New Zealand attitudes towards the emerging sport of Esports: Content analysis of New Zealand public discourse on Esports : A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Applied Science at Lincoln University

Abstract

Globally, esports is no longer a new activity due to the expansion of esports tournaments, university scholarships, large sponsorships, and well-documented growth in popularity. Despite the global growth, esports and esports research in New Zealand is in a preliminary phase, with a national sporting body for esports only being approved in 2016. This research sought to develop an understanding of the prominent conversations, attitudes, and discourse in New Zealand through analysing publicly available articles and documents written in New Zealand and by New Zealand authors. A qualitative content analysis method (Bengtsson, 2016) was chosen, focusing on a sentence-by-sentence coding methodology. It was found that esports is yet to be accepted in public discourse, with articles repeatedly using justification language to defend esports against stereotypes and criticisms. Sport was conversely not criticised for these same objections, despite many of the criticisms being challenges sport also faces. Sport continues to be upheld in public discourse in New Zealand as an inherent ‘good’ regardless of potential negative outcomes for participants, while esports is not provided the same benefit of social acceptance, confirming again the Great Sport Myth (Coakley, 2015). Beyond comparisons to sport, it was found that esports faces similar criticisms to videogames, adding to the difficulty of esports finding full acceptance socially and politically. While the data gathering method was set to rule out irrelevant articles, it was not possible to fully separate videogame content from esports content. Future research could compare the videogame and esports discourses to determine whether the themes are the same, similar, or different. Other future research opportunities found include determining a clear picture of the demographics of New Zealand esports players and fans, as well as investigating the current and potential future locations of esports facilities in New Zealand.