Türkiye'de e-spor ve oyun evleri: Emek, cinsiyet ve etkilenim

E-sports is a global industry based on professional and competitive playing of videogames, where revenues reach 1 billion dollars. The field of e-sports blends sports, technology and gameplay within a masculine, heteronormative, and entrepreneurial context. E-sports players work, play and live within gaming houses. Based on ethnographic research in gaming houses, e-sports events, and semi-structured interviews with players, families, and fans, this thesis aims to understand how professional e-sports players "playbor" within the context of post-industrialism where the path to a "good life" comes through not hard work but passionate play. This thesis reveals the ways in which neoliberal fantasies of love have permeated e-sports. Furthermore, it shows how heteronormative gender structures already inherent in videogames and physical sports get to be reproduced themselves within e-sports. Through an interdisciplinary framework between digital game studies, media studies, and digital labor studies, this thesis ultimately demonstrates the tensions and contradictions of how contemporary youth negotiates the promises of digital play with the realities of contemporary market economy within the context of the Global South.