Public Outlook on E-sports in China: A Content and Sentiment Analysis of Social Media

This paper aims to help people better understand the Chinese public outlook towards e-sports through the calculation and visual analysis of social media big data, so as to provide reference for the development of e-sports industry and relevant decisions. A mixed-method approach is employed to analyze social media texts by combining quantitative sentiment analysis with qualitative topic and keyword analysis. We have completed the topic coding table of public outlook to e-sports and analyzed the topic distribution and trend. We also have carried out keyword extraction and sentiment calculation for each topic to understand their main contents and sentiment changes. The results show that the Chinese public are paying more and more attention to e-sports and they care about E-sports Profession and E-sports Competition most. Especially, discussions on E-sports Culture show a trend of diversified, profound and normalized development. Combined with keyword analysis and sentiment analysis, it's indicated that people are trying to revise their past recognition of e-sports, but it is still closely related to games in the eyes of the public. Besides, people's sentiment towards the e-sports topics has changed from doubt to recognition, and tends to be stable, while they are more willing to exploration on the e-sports education system, e-sports professionalization and the combination between e-sports and traditional sports.