Figure 1 - uploaded by Yubo Kou
Content may be subject to copyright.
Screenshot of League of Legends. LoL affords a variety of ways for players to express their emotions. For example, they could type in the chat functions to express their emotions. They could also use emote, a type of sticker floating on their in-game characters. In the middle of Figure 1, there is a wheel of five emotes that the player could choose one from.
Source publication
Today eSports gaming is enjoying growing popularity in the world and much attention from various research areas, including CSCW. eSports gaming is a highly competitive environment commonly associated with negative emotions such as anxiety and stress. However, little attention has been paid to emotion regulation in eSports gaming. In this study, we...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... main gameplay mode in LoL is a match between two five-player teams, the blue and red teams. Two teams compete on the map called "Summoner's Rift." Figure 1 shows the beginning of a match. A match usually lasts 20-40 minutes. ...
Context 2
... character gets stronger by gaining experience points to level up, and obtaining gold to purchase in-game equipment by killing non-player characters (NPC) or opponent players. Figure 1 shows the beginning of a match where three players on the blue team are waiting to kill an NPC that will spawn soon. ...
Citations
... Through the observation and analysis of players' actions, decisions, and reactions, researchers can gain profound insights into user needs, psychology, and behavioral patterns. These insights are highly valuable for the design and evaluation of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Among these game, Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games have garnered substantial attention in the Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) community due to their high level of competitiveness and appeal to spectators. ...
The multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre has gained significant popularity and economic success, attracting considerable research interest within the Human-Computer Interaction community. Enhancing the gaming experience requires a deep understanding of player behavior, and a crucial aspect of MOBA games is matchmaking, which aims to assemble teams of comparable skill levels. However, existing matchmaking systems often neglect important factors such as players' position preferences and team assignment, resulting in imbalanced matches and reduced player satisfaction. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework called CUPID, which introduces a novel process called ``re-matchmaking'' to optimize team and position assignments to improve both fairness and player satisfaction. CUPID incorporates a pre-filtering step to ensure a minimum level of matchmaking quality, followed by a pre-match win-rate prediction model that evaluates the fairness of potential assignments. By simultaneously considering players' position satisfaction and game fairness, CUPID aims to provide an enhanced matchmaking experience. Extensive experiments were conducted on two large-scale, real-world MOBA datasets to validate the effectiveness of CUPID. The results surpass all existing state-of-the-art baselines, with an average relative improvement of 7.18% in terms of win prediction accuracy. Furthermore, CUPID has been successfully deployed in a popular online mobile MOBA game. The deployment resulted in significant improvements in match fairness and player satisfaction, as evidenced by critical Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) metrics covering usability, accessibility, and engagement, observed through A/B testing. To the best of our knowledge, CUPID is the first re-matchmaking system designed specifically for large-scale MOBA games.
... Methodology. In this paper, we set out to study bullet chats in esports with a focus on League of Legends (LoL) in China, where LoL is one of the most popular esports games in the world, and China has the largest esports market and most active bullet chat users (Kou and Gui 2020;Gough 2022Gough , 2023aHe et al. 2021). Concretely, during an entire game season of LoL, we collect 12,902,940 and 8,105,173 bullet chats from the official LoL livestreaming rooms on two mainstream platforms, Bilibili and Huya, respectively. ...
Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games and has attracted more than 530 million audiences worldwide. To watch esports, people utilize online livestreaming platforms. Recently, a novel interaction method, namely "bullet chats," has been introduced on these platforms. Different from conventional comments, bullet chats are scrolling comments posted by audiences that are synchronized to the livestreaming timeline, enabling audiences to share and communicate their immediate perspectives. The real-time nature of bullet chats, therefore, brings a new perspective to esports analysis. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the bullet chats for esports, focusing on one of the most popular video games, i.e., League of Legends (LoL). Specifically, we collect 21 million bullet chats of LoL from Jan. 2023 to Mar. 2023 across two mainstream platforms (Bilibili and Huya). By performing quantitative analysis, we reveal how the quantity and toxicity of bullet chats distribute (and change) w.r.t. three aspects, i.e., the season, the team, and the match. Our findings show that teams with higher rankings tend to attract a greater quantity of bullet chats, and these chats are often characterized by a higher degree of toxicity. We then utilize topic modeling to identify topics among bullet chats. Interestingly, we find that a considerable portion of topics (14.14% on Bilibili and 22.94% on Huya) discuss themes beyond the game, including genders, entertainment stars, non-esports athletes, and so on. Besides, by further modeling topics on toxic bullet chats, we find hateful speech targeting different social groups, ranging from professions, regions, etc. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first measurement of bullet chats on esports livestreaming. We believe our study can shed light on esports research from the perspective of bullet chats.
