Abstract
Esports is a booming new industry, full of a wide variety of players, games, sponsors, and tournaments. As the industry grows, audiences get bigger and bigger, with hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world watching their favorite Esport. With so much money and advertising deals on the line, Esport tournaments cannot afford to be boring. Esports need to be complex, interesting, and require vast amounts of skill. This paper aims to find a relationship between the complexity of an Esport and that Esport's popularity, to test whether or not complexity is a sufficient predictor for popularity. Due to the lack of resources and previous research, this paper aims to be a preliminary study on matters of complexity. For this paper, game theory concepts have been applied to create models to estimate game complexity in three different ways, and each was tested as a predictor for popularity. The first model is called the game state model, the second model is called the moment to moment decision model, and the third model is called the information model. A regression line was calculated for each model comparing the calculated complexity vs the game's popularity, and results were inconclusive. In the discussion section, the author details further steps for research on Esports and complexity that can be gained from this preliminary study.
Included in
Popularity vs Complexity in Esports Games
Esports is a booming new industry, full of a wide variety of players, games, sponsors, and tournaments. As the industry grows, audiences get bigger and bigger, with hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world watching their favorite Esport. With so much money and advertising deals on the line, Esport tournaments cannot afford to be boring. Esports need to be complex, interesting, and require vast amounts of skill. This paper aims to find a relationship between the complexity of an Esport and that Esport's popularity, to test whether or not complexity is a sufficient predictor for popularity. Due to the lack of resources and previous research, this paper aims to be a preliminary study on matters of complexity. For this paper, game theory concepts have been applied to create models to estimate game complexity in three different ways, and each was tested as a predictor for popularity. The first model is called the game state model, the second model is called the moment to moment decision model, and the third model is called the information model. A regression line was calculated for each model comparing the calculated complexity vs the game's popularity, and results were inconclusive. In the discussion section, the author details further steps for research on Esports and complexity that can be gained from this preliminary study.