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

Hundreds of thousands of spectators use Twitch.tv to watch The International, a Dota 2 eSports tournament and communicate in massive chats. In this paper, we analyse crowd behavior in these chats, disentangle features of social communication, such as contextual meanings of emojis and short messages. We apply structural topic modelling and cross-correlation analysis to investigate topical and temporal patterns of chat messages and their relation to in-game events. We show that in-game events drive the communication in the massive chat and define its emergent topical structure to a various extent. Following the discussion in communication and social computing literature, we discuss these findings in the framework of analysis of communication of physical sports crowds and outline some limitations of the 'stadium' metaphor, suggesting a complementary metaphor of 'sports bar' as a useful analytical and design device.