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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Serie: Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
Twitch is the leading live streaming platform in most of the world and an integral part of contemporary digital gaming culture. Millions of people broadcast their game play (as well as other activities) to over a hundred million people who regularly visit the site.
In this accessible book, Mark R. Johnson offers both a synthesis of existing Twitch research and a new way to understand Twitch as a public forum for gaming. Drawing on ideas of the ancient Greek agora or public forum, Johnson demonstrates how Twitch has become the key location for game players looking to understand what is contemporary, relevant, and important in modern gaming culture. He argues that Twitch has constructed a particular kind of public forum for gaming, an understanding which emerges from analysing the platform through its technological infrastructure, its streamers and viewers, its broadcast content, and its tightly knit communities. While this forum helps shape gaming culture, it also exhibits many of gaming's existing problems with harassment and cultural exclusivity. Despite being the essential public space for contemporary gaming, Johnson shows that Twitch is far more complex than it first appears, and is currently expanding in ways that challenge this – until now – core focus.
This book is essential reading for students and scholars of game studies, media studies, and anyone with an interest in the rapidly changing nature of online communication.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
What is Twitch?
‘You’re already one of us’
We have always watched games
On experiencing Twitch
On researching Twitch
The gaming agora
Outline of the work
Notes
1 The Platform
A brief history of Twitch
The Twitch interface
Channel customization
Safety and moderation on Twitch
Metrics on Twitch
Money on Twitch
Designing and building the agora
2 Twitch Users
Introduction
Twitch streamers
Twitch viewers
The ‘Twitch we’
Are streamers celebrities, friends, or both?
Moderators
Speaking and listening in the agora
3 Twitch Content
Introduction
Esports and competitive gaming on Twitch
‘Focused’ channels
‘Variety’ channels
Art and creation
Gaming or gambling?
Hot Tub streams
Webcams, private homes, live-streamed lives
Utterances and arguments in the agora
Notes
4 Community and Culture
Introduction
Channel communities
Twitch and other platforms
Twitch culture: emotes
Twitch culture: raiding and copypasta
Tones and norms of the agora
Conclusion
Twitch as the agora
Where is Twitch going?
The future of Twitch research
‘You’re still one of us’
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
, 2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
, 2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
, 3rd edition
Terry Flew,
Regulating Platforms
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Gerard Goggin,
Apps: From Mobile Phones to Digital Lives
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
, 2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Kylie Jarrett,
Digital Labor
Amelia Johns, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández and Emma Baulch,
WhatsApp: From a one-to-one Messaging App to a Global Communication Platform
Mark R. Johnson,
Twitch
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng and Patrik Wikström,
TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
, 2nd edition
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Nick Monaco and Samuel Woolley,
Bots
Jeremy Wade Morris,
Podcasting
Dhiraj Murthy,
, 2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry and Crystal Abidin,
tumblr
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
, 2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
, 3rd edition
Twitch
Mark R. Johnson
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Mark R. Johnson 2024
The right of Mark R. Johnson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5858-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5859-9(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951445
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
My two main expressions of gratitude go to my father – for his tireless support and love and protection – and to my girlfriend – for bringing long-forgotten laughter and joy to my life.
I’d also like to thank Chanel Larche for her constant and loving warmth in keeping me company digitally for a hard two years of lockdown and travel restrictions; Nathan Jackson for his friendship, often lending a listening ear, and the courage to meet the challenge of actually playing La-Mulana; Fiona Nicoll for supporting me on securing a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship in Canada and giving me the time and space to pursue my research interests; Tom Brock, Brett Abarbanel, Gregory Blomquist and Dan Merriman for their friendship (and in the first two cases, collaboration) during times when I have not always been as responsive or accessible as I would like; and all the roguelike fans on the internet who make my day every time they take a moment to tell me the creative efforts of my decade of hobbyist game design work have not gone unnoticed. I am also very grateful to Tom Apperley for recommending me for this book project, and Tom Apperley (again), Benjamin Burroughs, Mahli-Ann Butt, Chris Chesher, Brandon Harris, Maxwell Foxman, Gerard Goggin, Nathan Jackson (again), and Polity’s manuscript reviewers, for the generosity of their time in providing such detailed feedback and insights to strengthen the final manuscript. My editor Mary Savigar has always been highly positive about this project, supportive and responsive and helpful throughout, and for all these things I am also extremely grateful.
Introduction
What is Twitch?
