Enriching the Experience: Content Analysis on the Twitter Usage of Professional Esports Athletes Sonja Kareranta MA Thesis English, Language Specialist School of Languages and Translation Studies Faculty of Humanities University of Turku May 2021 Turun yliopiston laatujärjestelmän mukaisesti tämän julkaisun alkuperäisyys on tarkastettu TurnitIn OriginaIityCheck -järjestelmällä. The originality of this thesis has been checked in accordance with the University of Turku quality assurance system using the Turnitin OriginalityCheck service. UNIVERSITY OF TURKU School of Languages and Translation Studies / Faculty of Humanities KARERANTA, SONJA: Enriching the Experience: Content Analysis on the Twitter Usage of Professional Esports Athletes MA Thesis, 93 p., 59 app. English, Language Specialist May 2021 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The thesis studied the Twitter usage of 50 professional esports athletes by means of a content analysis of the 19-21 tweets on the athletes' Twitter frontpages, 1014 tweets in total. The athletes’ tweets were categorised into a primary category as well as a secondary and tertiary category, when applicable. The research questions were: 1. How do the most followed esports athletes employ Twitter in terms of the main properties in their tweets? 2. In addition to the main property, what additional features do the athletes’ tweets contain? 3. What are the differences and similarities in the emphases of the athletes’ tweets’ main properties and additional features, when examined by game of the athlete? The results showed that the category that the tweets were annotated most frequently into in the primary categorisation was INFORMATION SHARING, indicating that the athletes’ tweets’ main property was most often to share information on topics related to esports. The second most frequent primary category was ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT, signalling that the athletes did at times post tweets with esports-related photos, videos or humorous language as the most prominent property in the tweet. The third most frequently occurring category was DIVERSION, demonstrating that the athletes did post tweets that were unlinked to their status as professional athletes. PROMOTIONAL category was the fourth most frequent. Thus, the athletes employed Twitter also in promoting for their own and their teams’ financial gain by tweeting sponsored material. The two categories with the least tweets were INTERACTIVITY and FANSHIP, indicating that the athletes relatively rarely asked direct esports-related questions or commented on competing athletes and teams as the main property in their tweet. The three most frequent categories in the secondary and tertiary categorisations were ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT, PROMOTIONAL and INFORMATION SHARING. The result showed that that the athletes were prone to include photos, videos and humorous language as a feature in their tweets. The athletes relatively often used promotional aspects in the form of mentioning and tagging esports professionals, events as well as their own teammates in their tweets. Information was a common feature even when it was not the main property of the tweet or when the information was unrelated to esports. There were statistically significant differences in the categorisation results, when compared in groups based on the game played professionally by the athlete (Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike and Dota 2 as the games in the study). The only category where there were no statistically significant differences across categorisations was PROMOTIONAL, in terms of which the tweets did not differ enough across games for the differences to be statistically significant. Key words: Twitter, social media, celebrity, esports, games, content analysis, categories Table of Contents Lists of figures and tables 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 2. Esports and Twitter ......................................................................................................................... 3 2.1. Esports ....................................................................................................................................... 4 2.1.1. Esports: past, present and future .......................................................................................... 4 2.1.2. Esports games in the present study....................................................................................... 7 2.1.3. Esports professional athletes as celebrities in social media ................................................. 11 2.2. Twitter ..................................................................................................................................... 13 2.2.1. Twitter: past, present and future ......................................................................................... 14 2.2.2. Following esports athletes on Twitter ................................................................................ 16 2.2.3. Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh and Greenwell on sport athlete’s Twitter usage .............. 18 3. Material and Methods .................................................................................................................... 19 3.1. Material .................................................................................................................................... 19 3.1.1. Frontpages in Twitter ........................................................................................................ 20 3.1.2. Esports athletes ................................................................................................................. 22 3.1.3. Factors influencing the data ............................................................................................... 26 3.1.4. Ethical considerations on usage of social media data .......................................................... 28 3.2. Methods ................................................................................................................................... 31 3.2.1. Content analysis ................................................................................................................ 31 3.2.2. Categories in primary, secondary and tertiary usage ........................................................... 32 3.2.3. Categorisation process ....................................................................................................... 38 3.2.4. IBM SPSS Statistics analysis ............................................................................................. 40 3.3. Comparison of the study’s results with an earlier annotation in the study ................................... 42 4. Results ............................................................................................................................................ 43 4.1. Results of the categorisations .................................................................................................... 43 4.1.1. Results of the primary categorisation of the tweets ............................................................. 43 4.1.2. Results of the secondary and tertiary categorisations of the tweets ...................................... 43 4.1.3. Results of the total numbers of the assigned tweet categories for all three categorisations (primary, secondary and tertiary) ................................................................................................ 44 4.1.4. Comparison of the categorisation results ............................................................................ 45 4.2. Results by game of the esports athlete ....................................................................................... 46 4.2.1. Results by game of the esports athlete, primary categories ................................................. 46 4.2.2. Results by game of the esports athlete, secondary and tertiary categories ............................ 49 4.2.3. Results by game of the esports athlete, summary and explanation of results of the three categorisations ............................................................................................................................ 51 4.2.4. Comparison of the IBM SPSS Statistics results .................................................................. 55 5. Discussion ....................................................................................................................................... 56 5.1. Discussion on the results of the primary, secondary and tertiary categorisations ......................... 57 5.2. Further scrutiny into INFORMATION SHARING in primary categorisation ..................................... 63 5.3. Discussion on statistically significant differences in results between games ............................... 69 5.4. Comparisons with the Hambrick et al. study .............................................................................. 73 5.5. Ideas on further studies on similar topics ................................................................................... 83 6. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 84 References .......................................................................................................................................... 87 Appendix I List of