Special Session:

Esports Research: Challenges, Advances and Opportunities

Esports is a rapidly growing subsection of the games industry and associated culture where video games are played competitively, such as: CS:GO, Hearthstone, Starcraft 2, Rainbow Six and Dota 2. The esports audience is the ‘audience of the future’ here and now with 80% of the demographic being made up of 18-35 year olds. During 2018, there were over 2.6 billion hours of esports content consumed by 388 million people globally across a multitude of online platforms including; Twitch, Youtube, Mixer, Facebook, Twitter etc. The esports industry has been on the rise with recognition from the mainstream and steady growth for the last five years of 38.2%

In parallel with the rapid growth of the esports industry and esports as an entertainment sector, academic and industrial research has rapidly expanded, with more than 35,000 academic publications to date (the majority published within the past decade) and a thriving startup industry. Within the larger domain of esports research, technical esports research has grown rapidly, with esports titles being heavily analysed in terms of player behavior, or being used as the basis for AI research. However, the domain remains fragmented and there is a need for a gathering place for researchers working in the area. This special session aims to provide the starting point for a joint point of reference for technical esports work, representing an opportunity for IEEE CoG to become the nucleus for esports research.

The proposed 1-day special session will bring together the emerging and rapidly growing esports analytics community, highlight the cutting-edge advancements in esports game analytics research and discuss future opportunities and challenges in esports research. The session will include: invited talks by industry pioneers/leading industry stakeholders, a number of accepted talks based on peer-reviewed paper submissions and a panel discussion with leading academic and industry figures in esports research.

Recently, the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York, in collaboration with the Weavr Consortium and Creative Media Labs, based in the UK, established ARENA Labs. ARENA Labs is an informal research network covering esports, and will act as the entity organizing the special session.

Topics

Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Technical esports research.
• Game and player analytics methods for modelling players.
• AI and data mining to find patterns in playstyles.
• Analytics and game data visualization.
• Learning from demonstrations for player modelling.
• Annotation approaches for player behaviour and experience.
• Datasets of game playing and player experience.
• Prediction of match outcomes.
• Microprediction and classification of events during matches.
• Player role detection and classification.
• AI & data learning to create highly personalised viewing experiences.
• Esports player research.
• Technical design analyses and game analysis.

Organising team

• James Walker, University of York, UK (james.walker@york.ac.uk)
• Anders Drachen, University of York, UK (anders.drachen@york.ac.uk)
• Simon Demediuk, University of York, UK (florian.block@york.ac.uk)
• Florian Block, University of York, UK (simon.demediuk@york.ac.uk)

Reviewers

• Rafet Sifa, Fraunhofer Technical Institute, Germany
• Guenter Wallner, University of Arts Vienna, Austria
• Lennart Nacke, University of Waterloo, CAN
• Pejman Mirza-Babaei, UOUT Toronto, CAN
• Daniel Johnson, Queensland University of Technology, AUS
• Nicholas Ross, University of San Francisco, US
• William Raffe, University of Technology Sydney, AUS
• Michael Hitchens, Macquarie University, AUS
• Marco Tamassia, Deakin University, AUS
• Johanna Pirker, TU Graz, Austria
• Peter York, University of York, UK
• Alex Wade, University of York, UK
• Victoria Hodge, University of York, UK
• Ozan Vardal, University of York, UK
• Evelyn Tan, University of York, UK
• Joseph Heskett, University of York, UK
• Sebastian Deterding, University of York, UK
• Valerio Bonometti, University of York, UK
• Marian Ursu, University of York, UK
• Athanasios Kokkinakis, University of York, UK

Submission

Download Esports Research: Challenges, Advances and Opportunities CfP's PDF.

For the submission, authors need to follow this EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf= cog19

Further details on paper submissions can be found at https://www.ieee-cog.org/cfp/