Twitch is the dominant global platform for the ‘live streaming’ (live video broadcasting over the internet) of digital gaming – and much else besides. Examining how and why this happened, how Twitch and game streaming have evolved together, and the position we have arrived at, are among the principal objectives of this book. To understand contemporary game streaming, ‘gamers’, gaming as a public event, gaming as a newfound vehicle for aspiration and entrepreneurialism, gamers as celebrities and as friends, and the diversity and attitudes and behaviours in live-streaming communities and cultures both within gaming and beyond it, we need to understand Twitch. Yet Twitch is not solely a digital infrastructure and architecture for playing games: it is also now a keystone public location for debating, commenting, and disputing who gamers are, what gaming is, what the current issues are, what it should be, and where it’s going. Twitch users now individually and collectively help to determine what matters in gaming. Twitch is also, however, not only about gaming, and throughout this work the challenges posed to the once-unquestioned association between Twitch and gaming are key. New forms of live stream continue to emerge which demand our attention, and are becoming just as important as gaming if we wish to understand the wider Twitch picture.
As with all major internet platforms Twitch increasingly exhibits a size and complexity that makes comprehensive appraisal, let alone analysis, a daunting task. I therefore begin with one of Twitch’s very own slogans, what it can tell us about how the site sees itself, and the light it sheds on how and why over a hundred million people regularly tune in to view other people playing video games, and doing a growing range of other activities, on the internet.
‘You’re already one of us’
Twitch’s marketing likes to push the idea of belonging. The site’s 2019 advertising campaign, for example, confidently declared to the reader that ‘you’re already one of us’. The already implies that the user doesn’t need to do anything special to get started on Twitch: being interested in and knowledgeable about games and gaming are apparently all that one needs. It perhaps also harks back to the assumed childhoods of these imagined users, childhoods in which gaming has played a central role for more and more citizens in industrialized nations in the past fifty years. The us speaks to the sense of strong social bonds that are essential to Twitch (a topic I explore throughout this book) and implies a degree of in-group belonging. It suggests a demarcation between us and them before immediately reassuring the reader that they – that you – are already in the us, and need not worry about being left out in the cold with them. Both aspects of this slogan are designed to appeal to a young game-playing population. It emphasizes ideas of belonging and the naturalness of that belonging, setting up a divide between the ‘gamers’ who apparently belong on Twitch, and everyone else, who apparently doesn’t. Gaming has long been framed by many of its participants (and its marketers) as an exclusive or elite pastime (Kirkpatrick, 2017; Massanari, 2017; Paul, 2018; Huang & Liu, 2022; cf. Sjöblom et al., 2019: 25; Welch, 2022: 523) requiring deep skills and acquired knowledge, and Twitch is very clear in trying to connect to this sense of distinctiveness that many game players feel.
Understanding why this slogan was chosen for a website predominantly (although no longer exclusively) associated with gaming tells us immediately what Twitch is trying to do, and who Twitch is trying to bring on board. In an earlier era before ubiquitous internet access when games were a less visible pastime, a shared interest in gaming offered a fundamental form of connection. Working out how to run a game on home computers such as the ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, or navigating different compatibilities or graphics cards or sound cards in early eras of PC gaming, also further bolstered the (not wholly unreasonable) sense that those able simply to get games to run were, indeed, displaying some degree of technological and technical prowess. This sense of gaming being something apart, something different, or even something suggestive of membership in a technological elite, has unfortunately metamorphosed into one of the main sources of the toxicity and exclusion now found across gaming culture (Paul, 2018; Schott & Horrell, 2000). Yet for those on the inside, gaming could nevertheless be a source of deep belonging and a way to identify with others who had the same experiences and pursued the same ludic pleasures (De Grove et al., 2015; Vella et al., 2019). In this sense every player is, indeed, already ‘one of us’ from Twitch’s perspective. Every player brings some degree of gaming literacy and knowledge and the potential to quickly connect to other Twitch users via a shared interest in gaming or in specific games or genres.
Twitch is noteworthy for how rapidly a user can get started on the platform. There is no sign-up requirement and Twitch’s homepage immediately offers the interested viewer a range of channels. I might find someone playing a game I like, or a game I know nothing about but want to learn about, perhaps because I’m considering buying it. Maybe the ‘streamer’ (the broadcaster/player) rather than the game grabs my attention – it might be that they look like I do, or talk like I do, or seem to have had similar life experiences. Instead of the streamer or the game, maybe what grabs my interest is the text-based chat room associated with a channel. Perhaps the conversation between viewers there is highly amusing, or they’re talking about games or non-gaming topics that interest me. Speaking personally, even after almost a decade of researching Twitch there is still something compelling about entering a channel and immediately seeing how actively and enthusiastically its viewers are taking part in the broadcast. It suggests that one has stumbled on a whole world of peers one didn’t know of, and that surely if there’s something here many others are enjoying, I might enjoy it as well?
