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Home Studios

TRANSFORMING PRIVATE PLAY
INTO PUBLIC ENTERTAINMENT

Late one February night around 2:00 a.m., I found myself heading down a Florida interstate to visit a popular broadcaster at his home to see him do his live stream in person. We’d previously spoken on Skype, and I had watched a bunch of his broadcasts, but I was interested in getting a peek into what it looked like from the other end of the screen. Despite being a night owl, I was already getting tired and couldn’t quite imagine the prospect of rallying to go live to thousands of viewers at this time of day. But this was his usual broadcast slot, intentionally chosen to skim off North American audiences from other streamers who were wrapping up their shows and snag Australian viewers just starting their evening. Fortunately, I had the easy job; my plan was to sit off to the side and just watch. As I pulled into the driveway, I admit being surprised and impressed. I hadn’t known quite what to expect, especially given the financial insecurity so many streamers endure. Yet this was a suburban middle-class home you’d see in any number of cities around the country: two stories with a little lawn out front, surrounded by others that looked a lot like it. The street was quiet at this time of night, and the house was dark. As I rang the bell, I worried for a moment that I was either at the wrong place or about to wake people.

But he answered, saying he’d just gotten up from a nap. The house was silent as the rest of his family—wife, baby, and brother who lived with them—still slept. The open-plan living room and attached kitchen were arranged much like you’d expect of a young family—with baby things, TV/DVD setup, and mail along with assorted other stuff cluttering the counter. He offered me coffee, but in a bit of grogginess put a cider pod in the machine by mistake. I didn’t want to be any hassle (always the tricky bit of research as you descend into someone’s work or home) so said no problem while he gave me a quick tour of the downstairs. Perhaps sensing that I was taking it all in, he spoke about how amazed he was that they got to live in this house, how lucky he was to have the viewers he did, and how he never thought that this could be his life. Having previously spoken with him while he and his family were living with relatives, I knew there was immediacy to this feeling and his gratitude felt genuine.

We made our way upstairs to the room dedicated to his broadcasts, and he quickly fired off a tweet giving his followers a heads-up that he’d be live soon. His setup wasn’t anything fancy, just a generic black desk with a couple monitors, a few chairs, a lamp, assorted boxes, and gear here and there. His computer and monitors were already up and running as he sat down and began a ramp-up process. He started by looking at the Twitch front page, seeing viewer counts, assessing audiences, scanning the games and streamers that were on, and estimating when they were likely to sign off. Even before he began streaming, there were seven hundred people already on his channel hanging out in chat waiting for him. He decided to do a quick straw poll of the audience for them to pick what he should play. This involved using a third-party website to create a quick survey and pasting it multiple times to the chat. About twenty votes in, he settled on a game and sent out a “going live” message to Twitter. It was now approaching 3:30 a.m., and while the rest of the house was still asleep he began his broadcast. Although we’d been speaking in fairly quiet tones up until that point, with the start of the show, the vibe shifted and I saw him transition into his entertaining persona.

Over the next five or so hours, I watched him play through a few different games and keep an audience of four thousand entertained. Most strikingly, I saw the high degree of behind-the-scenes work happening. In interviews with streamers I’d heard about all the things they juggle while live, but seeing it in person was impressive. One of his screens showed his game, while the second monitor displayed a large chat window, his broadcasting software (which included a graphical trigger system for automatic messages that would pop up in the broadcast), and a window showing details about who was subscribing, donating, and following. The channel’s chat window was a central part of the production, and he was constantly keeping his eye on the conversation, issuing hellos, thanks, and responses. Viewers reminded him a few times about donations he’d missed acknowledging, and he apologized each time, promising to catch up with the backlog. Amid all the humor and sometimes-raunchy jokes, his heartfelt thanks to his viewers came through. At one point, perhaps because someone spotted me in the background, he waved me into the frame to say hi. I did so quickly and then tried to scoot my chair back to the side. I definitely didn’t have what it takes to stay on camera.

Eventually his brother popped his head into the room to check in about something. The rest of the house was waking up. He started wrapping up the broadcast. I noticed during the session that he hadn’t run any ads and only now at the end showed a few. He took a look at who was currently streaming and picked a few fellow broadcasters to suggest that his viewers switch over to watch, instigating a friendly “raid.” Once he turned off the broadcast, he showed me all the other tools in the background that he uses to monitor his productions. While he didn’t need to directly call on them during the session, he pointed out the Skype window where all his moderators were gathered to coordinate their handling chat. Finally, he tallied up the results of evening’s session: over fifty new subscribers, over eight hundred new followers, and over $500 in donations.