... software programs or policy documents). According to Kou and Gui (2020), AT assumes that users would actively explore the tools' 'affordances as well as internal working in order to use the tools properly and achieve the desired outcomes' (102:8). In the context of generative AI's implementation in HRD, this means that users would attempt to both understand how AI could be used to improve their performance in various stages of their work, and to understand the inner workings of the tool, unpacking the proverbial 'black box'. ...
... In the context of generative AI's implementation in HRD, this means that users would attempt to both understand how AI could be used to improve their performance in various stages of their work, and to understand the inner workings of the tool, unpacking the proverbial 'black box'. Kou and Gui (2020) explained that AT helps to analyse work at three layers: a layer of activity directed at an object; actions that are constituent parts of the activity and are directed at specific goals; and operations that are part of actions and are often routine and performed on an unconscious level. Kou and Gui stated that AI could be involved in human activities at all three layers: 'AI could augment operations to increase their efficiency and effectiveness; automate actions that were previously done by humans; or significantly transform the current systems of motives and participation at the activity level'. ...
... Emotion regulation has been studied in relation to emotional expression, frustrating situations, mental health, and physiological reactions of players. Regulating emotions in esports gaming, however, has not been the subject of much research (Kou and Gui, 2020). ...
... An athlete might, for instance, see that they were nervous prior to competition but managed to win, which progressively contributed to the perception that worries improved performance. Negative feelings may, therefore, be advantageous in sports (Kou and Gui, 2020). Having low-frequency scores in anger (185), disgust (88), fear (200), and sadness (141) simply means that only a few percentages of Filipinos still have a negative appreciation of esports due to their goals of winning and their attitude of competitiveness in any sports. ...
The number of participants and viewers in esports is increasing, making it a rapidly growing industry worldwide. In the Philippines, esports elicit a variety of feelings and attitudes. This paper investigates these emotions and sentiments, specifically anger, anticipation, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, surprise, and both positive and negative feelings, using existing research studies and articles. The research adopts the Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods approach, starting with gathering and analyzing qualitative data, followed by collecting and analyzing quantitative data, and finally, integrating the findings from both data types. The study employs data cleaning techniques such as tokenization, removing URLs, stop words, special characters, and hashtags. Additionally, it uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to explore different topics within journal articles, online news, and various issues related to esports in the Philippines. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis are techniques used to derive meaningful subjective information from text. The findings indicate that many Filipinos hold positive views, including trust, anticipation, joy, and surprise towards the burgeoning esports sector in the country. However, a small percentage of Filipinos still express anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and negative opinions about esports. The discussion on esports in the Philippines has evolved to acknowledge its growth as an industry, its increasing popularity as a sport, and its demands for mental and physical training, among other aspects.
... Emotional engagement in digital gaming is essential. Kou and Gui (2020) found that gamers adapt their in-game behaviour based on the emotions they experience. Positive emotions from socializing, teamworking, and competition motivate gamers to participate. ...
Purpose
The aim of this study was to investigate the role of immersive gaming on brand coolness and brand equity, with particular emphasis on fashion gaming collaborations. We used game theory as a theoretical framework to analyse immersive branding strategies and gain a deeper understanding of fashion consumers’ decision-making process in gaming environments. Gender, as a significant factor affecting gamers, has been studied as a moderator that impacts the overall proposed framework.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantitative method was used to assess the significance of relationships within the proposed model empirically. The partial least squares structural equation modelling technique was implemented to assess the relationships of the framework with a sample size of 160 active Malaysian gamers.
Findings
The findings indicate that brand equity is positively associated with perceived brand coolness. Furthermore, of the three core values of online games, perceived enjoyment is most strongly associated with perceived brand coolness, ahead of the values of self-expression and perceived emotional challenge. The results of the multigroup analysis further suggest that in the fashion industry, building brand equity through online games is strongly related to perceived brand coolness among female respondents, the role of perceived brand coolness being weaker among male respondents.
Originality/value
The study contributes to the existing literature by providing a deeper understanding of the impact of immersive gaming branding practices on the overall equity of the fashion brand. The results provide insight for fashion brand managers into the significant effect on consumer behaviour outcomes of fashion-gaming collaborations.
... In esports, studies on the influence of congestion resulting from consecutive matches are practically nonexistent, but it has been observed that weeks with a higher number of games lead to poorer sleep quality for players (32). The absence of research on game congestion in esports becomes even more relevant when considering that in esports, the psychological component is more predominant than the physical one, and alterations of the psychological state are associated with disruptive behaviors during games (33,34). This type of behaviours are frequent in LOL games, as in 70% of games players are confronted with annoying situations, including disruptive behaviour towards their teammates or opponents (35,36). ...
