eSports Mastery Research III

Since I started the Game Design MSc at Full Sail University I have been interested in the eSports industry. I have analyzed articles, videos and books on game design, eSports and other relevant topics. Some of the biggest contributions as foundation for the future direction of this research are: The model of experience economy value co-creation (Seo, 2013) and concepts like the gamer-spectator (Burroughs & Rama, 2015), the spectator ecosystem, and information asymmetry (Cheung & Huang, 2011).

In general, eSports can be categorized in MOBAs, Shooters, and Fighting games (EEDAR, 2015), each category having their own subgenres and specific audiences. Different events are held yearlong, official and fan-organized (Ho, 2017), to celebrate the fans love for these games. There is a risk on the eSports business going stagnant, because of spectator fatigue, lack of novel games or the game companies losing control of the events to the content creators. The works examined centered on one aspect of the whole experience, either one game, one genre, spectating and streaming,among the most relevant. Using those works as foundation the following three steps should be next. First, expand on EEDAR’s (2015) classification adding categories for Real Time Strategy (RTS) games and hybrid games like Rocket League, and subcategories for the most popular games with some examples. Second, using the previously described background, build a framework to analyze those games and to extract from them a set of heuristics for the design of eSports experiences. Third, the creation of a questionnaire is needed to be completed by players and spectators alike to validate the results from the previous. The result of this work will be a tool for the design of eSports as Spectated Competitive Videogames.

References

Burroughs, B., & Rama, P. (2015). The eSports Trojan Horse: Twitch and Streaming Futures. Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, 8(2), 1-5.

Cheung, G., & Huang, J. (2011). Starcraft from the Stands: Understanding the Game Spectator. CHI 11, Retrieved from http://jeffhuang.com/Final_StarcraftSpectator_CHI11.pdf

EEDAR, . (2015). eSports Consumer Analysis Whitepaper. In Electronic Entertainment Design and Research. Retrieved from www.eedar.com

Ho, B. (2017). Spectating the rift: A study into eSports spectatorship [Electronic version]. eSports Yearbook (2015/16), 9-35.

Seo, Y. (2013). Electronic sports: A new marketing landscape of the experience economy. Journal of Marketing Management, 29(13-14), 1542-1560.