Hello, my name is Alina Striner, and this work is on understanding audience participation in game live streaming on sites like Twitch.
In the era of COVD-19, audiences are turning to live-streaming sites for rich experiences that connect people all around the world. We present a theme map of participatory live-streaming as an emerging design space.
So, the capacity to alter experiences has empowered audiences beyond traditional roles, and has led to a dissolution of traditional audiencehood. A growing trend in live streaming shifts focus away from passive spectatorship towards active participation.
Live streaming platforms are driving a new wave of media experiences An emerging trend in live streaming shifts emphasis from spectatorship to social interactions, allowing viewers to respond to content, streamers, and one another via a text chat, emojis, and gifts.
In complement, remote audiences are given greater participatory roles:In Twitch plays Pokemon, for example, the gameplay is driven by the audience. Meanwhile, in choice chamber, the streamer is driving the game, but the audience is affecting the game mechanics.
Game live streaming is a particularly interesting space because games are inherently interactive; they offer many ways for audiences to engage, participate, and become emotionally invested.
So our contributions are: 1. A theme map diagramming a design space for audience participation, Accompanying instructions for the theme map, Empirical findings that validate the theme map, And articulations of three sensitizing concepts.
So, To create the map, we conducted a thematic analysis of 8 student projects from a Twitch Audience participation design course. The final product was a set of 19 themes divided into 58 sub-themes.
The map is organized by three sensitizing concepts , Agency, Pacing, and Community that encapsulated the themes and sub-themes from our analysis.
The goal of the map is to support design reflection: reflection in action that occurs while working through design actions, and Reflection on action, Analyzing existing experience by understanding their form, features, and organisation.
Now we were excited to present this work to you live in Yokohama, but of course, that is not currently possible. While the map was derived from game live-streaming, it contains elements that are applicable to many live-streaming experiences, such as this one...the CHI 2021 conference we’re currently participating in. As a fun exercise, we thus asked ourselves, how we could learn from game live-streaming to inform a more interactive streaming experience? And we wondered if we could we spark a conversation about how to design conferences to be more participatory using our theme map.
So, a time that seems like long ago, this is what attending CHI used to look like; in person presentations, interactivity demos and posters, and of course, social events!
Now, unfortunately, due to the COVID 19 pandemic, these rich social interactions have been reduced to a chat log on a screen.
So, to map the conference, we reinterpreted the sub-themes in context of virtual conferences.Then, we identified prevalent themes and sub-themes in current virtual conference experiences. And then, we envisioned what themes and sub-themes could make virtual conferences more engaging and participatory for audiences.
So here is our mapping of the current experience. Broadly, the focus here is on pacing and community themes, such as streamer-viewer relationships, Communication, and Scheduling.
Now, in turquoise, we’ve added new themes that envision would make the virtual conferences more engaging for audiences. These new themes include choice, live-streaming agency, and Roles and Identity.
And here is the opportunity space. Now we’ll zoom in on some sub-themes that can spark inspiration for redesigning the conference experience.
One subtheme we identified was shared identify between conference participants. Inspired by emotes from Twitch channels, a engaging concept we envisioned was to identify conference goers by their interests.
A design concept was to have users customize their profile and the text chat with stickers of sessions they attended.
A second subtheme was chatting during off times. Inspired by battle Royale games, we conceptualised a virtual lobby that allows CHI participants to connect to each other, by engage in cooperative mini-games.
Finally, the third sub-theme was about the feeling of a game world. Inspired by survival games like don’t starve with day and night cycles, our concept was to create a shared interpretation of a particular place and time.
In this design concept, participants can customize their backgrounds to reflect the time of day in Yokohama, so that everyone feel that they’re sharing a space together. 22 00:04:48,000-> 00:05:00,000 And now it’s your turn to respond. Has our map sparked any ideas about improving live streaming experiences? Thank you so much for your time