Finding such a connection on Twitch immediately positions the viewer as being a member of Twitch’s us: a member of a set of demographically similar players, or people who enjoy similar games, or people who live in similar places, or people who make and laugh at similar jokes (cf. Johnson, 2022). Although gaming is ubiquitous and the games industry is big business, comfortably eclipsing many other creative and media sectors in terms of yearly economic output – with most estimates placing it somewhere around $200bn (Monahan, 2021) – it is for many game players that sense of connection that is sought and valued, and Twitch indeed provides this. Yet this connection on Twitch, as elsewhere in gaming, is not equally available to all. The archetypal straight white male ‘gamer’ (Paaßen et al., 2017; Taylor & Chess, 2018) may well easily identify as ‘one of us’ – Twitch’s semi-real and semi-imagined proposed community of online gamers sharing their experiences and their passion for games – but this cannot be taken for granted outside that demographic.
Research has comprehensively demonstrated the varied and subtle but often explicit means by which women (e.g., Guarriello, 2019; Ruberg et al., 2019; Orme, 2021), queer players (e.g., Taylor, 2018: 20; Welch, 2022: 523; Lawson, 2023: 12) and ethnic minority players (Chan & Gray, 2020; Evans & Llano, 2023: 5; Han et al., 2023) are denied full engagement in gaming communities, including game streaming. Players who do not match the implicit norm of the ‘gamer’ – white, male, young and heterosexual – can struggle to find acceptance in gaming communities, representation and presence in games (Orme, 2018: 156–7), or form friendships and sociality around gaming, and often suffer bullying and bigotry. Being outside the demographics that games and game companies – including Twitch – implicitly or explicitly frame themselves as appealing to, can easily feel alienating or hostile. Twitch’s us is presented as an unquestioned and almost axiomatic expression of the apparent deep connection between gamers the world over, but in fact hides – as so many gamers are eager to do in their rejection of ‘politics’ in games (Phillips, 2020; Ruch, 2021) – a far more complex reality.
Who is, therefore, ‘one of us’? Who is not, and who gets to decide? What powers do ‘us’ members possess to shape and define gaming on Twitch and beyond, that those outside do not? I argue in this book that Twitch is a central public forum for the debate and creation of meaning and importance in gaming, which in turn requires us to ask who gets to speak, and who is listened to. This contestation is vital to our understanding of Twitch because there is a deep reciprocal relationship between what is considered important on Twitch and what sorts of streams get the most attention, and who is behind those streams and hence what sorts of content and ideas they put out into the site. There are few game players more prominent than those on Twitch and few games more prominent than those with large numbers of Twitch viewers, yet the politics of these phenomena are far from transparent. By examining Twitch we examine the politics of contemporary gaming through an extremely important but generally overlooked pair of questions: what matters in gaming, and who gets to decide? Figuring out the answers to these questions, as well as presenting an overview of this major gaming-focused – but no longer gaming-only – internet platform in the 2020s and beyond, are the key objectives of this work.
We have always watched games
Arguably the earliest scholarship in the discipline we now call ‘game studies’ that really addressed the spectator experience of gaming was that which explored spectating in arcades. Largely now a reminder of a bygone past in most countries – although Japan maintains an active arcade scene – it is with arcades that the watching potential and the social potential of gaming first became truly apparent (Schofield & LeDone, 2019: 1; Groen, 2020). The colourful cabinets, the large and bright screens, the interesting sounds of arcade machines drew in children, teenagers and young adults (Kocurek, 2015). Arcade spaces were designed to highlight the newest and potentially most interesting games, and to enable others to gather around them (Orme, 2021: 2253). This setting not just allowed spectators to view what was taking place on screen but also offered something of a free tutorial in a game. Those perhaps intimidated by the reflex or knowledge demands of gaming – or just unaware of how to play the latest title – would be able to watch others first before potentially playing themselves (Taylor, 2018: 38).
