Abstract

In this text I seek to reflect on how I adapted digital ethnography for my fieldwork with Mexican amateur and semi-professional digital athletes. Although we have a vast literature on research processes mediated by digital technologies, much of this academic production is in English and there are few cases in which we can think of situations and experiences of Mexican users. The text addresses the problem of putting the body and making a presence in the process of construction of the ethnographic field. One of the hypotheses that guided the work is that the notion of value in the process of becoming a digital athlete is associated with the way in which failure is re-signified in the learning curve that Mexican players go through.

Keywords: digital culture, digital ethnography, value, video games

learning to accompany mexico's amateur digital athletes: elements for analyzing the presence and construction of a tech-mediated field

In this article, a digital ethnography is adapted for fieldwork with amateur and semi-professional digital athletes in Mexico. Although much has been written about research mediated by digital technologies, most of this literature is in English, with few cases that enable reflection on the situations and experiences of Mexican users. The article takes up the issue of putting one's body on the line and building a presence in the construction of the ethnographic field. One of the hypotheses that guided the research was that, in the process of becoming a digital athlete, the notion of value is associated with the way in which failure is redefined in the learning curve that Mexican players face.

Keywords: digital ethnography, videogames, digital culture, value, sports.

From January 2019 to September 2021 I conducted my fieldwork with Mexican video gamers who aspired to become digital athletes; one of the most recurrent goals my interlocutors had was to compete in the eSports scene and earn money for playing, they used to call this "living the dream". Reaching that goal is very difficult and not everyone achieves it, only a minority manages to be formally hired to travel the world and compete in different places, while receiving a payment to devote full time to improve their technique in a specific video game. For my interlocutors, however, it was recurrent that their teams would disappear from one day to the next, sometimes one or two players would leave the project. On other occasions, the coaches disappeared or sometimes there was simply no one in the mood to train; however, this did not stop them from connecting to continue playing and trying again.

In this paper I will address the experience of failure and what I have learned about the ways in which players deal with it, in parallel I will explain how the process of accompaniment went; for this I will rely on the case of Loïc Wacquant (2004) to expose more clearly what it means to put the body in a sport discipline that seems not to demand any physical effort. Finally, I will propose a possible interpretation that will help us understand why players continue to invest their time in training with different sports organizations, even when they know that they will probably not manage to "live the dream".

In the background, I will address other topics of interest for anthropology: the construction of a field mediated by different digital technologies, the changes and technical adaptations to conduct interviews, the use of the telephone as a research tool and the material and digital supports that a field diary can acquire, which can be intervened by the interlocutors, which implies reflecting on the process of construction of ethnographic data.

Simultaneously, the issue of the importance of methodological reflexivity in the whole research process will appear, an issue that interests me greatly not only because in the field my interlocutors deal again and again with failure, but also because my journey was characterized by error, improvisation, doubt and uncertainty. All these elements were essential to improve my way of observing, recording and analyzing what happened in the field.

By way of a preview: spending hours in front of a screen frantically mashing buttons means thinking about why it is valuable to invest time in a game that subtly oscillates between sport and -in very exceptional cases- work, which inevitably modifies daily routines and the relationships that young players generate and maintain. This is the reason why I think that reflection on video games from the perspective of Latin American anthropology is a field that can lead us to stimulating reflections, in principle because they can be an object to investigate the features that characterize contemporary social life. If video games are articulated to a particular sociocultural system in which they are played - read, interpreted, reproduced - with a specific key that responds to a situation that depends on the context of the player, then investigating - for example - the experience of the players is not idle, it is an excellent way to understand the forms of time use, interpersonal relationships mediated by various socio-technical networks, the processes of technological appropriation and technodiversity, etc. Perhaps even more important is to consider that it reminds us of the importance of a practice that remains fundamental in contemporary society: playing.

