Mapping Design Spaces for Audience Participation in Game Live Streaming

Abstract

Live streaming sites such as Twitch ofer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and afect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community-to explore, refect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the frst to articulate such a lens, and to provide a refective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and refect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and refective tool.

StoryChat: Designing a Narrative-Based Viewer Participation Tool for Live Streaming Chatrooms

“…Apart from games being directly designed for viewers, viewer participation can occur in a variety of other ways, such as chatting via text or special emoticons [68,136], gifting [70], clicking likes or hearts [50], polling [28,86], subscribing to streaming channels [65], moderating chatrooms [122], or playing games with a streamer in video game stream [86]. Recognizing the growing attention that has been devoted to viewer participation techniques, researchers have also begun to investigate viewer experiences and interaction [22,132], as well as the difficulties associated with designing these viewer participation tools [124,133]. One of the challenges encountered in designing these viewer participation tools is the negative interpersonal interaction occurred in the community [94,124,133].…”

“…In recent years, research on viewer participation has shifted the focus from traditional media to live streaming scenarios [68,124,132] and from passive spectatorship to active participation [129,136]. As a result, several researchers and live streaming platforms, such as Twitch, have suggested various viewer participation techniques to improve interactivity and promote social interaction [22,58,68,124,133]. Some approaches have attempted to improve the viewerstreamer interaction by designing tools to support emerging forms of community gameplay.…”

“…Recognizing the growing attention that has been devoted to viewer participation techniques, researchers have also begun to investigate viewer experiences and interaction [22,132], as well as the difficulties associated with designing these viewer participation tools [124,133]. One of the challenges encountered in designing these viewer participation tools is the negative interpersonal interaction occurred in the community [94,124,133]. To address this [124], our research aims to design a viewer participation tool that can both increase viewer engagement and promote prosocial behavior or proactively reduce negative comments in a live streaming scenario.…”

“…Researchers have also developed a variety of viewer participation tools for live streaming platforms in order to improve interaction and engagement within the community via various new communication channels [88,124]. However, a concerning side effect of these tools is the rising occurrence of negative behaviors in the community [94,124,133], which means that harmful, humiliating, profane, and toxic comments are spread through the live streaming chatroom, indicating the need for moderation of these viewer participation tools as negative comments are likely to reduce viewers' engagement [32]. Although many live streaming platforms have incorporated systemic moderation methods with human moderators, the growing scale of live streaming communities makes it increasingly difficult for platforms to regulate large quantities of comments efficiently [57,74,96].…”

The Design Space of Livestreaming Equipment Setups: Tradeoffs, Challenges, and Opportunities

“…Segel and Heer analyzed the content of 58 interactive visual storytelling webpages (e.g., New York Times interactive articles) to formulate a design space of narrative visualizations [52] consisting of 7 dimensions, including transition types, ordering, and highlighting. Striner et al analyzed design process documents produced in a university gaming course to formulate a design space of audience participation needs for Twitch gaming livestreams [56], with dimensions such as agency, pacing, and community.…”