This was important because people in arcades could not just watch others playing the games, but could also expect to be watched when they played. Alongside this inherently spectatorial framing of the space and the possibilities it afforded, arcades also facilitated a kind of asynchronous spectatorship via high-score lists (Stenros et al., 2011). These enabled players to see what scores others were achieving on a given machine without having to be physically present at the time of play. Some arcade cabinets even allowed for viewing replays of other players’ achievements, allowing viewers to spectate – at a temporal distance – a session of play that had yielded a compelling high score (cf. Johansson, 2021: 8). Watching play in this earliest era of digital gaming expanded, therefore, beyond both its spatial and temporal borders, and rapidly established an important social dimension of gaming culture and the exchange of knowledge, achievement and prestige. Spectating also had an economic benefit, as the development of skill through observation potentially reduced the impact on one’s own stack of coins when seeking to reach a later level or achieve a particular in-game goal.
Yet early digital game spectating was not limited to the arcade. The rise of home gaming consoles and the popularity of gaming among children and teenagers increased opportunities for spectatorship, especially in singleplayer games where siblings or friends would take turns watching and playing (Dixon & Weber, 2007; Taylor, 2018: 37–8). I remember playing real-time strategy games like the Command and Conquer (1995–2020) series with my friends as a teenager, taking it in turns to play perhaps twenty or thirty minutes of an online multiplayer contest before handing over to the person sitting by and watching. This sometimes led to frustrations – we always wanted to be taking our turn at the end of a battle so that we could deal the final blow to our opponents – but also enabled a higher level of observation and tactical decision making, one that was only possible with a second player watching and entirely free to think and strategize, rather than making moment-to-moment inputs into the game itself. Much of the game advertising and marketing material of the era shows children or teenagers gathered around a console or PC with one playing and the others watching. Although presumably a marketing strategy to imply the potential excitement of gaming even for those who might not consider themselves gamers, it nevertheless reflected a reality for many families and in many homes.
Another antecedent of the recent eruption in game spectatorship on Twitch can be found in esports, which is to say competitive and often professionalized video gaming (Taylor, 2012; Reitman et al., 2020). For around two decades now gamers have been able to attend events in person to watch highly skilled gamers duke it out in different games. Major live events were a rarity for a long time, however, and it was often instead through the internet that the achievements of the world’s leading competitive players were broadcast and shared (Major, 2015: 13). Videos of competitive gaming matches have been uploaded to video- and file-sharing websites for the last few decades, while in South Korea (Jin, 2010; 2020) whole television channels are dedicated to StarCraft and StarCraft II. Here gaming has not taken on the arcade spectatorship experience of looking over the shoulder at someone else’s skilled play, nor the home spectating experience with friends or family enjoying a singleplayer game together, but rather a spectating experience that is closest to professional physical sports. Competitions can be watched in person or with friends and family, of course, but broadcasting offers an experience where viewers might be tuning in from anywhere at any time in any context.
People have thus always found watching games (just as with physical sports) to be compelling, through the games of the arcade and the newly-digitized modern home – and now Twitch. In a medium often thought of as being defined by its interactivity – in a way that literature or cinema are not – it is perhaps surprising how much pleasure and satisfaction can evidently be gained by forgoing that interactivity and instead allowing someone else to be interactive with a game, and simply watching what happens (cf. Orme, 2021). Twitch is the site that exemplifies this like no other, with well over a hundred million spectators regularly tuning in to watch several million other people playing digital games. This is not simply ‘instead’ of playing games themselves, but rather the relationships between a person’s Twitch game viewing and a person’s own game playing can be complex and multi-layered. The dynamics can range from viewers watching skilled players of their favourite games in order to learn something and improve their own play skills (Burroughs & Rama, 2015; Olejniczak, 2015; Lin, 2019), to people watching a Twitch streamer as ‘passive background entertainment’ (Ask et al., 2019; cf. Taylor, 2018: 39–40) while taking breaks in the working day or even gaming themselves, to people using Twitch as a source of something akin to a game review (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019b; cf. Nieborg & Foxman, 2023) to inform a potential future purchase decision (Speed et al., 2023), to people who don’t play digital games at all nevertheless enjoying the spectacle and the community (Orme, 2021; cf. Baldauf-Quilliatre & de Carvajal, 2021).
Twitch therefore takes some of the established dynamics of game spectating, and pushes the acceleration pedal hard. Rather than watching one friend, you can now watch as many different people playing games as you can find on the platform. Rather than being watched by a handful of friends, now you too can be watched by hundreds or even thousands of eager spectators. Rather than watching someone playing a game at a high level in person, you can watch them from the comfort of your own home or on your phone on the subway, and rather than skilled singleplayer gamers being known only from their three-letter tags in the local arcade machines, they are now globally visible, and globally seen. We might therefore conclude that something like Twitch was waiting to happen, with the antecedents I’ve discussed in this section telling us much about how compelling it is to watch the digital gameplay of others. Yet just as the physical space of the arcade or the home shaped earlier spectating practices, what can we say about the actual dynamics and experiences of spectating or broadcasting on Twitch? In the arcade one looks over the shoulder of a fellow player, while on the television channel one watches the celebrity playing. On Twitch a person can do both of these, but the platform also adds new dynamics to the spectatorship experience that were (are) not present in these other forms. It is to this I now turn in order to give a sense of what streams on the platform are really like and what it means to spend time on, and to experience, Twitch.
