The domesticating role of memes in esports cultures

The circulation of online memes sits at the intersection of politics and play (Mortensen and Neumayer 2023), particularly in online gaming cultures. This paper explores how memes often arise from moments of discontent in esports communities, where creating and referencing memes is a playful and culturally unifying activity. Politically though, playing with memes obscures the original source of discontent and furthers existing power relations. Through framing the obscuring of discontent via memes as part of a ‘domestication’ of fan resistance (Stanfill 2019; Bollmer and Tillerson 2025), a process that does not challenge the power relations of these long-standing games as a service models, this paper posits that memes serve a governing role in the games industry that upholds the status quo. Utilising examples of discontent turned memes from three prominent esports titles, context is provided for the transitions discontent undergoes as it is played with by a community and the political role these fan expressions play.