"Beautiful Forcefields!" : Promotional Metadiscursive Language in eSports Commentaries

Sammanfattning: For an eSports commentator, the ability to promote the rivalry between the competitors is just as important as fast and accurate commentary. Thus, it is of interest how an experienced commentator achieves this promotional language per some theoretical framework. Using the relatively new and unexplored linguistic field of promotional metadiscourse the quality of commentary can be evaluated quantifiably. Thus, this paper investigates the promotional language used by accomplished eSports commentators, in contrast to inexperienced novices, in the game StarCraft II. This is achieved with a lexical analysis of two StarCraft II commentaries using categories of promotional language previously identified in press releases. Experienced commentators were found to have a much more extensive and varied vocabulary than their inexperienced counterparts, adopting stronger evaluative adjectives and adverbs, as well as metaphorical language, in their commentaries. After comparing the commentaries with each other, the comments of two experienced commentators were compared. In this analysis, the same results were found in regards to commentator experience, as the less experienced commentator in this team featured less varied and weaker evaluative language than his more experienced co-commentator, yet more varied and evaluative than the novices. This paper shows that metadiscursive analysis methods can be fruitfully applied to non-academic discourses, as well as shining a light on the entertainment genre of eSports as a subject for further study.