On experiencing Twitch
Twitch is first and foremost a platform on which an individual can ‘live stream’ (broadcast) themselves doing something over the internet with accompanying video and sound (Sjöblom et al., 2019). Twitch does not allow content it deems to be sexual or otherwise unacceptable (Ruberg et al., 2019; Brown & Moberly, 2020) – though the barriers are porous and poorly policed (Cullen & Ruberg, 2019; Ruberg, 2021) as I discuss later in this book – but anything not within those categories is generally considered fair game. Live streamed sexual content has been an adult staple on the internet for decades. Some of this originated in the phenomenon of ‘cam girls’, who were women broadcasting themselves live on the internet with a range of objectives, only one of which was sexual or erotic (Senft, 2008) – although they are now often remembered as being solely about this, which is itself a telling reminder of how the internet often frames the activities of women. Cam girls represent an important precursor to Twitch (Ruberg, 2021; cf. Henry & Farvid, 2017), albeit one the site likes to distance itself from. Most broadcasts on Twitch can be viewed live and re-watched after the initial stream without needing to sign up for an account (Uszkoreit, 2018: 165), although some streamers make their recordings exclusive to committed fans. An account allows you to comment in the text ‘chat’ window accompanying a live stream to talk to the streamer or other viewers, and allows you to start your own channel with that username. A streamer is free to watch channels any time they are not streaming (or indeed when they are streaming), while a viewer can watch any number of channels simultaneously, in any broadcast language or from any time zone, and can stop and start their viewership of a particular channel at any time.
Although no longer the complete picture, Twitch is still primarily associated with, and predominantly features, digital gaming streams. In a gaming stream the four most common aspects of a broadcast are the streamed video of a game being played, a live webcam image of the streamer’s face and sometimes upper body, a voiceover commentary from the streamer, and the ‘Twitch chat’ window alongside the live video. The first (the main video) most often takes the form of a screen capture on the streamer’s computer using software specifically designed for this, such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) or StreamLabs (Woodhouse, 2021: 30). These record the image on the user’s screen and transmit it to Twitch, which then relays it to the viewers on that channel. This video content is usually broadcast at a high frame rate and these days is generally of a high quality such as 720p or 1080p, although lower-quality options are generally available for viewers on mobile phones or with limited data plans. The second (the webcam) is not universal but certainly the expected standard, and has hence received a high degree of scholarly attention (Sjöblom et al., 2019: 23; Brown & Moberly, 2020; Woodhouse, 2021; cf. Ruberg, 2022). Most streams on Twitch have a webcam focused on the streamer’s head, neck and sometimes upper body, allowing the viewer to see their facial and sometimes bodily responses and reactions to what is happening in the game (or other activity) or being posted in the chat window. Channels without a webcam, meanwhile, sometimes have a ‘VTuber’ (Sutton, 2021; Turner, 2022) avatar instead (Brett, 2022), a digitally generated humanoid (or robot, animal, etc.), which mirrors the real-world actions of the streamer through voice and motion capture, but without showing their actual image.
The third (the commentary) can range from a moment-to-moment stream of consciousness commenting on, and giving immediate responses to, whatever is happening in the game, to occasional comments and observations about the channel, to anything in between (Payne, 2018: 287; Taylor, 2018: 19–20; Ruberg et al., 2019: 473). Twitch channels without voice commentary only find an audience in the most unusual of cases (Johnson & Jackson, 2022), suggesting that this sense of personal interaction and seemingly off-the-cuff conversation is key to a channel’s appeal. The fourth (the chat) entails a text-based chat window which sits alongside the streamer’s video broadcast. Viewers can type messages to the streamer and to other viewers, and there are icons next to viewers’ names. These denote whether they are a financial supporter of the stream and if so to what extent and for how long, whether they are a stream moderator, or any one of several other statuses (Cai & Wohn, 2021: 9–10; Carter & Egliston, 2021: 14; Johansson, 2021: 44; Jackson, 2023a: 151–2). Known as ‘Twitch chat’ or more casually just ‘chat’, this window is the main way that viewers talk to the streamer and each other and has itself seen a significant amount of research (e.g., Ford et al., 2017; Recktenwald, 2017; Lo, 2018; Nematzadeh et al., 2019). Twitch chat is one of the most distinctive elements of the platform, with its low-fidelity text (Hamilton et al., 2014) sitting alongside the high-fidelity audiovisual content (Ruberg, 2021: 1683) being key to enabling many of the platform’s most distinctive practices and complex interactive possibilities (Harris et al., 2023).
