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Stephanie Boluk
Stephanie Boluk plays, makes, and writes about games at the University of California, Davis. She coauthored Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames as well as a series of small games like Footnotes and Triforce with Patrick LeMieux. She is also a cast member of Every Game in This City, a podcast on the Idle Thumbs Network about playing well together.
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Patrick LeMieux
Patrick LeMieux is a media artist, game designer, and associate professor in the Cinema and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the coauthor of Metagaming with Stephanie Boluk, cast member of Every Game in This City, and a creator of small games like Footnotes, Triforce, and the Octopad, an eight-player controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
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Abstract
This essay begins with a simple object—a ticket to The International, Valve Corporation’s annual Dota 2 Championship—and traces its life cycle to show how something seemingly straightforward like admission to an esports tournament in China can reveal a series of interleaved microeconomies that index the performances of professional players inside the stadium, instigate a host of informal money games played outside the stadium, and even intersect with contemporary geopolitics. From USD and RMB to online and offline tickets to wristbands and black-light stamps, blind boxes and swag bags, loot drops and virtual cosmetics, and back to money, a ticket does not simply grant entrance to watch a game but constitutes a metagame in and of itself. Although these types of games also occur alongside sold-out concerts, maximum-capacity sporting events, and bustling fan conventions, the life of this particular ticket brings together Valve’s unique history financializing esports and gamifying money with the political and economic realities of an American company holding an event in Shanghai the summer of 2019. Working with Tara Fickle’s concept of “ludo-Orientalism” and Marcella Szablewicz’s notion of “patriotic leisure,” this essay moves from the competition between pro gamers and esports commentary to the political spectacle produced by the metagame of ticket arbitrage. When the metagame of ticketing transgresses the boundaries of the magic circle of the esports stadium, the illusion of meritocracy falls away to reveal money games all the way down.