Sport 2.0

Transforming Sports for a Digital World

Andy Miah

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miah, Andy, 1975- author.

Title: Sport 2.0 : transforming sports for a digital world / Andy Miah.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016018952 | ISBN 9780262035477 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262343107

Subjects: LCSH: Sports–Technological innovations. | Performance technology. | Mass media and sports. | Social media. | Communication in sports–Technological innovations. | Sports spectators–Effect of technological innovations on. | Olympics–History–21st century.

Classification: LCC GV745 .M53 2017 | DDC 796–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018952

ePub Version 1.0

d_r0

for @ethanmiahgarcia #play

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I The Field of Play

1 Games-Based Culture

2 Real-World Games

II E-Sports in Three Dimensions

3 The Digital Ecology of Elite Sports

4 The Serious Gamer as Elite Athlete

5 Digital Spectators in Augmented Realities

III The Olympic Games and Sport’s Digital Revolution

6 Media Change at the Olympic Games

7 The New Olympic Media

8 Social Media and the Olympics

9 The Effect of Social Media on the 2012 London Olympics

10 Citizen Journalism and Mobile Media

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

Table 4.1

Table 9.1

Table 9.2 Top ten YouTube videos published by LOCOG, by view count.

Table 9.3 Top YouTube video view count on the IOC’s Channel.

Table 9.4

Table 9.5 Twitter follower count of the UK Paralympic and Olympic Broadcasters.

Table 9.6 Twitter Followers for Sponsors of 2012 London Games.

Table 9.7 Sentiments of UK-based Twitter users toward content of 2012 London Games (source: EDF Energy of the Nation Report, 2012).

Table 9.8 Facebook likes of athletes during 2012 London Games (source: Frank and Williams 2012).

Table 10.1

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1 Tom Daley’s tweet.

Acknowledgments

A number of people have influenced the journey this book has taken. The first is Dennis Hemphill, with whom I found much common ground in the initial stages of writing. Hemphill’s work informed my own broader interests in digital technology as not only a mechanism of activism but also a tool for constituting performance spaces and conditions. A second important collaboration during the process of writing was with FACT in Liverpool, particularly through its role in the development of the Abandon Normal Devices festival, which began as a London 2012 Cultural Olympiad project in collaboration with HOME in Manchester and Folly in Cumbria.

My Fellowship at FACT allowed me to engage with a new range of sport stakeholders within the digital art community, many of whom found an entry point into sport through the Olympic Games. Conversations with various people over the period leading up to London 2012 enriched my thoughts about what this book could contribute. I am particularly grateful to Mike Stubbs, Dave Moutrey, Gaby Jenks, John O’Shea, Leon Seth, Heather Corcoran, and Laura Sillars for the thoughtful conversations we have shared over the years about all things digital. Special thanks also go to Debbi Lander, the London 2012 Creative Programmer in England’s North West, who was a strong advocate for my work on citizen journalism through the #media2012 project, and who was a champion of digital innovation around the London 2012 Games. It was also a pleasure to work with Drew Hemment and the Emoto 2012 team during the Games, which allowed us to create a unique, artistically informed visualization of London 2012 Twitter data.

Other people who have informed this journey are Emma Rich, Kris Krug, Ana Adi, Beatriz Garcia, Daniel Dayan, Monroe Price, Charlie Beckett, Nick Didlick, Larry Katz, Alexander Zolotarev, and Alex Balfour. Their thoughtful contributions during discussions and correspondence have influenced the book’s range of considerations, and their views became constitutive of the research process that underpinned the work along the way.

I am also especially grateful to the many people within the Olympic movement whom have provided support for my work over the years. In particular, I have felt privileged to work with Anthony Edgar, Head of Media Operations at the International Olympic Committee, whose support and generosity have allowed me to develop the research during the period between London 2012 and Rio 2016. I am also grateful to conversations with Mark Adams, Dick Pound, Alex Huot, and Alex Balfour, and Hisham Shehab for their willingness to share perspectives and insights into Olympic matters and the world of sport.

