The Fall of the Fourth Wall: Designing and Evaluating Interactive Spectator Experiences

Over the past several years, the live-streaming of digital games has experienced a vast increase in popularity, coinciding with the rise of eSports as an entertainment medium. For a rapidly growing audience, streamed content provides material from an ever-increasing roster of games, tournaments, and special events. Recently, streaming platforms, game developers, and professional players have experimented with the inclusion of viewer interaction through mechanisms such as chat, broadcast messages, donations, and voting systems. With the advent of these mechanisms, the concept of game viewership has entered a transitory period; while still largely focused on consumption, for many spectators, the viewing experience is no longer an entirely passive act. The idea of interactive spectatorship (the authors refer to it as Spectator-players) carries the potential for audience members to engage with content at a much deeper level, participating actively in a novel form of entertainment and contributing to an enriched gaming community. This novel form of gaming interaction poses interesting challenges for game designers, as it requires design considerations to meet the needs of players, passive viewers, and active audience members alike. In this paper, the authors examine the opportunities and challenges presented by the design of interactive spectator experiences. Ultimately, they propose a series of design guidelines aimed at the exploration of development in the area of interactive spectator experiences.