Abstract
As the esports industry experiences unprecedented growth, efforts to legitimize it as a recognized sport have intensified. This paper explores the transformative changes in China’s esports landscape with focus on the aftermath of its official recognition at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou. For this, this study employs a data-driven comparative approach to analyze both online news data and viewer comments on a video platform broadcasting the esports tournament during the Hangzhou Asian Games. For text data, it utilized text mining techniques of the Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm (LDA), and for conversion from image to text, it used through the Contrastive Language–Image Pretraining (CLIP) model. The findings reveal that the text and image data in online news emphasize the industry’s positive anticipation of esports becoming a medal sport, but the public who watched esports events showed mixed expectations, doubts, or even negative sentiments about the reevaluation of esports. As evidenced in the paper, the public’s divided stance towards esports might hinder the establishment of a solid consensus in developing the necessary infrastructure or policymaking. Thus, the transition for games to be recognized as an Olympic sport after their inclusion in the Asian Games demands a prolonged period and a comprehensive blend of economic, social, cultural, and educational policies.
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