Research On The Construction Of Media Rituals Of Live Broadcast Of E-sports Events

In the past two decades,Chinese e-sports has gone through the phases of exploration,development and explosive growth,gradually transforming into standardized and industrialized digital sports.The e-sports industry ecology continues to develop,the commercialization model is becoming more and more mature,the social recognition and government attention continues are growing.In 2020,the scale of China’s E-sports users has reached 520 million.Among all the events,the League of Legends events is one of the most famous e-sports events in the world,and the League of Legends World Championship has become the world’s longest watched e-sports event in 2019.League of Legends event has a long development history,complete ecology and large user scale.Therefore,this article selects the League of Legends events as the representative case for the study of Internet communication landscape of e-sports.The game live broadcast platform is the main communication channel and development environment for e-sports events.The content of the e-sports event is composed of the game competition and the contents produced by user’s interactive viewing,so this article will study the live broadcast of e-sports events as a whole.Since there have been many media-related formal behaviors in the live broadcast of e-sports events,this article uses Nick Couldry’s media ritual theory as a framework.Based on the description and analysis of the ritual space for the live broadcast of e-sports events,the specific formalized behaviors are summarized in the media-related categories represented by festival-style event live broadcast ritual,media pilgrimage and fan interaction ritual.Further,from the perspective of "post-Durkheimian",the construction of media rituals not only helped the live broadcast of e-sports events to gain a central position,and became an important force in the mainstreaming of niche culture derived from e-sports events,which continuously affects the formation of ritual participants’ rule awareness and group identity,but also allows the process of concentrating symbol resources to the media to be more naturally accepted,which reflects the operation of media power.On the basis of studying the construction of media rituals of live broadcast of e-sports events,this article reflects on the aesthetic trend and value orientation of live broadcast of e-sports events and the form of information production and dissemination under the operation of media power,and look ahead to the future for e-sport.