I am grateful also to Alex Lim and Jay Shin at the International E-Sports Federation, and to Patrick Nally. Many of my ideas about the future of the competitive e-sport industry were crystallized through conversations with them at the seventh eSport World Championships in Seoul during 2015.

Some thanks are due to those who have been directly influential to the funding of this work. First, I would like to thank the University of Salford in Manchester for supporting my broad portfolio of research, and to thank my former employer, the University of the West of Scotland, for its investment in my research over the last decade. Additionally, thanks to the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, which funded my empirical work during the Olympic Games from Athens 2004 to Vancouver 2010. Finally, I thank Doug Sery for continuing to believe in this project as it developed from one Olympic Games to the next.

These acknowledgments are offered not just to the time we have shared in the development of my data gathering, but also to the time I have spent wondering what they would think about my overarching ambition for the book and my pursuit of imagining this new vision of sport. I hope the book does justice to the one element that unites all the people I have acknowledged above, which is their willingness and desire to transcend boundaries in their respective endeavors.

Introduction

Intelligent exoskeletal devices (data gloves, data suits, robotic prostheses, intelligent second skins, and the like) will both sense gestures and serve as touch output devices by exerting forces and pressures. … Exercise machines increasingly incorporate computer-controlled motion and force feedback and will eventually become reactive robotic sports partners. … Today’s rudimentary, narrowband video games will evolve into physically engaging telesports … .

William Mitchell (1995, p. 19)

William Mitchell’s vision of future human–computer interactions helped to shape my interest in the relationship between sports and digital technology. His vision of a world where intelligent exoskeletal devices augment the range of human functions and the sensory experiences we enjoy resonated with my own views about the direction sports would take—a view that was also influenced by what was happening in biotechnology. In the late 1990s, cyborg researchers were drawing attention to the common ground shared by digital and biological systems, revealing new possibilities for how their integration could permit our experiencing a new kind of corporeal presence. In this context, it was becoming clear how such approaches to being in the world could create new kinds of possibilities in the realm of performance, not just in sports but in music and dance too.

Small changes in established sports also suggested that the structural parameters of sports were not sufficiently robust to accommodate the changing biological capacities of techno-scientific athletes—athletes whose careers, minds, and bodies had been shaped by insights from sport science and technology. For example, the ever-increasing speeds of men’s tennis serves generated debate about changing some elements of the sport’s physical dimensions—for example, increasing the size of the ball or raising the height of the net. While members of the governing bodies of established sports considered how to modify their games to maintain their integrity, others considered how new kinds of sports, designed for these enhanced humans, may emerge. In the case of the latter, Mitchell imagined a world of remote arm-wrestling, teleping-pong, virtual skiing and rock-climbing—a veritable feast of cyborgian experiences made for our growing bionic capacities.

Mitchell’s posthuman future coincided with another of my influences, typified in the performance art of Stelarc (Smith 2005). Rarely does one find reference to Stelarc in the sports literature, but his pioneering work in exploring the cyborg interface has relevance for how one imagines the future of sports. Stelarc’s exoskeletal machines and digitally immersive devices offered a glimpse into a future in which our movement and thoughts would be mediated by technology—a future in which artificial intelligence converges with robotics and new forms of human agency bring forth new ways of experiencing embodied action. Back in the 1990s, many of these possibilities were realized only in the creative performances of artists such as Stelarc, in the novels of authors such as William Gibson, and the writings of intellectuals such as William Mitchell. Some of the ideas seem crude today; when they were first articulated, however, rapid accomplishments in digital technology were beginning to show how such scenarios could soon be realized. As the new millennium began, the development of digital technology by a new generation of netizens was provoking a shift in how people consumed media, and a population of prosumers (Toffler 1970) was beginning to emerge. These new digital communities were more concerned with producing digital media content than with consuming it, and this growing desire to be active rather than passive in our technological culture does much to help explain why these possible futures are so compelling.

