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:

Organising team

Reviewers

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/