Digital gameplay dominates Twitch in terms of the volume of broadcast content and in terms of how people (gamers and otherwise) think about the site, but it is not the entire story (Payne, 2018: 287; Consalvo & Phelps, 2019). Non-gaming streams exhibit similar traits, except that, rather than capturing gaming video, they might capture a second webcam showing the streamer doing something (e.g., making a costume), or just a single webcam image that shows the streamer and their activities but nothing else besides. One of the most popular non-gaming broadcast types is the so-called ‘Just Chatting’ category (Kersting et al., 2021: 6; Lamerichs, 2021: 182) in which live streamers are simply having conversations with their viewers, either from home or while travelling. Many of these streams are quite relaxed and try to generate an atmosphere of cosiness and comfort (see Johnson, 2021: 1012; Youngblood, 2022; cf. Wohn et al., 2019: 103) through a sense that one is simply having a nice chat with one’s friends (Speed et al., 2023; cf. Leith, 2021: 112). These are all dynamics of Twitch addressed more fully later in the book but here it is enough to note that this sense of easy friendship and mutual interest between a streamer and their viewers – whether incidentally in a gaming (or non-gaming) channel, or as the focus of a chatting channel – is a key dynamic for our understanding of Twitch culture.
These observations lead us to one of the major ongoing debates about Twitch and one of the key themes of this work: what is Twitch for? Platform infrastructures and technologies can easily lead to unexpected outcomes which can be capitalized on by a platform’s owners, resisted by them, or continue to exist in states of tension and debate. There are examples to be found on many platforms, such as the curious forms of humour and poetry and ‘bots’ which exist on Twitter* (e.g., Veale & Cook, 2018; Dynel, 2020) or the emergence of cultures of sexual and gender openness, expression and exploration on Tumblr (Tiidenberg et al., 2021). The internet has long been renowned for users’ ability to find unintended uses for websites and facilities and infrastructures that go far beyond original design goals and specifications. As I examine in chapter 1, Twitch exploded to wider popularity following the unexpected success of its gaming content – and its subsequent self-framing as being for gaming – but that does not mean such a situation is set in stone. I therefore cannot address Twitch solely in its primary state as a platform for gaming, but rather it must also be addressed as a platform whose purpose is itself in flux, contested, and intertwined with the politics of the activities it hosts on its millions of channels. This is one of the most important current dynamics of Twitch and must be examined alongside its powerful role within gaming if we are to gain a comprehensive image of what Twitch is, what it is used for, what roles and functions it fulfils, and where it might be going.
On researching Twitch
My own research on Twitch started in 2015 after completing my doctorate and acquiring a small grant from a UK funding agency. With this money my colleague Dr Jamie Woodcock and I travelled to Twitch’s annual ‘TwitchCon’ event in 2015, 2016 and 2017. Amongst the many thousands of attendees we conducted around a hundred streamer interviews, some of quite significant length. These streamers had gathered at the event to meet their fans, promote their channels, network with other streamers and potential sponsors, and in many cases simply to experience the extraordinary rise of this gaming platform of which they were a small yet important part. Many gave their time generously to discuss their experiences and reflections on the platform, their labour, their perceptions of Twitch, game streaming and its future. All of this made it particularly valuable to get such a large volume of data, especially at a time when Twitch scholarship was in its infancy.