As digital devices and sports cultures develop, humanity comes ever closer to an era of virtually constituted sports performances in which the primary medium of participation is not a physical playing field but a digitally mediated space. Consider the recently launched Oculus Rift experience produced by the company Virtually Live, which uses motion-tracking technology to capture the movements of players within a live soccer match. It then translates the data into a computer-generated Oculus experience, allowing the user to feel as though he or she is a spectator within the stadium, sitting in the stands and watching the match in real time. A number of questions pertinent to this book arise from these prospects. For example, how would such conditions change sports experiences, physical activity, and people’s sense of what it is to be embodied? How would the technology change the social meaning attributed to sports, the social function of sports, and the way in which sports create participatory communities? Would sports begin to occupy a different place within our social and cultural lives, if our experience of them is played out in virtual realities? Furthermore, what are the consequences of making corporeality a surrogate to a virtual economy, thus creating a physical culture that is defined largely by digital interactions? Would we even make the distinction if the simulation were perfect?

Finding ways to answer these questions—and others that follow from them—is what interests me about the subject of digital sports. This book begins by considering how such technologies challenge how we think about performance, liveness, and the idea of the virtual, then explores how sports are delivering new kinds of experiences through digital technology. Thus, the book first investigates what is understood by a number of concepts that are brought into question by these developments. Specifically, it considers the meanings of sports, games, and play and how our understanding of them changes when they are situated within a taxonomy of digital leisure practices. It also explores the differences and the similarities between the two primary cultural experiences under discussion: sports culture and digital culture. For instance, how does play within computer culture differ from play within sports? Are there similarities that explain their convergence and that permit one to argue that games occurring within virtual worlds should be afforded the same status as sports? These initial inquiries also outline the range of digital sports subcultures that have roles to play in articulating the rich history of what I call Sport 2.0, a term that denotes a transition from an analog to a digital way of producing and experiencing sports.

Experiences within virtual worlds have already become inextricable from many other aspects of living. From remote surgical procedures in medicine to managing the global economy, life online is a constitutive element of many societies around the world today. And to varying degrees, participation in a digital economy enables people to traverse other technological divides. For example, in developing countries with limited technological infrastructure or little economic stability, the use of mobile telephones has been a crucial part of the local economy for at least a decade (Plant 2003), and the rise of smart devices is growing especially quickly in such areas. Furthermore, digital products have become a constitutive feature of the creative and cultural industries—which include sports—and they are intimately connected to how licensing, sponsorship, branding, and a host of other creative media practices are monetized. Digital products are also central to strategies for optimizing the commercial potential of any brand.

Perhaps most crucial is the fact that life online occupies the space around our most intimate (private) and most collective (public) experiences. For example, in November 2015, when terrorist attacks by ISIS took place in Paris, one of the most immediate reactions was from the social network Facebook—not just the users, but also the company. Their collective intervention was to encourage their users to change their profile pictures so as to incorporate the colors of the French flag. Overnight, millions of Facebook users’ identities became politicized by Facebook’s enabling them to take part in an act of solidarity, which changing one’s profile picture was designed to convey. Thus, a social-media platform had allowed millions of people to unite around a single gesture, fusing a universal symbol with a unique image—one’s photograph—in an act of visible defiance. Of course, these are not simply gestures of solidarity, and later in the book I will consider the complex geopolitical effects of such gestures and how one cannot regard social-media platforms—especially large ones—as simply politically neutral social spaces. Indeed, this aspect of social media raises important considerations for why they often act as editorialized platforms, not just distribution networks for content produced by other editors.