Putting the body in a field mediated by technologies

In Wacquant's (2004) ethnographic work we accompany a white French researcher in his process of understanding the segregation and racism of the black community in Chicago. We all know the story: the sociologist registers at a gymnasium to make a meticulous record of the daily life of young blacks and along the way assumes the methodological commitment to go through the same training as his interlocutors, as a way of trying to capture more directly what happens there. The interest in total immersion is not a new issue, M. Duneier, P. Kasinitz and A. Murphy (2014) begin their compilation of urban ethnography with a quote from Robert Park that Howard Becker recorded in a class taught by the sociologist in 1920:

He has been told to go digging in the library, where he accumulates a large number of notes and a generous layer of grime. You've been told to pick problems wherever you can find musty piles of routine records based on trivial programs prepared by tired bureaucrats. This is called "getting your hands dirty in actual research." Those who advise you are wise and honest; the reasons they offer are of great value. But one more thing is necessary: first-hand observation. Go and sit in the lounges of luxury hotels and in the doorways of flophouses; sit on Gold Coast couches and in speakeasies; sit in Orchestra Hall and in the burlesque Star and Garter. In short, gentlemen, go soil the seat of your pants in real research (Duneier, Kasinitz, & Murphy, 2014: 1).

The authors I have mentioned point to an essential issue: we cannot understand the world of the other -nor our own- if we do not engage in all senses; when we put our bodies into it, we have the possibility of grasping "the cognitive, ethical, aesthetic and conative schemes" (Wacquant, 2004: 16) that shape the routine of our interlocutors. It is clear that this means confronting ourselves with our personal and theoretical prejudices, which is not easy when everyday life keeps its times and rhythms no matter what we think of it. When I began my fieldwork with e-sports teams, I thought that a good part of my time would be spent in the places where my interlocutors gathered; I had thought long and hard that my way of putting my body out there would be to spend time at the gaming centers and stay awake with them during their long training sessions. This did not happen.

The pandemic that began in mid-March 2020 paused all my plans, at the beginning I thought I would be home for a few months -maximum one semester- and then everything would return to normal, I could not have been more wrong. Ethnographic work is usually full of this type of unforeseen events, in many cases these are situations that cannot be controlled, but this also forces us to look for and/or invent solutions to what could well truncate our research process. So, I made the decision to look for recruitment calls for players for Mexican e-sports teams on Facebook. Maybe I was not going to be able to be in the gaming centerBut as long as I could be part of a team and get an overview of how teams work. It seemed to me that this was better than resigning myself to being stuck at home with nothing to do. I had tried to get in touch with professional teams, but I never received a response, the agendas of many of them are full of commitments and I did not have the social capital to be able to build ties with players, coaches or managers. Living in the city of Puebla was a kind of barrier.

By this time I was clear that I did not want to be a digital athlete, my rank was very low and I used to cause the mockery of many players. However, I thought it would be good to apply to be part of the board of directors or of the staffIn the past, many of the teams are clear that they need people working behind the scenes to make it all work: a manager, coaches, psychologists, analysts, physiotherapists and content creators. In the past, I had already been involved in maintaining the pages of some eSports projects and working on creating blog posts for an eSports company. marketingThe client was a computer equipment company; this activity is interesting, but it wasn't going to let me be anywhere near the action. I decided to use my degree in psychology and apply for that position in computers.

It seemed to me that such a place would allow me to accompany not only the players, but also the coaches, analysts and all those involved in the team's performance; moreover, I could offer something more than just being there, observing and recording for my research. Putting my knowledge of psychology at the service of my interlocutors seemed like a fair deal, especially for amateur or semi-professional teams, who usually do not have a financial income to support their sports organizations. Needless to say that during the different recruitment processes I went through, I always made explicit my objectives, what I was doing and for what, this also included two important clarifications: first to make it clear that I had never worked as a psychologist for an e-sports team, but that I had all the intention, energy and time to perform to the best of my ability. Secondly, that my work as a psychologist was not to provide therapeutic support, but to intervene in the group dynamics of the teams.

I ended up spending two years and eight months accompanying nine e-sports projects, seven of which were teams with the intention of becoming professional and two communities of Mexican video gamers. The young players ranged from 18 to 26 years old, most of them were studying, lived at home with their parents and were economically dependent on them. I was also able to talk to gamers who were finishing their degrees, some were about to start working, they were in that strange moment of liminality in which they were not graduated, but had already completed their studies. I only found one case of a player who was a family man, had his own business and supported his wife and two children financially.