We headed downstairs to say hello to his family, now all woken up and starting their day. I’d met his wife before so we hugged and chitchatted, but it was the first time I’d seen his new baby. She was happy and reached out for her dad when she spotted him. He took her and bounced her around with morning hellos. The rest of his day would be a mix of helping with childcare, errands, and all the prep and postproduction work that streamers are constantly doing. I said my goodbyes, and as I pulled away from the quiet suburb to make my way back to the hotel for some sleep, I couldn’t help but think about how in average homes around the world these quirky one-person studios were appearing and broadcasting out content to millions of viewers every day.

This chapter explores these individual live streamers who are transforming their private play into public entertainment. In particular, I focus on those aspiring to create a new professional identity in this space. Whether they are “variety” broadcasters who play many different game titles, or esports players sharing hours and hours of practice of a single game, streamers are not only developing conventions for game spectatorship as they broadcast but are also constructing a new form of work. While many variety streamers still hold day jobs, a number of them are pursuing full-time professional live streaming, often supported by family or partners. Esports competitors increasingly supplement tournament income and broaden their sponsorship opportunities via live streaming. Despite working with differing kinds of games and genre conventions, both types of streamers are typically based in home studios (frequently located in their living room or bedroom) and navigate the labor of producing one’s play for spectatorship. It is usually an economically precarious, if personally fulfilling, path.

Given that Twitch supports synchronous chat running alongside the video, broadcasters are typically engaging with their audiences—saying hello, answering questions, responding to feedback, and over the course of months or years, getting to know them and be known by them. As one longtime streamer put it to me, Twitch allows him to say to his audience, “Welcome to my channel. Now you’re a part of the experience.” This social and emotional labor extends beyond the bounds of the broadcast platform; having a successful channel also often requires attention to other forms of social media. Managing a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube and gaming platforms like Steam can become an important part of building and maintaining an audience. Live streamers are not only content producers but brand and community managers too.

Aside from this “front-stage” labor, live streamers frequently find themselves having to skill up into agile one-person production studios. Whereas traditional media production involves a division of labor spanning a number of skilled technical and creative professionals—from camera operators and audio experts to writers and producers—live streamers regularly take on all these roles themselves, especially when they start out. While broadcasting, they are not only producing all the creative content but also tend to be simultaneously managing all the technical components to make the production happen. Live streaming, particularly when undertaken with professional aspirations, becomes the work of play.

Trajectories of Engagement

Perhaps one of the most important things I learned early on when talking to live streamers is that there was no single reason why they broadcast their play. All had a deep core passion for gaming, but there were a range of reasons animating those who turned on a camera and started broadcasting. Oftentimes what initially got them to try out streaming evolved into something more. Motivations for starting streaming and keeping with it, especially over many years, differ among broadcasters and can change as one develops their profile. What may have begun as a fun thing to do after work at night, a hobby, can develop into a full-fledged creative endeavor with professional aspirations. I will discuss these in more depth throughout the chapter, but a brief description of how people get into streaming and some of the work involved is helpful in setting the stage for what follows.

Social connections: Some simply start streaming from a desire to share their play with a small group of friends. Many times these streamers wanted to find new ways to build social connections with friends and strangers. The central pleasure was in being connected through broadcasting to others who love gaming. Many professional streamers begin this way, derive joy from it, and find they have a knack for it.

Transforming the play experience: Others speak of how broadcasting play can become a means of amplifying the experience through a public performance. Esports competitors would sometimes tell me that broadcasting offered a form of public motivation and accountability. Variety streamers would note that introducing spectators into the mix made gaming more enjoyable. In both cases, broadcasting was a mechanism that changed the experience of play in a way the streamer enjoyed.

Creativity and performance: Some streamers are excited by the creative or production aspects of broadcasting. They are drawn to the expressive aspects of live streaming and enjoy being an entertainer. Broadcasting their play became a new performative outlet, not dissimilar from theater and acting. Some found the more formal or technical challenges such as setting up a good system, creating overlays, or building the “set” an engaging experience in media production.

Professional aspirations: Quite a few of the streamers I spoke to were attracted to live streaming to economically support their love of gaming, especially in the face of otherwise dire job prospects. One described struggling with traditional work, saying, “I had been meandering from one dead-end retail soul-sucking job to another and I was just trying to think what am I going to do with my life. These jobs are literally killing me.” For these people, live streaming offers a space of meaningful and fulfilling work, unlike what they experienced in more traditional jobs.

Professional expectations: Finally, especially in the case of esports streamers, broadcasting has not only become an important part of how they make money but may often be required of them as well. Increasingly, esports teams are including live streaming expectations as part of the work that players must undertake and are putting it into contracts. In the same way that individual streamers can use broadcasting to solidify their brand (and revenue), teams have come to see it as a crucial part of their overall presence, particularly if they are luring sponsors with promises of getting their products in front of audiences daily.

