Summarizing E-sports matches and tournaments: the example of counter-strike: global offensive

Abstract

That video and computer games have reached the masses is a well known fact. Furthermore, game streaming and watching other people play video games is another phenomenon that has outgrown its small beginning by far, and game streams, be it live or recorded, are today viewed by millions. E-sports is the result of organized leagues and tournaments in which players can compete in controlled environments and viewers can experience the matches, discuss and criticize, just like in physical sports. However, as traditional sports, e-sports matches may be long and contain less interesting parts, introducing the challenge of producing well directed summaries and highlights. In this paper, we describe our efforts to approach the game streaming and e-sports phenomena from a multimedia research point of view. We focus on the challenge of summarizing matches from specific relevant game, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). We survey related work, describe the rules and structure of the game and identify the main challenges for summarizing e-sports matches. With this contribution, we aim to foster multimedia research in the area of e-sports and game streaming.