As you can imagine, this meant changing many of my daily routines and learning other ways of using some devices and socio-digital platforms to be able to do my field work, which I will explain in more detail. Since it was necessary to install the game and the video call service (Discord) I realized that my laptop In fact, I was trying many ways to make my field diary: for a while I made recordings of everything that happened on my screen, then I decided to complement that with the notes I was writing in my notebooks, in parallel I was making a collection of images and screenshots, I had to think of a way to store all this in an orderly manner and that had some kind of circularity: my notes had to lead me to a video file, but also to an image or redirect me to a link on YouTube, Twitch or Facebook, to name a few platforms.

Of course, my phone became a fundamental tool because the players used to have WhatsApp groups where the boards would organize activities or just discuss what was happening on a daily basis. It seemed important to me to be present as much as possible, to make it obvious that I could connect as often as necessary to be with the teams.

When I began my fieldwork, I thought that my diary was going to be incomplete in some way, it was clear to me that ethnographies in virtual worlds had been written before (Boellstorff, 2008), but the circumstance of confinement made me feel insecure about the validity of what I could write and reflect on while accompanying Mexican players who did not live in the same city and whom I would probably never meet face to face. However, as time went by I noticed that my field diary was growing rapidly.

Each team had a different dynamic and routine, some trained in the afternoons, but there were also teams that preferred to connect in the early mornings; as I said, my goal was to be there and record everything that happened in my presence: the rules and their exceptions, the conflicts and the ways to solve them, the love bonds, their ruptures and the consequences they had on the team dynamics, the power relationships and the ways in which alliances were generated, friendships based on small gestures of affection such as sending a meme or sending food to someone through DiDi or Uber. Many of these activities occurred when many of the players did not know each other in person either, this can produce a surprise in anyone, for me it corroborated that we are at a time when our presence has been able to compress the space-time situation, overcoming -at least in these cases- the division between being connected or not.

Recording all these situations convinced me that I was already in the field. In fact, I began to notice that my habits changed: my sleeping hours were adjusted to those of the teams, I started consuming video game related content (streamers, castersI also began to resent spending so much time sitting: in some seasons I suffered from back pain that led me to consider buying an ergonomic chair, and some months I suffered from pain in my forearms due to a bad sitting posture. I started to worry more about how to set up my machine so that I could maintain an acceptable performance considering the long training sessions, I changed my monitor and bought some glasses that reflect the rays of the sun. uv because of eyestrain, then I bought professional headphones to improve the gaming experience, but also because the ones I had were hurting my ears. This socio-technical network helped me to keep better track of what was happening in training and made me realize that my body was more than present in this learning curve I was going through with the equipment.

Actually, for a while I had difficulty distinguishing when I was in the field and when I wasn't. The fact that my interlocutors saw me "connected" on WhatsApp all the time meant that my presence in the field was constant. The fact that my interlocutors saw me "connected" on WhatsApp all the time assumed that my presence on the field was constant, I thought a lot about how much I should record of all the exchanges that happened: was it relevant to write in my diary that a player wrote me at two in the morning for training, was it important to have a screenshot of the meme that was circulating in the team group that week, was it important to have a screenshot of the meme that was circulating in the team group that week? At first, as happens to many colleagues, everything seems interesting and worth recording, but little by little I noticed that my observation became more refined. Thus, my notes became much more accurate.

This process led me to reflect that fieldwork is actually a process of constant construction and although at the beginning it seems that we are faced with an endless cascade of information, eventually all this is arranged in a structure that responds to the needs of the research, especially when we write a report, a book chapter or an academic article (De Seta, 2020). Returning to the diary notes after a while would, in this sense, imply one more exercise of reconstructing the field and its possible reinterpretation.

It seems essential to me to think about all those other ways how we researchers put the body, and to emphasize that our displacements are no longer only spatial, but can also be temporal (Barley, 2018) and mediated by different digital technologies (Hine, 2015). This means that it is always open to think about other ways of constructing a presence in the field and how this changes our work of registration, in my case this is important if we consider that a practice such as videoplay is linked first and foremost to the body. Without a body there is no possibility of inhabiting any virtual world. It may seem that my experience is a frank contradiction to Park's idea and Wacquant's experience; although I have not literally "soiled my pants", my immersion in the field involved putting the body as a form of commitment to try to capture that "reality" that the players who collaborated with me lived.

