The Enhanced Games: a timely injection for the International Olympic Committee.

The Enhanced Games, a privately funded sporting megaevent aspiring to rival the Olympic Games, have garnered significant media attention since its public inception in 2023. This attention has primarily been driven by the Enhanced Games' embrace of performance-enhancing drugs. Lost in the public fixation on the event's green-lit drug-use, however, is the fact that the Enhanced Games distance themselves from current Olympic standards in numerous ways beyond drug-policies alone.

Expressive Avatars: Vitality in Virtual Worlds.

Critics have argued that human-controlled avatar interactions fail to facilitate the kinds of expressivity and social understanding afforded by our physical bodies. We identify three claims meant to justify the supposed expressive limits of avatar interactions compared to our physical interactions. First, "The Limited Expressivity Claim": avatars have a more limited expressive range than our physical bodies.

Both Physical and Virtual: On Immediacy in Esports.

This article strives to make novel headway in the debate concerning esports' relationship to sports by focusing on the relationship between esports and physicality. More precisely, the aim of this article is to critically assess the claim that esports fails to be sports because it is never properly "direct" or "immediate" compared to physical sports. To do so, I focus on the account of physicality presented by Jason Holt, who provides a theoretical framework meant to justify the claim that esports is never properly immediate and therefore never sports.

Social bodies in virtual worlds: Intercorporeality in Esports.

As screen-based virtual worlds have gradually begun facilitating more and more of our social interactions, some researchers have argued that the virtual worlds of these interactions do not allow for embodied social understanding. The aim of this article is to examine exactly the possibility of this by looking to esports practitioners' experiences of interacting with each other during performance. By engaging in an integration of qualitative research methodologies and phenomenology, we investigate the actual first-person experiences of interaction in the virtual worlds of the popular team-based esports practices Counter Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends.