Narrative Bytes

Abstract

Esports -video games played competitively that are broadcast to large audiences -are a rapidly growing new form of mainstream entertainment. Esports borrow from traditional TV, but are a qualitatively different genre, due to the high flexibility of content capture and availability of detailed gameplay data. Indeed, in esports, there is access to both real-time and historical data about any action taken in the virtual world. This aspect motivates the research presented here, the question asked being: can the information buried deep in such data, unavailable to the human eye, be unlocked and used to improve the live broadcast compilations of the events? In this paper, we present a largescale case study of a production tool called Echo, which we developed in close collaboration with leading industry stakeholders. Echo uses live and historic match data to detect extraordinary player performances in the popular esport Dota 2, and dynamically translates interesting data points into audience-facing graphics. Echo was deployed at one of the largest yearly Dota 2 tournaments, which was watched by 25 million people. An analysis of 40 hours of video, over 46,000 live chat messages, and feedback of 98 audience members showed that Echo measurably affected the range and quality of storytelling, increased audience engagement, and invoked rich emotional response among viewers.

Time to Die 2: Improved in-game death prediction in Dota 2

“…Despite the rising popularity of esports establishing the state-of-theart is challenging due to commercial confidentiality resulting in many systems and findings being unavailable to the public. That said, there are emerging trends in academic esports research across a broad range of topics and disciplines including; AI, analytics, psychology, education, visualisation (Block et al, 2018), ethnography, marketing, management and business, e.g. Hamari and Sjöblom (2017), Schubert et al (2016), Seo (2013), Xue, Pu, Hawzen, and Newman (2016), Yang, Harrison, and Roberts (2014) and Yannakakis (2012).…”

Designing Visual Markers for Continuous Artificial Intelligence Support

“…Similarly, recent work in esports presents the use of visual overlays to e.g. compare an individual's performance against historical data or to explain strategies as they unfold [5].…”

Research on the Overall Architecture and Application of E-Sports Big Data

“…The data application on the event side is based on the interpretation of game information and data, so as to make scientific decisions on event communication and star player creation, so that the audience can have a more intuitive event experience. Block et al (2018) designed an analysis tool based on Dota 2 event -"Echo", which can statistically analyze the performance data of athletes, and transform the dynamic data points into a graphic form easy to understand for presentation, so as to improve the audience's watching experience.…”