An inherent inequality. Team hierarchy

Julieta Quirós (2015) narrates that Marcio Goldman used to say that fieldwork was a stage of the method to find what was not sought, it is clear that there is no pre-established route to know how to enter, stay and leave the field, let's add all the unforeseen circumstances in the ways we weave relationships in the field and we will end up with many more questions than certainties. In this section I will use two unexpected situations that led me to think about the importance of assuming a place in front of the teams, even if this was contradictory to my initial ideals and intentions. This is a subject that I had not given serious thought to until I found myself involved in a web of relationships that seemed contradictory and, to a certain extent, shocking.

In my first recruitment processes -which, by the way, used to make me a bit nervous- I tried to present myself with the naivety and curiosity of someone completely inexperienced, I was not interested in being seen as a specialist, but in being perceived as transparent about who I was, what I was doing there and what I could offer to the teams. As much as possible, I avoided talking about my academic credentials -except that of a psychologist- until I had passed all the filters, I was interested in being chosen for what I knew and where my weaknesses were considered.

In one of the teams the recruitment consisted of a first selection of profiles through Google Forms, then a group meeting and finally a personal interview through the video call service (Discord). If everything went well, you could move on to a trial phase that lasted a period of time established by the board of directors and then get a place in the sports organization. I was selected for the group meeting, in which the founder -who we will call H.- told us about the history of the team, the names it had had before, its vision, mission, the internal organization chart and the values that governed the sports organization. H. warned us that all this information was going to be important for the next phase, this produced a sudden silence among all the aspirants that I interpreted as a tension typical of the desire to be part of the team. The structure of the presentation was such that it gave the impression that we were applying for a job in some company and not so much for an amateur e-sports team.

After the presentation, H. would choose an applicant at random to go to a private room for an interview. I noticed that most of them were disappearing from the room, which meant that they had been eliminated from the process. When it was my turn, H. started asking me for the previous names of the team, fortunately I had written down everything and answered immediately without hesitation. In the interview I tried to emphasize my knowledge of psychology and how that could serve the team, H. completely ignored the subject because he was looking for one more question, after a silence he commented, "Here comes the question that everyone is wrong with, if you answer it right you are in... Why do you want to join the club?". I didn't understand why this question was supposed to be the hardest one, it was enough to explain your intentions. I started talking about what I wanted to learn and what I hoped to bring to the team, just as I was about to talk again about my background in psychology I was interrupted, "That's not the answer we were expecting, you're out."

I felt a lot of confusion, in fact, I remember my bewildered face on the screen. I tried to think what I had done or said wrong. Seeing my obfuscated face, H. told me that "the answer should start by saying that you were sure you wanted to be in and that's it." This only made me more confused. Frankly I couldn't see the logic, especially since the question started with a "why", I felt that H. was too sure of his position and somehow represented an authority figure that was difficult to negotiate with. I decided not to argue any more, I was not going to be able to join this team, but I was not losing anything by asking him for an interview for my research project.

As soon as I explained my objective and that the interview would be useful for my doctoral work, H.'s attitude quickly changed:

Hey, look... we don't take just anyone here, that's why I have to make these filters, but what you just said has put you back in the game. I think I'll put you on the administrative side, I'll need you to work closely with the coach and discuss any problems that come up in the team. I'll see you tomorrow at 9 p.m. for the next phase and of course, then we'll talk about the interview.

H. assigned me to the area he called "human capital", which consisted of attending to the needs of the players. Later that would lead me to become the team manager. I automatically obtained the rank of administrator in the video call service used by the team and received an email with an Excel file detailing my schedule (from 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.) and my functions. H. warned me that because I was inexperienced I would have extra work and tasks, my first responsibilities were to review a business administration book by Lourdes Münch and to deliver a weekly report to H. about the problems, tensions and other situations that I observed in the team.