... Given that negative gaming experiences with other players keep players in a negative mood hours after the end of games (33,41), are one of the main reasons to stop playing MOBAs (42,43), and knowing that the mood prior to the game can predispose to the occurrence of this type of behaviors during games (33), it is necessary to know whether the results obtained in consecutive LOL games can attenuate or worsen the mood with which players face the next game. Even more so when considering that consecutive games of esports negatively affect the players' rest (32), so it could also affect mood. ...
... Given that negative gaming experiences with other players keep players in a negative mood hours after the end of games (33,41), are one of the main reasons to stop playing MOBAs (42,43), and knowing that the mood prior to the game can predispose to the occurrence of this type of behaviors during games (33), it is necessary to know whether the results obtained in consecutive LOL games can attenuate or worsen the mood with which players face the next game. Even more so when considering that consecutive games of esports negatively affect the players' rest (32), so it could also affect mood. ...
Introduction
Esports have experienced tremendous growth in recent years. In the scientific field, previous research has shown the determining role of psychology in competitive performance, but little is known about the factors that may be more determinant. In addition, in the amateur field, where fun and enjoyment are the most important factors, it has been observed that players can see their psychological state altered due to different factors, but it is not known if the outcome of the game (win or lose) can be influential. For this reason, the aim of the present investigation was to analyze changes in players' mood between three consecutive games as a function of the outcome of each game.
Methods
A total of 14 amateur players participated in the research, all of them with previous experience and being regular League of Legends players. The participants completed the POMS questionnaire before the start of each game and the outcome of each game was recorded at the end.
Results
The results showed that no significant pre-game differences were found in any of the games, regardless of winning or losing. Significant differences were found in the pre-game mood between the first and second game, according to the outcome of the first game, and between the second and third game, according to the outcome of the second game. Between the first and second games, there was a significant increase in depression (p = 0.038) and anger (p = 0.003) when the first game was lost; and between the second and third games, there was a decrease in tension (p = 0.003) and anger (p = 0.022) when the second game was won. In addition, it should be noted that fatigue increased significantly after each game, regardless of the outcome, and with respect to the change in mood, this was more noticeable when the first game was lost and the second was won, as significant changes were observed in tension (p = 0.028), depression (p = 0.030) and anger (p = 0.006).
Conclusion
Pre-match mood does not influence post-match performance, but mood changes do occur between successive matches depending on the outcome of the match.
... Some research suggests that the competitive and cooperative nature of esports requires many of the same skills as traditional sports [14,45], including mental skills like decision-making and coping with mistakes [27], teammate and performance-related stressors [55,56], and emotion regulation skills [46,48]. On the other hand, there is also evidence that the digital nature of esports introduces stressors not present in traditional sports, related to game design [36], technical difficulties [57], and the ubiquity of game-based toxicity [75]. Furthermore, contrary to research in traditional sports, research in affective computing has suggested that slightly elevated negative affect can be beneficial at work in myriad ways [69] that relate to performance in esports. ...
... While there is evidence pointing to the shared coping experiences among esports players and traditional athletes, esports differs from traditional sports in critical ways that extend beyond physicality. The digital nature of esports introduces unique sets of computer-mediated stressorssuch as game design (e.g., changes in meta) [36], technical difficulties (e.g., disconnecting from game, unresponsive equipment) [57], and competition formats (e.g., limited rest between matches) [43]-that are absent from traditional sport settings. Moreover, a prevalent concern in computermediated contexts is that of online toxicity. ...
... Emotive Factors. Relevant to our research question, Kou and Gui [36] identified three emotive factors (i.e., situations that trigger players' emotional experiences) among League of Legends (LoL) players through an inductive thematic analysis of 431 posts on the LoL subreddit. The following factors are not mutually exclusive and can work together to influence a players' emotional experience: ...
The massive growth of esports has vitalized the need to study human performance in competitive video gaming. The pressure of competitive play elicits a range of emotional experiences, which can affect players during and beyond a gaming session. In this work, we review the state of the literature concerning the role emotions play in esports performance as well as highlight coping strategies players use to regulate emotions during competitive play. We review the findings of N=32 peer-reviewed articles pertaining to emotions and esports, finding that the emotional experiences elicited by competitive play affect esports performance. In response, players attempt to regulate their emotions to maintain performance; however, efforts to do so vary, as they currently lack effective coping strategies. Lastly, we review the potential of technical interventions in esports training for improving emotion regulation among players. Our findings support knowledge development in esports, and present avenues towards promoting the emotional wellbeing of competitive gamers.
... Although esports researchers are starting to build a clear understanding of cognitive selfregulation through qualitative enquiry, there is still a need to understand the physiological selfregulation of players (Kou & Gui, 2020). A recent systematic review of psychophysiological stress in esports would suggest that esports players may exhibit a physiological stress response both during and post-competition (Leis & Lautenbach, 2020). ...