How processes such as those described above are affecting sports experiences, and, more broadly, what this may mean for how we make sense of the role of sports in society, have been largely overlooked. Moreover, while aspects of the subject are pertinent especially to the internal logic and ecosystem of sports, they also speak to wider societal concerns. For instance, chapter 10 discusses how users of social media reacted to the involvement of British Petroleum (BP) in the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic program. BP was a leading domestic sponsor whose involvement attracted considerable controversy and resistance, most of which was made manifest within digital environments. In this case, the reactions were underpinned by a wider concern about climate change and the use of fossil fuels. The Olympic Games are often subject to similar attacks, criticisms, and even violence, which make it especially useful to consider them as an indicator of global social concerns.

Sport 2.0 also provides a way towards re-evaluating the assumptions we make about digital culture, as may be said of computer games. Despite having enjoyed more than twenty years of life online, computer game cultures remain a subject of popular controversy. Computer game cultures are still criticized for their supposedly generating more passive populations, addictive habits, or even violent and anti-social behavior. These allegations are often directed at specific, prominent examples of digital games, such as Grand Theft Auto (an action-adventure game set in fictional American cities where the player’s goal is to ascend within an organized crime community). Yet these allegations make dubious assumptions about what takes place within such environments; they also tend to treat gaming as a singular community, when in fact it is diverse. Alternative forms of gaming indicate how digital participation can inspire extraordinary levels of creativity and imaginative engagement to the point where gamification has become an ideal means of engagement across a range of sectors. For instance, in recent years the Wellcome Trust, a large science funding body, launched a program to gamify one’s PhD, and many forms of citizen science programs employ gaming, as a means of encouraging involvement within such projects. The alternative depictions of gaming I wish to discuss draw more on its capacity to nurture politically engaged citizenship and a rise in creative practice. This capacity becomes even more apparent when the format is aligned with sports.

In each case, digital technology must be seen as an opportunity for creative expression, or social engagement, rather than as detracting from it. Indeed, anxieties about life online may reveal themselves historically as concerns of a pre-mobile digital age, a period of time in which society was anxious about change, the erosion of the physical world, and uncertain about how digitally mediated communication was changing how we relate to one another. As mobile devices transform computers into hand-held objects and, increasingly, wearable technologies, being online is looking very different from how it looked twenty years ago. Today, life online is more akin to the taken-for-granted value we attribute to electricity or other essential services. Indeed, some societies are beginning to advance the idea that access to the Internet should be treated as a human right. Understood in this way, life online and life offline are not obviously qualitatively different.

In this context, this book considers how discourses on digital culture apply to sports. For example, although most of our digital experiences are still mediated through our fingers and hands, does our evaluation of their worth change once these experiences are transformed into activities that demand more physical exertion from us, and, thus, activities in which a clearer relationship between the physical and the virtual experience is apparent? We begin to see glimpses of this in the self-tracking technologies of mobile running applications. Recently the worldwide Pokémon Go craze has generated new conversations about how mobile technology can create new opportunities for physical activity, exploration, and seeing physical places differently. Should it become clear that our evaluation of the digital world changes as a consequence of such trends, our evaluation of the worth of time spent in digital worlds might also change.

This book examines the creative use of emerging digital technology within sports culture in order to reveal the complex ways in which practices such as those mentioned above are changing our views about digital space. Both sports and digital worlds are changing, and a significant part of that change may be attributed to their convergence—digital experiences are becoming more physically enabled through wearable technologies, and sports are becoming more digitized through sharing, big data, and immersive spectator experiences. In this context, I explore how the culture of physicality that surrounds digital life is transforming how we make sense of the desirability of these developments. More precisely, I argue that the advanced use of digital technologies in sports transforms them into new kinds of cultural experiences—experiences that are defined by different values and expectations and which are constituted by new populations of practitioners. In short, digital technology is changing everything about sports culture, including the people taking part, the places where it occurs, and the purposes to which it is put. In turn, the changing culture of sports—marked by the rise of alternative sports—is causing the digital environment to change.

