eSports and Social Media

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Max Sjöblom, whose focus is on the nexus between social media and eSports. eSports has become increasingly popular in recent times, and refers to forms of sport that are facilitated by electronic systems, where input as well as output are processed by computers. This can take place in a networked environment, but increasingly there are also eSports tournaments being staged in live venues (with additional online streaming).

The present study examined these developments through surveys distributed during the Assembly 2016 eSports event in Finland, extracting psychometric measures of the motivations for eSports consumption. Demographics are predominantly male (79%), with a mean of 23 years of age amongst participants, who usually play some 23 hours of computer games per week. They are spread across a range of social media platforms, and platforms like Twitter and Reddit are used somewhat more than they are by the general Finnish population.

Some of the larger trends that emerged from this were that there people used social media services to a considerable degree at events, with few obvious explanations for variance between platforms. Event organisers also promote such use, but at the same time social media platforms were seen by some participants as a distraction from the live event itself.