1. Introduction
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) [
1] declared the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), first identified in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, as a global pandemic. Since then, COVID-19 has precipitated a global crisis, with more than 214,468,601 confirmed cases and more than 4,470,969 deaths worldwide as of 27 August 2021 [
1]. The progression of COVID-19 sparked a series of government interventions and responses, including country-wide lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, and cancellation of public events. Moreover, social distancing and curfews were strictly implemented to prevent the spread of the disease within communities. The COVID-19 pandemic and the need to slow its spread have impacted social interactions in nearly every sector, including employment, education, entertainment, travel, transportation, and recreation.
As millions of individuals were forced to stay home, new entertainment trends emerged [
2]. Some of those trends were digital, such as video-on-demand and streaming video and electronic sell-through. Others involved physical engagement between close family members, such as playing board games and cooking new recipes. People often share their entertainment trends on social media platforms, including Twitter [
3,
4].
The Saudi Ministry of Health [
5] confirmed the first COVID-19 case in Saudi Arabia in March 2020. The Saudi government was very proactive in preventing the spread of COVID-19. For instance, a partial curfew (6:00 AM to 7:00 PM) was issued on 23 March 2020 and lasted for 21 days. After that, a 24-h curfew was issued in major Saudi cities, including Riyadh, Dammam, Tabuk, Dahran, Hafuf, Jeddah, Taif, Qatif, and Khobar. During the Eid Al-Fitr holiday, the authorities imposed a country-wide 24-h curfew that started on 23 May 2020 and lasted for five days. Moreover, school closures were enforced between 9 March 2020 and 29 August 2021, mosque closures were enforced between 15 March 2020 and 31 May 2020, and national flight lockdowns were enforced between 19 March 2020 and 17 May 2021. Research has found an increase in gaming duration and overall online activity during these lockdown periods [
6].
Sentiment analysis is a text mining technique that aims to process and detect the emotions conveyed in a given text. Typically, the goal is to help specify the attitude toward an entity, topic, or concept [
7]. Here we constructed a dataset comprising Arabic tweets posted by individuals residing in Saudi Arabia using a specific set of keywords related to gaming. In this work, we study the gaming trends in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 lockdown (9 March 2020 to 21 June 2020) using sentiment analysis of Twitter data. The goal is to characterize the preferred gaming style, the most popular online game, and the most popular physical game among the Saudi population. We also investigate the impact of the preventative measures employed by the Saudi government on the gaming demand in Saudi Arabia. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:
- 1.
Creating a Twitter dataset containing Arabic tweets relevant to gaming trends during the lockdown period posted by individuals living in Saudi Arabia. Specific game-related keywords were used to retrieve the tweets.
- 2.
Analyzing the sentiment of the obtained dataset to discover the Saudi community’s style of gaming during the COVID-19 lockdowns (individually or in groups).
- 3.
Analyzing the sentiment of the obtained dataset to discover the most popular online game and the most popular physical game within the Saudi community.
- 4.
Investigating the impact of the preventative measures employed by the Saudi government on the gaming demand among the Saudi population during the lockdown period.
Our results show that 60% of people prefer to play within groups rather than play individually. We further observed that Ludo was the game most frequently played. In addition, the largest number of gaming-related tweets were posted in the week of 22 March 2020, which marks the beginning of the curfew in Saudi Arabia. The results show that people had high spirits and more interest in playing games during the curfew. The results of this work can be used as a guide by the Saudi General Entertainment Authority (GEA) as well as game designers, developers, and advertisers. Our results can assist in directing the attention of interested parties toward the gaming style, games, and gaming conditions preferred by the Saudi community and meeting their desires.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 discusses the related work.
Section 3 presents the methodology.
Section 4 and
Section 5 present the results and discussion, respectively. Finally, the conclusion and future works are discussed in
Section 6.