Yet there remains a degree of ambivalence about the value of digital technology within the sports industry, at least as a tool for changing how sports should be played. Critics argue that technology is increasingly dehumanizing the athlete’s experience, perhaps even overtaking the human contribution to the results of competitions—a trend that many traditionalists resist. Such arguments are not unique to digital technology; for example, they have been advanced toward a range of technological changes in Formula One auto racing. Alternatively, the value of digital technology in sport has been questioned over its tendency to replace the role of officials. Thus, in an era of pervasive camera technology, the playing field becomes a living manifestation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in which automated devices govern and regulate the behavior of players as well as ensure that more accurate decisions are made about important results. In such a world, the role of a human referee appears to be compromised and some aspect of sport may be lost as a result.

Despite these concerns about the erosion of human agency in sport as a result of digitally embodied physical activity, there are compelling societal reasons to support such trends. For instance, Sport 2.0 offers a preview of an era in which sports will no longer be played in environmentally unfriendly places in the physical world, which often become white elephants for cities or cause large-scale disruption in resource allocation. Instead, sports will move toward a more sustainable, digital world in which their only environmental burden will be hard-drive space and electricity use. Already one can observe growing support for such new sporting worlds through criticisms about the unsustainability of some sports (such as golf, which is often played in countries with limited water supplies). The rise of the eSport athlete—athletes whose competition is playing computer games—may thus be a prologue to a new era for sport in which such events as virtual golf would thrive. Consequently, this book also investigates the concerns that surround the growth of our life online and the impact of convergence between virtual and non-virtual worlds. In this context, I introduce the notion of second-wave convergence, which focuses attention on the sharing of content and on the means of production as a conditioning characteristic of digital culture. In turn, this characteristic is also shaping sports experiences, which become increasingly tied to the utilization of digital technologies.

The broader implications of the increase in digital immersion are already apparent off the playing field. Expectations of participatory digital media have become constitutive of 21st-century citizenship, and the sports spectator’s experience is increasingly indicative of this. Furthermore, the debates about a growing digital divide—which were prominent in early studies of life online—have shifted in the past ten years, requiring a more nuanced view when explaining what is happening within less digitally developed nations. Although it is difficult to deny that there probably will always be a digital divide, the characteristics of this divide have changed. We now are less concerned about access to technology and more concerned about access to knowledge systems that make participation possible. For example, while one might appeal to the ubiquity of mobile devices or blogging platforms, the proliferation of device technology, operating systems, and open-source solutions requires the end user to quickly adapt to new interfaces that demand ongoing reskilling in order to remain a participant. To some extent, this reflects a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but this is just one way of characterizing what has changed.

Despite the challenge associated with democratizing digital technology, there are reasons to be optimistic about the empowering consequences of the shift in the divide which I describe. For instance, the success of Sugata Mitra’s hole in the wall program to bring computing to areas of considerable poverty, by just leaving computers out in the open for people to use, shows how creative approaches to distributing computing technology can be a gateway to a wider education and even a vehicle of education reform, especially in places with limited infrastructure and public services. People, it would seem, can figure out how to narrow the digital literacy divide themselves, but to do so they need the digital divide to be a thing of the past. The ambitions of Facebook and Google to bring the Internet to the parts of the world that don’t yet have it offer a glimpse of the radical transformation the world is about to see.

Overall, this book brings together various aspects of digital technology in sports, covering activities ranging from Olympic competition to computer gaming and remote spectatorship. The Olympic Games, which have always been a showcase for media innovation, provide a way to observe these developments over time. For instance, Olympic Games were the first events to publicly showcase such televisual innovations as slow-motion replay and live satellite broadcasts. The research will show how this innovation is advanced not only by owners of media technology but also, increasingly by users. The Games are also interesting since there are a range of activities that operate around the sports competitions, which are gradually connecting the digital worlds of sport and culture. Through new media technologies, the Olympic Games have become an incubator for the use of novel fan experiences, such as the development of urban screens, providing digital public spaces for celebration that now accompany hosting an Olympic Games. These spaces expand the audience experience and give rise to new opportunities for thinking about how audiences encounter sport remotely. Furthermore, they transform how people engage with public space and become a defining component of collective celebration. Additionally, mobile technology has become an integral part of the Olympic Games broadcasting experience, the torch relay (more accurately, a flame relay) playing a leading role via mobile devices. Athletic competitions mirror this use, from the utilization of digital navigation and tracking devices in sailing to the use of Hawkeye technology in tennis umpiring, digital technology is part of the fabric of the elite sports competition.

