SURPRISE! and When to Schedule It

TL;DR

This study investigates how the timing and amount of surprise in esports matches influence audience ratings, highlighting the importance of end-game surprises for perceived quality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis linking information flow and surprise timing to audience ratings in esports, emphasizing the significance of when surprises occur.

Findings

End-of-game surprise strongly predicts audience ratings.

Timing of surprise impacts perceived game quality.

Content providers should schedule twists towards the end.

Abstract

Information flow measures, over the duration of a game, the audience's belief of who will win, and thus can reflect the amount of surprise in a game. To quantify the relationship between information flow and audiences' perceived quality, we conduct a case study where subjects watch one of the world's biggest esports events, LOL S10. In addition to eliciting information flow, we also ask subjects to report their rating for each game. We find that the amount of surprise in the end of the game plays a dominant role in predicting the rating. This suggests the importance of incorporating when the surprise occurs, in addition to the amount of surprise, in perceived quality models. For content providers, it implies that everything else being equal, it is better for twists to be more likely to happen toward the end of a show rather than uniformly throughout.