Mapping design spaces for audience participation in game live streaming

Abstract

Live streaming sites such as Twitch ofer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and afect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community-to explore, refect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the frst to articulate such a lens, and to provide a refective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and refect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and refective tool.

Publication Title

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

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