Abstract
Online gaming franchises such as World of Tanks, Defense of the Ancients, and StarCraft have attracted hundreds of millions of users who, apart from playing the game, also socialize with each other through gaming and viewing gamecasts. As a form of User Generated Content (UGC), gamecasts play an important role in user entertainment and gamer education. They deserve the attention of both industrial partners and the academic communities, corresponding to the large amount of revenue involved and the interesting research problems associated with UGC sites and social networks. Although previous work has put much effort into analyzing general UGC sites such as YouTube, relatively little is known about the gamecast sharing sites. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive study of gamecast sharing sites, including commercial streaming-based sites such as Amazon’s Twitch.tv and community-maintained replay-based sites such as WoTreplays. We collect and share a novel dataset on WoTreplays that includes more than 380,000 game replays, shared by more than 60,000 creators with more than 1.9 million gamers. Together with an earlier published dataset on Twitch.tv, we investigate basic characteristics of gamecast sharing sites, and we analyze the activities of their creators and spectators. Among our results, we find that (i) WoTreplays and Twitch.tv are both fast-consumed repositories, with millions of gamecasts being uploaded, viewed, and soon forgotten; (ii) both the gamecasts and the creators exhibit highly skewed popularity, with a significant heavy tail phenomenon; and (iii) the upload and download preferences of creators and spectators are different: while the creators emphasize their individual skills, the spectators appreciate team-wise tactics. Our findings provide important knowledge for infrastructure and service improvement, for example, in the design of proper resource allocation mechanisms that consider future gamecasting and in the tuning of incentive policies that further help player retention.
- H. Abrahamsson and M. Nordmark. 2012. Program popularity and viewer behaviour in a large TV-on-demand. In Proceedings of the 6th Internet Measurement Conference (IMC'12). ACM, Boston, USA, 199--210. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. Anderson. 2004. The long tail. WIRED Magazine. www.wired.com/2004/10/tail. (2004).Google Scholar
- R. Aparicio-Pardo, K. Pires, A. Blanc, and G. Simon. 2015. Transcoding live adaptive video streams at a massive scale in the cloud. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'15). ACM, New York, USA, 49--60. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- G. Armitage, C. Javier, and S. Zander. 2006. Post-game estimation of game client RTT and hop count distributions. In Proceedings of 5th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Network and System Support for Games (NetGames'06). Singapore, 1--6. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Cha, H. Kwak, P. Rodriguez, Y. Ahn, and S. Moon. 2007. I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: Analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC'07). ACM, San Diego, USA, 1--14. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Cha, H. Kwak, P. Rodriguez, Y. Ahn, and S. Moon. 2009. Analyzing the video popularity characteristics of large-scale user generated content systems. Transactions on Networking 17, 5 (2009), 1357--1370. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. Chambers, W. Feng, S. Sahu, D. Saha, and D. Brandt. 2010. Characterizing online games. Transactions on Networking 18, 3 (2010), 899--910. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K.-T. Chen, Y.-C. Chang, H.-J. Hsu, D.-Y. Chen, C.-Y. Huang, and C.-H. Hsu. 2014. On the quality of service of cloud gaming systems. Transactions on Multimedia 16, 2 (2014), 480--495. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- X. Cheng, B. C. Burnaby, C. Dale, and J. Liu. 2008. Statistics and social network of YouTube videos. In 16th International Workshop on Quality of Service (WQoS'08). IEEE, Enschede, the Netherlands, 229--238.Google Scholar
- G. Cheung and J. Huang. 2011. Starcraft from the stands: Understanding the game spectator. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'11). ACM, Vancouver, Canada, 763--772. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Clauset, C. R. Shalizi, and M. E. J. Newman. 2009. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Reviews 51, 4 (2009), 661--703. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. Claypool, D. Finkel, A. Grant, and M. Solano. 2014. On the performance of OnLive thin client games. Multimedia Systems 20, 5 (2014), 471--484. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. Davidson, B. Liebald, J. Liu, P. Nandy, and T. van Vleet. 2010. The YouTube video recommendation system. In Recommender Systems (RecSys'10). ACM, Barcelona, Spain, 293--296. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. Downs, F. Vetere, S.Howard, and S. Loughnan. 2013. Measuring audience experience in social videogaming. In Proceedings of the 25th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference: Augmentation, Application, Innovation, Collaboration (OzCHI'13). ACM, Adelaide, Australia, 217--220. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- F. Figueiredo, F. Benevenuto, and J. M. Almeida. 2011. The tube over time: Characterizing popularity growth of youtube videos. In Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'11). ACM, Hongkong, China, 745--754. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- D. Fitzgerald and D. Wakabayashi. 2014. Apple quietly builds new networks. Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579361201655365302. (2014).Google Scholar