Since then I’ve published scholarship on Twitch addressing a range of topics – labour, culture and monetization being three of the most central – yet throughout this entire research process there has been one theme not yet fully examined. Specifically, I have continually observed how important things that happen on Twitch seem to be for gaming and for gamers, how much they are talked about and discussed, and how much of a continued life and continued influence they hold beyond the platform itself. This process began with the broadcast of esports events on Twitch, which were key moments in the communities and politics around competitive games (Burroughs & Rama, 2015; Taylor, 2018), but has since expanded massively across games and genres. Now it is not just individual broadcasts of individual moments in games that are of consequence – a new world record speedrun, for example (Scully-Blaker et al., 2017) – but rather Twitch’s collective interest in a game (Stuart, 2020), or lack of interest in a game, can shape the financial success of that game and its wider popular reception (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019b; Parker & Perks, 2021). Major accomplishments in gaming streamed on Twitch garner immense amounts of gaming press and responses from players (e.g., Moyse, 2018; Gault, 2019). New games are often released by having famous streamers broadcast their play of the game – sometimes before others have access to it – such that their responses shape initial cultural reactions. Game developers change aspects of games to appeal to streamers and to be compelling on Twitch (Johnson & Woodcock, 2019b; Parker & Perks, 2021), sometimes even including big-name streamers in their advertising and sponsorships (Sjöblom et al., 2019; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019; Kersting et al., 2021). Controversies on Twitch immediately spill over into other social media platforms and gaming – as well as non-gaming – news sites (e.g., Hern, 2022; Park, 2023). Yet we also see increasing contests over, and diversity in, what Twitch is or should be for (e.g., Taylor, 2018: 22; Ask et al., 2019; Cabeza-Ramírez et al., 2021), and these contests inevitably intersect with ideas of what gaming is, who gaming is for, and who ‘gamers’ are.
All of this makes Twitch an exemplary site for research when trying to understand contemporary gaming (and other streamed activities, as I explore in later chapters). Researching Twitch offers a tremendous availability of content and behaviour for study; streamers eager to talk with you if you’re actually able to get in touch with them; and data applicable to a wide range of research agendas and interests – not only gaming and games. Yet streamers can exhibit neoliberal and optimized thought processes about their time that makes securing interviews and the like for academic research very difficult, and the complexity of what the site offers necessitates engaging with numerous disciplines and approaches if one wishes to make serious intellectual progress. Nevertheless, Twitch has manoeuvred itself (and by the immense labours of its streamers and, to a lesser extent viewers, has been manoeuvred) into a position of massive visibility and importance in gaming, and increasingly in other domains as well, making it a key site for contemporary internet and digital cultures research. In this book I hope to present the reader with a comprehensive and novel sense of the site and its significance through the combination of synthesizing contemporary scholarship and presenting new analysis – in the latter case through a new argument that seems clearer to me with each passing year of studying Twitch. That is, specifically, the role that Twitch plays as a kind of agora.
The gaming agora
Sociologist T.L. Taylor (2018) published the first monograph on Twitch, building on her esports interests (Taylor, 2012) by giving professionalized and competitive gaming a dominant place in the analysis presented, and examining in detail the central role Twitch has played in the rapid growth of esports. It also examines Twitch’s history, the emotional and affective work of game live streaming, and its legal and regulatory complexities. Taylor (2018: 23) identifies ‘multiple cultural trajectories’ that collide in game live streaming, specifically television, ‘broader cultures of gaming and spectatorship’, user-generated content and ‘telecommunications’. We are told that Twitch in turn emerges from a conflux of ‘television transformations, internet culture, and multiplayer experiences’ (ibid.: 38). These observations remain as true as they were in 2018, but the emergence of other key factors in the last half-decade – particularly the rise of celebrity influencers on the site, and Twitch’s intensification as a monetized and metricized platform – now demands our attention. Equally, broadening out from a focus on esports is another way this current volume looks to update our understanding of Twitch to the 2020s and beyond. Taylor’s framing of gaming channels as being either ‘esports’ or ‘variety’ in nature (Taylor, 2018: 3, 6, 35) is no longer able to capture the now immense range of genres of gaming channels, the rise of many non-esports competitive gaming channels which focus on a single game, and the simple fact that esports is now just one part of gaming content broadcast on the site. As Taylor (2018: 6, 19, 22) puts it, her work is fundamentally concerned with the question of what happens when ‘private play’ becomes ‘public entertainment’ through a site like Twitch – this volume, by contrast, looks to update our understanding of Twitch to reflect a deeply changed platform, and integrate new analyses that reflect numerous major changes Twitch has undergone in recent years, especially in terms of Twitch’s increasingly key role in the wider gaming ecosystem.
