eSports Events Trend: A Promising Opportunity for Tourism Offerings

eSports events are a groundbreaking phenomenon worldwide. For this reason, this study aims to recognize the potential of eSports as an alternative for tourism events diversification in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Within the methodological framework of an exploratory-descriptive scope, it was proposed to analyze the conditions of eSports events and the tourist perception of them in the selected city. A survey was applied to 384 participants of eSports events (potential tourists), using video game rooms and player community networks throughout Latin America. The instrument used to collect data was a questionnaire available online for six months for further analysis. The principal findings in terms of quality performance of the event, perception of the event, destination image, and satisfaction revealed four vital indicators associated. Event staff, event atmosphere, hospitality, and good feelings about live attendance must be taken into consideration while designing a satisfactory experience to integrate into eSports into the city’s tourism offerings. Attendees also expressed their willingness to return to the city in the future. These results contribute to expanding the scientific literature on the evaluation and management of eSports events for other developing cities and countries.Fac. de Ciencias Políticas y SociologíaTRUEpu

Community in the Crowd: Motivations for Commenting on Twitch.tv Live Streams

Twitch.tv is a growing platform designed or interaction, communication, and socialization. It is space for content creators and viewers can to interact and build communities. Although it is not exclusively video game streams, Twitch.tv has become a major player in the industry. This study is a thematic analysis of comments made during live streams of video game content. The questions guiding this research were: What do viewers comment about on streams? What do these comments reveal about their motivations for participating? What are the variations between content types? After analyzing 9084 comments across 10 streams, what was found was that a major motivation for Twitch.tv viewers is the creation and maintenance of social bonds. Additionally, the building of hype was a large motivator. There was a small but widespread number of toxic comments. This research shows that Twitch.tv acts as a center for communities to grow around unique streamers and the potential significance of the platform itself

Investigating the role of eSport on the free to play business model: An analysis of league of legends economic success

ESport is a rising entertainment industry that has grown exponentially in the past decade. Competitions broadcasted online make eSport appealing for a large audience of video game enthusiasts, creating an opportunity for sponsorship deals. To this day, scholars have focused their efforts on understanding which are the motivations for people to watch eSport, and only scarce research has been made to measure how eSport consumption affects video game consumption. Filling this literature gap is the first objective of this study. Free-to-play games are a logical response to the shifts of the video game industry. A second objective is to investigate the determinants of free-to-play games profitability: while being free, these games generate their revenues through the sale of virtual items. League of Legends, a successful freeto- play game and leading player in the eSport industry, was selected as the context of this study. A quantitative questionnaire was distributed in eSport and League of Legends online communities. A PLS-SEM analysis revealed two motivations to watch eSport, (1) knowledge acquisition and (2) aesthetics. Such motivations drive the players’ perception of the game enjoyability and ease of use, this study being the first to establish these links. The model also confirms that customer loyalty predicts purchase intention of virtual items. Findings carry implications for a wide range of eSport and video game industry stakeholders and emphasize the importance of mentoring novices and rewarding the loyalty of existing players.O eSport é uma indústria de entretenimento em ascensão que cresceu exponencialmente na última década. As competições transmitidas online tornam o eSport apelativo para uma grande audiência de entusiastas de videojogos, criando uma oportunidade para importantes patrocínios. Até hoje, as investigações têm-se focado na compreensão de quais são as motivações para as pessoas assistirem ao eSport, e foram feitos poucos estudos para medir como o consumo de eSport pode afetar o consumo de videojogos. O primeiro objetivo desta tese é preencher esta lacuna na literatura. Um segundo objetivo é investigar os determinantes da rentabilidade dos jogos free-to-play: jogos gratuitos que geram as suas receitas através da venda de itens virtuais. Com esse propósito, esta tese foca-se no caso do League of Legends, um jogo free-to-play bastante popular na indústria de eSport. Um questionário quantitativo aplicado nas comunidades online de eSport e League of Legends foi analisado utilizando equações estruturais PLS-SEM e revelou duas motivações para assistir ao eSport, (1) aquisição de conhecimento e (2) estética. Estas duas motivações impulsionam a perceção dos jogadores sobre a capacidade de utilização do jogo, sendo este estudo o primeiro a estabelecer estas ligações. O modelo confirma ainda que a fidelização do cliente prevê a intenção de compra de itens virtuais. As descobertas têm implicações para uma vasta gama de intervenientes da indústria de eSport e videojogos e enfatizam a importância de orientar os novos jogadores e recompensar a lealdade dos jogadores existentes

Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch

This Open Access book provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly developing esport phenomenon by examining one of its contemporary flagship titles, Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016), through three central themes and from a rich variety of research methods and perspectives. As a game with more than 40 million individual players, an annual international World Cup, and a franchised professional league with teams from Canada, China, Europe, South Korea, and the US, Overwatch provides a multifaceted perspective to the cultural, social, and economic topics associated with the development of esports, which has begun to attract attention from both commercial and academic audiences. The book starts with an introduction chapter to Overwatch and esports engagement in general, co-authored by the editors. This is followed by 15 unique chapters from scholars within the field of game cultures and esports, representing ten different nationalities. The contributions construct thematic sections that divide the book into three parts: Players, Diverse Audiences? and Fan & Fiction Work. As such, the parts provide a wide-ranging overview of esport engagement, thus disclosing the phenomenon’s cross-cultural, transmedial, and interconnected relations that have not been probed earlier in a single anthology

Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch

This Open Access book provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly developing esport phenomenon by examining one of its contemporary flagship titles, Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016), through three central themes and from a rich variety of research methods and perspectives. As a game with more than 40 million individual players, an annual international World Cup, and a franchised professional league with teams from Canada, China, Europe, South Korea, and the US, Overwatch provides a multifaceted perspective to the cultural, social, and economic topics associated with the development of esports, which has begun to attract attention from both commercial and academic audiences. The book starts with an introduction chapter to Overwatch and esports engagement in general, co-authored by the editors. This is followed by 15 unique chapters from scholars within the field of game cultures and esports, representing ten different nationalities. The contributions construct thematic sections that divide the book into three parts: Players, Diverse Audiences? and Fan & Fiction Work. As such, the parts provide a wide-ranging overview of esport engagement, thus disclosing the phenomenon’s cross-cultural, transmedial, and interconnected relations that have not been probed earlier in a single anthology

Sports in Digital Era

The thesis's primary purpose is to demonstrate the growth of the digital era on the sports industry for awareness and better management. Moreover, it aims to explain the digital technology revolution and its effect on physical activities and sports. The paper presents a social analysis of sports regarding the effects of the IV Industrial Revolution, driven by an unprecedented level of development in materials sciences, digital technology, and biology. The future views on the evolution of the sports industry and options for the sports manager in the phase of digital transition are illustrated. The conclusion summarizes the implications and represents the direction of the sports industry.O objetivo desta tese é demonstrar o crescimento da era digital na indrústia desportiva para a consciencialização e uma melhor gestão. Além disso, visa explicar a revolução tecnológica digital e a sua influência na atividade física e desporto. O documento apresenta uma análise social do desporto em relação aos efeitos da IV Revolução Industrial, impulsionada pelo sem precedente nível de desenvolvimento nas ciências materiais, tecnologia digital e biologia. O futuro da evolução da indústria do desporto e as opções dos gestores desportivos na fase de transição do digital. A conclusão resume as implicações e reflete a direção da indústria do desporto

Moment-to-moment Engagement Prediction through the Eyes of the Observer: PUBG Streaming on Twitch

Is it possible to predict moment-to-moment gameplay engagement based solely on game telemetry? Can we reveal engaging moments of gameplay by observing the way the viewers of the game behave? To address these questions in this paper, we reframe the way gameplay engagement is defined and we view it, instead, through the eyes of a game's live audience. We build prediction models for viewers' engagement based on data collected from the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as obtained from the Twitch streaming service. In particular, we collect viewers' chat logs and in-game telemetry data from several hundred matches of five popular streamers (containing over 100,000 game events) and machine learn the mapping between gameplay and viewer chat frequency during play, using small neural network architectures. Our key findings showcase that engagement models trained solely on 40 gameplay features can reach accuracies of up to 80% on average and 84% at best. Our models are scalable and generalisable as they perform equally well within- and across-streamers, as well as across streamer play styles.Comment: Version accepted for the Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2020 - Malt

The Labor of Play: the Political Economy of Computer Game Culture

This dissertation questions the relationship between computer game culture and ideologies of neoliberalism and financialization. It questions the role computer games play in cultivating neoliberal practices and how the industry develops games and systems making play and work indistinguishable activities. Chapter 1 examines how computer game inculcate players into neoliberal practice through play. In chapter 2, the project shows Blizzard Entertainment systematically redevelops their games to encourage perpetual play aimed at increasing the consumption of digital commodities and currencies. Chapter 3 considers the role of esports, or professional competitive computer game play, to disperse neoliberal ideologies amongst nonprofessional players. Chapter 4 examines the streaming platform Twitch and the transformation of computer gameplay into a consumable commodity. This chapter examines Twitch’s systems designed at making production and consumption inseparable practices. The dissertation concludes by examining the economic, conceptual, and theoretical collapses threatening game culture and the field of game studies