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. Our analysis discloses how the practitioners’ interactions essentially depend on intercorporeality – understood as a form of reciprocity of bodily intentionality between the players. This is an intercorporeality that is present throughout the players’ performance, but which especially comes to the front when they engage in feinting. Acknowledging the intercorporeality integral to at least some esports practices helps fuzzying the sharp division between virtuality and embodied social understanding. Doing so highlights the fluidity of our embodied condition, and it raises interesting questions concerning the possibility of yet other forms of embodied sociality in a wider range of virtual formats in the world.

随着基于屏幕的虚拟世界逐渐开始促进我们越来越多的社交互动，一些研究人员认为，这些互动的虚拟世界不允许具体的社会理解。本文的目的是通过研究电子竞技从业者在表演过程中相互交流的经历来准确检验这种可能性。通过整合定性研究方法和现象学，我们调查了流行的基于团队的电子竞技实践反恐精英：全球攻势和英雄联盟的虚拟世界中互动的实际第一人称体验。我们的分析揭示了从业者的互动本质上是如何依赖于身体间的——被理解为玩家之间身体意向的一种互惠形式。这是一种贯穿球员表演的身体内部，尤其是在他们进行佯攻时。承认至少在一些电子竞技实践中不可或缺的实体间性有助于模糊虚拟性和具体社会理解之间的尖锐划分。这样做突出了我们具身状态的流动性，并提出了有趣的问题，即在世界上更广泛的虚拟形式中，还有其他形式的具身社会性的可能性。