At the beginning it seemed to me that everything was going well; however, I began to notice strange attitudes in the players. When I would connect to the room for the video call suddenly the players would be silent, when the trainings were over they would all disconnect from Discord and say goodbye, but I would find them connected in the video game. It was as if they were deliberately avoiding me. The fact that I was part of the staff I was being treated differently, with a certain distance, we were not on the same level. This seemed problematic to me because my intention was to be able to be with them as much time as possible and the opposite was happening, I could accompany them, but from the distance that the hierarchy of the organization chart allowed. Of course, this is an issue I never considered.

I dedicated some sessions to tell the players what my work in the team consisted of, as well as the academic objectives I had set myself, and instead of this bringing calm, it produced more concerns: "Are you going to write down everything we say, and what's so important about that or what, are you making a book about us? I discovered that the relationship of horizontality that I had idealized so much was not going to be possible so immediately, I knew that the presence of the researcher causes curiosity and doubt, but this was a completely different situation because it implied a series of hierarchical and power ties that I could not ignore.

As you can imagine, some players behaved differently - they talked less, said less profanity, obeyed the rules set by the coach - while they were connected. Over time I discovered that I had to play that role of authority, but that this had to work at specific times, training is a process with a particular rhythm and it was essential to understand the moments that make up a training session, at least so that they could distinguish between the team psychologist and the buddy with whom you could play and talk about anything. While they were training I avoided joking, laughing at their jokes and treated everyone with respect, I built a distance as that someone who is evaluating the performance of another; but once the training time was over I allowed myself to talk more freely, joke or play with them without the proper objective of the sport discipline.

Understanding the rhythm of the trainings to know how to be with my interlocutors was a difficult matter: during the first weeks I spent a lot of time in silence, observing, listening and taking a lot of notes of what was happening in the trainings. This routine changed when H. called my attention saying: "Hey, it really seems like you are not doing anything". I justified myself by saying that first I needed to familiarize myself with the routines, the players -which was not a lie-, but on the other hand I was trying to figure out how to build my presence with the players considering the symbolic burden of having a hierarchical rank in the team.

Over time, the players allowed me to join them in their casual conversations and so I began to listen to their way of being in the world: how their family and school life was, what they had eaten during the week, what they enjoyed about the game and what they disliked, the conversations were most interesting because they could discuss the goal of education, their future projects and the search for a job that they knew was going to be precarious. As we talked, it didn't matter whether we won or lost - as it did in training - but rather we immersed ourselves in the leisure and pleasure of spending time together. In these conversations I began to hear their opinions about how the team was supposed to function in a more honest way.

However, I would like to emphasize that being a doctoral student was the reason why I was considered again as someone worth having in the team and that had already created a situation of inequality with my interlocutors. This fact has one more reading, my presence was valuable for H. because it somehow brought the team closer to something he imagined as professional; in different occasions H. emphasized how important it was to have "prepared" people.

In fact, when H. requested my reports, he used to tell me in front of everyone that he should use the quoted apa and a template he had designed, because that would make what I was explaining there look more "scientific and serious". It was a document that aspired to an objectivity that was completely alien to me; there were also times when H. corrected my notes, adding or removing details in a way that sometimes seemed completely arbitrary to me. During that period I could not stop thinking about how my interlocutor was intervening in the way I was writing my field diary, and this was accompanied by a certain uneasiness. Being corrected so many times and at times being shown up in front of the players was a frustrating experience at times and one that used to discourage me. In retrospect I greatly enjoyed that exercise because it led me to reflect a lot on my way of observing, recording, but also interpreting what was happening every day.

Beyond what this experience meant to me, I began to be struck by the strong influence of imagining a "professional" team and everything that was done to achieve that imaginary; for example, starting with getting the team to be convinced that this was a "professional" team. the form of organizing an e-sports team: with professionals, manuals, hierarchies, missions, visions, organizational charts, evaluation processes, recruitment, reprimands. Everything looked serious and formal, the only thing missing was the money to solidify the professionalization itself.

Although the team never had an investor or a sponsor, the fact that the eventual presence of money was imagined seemed to articulate for some team members a sufficient reason to maintain all that order, necessary - of course - as in any other sports discipline. The point was that for other players there were other things more valuable than the pursuit of money; in fact, some players thought that the money would come as a bonus, the primary thing was to feel a passion for the game and to be able to enjoy the time shared with the team.

What is the value of training daily?

