Paying, Playing, and Spectating: Relationships Between Digital Game Play and Spectating Esports

The association between playing digital games and watching esports has, to date, been an explicit assumption of many works, specifically that there is a strong and direct correlation between playing games and watching esports. The conflation of game play and esports serves to create conceptual confusion and a lack of clarity in research, both in HCI and beyond. This exploratory, atheoretical work demonstrates that some correlations exist between game play and spectating esports; however, many measures were not found to have statistically significant associations. Furthermore, the observed correlations were found to have small effect sizes and explained little variance of esports spectating measures. Results question fundamental assumptions of many works, which assume a strong association between playing games and spectating esports, raising concerns about their validity and applicability. Furthermore, they highlight the need for further research into the interactions of digital games and the systems which have emerged around them.