Exploring emotions and sentiments in the Philippine esports industry: A mixed methods approach

The number of participants and viewers in esports is increasing, making it a rapidly growing industry worldwide. In the Philippines, esports elicit a variety of feelings and attitudes. This paper investigates these emotions and sentiments, specifically anger, anticipation, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, surprise, and both positive and negative feelings, using existing research studies and articles. The research adopts the Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods approach, starting with gathering and analyzing qualitative data, followed by collecting and analyzing quantitative data, and finally, integrating the findings from both data types. The study employs data cleaning techniques such as tokenization, removing URLs, stop words, special characters, and hashtags. Additionally, it uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to explore different topics within journal articles, online news, and various issues related to esports in the Philippines. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis are techniques used to derive meaningful subjective information from text. The findings indicate that many Filipinos hold positive views, including trust, anticipation, joy, and surprise towards the burgeoning esports sector in the country. However, a small percentage of Filipinos still express anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and negative opinions about esports. The discussion on esports in the Philippines has evolved to acknowledge its growth as an industry, its increasing popularity as a sport, and its demands for mental and physical training, among other aspects. (c) 2024 The Authors. Published by IASE. This is an open access article under the CC BY -NC -ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).