H.'s place in the team was somewhat confusing, he was part of the team, he was on the board, he designed the training plans, developed evaluation systems for the players and the boards, was in charge of the recruiting process, updated the vision, mission, organizational chart and wrote a training method that he kept secret throughout the time I was on his team. H. gave the impression of being a methodical person, everything that was done had to have a rationale or a rule; however, the players perceived the opposite, he was an impulsive player, who did not delegate responsibilities and had serious difficulties working as a team. He made many decisions unilaterally and the players did not know how to approach this with him, since that conversation always ended with the possibility of being sent off.

During this period of time I learned that H. had just finished studying Business Administration. Although H. expected to be considered a leader by his peers, he was actually getting the players to loathe the authority figure he represented; when I proposed to talk openly about it, H. complained that my perspective was a product of my inexperience in e-sports and that I did not know how to resolve these conflicts.

The turning point was that H. began to argue more frequently that everyone in the organization was a human resource who had to be willing to do whatever it took for the team to grow; from his perspective, the players had to be passionate enough to feed that hunger that would allow them to raise their level and grow professionally. For the players this vision was an exaggeration, at one point, one of the players told me: "How do you expect them to obey you? I mean, we are here for the fun of it, not to be nagged and bossed around...we are not paid to train...we are not paid players".

This disagreement within the team has led me to think about how a notion of what was valuable was constructed. What exactly did it mean to "be here for fun"? Somehow this difference implied a way of conceiving the use of time in relation to the game, sport and work based on the idea of one day being paid for being digital athletes. As we will be able to see, it is difficult to distinguish the boundaries between each concept in such a routine activity for gamers. When players conceive of playing time as part of a discipline in which energy, dedication and effort must be invested, it is making the underlying point that time must be put to good use; it seems to me that this involves conceiving of the idea that players connect not just because they want to have fun. This shift seems fundamental to me because it reflects a sense of value associated with time.

The issue of how value is established is not a trivial one, so understanding this dimension will allow us to understand the structures, hierarchies and discourses of sports organizations. Somehow, the - seemingly arbitrary - decision to establish value to a good or service involves considering a series of implicit assumptions about what is worthwhile. For David Graeber (2018) this is a radical theoretical concept because everything that human beings do, desire, feel and organize is associated with value or values, it is a notion that allows us to inquire into the preferences that players have, their relationships and interactions as they conceive of themselves as professional digital athletes.

The disagreement between H. and his players shows, in principle, two essential attitudes: on the one hand, the importance of the passion for the game as a strategy of disarticulation of its economic value and in which the accumulation of power or wealth is treated -apparently- with unconcern and, on the other hand, the certainty that the only way to enter the e-sports industry and climb in it is by assuming what M. Marzano (2011) calls neoliberal sensibility, understood as that risk calculation that openly seeks to accumulate wealth and power through social, cultural or economic capital. Sports organizations integrate a framework of principles with which their value is established, even when they do not speak openly and explicitly about it.

With the passage of time I learned that this is a naïve reading because it is centered solely on economic value as the central axis that articulates all interpretative possibilities. In reality, anthropological reflection on value is an unresolved issue. Graeber (2018) has already explained that we tend to easily confuse the sociological and economic sense of value when we refer to an object or activity. In some cases we are perhaps rather dealing with a reflection on the "appropriateness", "desirability" or importance of something and not on the establishment of a cost.

When teams are unable to agree on a meaning of what is valuable, this tension can end up separating the entire sports organization. This negotiation is often difficult and is a transition point that not many manage to cross, a good part of the cases of team dissolution that I recorded have at their core the question of where the value of what they do lies. This is an essential construct of meaning; players need to know that there is a purpose beyond simply connecting to have a good time, than training to make money or competing to somehow increase some kind of capital. Each member of the sports organization needs to know that what they do contributes to the growth of the team; Richard Sennett (2018) has explained that we all have a need to feel useful, to know that we serve a purpose and that we are good at doing it.

The value is made up of very diverse elements, for example, when they create their organizational charts with rules, hierarchies and types of relationships between their members, when they design daily training plans and establish a form of accompaniment for the players, which involves a type of care work that cannot be quantified. Also when together they imagine getting sponsorships and contracts that allow them to receive financial retribution, sometimes the valuable thing is to meet the players one admires and learn things together. At the same time, there is an aesthetic dimension to the game that produces a kind of pleasure that is proper to the experience of playing.