Thus, the Olympic Games are an arena in which new technologies are implemented and sports take on their role as instantiations of human evolution, both the athletic performance of the participants and the technological grandstanding of their entourage seeking to demonstrate how far humanity has advanced. Making sense of these embedded identities of, especially, elite sports is crucial to understanding their future trajectory and social role. Furthermore, the Olympic Games give rise to remarkable spectator innovation, both in terms of how the Games are viewed remotely and as a vehicle for creating new kinds of spectator experience. This is why the book also focuses on how digital technology is transforming what the Olympic Games mean to their audience, which encompasses both sports fans and those who regard the Olympics as an important social movement.

The expansion of digital technology offered through my characterization of Sport 2.0 also offers more opportunities for the Olympic brand to reach more people, though I endeavor also to reveal where these opportunities may give rise to social concern. For example, the large urban screens that occupy cities during Olympics constantly displaying the Olympic messages may also be seen as a form of indoctrination into celebrating an event which many people do not believe to be simply politically neutral as Olympic family would want to argue. This raises questions about the omnipotence of mega-events and their capacity to undermine expressions of citizenship, exemplified by State of Exception, Jason O’Hara’s film about preparations for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games. In this context, digital resistance becomes an indirect consequence of the Olympic industry and a key mechanism through which citizens can challenge these impositions. In this context, the book documents and scrutinizes the transformations of sports that is occurring through digital technology, while considering the ideological questions it provokes about how people make sense of themselves and their societies in a post-analog age. Thus, I will explain how these two trajectories—from the individual to the societal—are intimately intertwined in the context of sport and digital technology. Furthermore, I consider what this means for the future of performance and participation in one of the most universal of cultural practices: sport.

The book is divided into three parts and ten chapters, which take the reader through the central questions arising from the development of Sport 2.0. Part I focuses on how digital technology is changing sport experiences from a wide range of perspectives, while also providing some of the book’s philosophical underpinning. Chapter 1 considers the different cultures of sport, digital technology, and the Olympics. It explores how much further there is still to go before one can talk about a global digital culture that has become inextricable from all aspects of our lives. It also discusses how sports cultures have begun to change and, in particular, become subservient to media change, and what this will mean for how various systems of governance develop their approach to culture. This inquiry leads to questioning what it is that makes sports experiences distinct and meaningful—in short, their social function and value—a theme that is taken up later in the book. This chapter also explores the societal justification for sports, so as to understand how digital technology challenges or responds to these interests. Finally, through analyzing Olympic culture (perhaps the most prominent example of an ideology-driven sports-related program), chapter 1 considers how the Olympic movement has become a central driver in shaping the values of sports culture and business and what it will need to do in the future to retain this place in the sports system.

Chapter 2 sets out the theoretical dimensions of the book. It begins by discussing the current conceptual understandings of virtual reality, computer culture and sport. It identifies the book’s major themes, arguments, problems and possibilities, including reference to the major, pertinent philosophical notions of games and sport, integrating the seminal work of Bernard Suits and Brian Sutton-Smith, and how discussions about digital culture and sport relate to them. This is where the book’s main questions are formulated and where the pivotal concept of unreality is explored to identify areas of common ground in theoretical work on sports and digital culture. In particular, I consider the way in which a certain kind of sense of the physical world arises within digital space, often through the design interface that mediate our experiences. Keyboards, mice, and gesture technology