In this book I therefore build on Taylor’s discussion of Twitch’s role in the increasing publicity of private digital game play, by posing the question: what, therefore, does Twitch mean for gaming? What does this site mean for how we understand what gaming is, what gaming is not, what gaming entails, and what is important in gaming? In other words, what is Twitch doing to our ideas about gaming, and how is Twitch changing and shaping how those very ideas are debated, contested, and settled? While I retain a strong interest in the individual streamers and viewers of Twitch and much of this book will be concerned with their experiences, interests, behaviours and motivations, it is these broader political and ideological (and economic) questions that now come to the fore. Twitch has grown to such a size that the site is no longer just a location for individual experiences, but instead a major actor in its own right in gaming and gaming media. The experiences of individuals on the platform are not just their own but collectively constitute the nature of the much larger actor that Twitch has become. Twitch’s influence as a platform is constructed from the behaviour of all its users, but much like the relationship between a state and its population, the actions of the former cannot be seen as simply an aggregate of the individual actions of its members.
To address these topics I propose in this work that Twitch should be understood as a leading – perhaps, now, the leading – gaming agora. The agora, in ancient Athens, was a city square in which ‘administrative, political, judicial, commercial, social, cultural, and religious activities’ (Camp, 1986: 6; cf. Sennett, 2016: 2) were all carried out and, importantly, were seen to be carried out. This might involve debates over political issues, important trade deals between leading figures, major religious ceremonies or observances, discussions over philosophy or history, and affairs of state or the public settling and proclamation of legal or civil matters. In a pre-digital era this gathering of people in one place, and this gathering of significant matters in one place, did much to define matters of importance and give large numbers of people some degree of say and engagement with them. Just as the most popular speakers in the ancient agora dominated through their ‘rhetorical skills’ (Davenport & Leitch, 2005: 143), so too do Twitch’s most popular streamers command massive audiences and hold the ability to shape perspectives on major issues in gaming. This occurs because an agora fundamentally allows people to ‘speak in a public forum’ and exhibits three key characteristics: the equal ‘right and opportunities to speak’, a sense of ‘shared values’, and ‘informal controls on debate’ (ibid.). The totality of Twitch’s millions of users, tens of thousands of channels, its infrastructures and affordances, its content, its cultures, together create a dynamic and influential agora. It is from an agora that ‘reasons, purposes and norms emerge’ (O’Kelly & Dubnick, 2014: 9) within a given culture or society, and it is the emergence of these articulations of importance and consequence in gaming, and for gamers, that are at the core of this book. I therefore select the agora rather than any of the other (more commonly invoked?) scholarly metaphors for the internet or websites, such as ‘third places’ (Steinkeuhler & Williams, 2006), ‘third spaces’ (Graham et al., 2015), the ‘virtual sphere’ (Papacharissi, 2002), and so on. It is the agora’s focus on speech and presentation, its explanation of the elevation of some speakers above others, and its emphasis on ideas of norms, debates and ritual, which are all key to developing a new perspective for understanding Twitch.
In exploring this agora two of the key questions are who speaks in it and who listens in it, and hence the power dynamics around Twitch’s diverse set of users. The platform has become one of gaming’s primary places for influencing gaming trends, creating famous gaming moments, forming game communities and even enabling gaming careers, but also one of gaming’s primary places for shaping and reinforcing harassment, exclusion and prejudice. At the very same time the ‘exclusivity’ of that forum for gaming-related content and hence gaming-related concerns is itself being challenged, with many other streamers – offering cooking channels, artistic projects, chat shows and more – recognizing the potential of the platform for matters beyond the politics and play of digital games. The Twitch agora is an absolutely central hub for the politics and contests and meanings of modern gaming, but a second level of politics also plays out about whether other matters, not just gaming, can or should be accommodated within Twitch’s walls. All of Twitch’s streamers are standing on the agora’s cobblestones when holding their debates with their fellow gamers and more generally their fellow Twitch users, but some are also levering up those stones and trying them out in new orientations at the very same time (cf. Harris et al., 2023). These two layers of debate on Twitch – what matters in gaming, and whether or not ‘what matters in gaming’ should be the exclusive focus of the site – co-exist, and are the source of much of what makes Twitch so interesting as well as the source of some of its strongest controversies, challenges and issues. Throughout this work the agora perspective will, I hope, allow us to focus more thoroughly than before on many of these dynamics key to understanding the site, and (game) live streaming more broadly.
This work consequently has several goals. One of them is to give an outline and overview of Twitch as it stands now in the early to mid-2020s. Some of this foundational work can be found in Taylor (2018) and in the hundreds of journal and book chapter publications that now exist on Twitch, but the site is also a constantly evolving experience. A half-decade has passed since Taylor’s book and this is ample time for new dynamics (e.g., the celebrity influencers and metricized monetization mentioned previously) to rise to prominence on any platform, especially one evolving as rapidly as Twitch. We are therefore due an updated look at the platform and what takes place on it, who is involved in it, but also how the platform as an actor
