When Game Becomes Life

Abstract

Online gaming franchises such as World of Tanks, Defense of the Ancients, and StarCraft have attracted hundreds of millions of users who, apart from playing the game, also socialize with each other through gaming and viewing gamecasts. As a form of User Generated Content (UGC), gamecasts play an important role in user entertainment and gamer education. They deserve the attention of both industrial partners and the academic communities, corresponding to the large amount of revenue involved and the interesting research problems associated as UGC sites and social networks. Although previous work has put much effort in analyzing general UGC sites such as YouTube, relatively little is known about the gamecast sharing sites. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive study of gamecast sharing sites, including commercial streaming-based sites such as Amazon's Twitch.tv and community-maintained replay-based sites such as WoTreplays. We collect and share a novel dataset on WoTreplays that includes more than 380 thousand game replays, shared by over 60 thousand creators with over 1.9 million gamers. Together with an earlier published dataset on Twitch.tv, we investigate basic characteristics of gamecast sharing sites, and we analyze the activities of their creators and spectators. Among our results, we find that (i) WoTreplays and Twitch.tv are both fast-consumed repositories, with millions of gamecasts being uploaded, viewed, and soon forgotten; (ii) both the gamecasts and the creators exhibit highly skewed popularities, with a significant heavy tail phenomenon; and (iii) the upload and the download preference of creators and spectators are different: while the creators emphasize their individual skills, the spectators appreciate team-wise tactics. Our findings provide important knowledge for infrastructure and service improvement, for example, in the design of proper resource allocation mechanisms that consider future gamecasting, and in the tuning of incentive policies that further help player retention.

Exploring the learning potential of online gaming communities: An application of the Game Communities of Inquiry Scale

“…Nakandala et al (2017) explored social media discourses about digital entertainment with an emphasis on gender, pointing to a significant objectification against women. Jia et al (2016) found that community-maintained replay-based sites about gaming work as important outlets for discussing and appreciating group strategies related to games. Finally, Reitman et al (2020) directed a literature review about esports highlighting the importance of community factors in player's experiences with video games.…”

Mapping Design Spaces for Audience Participation in Game Live Streaming

“…helpers vs. power seekers) in participatory games can further shape community identity [69]. Thoughtfully designing for these roles is particularly important because streamers and viewers favor diferent relationship dynamics; content creators often focus on their individual skills, whereas viewers appreciate team dynamics [41]. Moderators enjoy a special role in the streaming community, and are highly valued by both streamers and viewers [69].…”

Exploring the Emerging Domain of Research on Video Game Live Streaming in Web of Science: State of the Art, Changes and Trends

“…A substantial number of these papers have their roots in the discipline of psychology, which has a long tradition of developing and using models to explain behavior [59,60,65]. The subdomains focused on the platform and the transmission are characterized by the use of more heterogeneous methods, although the former stands out for the inclusion of descriptive statistics and techniques for constructing graphs [87][88][89][90][91][92], and the latter for compiling information through application programming interfaces (APIs), both for Twitch [73,[93][94][95][96][97] and other platforms such as Douyu [98]. The collection of information through public APIs is spreading to other subdomains (Streamer [99] Riot Games API; Receiver [100] Twitch API; and Platform [87,89,91] Twitch API), opening up future research opportunities if simultaneous information about the streamer, receiver, and platform can be connected.…”

“…The term Twitch features particularly strongly in the subdomain or specialization focused on analyzing platforms. In relation to this node, comparisons with other streaming platforms [88] have been carried out, subcultures of players and viewers have been identified [89], and shared patterns of media consumption and production have been analyzed, [52] as well as the similarities and differences with fastconsumed repositories [90] or with other types of "static" content distribution platforms such as YouTube and Netflix [91]. In addition, Twitch has served as a reference to analyze traffic patterns [92], examine its business model and impact on the video game industry [8], explore its potential in terms of marketing [109] and education [71], and study its content policies [119].…”