Between an Arena and a Sports Bar: Online Chats of eSports Spectators

ESports tournaments, such as Dota 2’s The International (TI), attract millions of spectators to watch broadcasts on online streaming platforms, to communicate, and to share their experience and emotions. Unlike traditional streams, tournament broadcasts lack a streamer figure to which spectators can appeal directly. Using topic modelling and crosscorrelation analysis of more than three million messages from 86 games of TI7, we uncover main topical and temporal patterns of communication. First, we disentangle contextual meanings of emotes and memes, which play a salient role in communication, and show a meta-topics semantic map of streaming slang. Second, our analysis shows a prevalence of the event-driven game communication during tournament broadcasts and particular topics associated with the event peaks. Third, we show that “copypasta” cascades and other related practices, while occupying a significant share of messages, are strongly associated with periods of lower in-game activity. Based on the analysis, we propose design ideas to support different modes of spectators’ communication.