By this I mean to make it clear that value cannot be read solely in economic terms. We run the risk of misreading it when we try to understand the production of value in terms of how much money people earn -or lose- by doing something. In analytical terms this is problematic because it hinders our ability to conceptually distinguish play from sport and in parallel from work. However, it seems to me essential to recognize - at least in principle - that this transition is not total and that it involves many elements that blend simultaneously. I have thought that one possible way to imagine it is as a pendulum swinging between play, sport and work. That metaphor, which I have thought of calling the "pendulum of value," also allows us to note the difficulty of grasping the transitions, since they occur in a kind of continuum that is always in motion.

In essence I can say that when players find being on a team worthwhile it means that all of these elements are articulated and the pendulum swings back and forth. When the pendulum stops in one place - that of the game, sport or work - then team members begin to experience a certain loss of meaning: is it worth it to be scolded so much for something that originally gave me pleasure, how much longer should we put up with all these joints if we are not winning anything, why do we train so much if we are not entered in any tournaments, does it make sense to do the weekly training plans if the players are unmotivated, is there any point in doing the weekly training plans if the players are unmotivated?

Teams stay together because it is valuable to be there, some may stay together at least until something more valuable comes along: for some that means finding a new team, but it may also mean spending more time with friends, partners, family, or pursuing an academic or work activity. For this reason, it is unproductive to stay at the level of purely economic reading, because some things that are valuable to players and that define the way they make decisions go beyond the presence/absence of money.

By way of closing. A brief reinterpretation of failure

There are few cases of teams that start with a strong economic investment and infrastructure. Most e-sports teams start from nothing, joining the wills of many people who spontaneously integrate their concerns in the search to achieve something: from winning a tournament to becoming a brand that competes globally to obtain sponsorships. The economic reading, the one that limits us to see the calculations of risks and benefits to accumulate any form of capital, leads us to see a kind of learning curve almost always progressive and linear: players start at the amateur level, move to a semi-professional one and then become professional digital athletes.

Instead, my field experience showed me the importance of stumbles and failures in this process. At some point in my fieldwork I found it problematic to explain why players would abandon the projects they had built with so much effort and careful craftsmanship. Why would anyone abandon their own work, and more interestingly, why do some players continue to try to become digital athletes and start new teams? There is no conclusive answer, but we could say that in essence gamers are changing the meaning of what they consider valuable.

The experience of seeing a team spontaneously disappear, without further explanation, is usually a situation that discourages any initiative that players, coaches, analysts, physiotherapists or team psychologists may have. However, I noticed that players learn to improve different processes from these experiences of failure, which involves adjusting the way of establishing ties with others, reorganizing structures and hierarchies, negotiating other ways of delegating responsibilities, of course improving technical processes, for example, recruitment strategies, training, moderation and media management, etc. It is inevitable to think of the parallel that this has to do with ethnographic work, where the researcher also finds himself in a situation from which he must learn to adjust and change his ways of thinking, observing and recording. Achieving this involves going through a series of stumbles and errors typical of fieldwork.

This adaptation also implies a certain flexibility and reflexivity that must be maintained throughout the process, so that there is a certain capacity to think about our way of conducting ourselves in the field. There is nothing new in thinking of error as a source of knowledge, writing it down ends up making invisible all the sensations that imply unlearning what books teach us in order to rely more on what we find in the field.

The players, like the ethnographer, learn - ideally - from their stumbles to confront the ambiguous and paradoxical conditions that occur in the field in order to try to understand how others understand and inhabit the world. They unwittingly accomplish something unexpected: they end up learning more about themselves.

Bibliography

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Ivan Flores D. in Anthropological Sciences from the uam-Iztapalapa. Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla and at the School of Humanities and Education of the Tec de Monterrey. Interested in the study of digital cultures, technological appropriations and the presence of technologies in everyday life. His work has addressed the problem of methodologies mediated by the digital, especially in the case of ethnography, as well as in the process of construction of objects and theoretical frameworks for social research.