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Moment-to-moment Engagement Prediction through the Eyes of the Observer: PUBG Streaming on Twitch

Published: 17 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Is it possible to predict moment-to-moment gameplay engagement based solely on game telemetry? Can we reveal engaging moments of gameplay by observing the way the viewers of the game behave? To address these questions in this paper, we reframe the way gameplay engagement is defined and we view it, instead, through the eyes of a game’s live audience. We build prediction models for viewers’ engagement based on data collected from the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds as obtained from the Twitch streaming service. In particular, we collect viewers’ chat logs and in-game telemetry data from several hundred matches of five popular streamers (containing over 100,000 game events) and machine learn the mapping between gameplay and viewer chat frequency during play, using small neural network architectures. Our key findings showcase that engagement models trained solely on 40 gameplay features can reach accuracies of up to 80% on average and 84% at best. Our models are scalable and generalisable as they perform equally well within- and across-streamers, as well as across streamer play styles.

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  • (2024)Ethics and Transparency in Game DataCompanion Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3665463.3678859(466-470)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Gender and Racial/Ethnic Bias Against Video Game Streamers: Comparing Perceived Gameplay Skill and Viewer EngagementProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3650009(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
  • (2023)Multiplayer Tension In the Wild: A Hearthstone CaseProceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3582437.3582440(1-9)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
September 2020
804 pages
ISBN:9781450388078
DOI:10.1145/3402942
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 17 September 2020

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Author Tags

  1. Machine learning
  2. PUBG
  3. artificial neural networks
  4. battle royale games
  5. engagement
  6. streaming
  7. viewer modelling

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Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Ethics and Transparency in Game DataCompanion Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3665463.3678859(466-470)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Gender and Racial/Ethnic Bias Against Video Game Streamers: Comparing Perceived Gameplay Skill and Viewer EngagementProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3650009(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
  • (2023)Multiplayer Tension In the Wild: A Hearthstone CaseProceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3582437.3582440(1-9)Online publication date: 12-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Predicting Player Engagement in Tom Clancy's The Division 2: A Multimodal Approach via Pixels and Gamepad ActionsProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3577190.3614203(488-497)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
  • (2023)The Pixels and Sounds of Emotion: General-Purpose Representations of Arousal in GamesIEEE Transactions on Affective Computing10.1109/TAFFC.2021.306087714:1(680-693)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
  • (2023)Affective Game Computing: A SurveyProceedings of the IEEE10.1109/JPROC.2023.3315689111:10(1423-1444)Online publication date: Oct-2023
  • (2023)Estimated Twitch Streamer Revenue Using Linear Regression Algorithm2023 5th International Conference on Cybernetics and Intelligent System (ICORIS)10.1109/ICORIS60118.2023.10352194(1-5)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2023
  • (2022)The Arousal Video Game AnnotatIoN (AGAIN) DatasetIEEE Transactions on Affective Computing10.1109/TAFFC.2022.318885113:4(2171-2184)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
  • (2021)PUBG Winner Ranking Prediction using R Interface ‘h2o’ Scalable Machine Learning Platform2021 International Conference on Emerging Smart Computing and Informatics (ESCI)10.1109/ESCI50559.2021.9396823(300-305)Online publication date: 5-Mar-2021
  • (2021)Towards General Models of Player Experience: A Study Within Genres2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9618902(01-08)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2021
  • Show More Cited By

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