After the breakdown in the last blog post, it’s time to delve into some literature about these differentiated themes. But wait, is there even literature about streaming and video games? Well, plenty of papers are written by PhD students. A lot of them grew up with the emergence of internet and video games. Guess what they’re doing in their free time, or rather would do if they had any. However, some come up with the genius idea of combining the best of both worlds: just do your research about video games and streaming. Exactly what I am doing basically, you got me.
My mentor assembled a considerable amount of papers for me to read. The contents varied from general studies about the emerging streaming phenomenon to similarities in design of successful esports industry games. After a week of reading in an isolated room and almost going mental, I concluded that I read enough about the live streaming and esports theme. The few papers about data visualisation in this context that I read were really interesting and more of a practical nature. I figured I might as well take some more mental punches to the brain and started looking for additional papers about this theme specifically.
After absorbing such a vast amount of information in such a short timespan, I had some trouble to see things clearly. I desperately needed some structure. Thus I took a step back, grabbed a sheet of paper and began constructing a categorisation tree in which every paper that I read would have a place. Once my brain deemed this structure satisfactory (it usually takes some time to convince it), another thought crossed my mind: wouldn’t it be useful to aggregate my, uhum very professional and detailed, notes about the different papers in this structure too? That way I could traverse this structure and find exactly the papers about the requested category along with their corresponding notes. So I developed a simple web application to do just that. Unfortunately it's not available online anymore.