate physical locations. In-person esports events, as popular and highly-anticipated as they are, remain outliers in an esports world characterized by online, dispersed play. Esports as a whole are heavily mediated and geographically dispersed cultural phenomena that are not inherently or unproblematically “live.” While they rely on temporal synchronicity, the fact that esports typically lack the sharing of physical space means that they do not automatically meet the definition of live performance that we set out above. When esports LANs do occur, with the teams competing on a stage in front of a physically-present audience, they stand on this cultural ground of years-long pre-existing norms of digital esports sociality. The audience at LANs watches the same broadcast that the at-home audience does – we just watch it on a larger screen and surrounded by other people. While we could watch the players at their computers on stage, the minute physical movements required to play League of Legends or other esports have little theatrical value – and even less so when most of the players are at least partially hidden behind their computer screens. To attend a LAN is to be repeatedly reminded that you, as the live audience member, are not the focus of the event; you are there to add a flavor of liveness to make the broadcast product more engaging for the fans at home. It is no coincidence that, when technical issues arise at LANs – as they often do – it is second nature for the fans in the audience to pull out their phones, load up Twitch, and watch the broadcast along with the fans at home. Esports norms of digital, dispersed spectatorship carry over into LANs. As such, we are presented with LANs as events that are by definition live – characterized as they are both by shared physical space and temporal synchronicity – but which do not necessarily produce the affects of liveness. It is not enough to simply be live; these events must also be made to feel live. What we are left with, what I have experienced over and over and over again in my two years of ethnographic research with esports fan communities, is a situation where both fans and event producers consciously manufacture and distribute the sensory experience of liveness in order to sustain the aesthetic and economic foundations of esports. There are many tools which are used for this manufacturing of liveness, from both spontaneous and curated audience chants to specific modes of participation in Twitch’s live chat function – but today I am focusing on the most monumental and recognizable of these tools in League of Legends esports: Silver Scrapes.
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The feelings of Silver Scrapes – of competitive intensity, of high drama, of excitement and nervousness and passion – only take form as “the feelings of Silver Scrapes” when made manifest with and among other people. Whether those other people are the fans sitting in the arena seats around you or the fans spamming catJAM in the Twitch chat, Silver Scrapes derives its core meaning from feeling with others. Synchronized headbanging, swaying cell phone flashlights, singing along with nonsense syllables – when you are in the crowd at a League of Legends tournament and Silver Scrapes comes on, these individual responses meld into the emergent communal performance ritual that is Silver Scrapes. Silver Scrapes is not tightly scripted, and different instances may look remarkably different from one another. What is most important are not the exact physical movements of the fans; it is the communalism that emerges with and through Silver Scrapes; a communalism that is driven by sound; a communalism that produces an affect of shared space and time, and thus of liveness. These moments are not contained within the crowd, however. Silver Scrapes – both the song and the performances of fans – are broadcast to the audience watching at home. It is through broadcasts on platforms like Twitch that most fans watch these events, and advertising revenue from these broadcasts is a major component of keeping esports financially solvent. The affect of liveness that Silver Scrapes engenders is a result of the labor of both event production staff and the fans physically present at the venue – and sound is the predominant form in which such liveness is packaged, remediated, and commodified. This includes but goes beyond moments of spectacle such as Silver Scrapes; it is no accident that most esports LANs place microphones around the audience to capture and amplify the sounds of clapping and cheering and chanting. This liveness is then re-mediated and sold as part of the League of Legends esports product. This is part of a feedback loop in which audiences at home then want to attend LANs in person in order to be part of this crowd and experience the famed communalism of esports LANs, and in so doing become part of the laboring force which produces the affect of liveness which can then be rebroadcast and begin the cycle anew. While I don’t have time to get into this history today, it is worth noting that this cycle is not necessarily intrinsic to esports as a practice; indeed, it has only arisen in the last decade as a result of a shift from spectatorship as an action to spectator as an identity.
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As a kind of epilogue, I want to zoom out from Silver Scrapes to consider music in League of Legends esports more broadly. Silver Scrapes is only one of many dozens of ways in which music helps constitute this scene as a cultural community. There are too many musical aspects of League of Legends esports to describe here – suffice to say that music is integral to this scene in ways that go well beyond anything we might expect from traditional sports. There are many concrete historical reasons for this, but I want to suggest this phenomenon can be partially explained through the conversation we have been having about liveness in esports and the sonic labor Silver Scrapes performs in conjuring the affect of liveness into being. Music is an inherently temporal social experience. Music is sound organized in time, or at least so we tell our students; we could just as easily, however, say that music is time organized in sound. Indeed, in one of my other areas of research on music in virtual worlds, musical performance is almost sacrosanct in its ability to “prove” temporal synchronicity and thus live sociality. Musicking’s inherently temporal nature overlaps with the importance of temporal synchronicity in defining liveness; communal experiences of musicking verify and produce liveness. Contemporary esports depend upon experiences of liveness for both their aesthetic coherence and their economic viability. Music, particularly social experiences of music in all their forms, is a key way for League of Legends esports in particular to produce, manage, and distribute its liveness. Music is thus critical to understanding esports as a cultural framework – but more than that, the ways that music is utilized in esports contexts can help us reconsider the very meanings and functions of live music in our world at large.