What is eSports and why do people watch it?

By Juho Hamari, Max Sjöblom. Internet Research, 2017

866 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Factors Influencing eSports Viewership: An Approach Based on the Theory of Reasoned Action (2020, background): “This indicates that, for eSports viewers, watching eSports games is a way to acquire information about teams/players and learn their ways of play (Hamari & Sjöblom, 2017).”
Why do people play games? A meta-analysis (2017, background): “…games, and games-for-purpose) (Hamari et al. 2014; Hamari et al. 2016; Huotari & Hamari 2016; McGonigal 2011) as well as increasingly as a eSport (Hamari & Sjöblom 2017; Sjöblom & Hamari 2016; Taylor 2012), although commonly held legacy causes most to still consider games as mere hedonic systems…”
eSport vs. Sport: A Comparison of Spectator Motives (2018, background): “Hamari and Sjöblom (2017) did not distinguish between different eSports, treating motives to spectate eSport as universal across all games and genres.”
Social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on Twitch (2018, background): “…in previous ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPTSOCIO-MOTIVATIONS OF LIVE-STREAMING VIEWER ENGAGEMENT research (Chen & Lin, 2018; Hamilton et al., 2014; Sjöblom & Hamari, 2017; Sjöblom et al., 2017), as well as other types of online media related to this field, such as social media (Papacharissi & Mendelson,…”