- P. Gill, M. Arlitt, Z. Li, and A. Manhanti. 2007. YouTube traffic characterization: A view from the edge. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement (IMC'07). ACM, San Diego, USA, 15--28. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Y. Guo and A. Iosup. 2012. The game trace archive. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames'12). IEEE press, Venice, Italy, 4:1--4:6. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- W. A. Hamilton, O. Garretson, and A. Kerne. 2014. Streaming on twitch: Fostering participatory communities of play within live mixed media. In Proceedings of the 32Nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'14). ACM, Toronto, Canada, 1315--1324. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- T. Henderson and S. Bhatti. 2001. Modelling user behaviour in networked games. In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM'01). ACM, Ottawa, Canada, 212--220. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Y. Huang, T. Z. J. Fu, D. M. Chiu, J. C. S. Lui, and C. Huang. 2008. Challenges, design and analysis of a large-scale P2P-VoD system. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Conference on Data Communication (SIGCOMM'08). ACM, Seattle, USA, 375--388. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Iosup, R. van de Bovenkamp, S. Shen, A. L. Jia, and F. Kuipers. 2014. An analysis of implicit social networks in multiplayer online games. Internet Computing 18, 3 (2014), 36--44.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- A. L. Jia, S. Shen, R. van de Bovenkamp, F. Kuipers, A. Iosup, and D. H. J. Epema. 2015. Socializing by gaming: Revealing social relationships in multiplayer online games. Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data 10, 2 (2015), 11:1--11:29. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- C. Kang. 2014. He wants to make it playing video games on Twitch. But will people pay to watch? http://www.washingtonpost.com/. (2014).Google Scholar
- M. Kaytoue, A. Silva, and C. Raissi. 2012. Watch me playing, I am a professional: A first study on video game live streaming. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW'12 Companion). ACM, Lyon, France, 1181--1188. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- H. Kim and K. Kim. 2014. Learning to recommend game contents for real-time strategy gamers. In 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG'14). IEEE press, Dortmund, Germany, 1--8.Google Scholar
- J. Li, D. Li, Y. Ye, and X. Lu. 2015. Efficient multi-tenant virtual machine allocation in cloud data centers. Tsinghua Science and Technology 20, 1 (2015), 81--89.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- X. Lu, H. Wang, J. Wang, J. Xu, and D. Li. 2013. Internet-based virtual computing environment: Beyond the data center as a computer. Future Generation of Computer Systems 29, 1 (2013), 309--322. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- A. Mahanti, N. Carlsson, A. Mahanti, M. Arlitt, and C. Williamson. 2013. A tale of the tails: Power-laws in internet measurements. IEEE Network 27, 1 (2013), 59--64.Google Scholar
- J. McGonigal. 2011. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. Jonathan Cape. 1--400 pages. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- V. Nae, A. Iosup, and R. Prodan. 2011. Dynamic resource provisioning in massively multiplayer online games. Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems 22, 3 (2011), 380--395. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- M. E. J. Newman. 2006. Power laws, pareto distributions and Zipf’s law. Contemporary Physics 46 (2006), 323--351.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- H. Pinto, J. M. Almeida, and M. A. Goncalves. 2013. Using early view patterns to predict the popularity of youtube videos. In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'13). ACM, Rome, Italy, 365--374. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- K. Pires and G. Simon. 2015. YouTube live and twitch: A tour of user-generated live streaming systems. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'15). ACM, Portland, Oregon, 225--230. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- J. A. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D. H. J. Epema, and H. J. Sips. 2005. The BitTorrent P2P file-sharing system: Measurements and analysis. In 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'05). Springer, Ithaca, USA, 205--216. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Y. Qu, G. Y. Keung, C. Lin, J. Liu, B. Li, S. Xie, and X. Zhang. 2008. Inside the new coolstreaming: Principles, measurements and performance implications. In The 27th Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM'08). IEEE press, Phoenix, USA, 1031--1039.Google Scholar
- S. Shen and A. Iosup. 2011. The XFire online meta-gaming network: Observation and high-level analysis. In Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments (MMVE'11). IEEE press, Qinghuangdao, China, 1--6.Google Scholar
- C. Spearman. 1904. The proof and measurement of association between two things. American Journal of Psychology 15 (1904), 72--101.Google Scholar
Cross Ref
- M. Suznjevic and M. Matijasevic. 2013. Player behavior and traffic characterization for MMORPGs: A survey. Multimedia System 19, 3 (2013), 199--220. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Twitch. 2011. (2011). http://www.twitch.tv/.Google Scholar
- R. van de Bovenkamp, S. Shen, A. Iosup, and F. A. Kuipers. 2013. Understanding and recommending play relationships in online social gaming. In Fifth International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS'13). IEEE press, Bangalore, India, 1--10.Google Scholar
- WoTreplays. 2013. (2013). http://www.wotreplays.com.Google Scholar
- H. Yu, D. Zheng, B. Y. Zhao, and W. Zheng. 2006. Understanding user behavior in large-scale video-on-demand systems. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGOPS/EuroSys European Conference on Computer Systems 2006 (EuroSys'06). ACM, Leuven, Belgium, 333--344. Google Scholar
Digital Library
Index Terms
When Game Becomes Life: The Creators and Spectators of Online Game Replays and Live Streaming
Recommendations
How to Extend Life Cycle of an Online Game?
Human-Computer Interaction. Interaction TechnologiesAbstractWith the increasing popularity of online games, more and more studies have been undertaken to identify key factors impacting users’ acceptance of online games. However, even game designers noticed most of these key factors long time ago, the ...
Simulation of artificial life model in game space
AIS'04: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on AI, Simulation, and Planning in High Autonomy SystemsGame designer generally fixes the distribution and characteristics of game characters. These could not possibly be changed during playing a game. The point of view at online game player, usually the game playing time is getting longer. So online game is ...
Virtual Office Life Desktop Game Application
ICI '11: Proceedings of the 2011 First International Conference on Informatics and Computational IntelligenceOffice Life Game is one kind of virtual game that has working activities like in the real office. Through this game, the player can get some experiences about how to work in office. It starts from the interview session until players become an employee ...






Comments