Games and Beyond: Analyzing the Bullet Chats of Esports Livestreaming

Esports, short for electronic sports, is a form of competition using video games and has attracted more than 530 million audiences worldwide. To watch esports, people utilize online livestreaming platforms. Recently, a novel interaction method, namely "bullet chats," has been introduced on these platforms. Different from conventional comments, bullet chats are scrolling comments posted by audiences that are synchronized to the livestreaming timeline, enabling audiences to share and communicate their immediate perspectives. The real-time nature of bullet chats, therefore, brings a new perspective to esports analysis. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the bullet chats for esports, focusing on one of the most popular video games, i.e., League of Legends (LoL). Specifically, we collect 21 million bullet chats of LoL from Jan. 2023 to Mar. 2023 across two mainstream platforms (Bilibili and Huya). By performing quantitative analysis, we reveal how the quantity and toxicity of bullet chats distribute (and change) w.r.t. three aspects, i.e., the season, the team, and the match. Our findings show that teams with higher rankings tend to attract a greater quantity of bullet chats, and these chats are often characterized by a higher degree of toxicity. We then utilize topic modeling to identify topics among bullet chats. Interestingly, we find that a considerable portion of topics (14.14% on Bilibili and 22.94% on Huya) discuss themes beyond the game, including genders, entertainment stars, non-esports athletes, and so on. Besides, by further modeling topics on toxic bullet chats, we find hateful speech targeting different social groups, ranging from professions, regions, etc. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first measurement of bullet chats on esports livestreaming. We believe our study can shed light on esports research from the perspective of bullet chats.