Understanding Entertainment Trends during COVID-19 in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Studying people’s opinions is a growing research field. This area of research is known as sentiment analysis. The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything around the world and reduced social contact among people. Citizens and residents of Saudi Arabia experienced high stress during the pandemic, seeking entertainment via games and publishing their activities on social media platforms such as Twitter. In this paper, we focus on applying the Mazajak sentiment analyzer on tweets containing game keywords in Arabic collected using Twitter API during the lockdown period to decide whether users preferred playing individually or in groups. This can help designers and developers, as well as the Saudi General Entertainment Authority (GEA), focus on creating the most interesting games for individuals and improving them to meet users’ expectations. Our approach has three main stages: tweet collection, tweet preparation, and finally, the application of sentiment analysis to get the desired goal based on people’s behavior toward the games. The result of this paper confirms that people, in general, preferred playing in groups, instead of alone, during this period.