Heart rate variability (HRV) is a psychophysiological measure of particular interest in esports due to its potential to monitor player self-regulation. This study aimed to systematically review the utilisation of HRV in esports. Consideration was given to the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of previous works to provide recommendations for future research. The protocol was made available on the Open Science Framework. Inclusion criteria were empirical studies, examining HRV in esports, using esports players, published in English. Exclusion criteria were non-peer-reviewed studies, populations with pre-existing clinical illness other than Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), opinion pieces or review papers. In November 2022 a search of Web of Science, PubMed and EBSCOHost identified seven studies using HRV in esports. Risk of bias was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Narrative review identified two primary uses of HRV, investigating stress response and IGD in esports. A lack of theoretical and methodological underpinning was identified as a major limitation of current literature. Further investigation is necessary before making recommendations regarding the use of HRV in esports. Future research should employ sound theoretical underpinning such as the use of vagally mediated HRV and the robust application of supporting methodological guidelines when investigating HRV in esports.
... Playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing and first-person shooter games can improve the different cardiovascular responses of gamers with IGD (Metcalf & Pammer, 2013). The League of Legends (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Riot Games, Los Angeles, US) can elicit both negative (frustration, anger, and sadness) and positive emotions (happiness and enjoyment) (Kou & Gui, 2020). The Resident Evil game (a massively multiplayer online third-person shooter, Capcom Co., Ltd., Osaka, Japan) was considered a horror and violent game (Krahé & Möller, 2004). ...
Online games are becoming increasingly popular, but a corresponding problem has emerged: Internet gaming disorder (IGD). IGD refers to problematic game use, where gaming results in problems with cognition and emotional regulation. Abdominal breathing (AB) is one method of psychophysiological reaction regulation. However, few studies have explored the effect of AB on gamers with IGD. In this study, we investigated the effects of short-term AB training (10 min) on the heart rate variability (HRV) of college students with IGD as they watched positive and negative online gaming videos. In total, 21 and 19 participants with low-risk IGD and high-risk IGD (HIGD), respectively, were included in the analysis. The results revealed that AB training was associated with increases in the natural logarithms of the total power and low-frequency HRV of the HIGD group during both video stimuli (p < .01). The difference in the natural logarithm of total power and low-frequency HRV between before and after AB was a predictor of IGD risk (area under the curve = 0.63 and 0.64, respectively). We find that short-term AB affects the HRV responses of college students with HIGD during game-related stimuli, particularly for negative games. These findings highlight the potential benefits of adding AB training to psychotherapies to improve the psychophysiological regulation of college students with IGD. Further studies should investigate the effect of long-term AB on the psychophysiological responses of those with IGD during gameplay.
... The emotional investment that players might have in online gaming is one of its main draws. Studies discovered that gamers modified their physical interaction with circumstances based on their felt emotions (Kou & Gui, 2020). Some main motivations for playing games are to experience positive emotions such as those resulting from socialization, teamwork, and competition, aside from negative emotions such as tension and anxiety (Denisova et al., 2021). ...
Gaming and related gamified experiences in marketing and retailing had been
highlighted in recent years. However, gaming in fashion branding is still a virgin phenomenon
and further research is needed to conceptualize consumers’ behavioural responses toward it.
On the other hand, brand coolness had been highlighted as an indicator for brand success,
especially among younger generations, who represent the main segment of the gaming markets.
The research applied to technological products (ex. mobile phones) have shown a positive
connection between consumers’ perceived coolness and their love for the brand (Warren et al.,
2019). However, the effects of gaming on the perception of brand coolness and how this
contributes to other branding and marketing constructs (ex. brand equity) have not been
thoroughly explored. Spotting gender-related differences, gaming was known for being a maledominated
market (Lier & Breuer, 2020), in contrast, fashion as a product is a female-oriented
product (Raman, 2021). With respect to those proven differences, the need to provide an answer
for those gender differences’ influences in the sector of fashion markets is still needed.
To fill these research gaps, we drew on comprehensive theoretical considerations to develop
and test a predictive model for how the core game values predict brand coolness, as well as
how brand coolness may influence brand equity in the fashion industry with respect to gender
differences. This study aims to spotlight the new branding direction of fashion/gaming
collaborations while empirically study its effect on consumer perception toward fashion
brands. The study makes three main contributions to the literature. First, we expand the
knowledge of fashion brands to include gaming and integrate brand coolness as a key element
in the fashion industry’s marketing endeavors in this new domain. Second, we empirically
identify potential antecedents and outcomes of brand coolness for fashion products in the
gaming context. Third, we investigate whether gender has any effect on the pathways between
these antecedents and outcomes.
