Analysis of Video Game Players' Emotions and Team Performance: An Esports Tournament Case Study

Video gaming and eSports is a quickly developing industry already involving billions of players worldwide. Gaming and eSports tournaments require strong mental abilities to avoid severe stress and other negative consequences upon completing the game. In this article, we report on the impact of emotions on a team performance. For this reason, we collect audio recordings and game logs from the players in real conditions at an eSports tournament. This data is further used in trained machine learning models for analysis of players' emotional conditions from the voice during the game. We considered recognition of several types of emotions as well as the background sounds. To do this, we trained 92.7% accuracy classifier of six most common classes of emotions and sounds in eSports audio and applied it to eSports data. As a result, we demonstrate that there is an opportunity to measure the eSports team's performance from the players' emotional conditions obtained from the voice communication. We found that there is a strong correlation among the performance of the team, communication between the players, and emotional sentiment of communication. The teams achieve much better results when they had much more internal conversations during the game.