Game-Changing Event Definition and Detection in an Esports Corpus

Game-Changing Event Definition and Detection in an eSports Corpus Emily Grace Olshefski Montclair State University 1 Normal Avenue Montclair, NJ 07043, USA [email protected] Abstract corpora. For example, the Manually Annotated Sub- Corpus (American National Corpus Project) con- Despite the growing cultural presence of eS- tains multiple genres of entertainment, like fiction, ports, no corpus contains this genre of en- essays, and movie scripts. eSports, like film, is a tertainment. This paper presents how a preliminary corpus was created from broadcast multi-billion dollar industry that is growing rapidly, speech from a professional game of the eSport and by collecting data for eSports other corpora Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). can become representative of emerging language The corpus was initially annotated follow- use. While projects such as FrameNet (International ing the Automatic Contact Extraction (ACE) Computer Science Institute) and other genre spe- event subtype definitions for game-changing cific corpora like GENIA (Kim et al., 2005), a bio- events: deaths, injuries, and attacks. Event textmining corpus, have undergone extensive event subtype definitions were modified for fur- ther annotation to detect a wider range of annotation, eSports has not been included in prior game-changing events otherwise not defined event annotation work, and doing so may provide by ACE. A high degree of inter-annotator insight into event detection and definition. agreement for most event subtypes suggests This paper aims to explain how a preliminary eS- that modifying event subtype definitions for ports corpus was created from the speech of eSports an eSports corpus is necessary to detect the broadcasters who provide play-by-play and color breadth of game-changing events. commentary of one of the most popular eSports, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or CS:GO. The 1 Introduction corpus was annotated by two annotators with exten- The phenomenon of eSports (electronic sports, or sive knowledge of not only CS:GO but also language competitive video gaming) is relatively new but has the community and broadcasters use to describe the quickly become a global sensation. The advent of events of CS:GO games. Creating and annotating a local area networks (LAN) has made eSports as corpus of CS:GO speech also provides a controlled competitive, if not more, than traditional sports, es- model for the annotation of real-life attack, injury, pecially in countries like South Korea and China and death events in, for example, a military based and, “this emerging market segment produces bil- corpus. lions of dollars and contributes economically to the The corpus was annotated twice to explore the growth of the sport industry as a whole” (Lee and nature of game-changing events (events that signif- Schoenstedt, 2011). icantly impact the outcome or course of gameplay) Despite the popularity, growth, and cultural im- in CS:GO. The corpus was first annotated follow- pact of eSports, few studies examine the nature of ing definitions designated by the Automatic Content eSports. Furthermore, no linguistic studies of eS- Extraction (ACE) Program. Annotations were then ports exist due to the lack of eSports as a genre in made after event subtype modification. A new event 77 Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on EVENTS at the NAACL-HLT 2015, pages 77–81, Denver, Colorado, June 4, 2015. c 2015 Association for Computational Linguistics subtype was created to more accurately detect game- 2.2 The CS:GO Corpus changing events. This paper is the first step in de- The corpus consists of 47 minutes of speech com- tecting game-changing events in a corpus comprised prised of 10,000 words from an August 2014 video entirely of language from eSports. broadcast of a professional CS:GO game posted on YouTube between a French team, Titan, and a North 2 Approach American team, Cloud9. The speech was manually The first step in the approach to detecting game- transcribed by the author due to a lack of transcripts changing events in an eSports corpus began with or closed captioning. This broadcast took place choosing an eSport (CS:GO) and creating a corpus during the Electronic Sports League One Cologne from the speech of professional CS:GO broadcast- 2014 tournament, and since the broadcasters were ers. Annotators were chosen based on knowledge of not in soundproof booths background noise rendered the eSport, and event definitions and modifications speech-to-text programs useless in obtaining data. were made to better detect game-changing events. This video was chosen primarily on the basis of the broadcasters, Auguste “Semmler” Massonant 2.1 CS:GO Classic Competitive - Bomb and Anders “Anders” Blume. Semmler and An- Scenario ders, as they are known in the CS:GO community, were chosen due to their expert knowledge Although there are five different game modes in of CS:GO, their extensive experience broadcasting, the first-person shooter CS:GO, the only one played and the clarity of their speech. Written permission professionally is Classic Competitive - Bomb Sce- to use their speech as the basis of this corpus was nario. This game mode is played between a team obtained from both broadcasters. An example of the of five terrorists and five counter-terrorists, loosely speech in the corpus is as follows: “Hiko tries to put modeling a terrorist bomb plant scenario. shots through with the Five Seven, and Seangares The goal of the terrorist team is to plant the bomb looking to do some damage but the bomb will get and have it explode, and/or to kill all of the counter- planted and Cloud9, they just don’t have the fire- terrorists. The goal of the counter-terrorist team is power or the nades to really get in here and have an to defuse a planted bomb, kill all of the terrorists, impact.” or have a minimum of one player alive in the ab- sence of a bomb plant. The teams switch sides (from 2.3 Annotators counter-terrorist to terrorist, and vice versa) at the halfway mark of 15 rounds, and the first team to win The annotation task was completed by two an- 16 rounds wins the game. In the event of a tie (30 notators, referred to as Annotator A (the author) rounds, each team with 15 round wins) the game ex- and Annotator B. Both annotators have spent over tends into overtime to determine a winner. 1000 hours playing CS:GO, watch broadcast games Each player starts each round with 100 health weekly, and have not completed any prior annotation and zero armor points unless they purchase armor tasks. in the form of a Kevlar vest and/or helmet. Play- ers lose health and armor points by taking damage 2.4 Original Event Definitions from guns, knives, tasers, bomb and grenade explo- Originally the annotators agreed that the ACE sions, and grenade contact, and damage can be dealt English Annotation Guidelines for Events Ver- from the opposing team, one’s own teammates, or sion 5.4.3 2005.07.01 definitions for LIFE.DIE, oneself. When a player loses all of their health and LIFE.INJURE, and CONFLICT.ATTACK event armor points they die and are unable to participate in subtypes represent the majority of game-changing the game until the next round. Professional players events in a CS:GO game. Player kills (LIFE.DIE often plan their strategies around planting bombs, events) can significantly alter the outcome of rounds, killing and/or injuring opposing players, and creat- and even lowering a player’s health (LIFE.INJURE ing space with smoke and flash grenades (referred to events) affects strategy and gameplay. When players as flashbangs in CS:GO). are not killing or injuring each other different types 78 of attack events (CONFLICT.ATTACK) occur that Event Subtype A B Agreement change the course of the game. The ACE (Linguistic DIE 140 140 0.976 Data Consortium, 2005) definitions for these afore- INJURE 1 1 1.00 mentioned event subtypes are as follows: ATTACK-D 70 63 0.653 “An INJURE Event occurs whenever a PERSON ATTACK-ND 22 19 0.952 Entity experiences physical harm. INJURE Events can be accidental, intentional or self-inflicted. Table 1: Number of Annotated Events and Degree of A DIE Event occurs whenever the life of a PER- Inter-Annotator Agreement SON Entity ends. DIE Events can be accidental, intentional or self-inflicted. events depicting these types of attack events fit into An ATTACK Event is defined as a violent phys- the ACE definition for CONFLICT.ATTACK. ical act causing harm or damage. ATTACK Events Smoke grenades, on the other hand, which cre- include any such Event not covered by the INJURE ate a smoke cloud and block vision, and flash- or DIE subtypes, including Events where there is no bangs, which create a blinding light on the player’s stated agent. The ATTACK Event type includes less screen if they look in the direction of the grenade specific violence-related nouns such as ‘conflict’, as it is thrown, are solely used for a strategic pur- ‘clashes’, and ‘fighting’. ‘Gunfire’, which has the pose. These attacks do not cause any quantifi- qualities of both an Event and a weapon, should al- able damage but are violent and physical in nature, ways be tagged as an ATTACK Event, if only for the and despite the ACE definition, would be consid- sake of consistency. A ‘coup’ is a kind of ATTACK ered an attack by the CS:GO community. The cre- (and so is a ‘war’).” ation of a new event subtype makes a necessary 2.5 Modified Event Definitions distinction of events that are both game-changing but vary regarding damage and harm.

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