While the motivations vary, for most individual streamers there is a common practical trajectory in terms of actually learning to set up a stream and broadcast.¹ While some utilize built-in game console functionality (for instance, PlayStation 4 has a “share” button that you push to broadcast), at the time of my research most people began by trying it out on their computer. This is not a trivial matter, though, since it requires downloading and setting up a third-party piece of software that pipes out to Twitch what is happening on the streamer’s computer.

This step typically necessitates some basic research by searching online, visiting an official Twitch help page, or asking other streamers and viewers. Subreddits like /r/Twitch have become a valuable hub for aspiring streamers to share all kinds of information, from camera setups to tips on interacting with audiences. One streamer described how he began playing with broadcasting software:

People usually don’t just decide they want to jump on and start streaming like every day, or streaming a specific series or something. What usually happens is kind of like Photoshop or like how you learn anything that you do on computer as you start off with an application: you download the application because you think it’s cool, your friends have it or you have seen someone else use it, and you start to play with it, you get comfortable with it, and then you actually start using it regularly and you try to build something from that.

If a streamer finds themselves getting hooked on the practice, they will often begin investing in equipment, adding in a microphone or camera. One woman I spoke with portrayed this transition in the following way: “When I first started, I was very, very nervous. I didn’t want to add my microphone. I didn’t want to add my webcam. I just wanted to let people watch me play the game.” This initial hesitation is not unusual, especially for women or people of color, who might face additional barriers of harassment (something I’ll discuss in more detail later), and streamers often spoke to me about the ongoing development of their broadcast as they become more invested in it. Ramping up the complexity of a production is not simply a design or technical choice but rather one that involves social and psychological considerations. As streamers develop their performance and voice as a broadcaster, they will frequently enlist new layers of design and technology.

Camera and microphone upgrades are common entry points when streamers build out their broadcasting setups. At the higher end, those who get more interested in the production quality side of things will often buy mixing boards and other professional A/V devices to handle numerous inputs and outputs. On the high end, this equipment can be so expensive that the broadcaster, like traditional production companies, will just rent gear for special events. For example, rather than buying four cameras that would cost $8,000 each and a TriCaster to manage a multicamera production for another $40,000, one broadcaster who occasionally does elaborate special shows will rent it all for $7,000 a week. Second (and third) monitors are not unusual, as are green screens to chroma key in other graphics.² For those fortunate enough to have the space, they may dedicate a special room to all this gear, creating an in-home studio. Others will simply set their production area in a corner of a living room or bedroom.

Aside from hardware components, as streamers become more experienced they will also typically start deploying software bots to help them moderate their channel. They will begin using graphical overlays and alert systems. They may also utilize third-party websites and software that help manage donations as well as giveaways. As a channel grows, a broadcaster may increasingly also find they need to draw more on others to help with the production. Moderation teams, often seeded with dedicated viewers, will get formed to help manage a channel’s community and live chat. Contractors specializing in design may be hired to make graphical assets for not just shows but ancillary sites too.

Those who turn to making their live streaming a sustainable financial endeavor tend to implement scheduling and focused attention to building a quality stream with the hope of attaining partnership or affiliate status with Twitch, thus allowing them to tap into additional forms of monetization (such as ad revenue and subscriptions). As their practice grows, they may do more to experiment creatively, to connect up to larger networks of other live streamers by doing guest spots on other shows, sharing audiences, or joining a streaming community. If they are one of the fortunate few, they build a professional life as a broadcaster that supports them economically.

In what follows I will detail these various kernels in more depth, but it is key to keep in mind as we begin this chapter that individual streamers are not homogeneous in their motivations, and how they experience broadcasting may change over time. They take on a range of work, from social engagement with their audiences to performance and production. In this book, I specifically focus on those who also seek to build professional careers out of their broadcasting because they give us insight into a complex relationship between work and play as well as a form of creative yet precarious labor within a changing media landscape.

Layers of Production

As one can see from the brief description above, game live streaming can quickly become a serious production. The level of attention, labor, resources, and creativity that streamers put into their practice to take a game and make a product out of it that extends well beyond its formal properties is stunning. Accomplished broadcasters make compelling performances and productions that capture viewers and keep them entertained for hours. In just a handful of years, we’ve seen the practice develop from the simple broadcast of play to full-fledged “shows” with a range of genre conventions. The current state of top-level variety productions utilizes a range of technologies and practices. These live stream productions can be broken down into a number of layers:

Set design: While the game itself makes up a portion of the viewer’s screen, accomplished streamers often use complex “sets” that involve additional audio, graphical overlays, green screening, cameras, triggered events (graphical/audio notifications of new followers, for example), chat bots, custom chat emoticons specific to the channel, and a customized channel page (see figure 3.1). It is worth noting that many of these components are produced not just by the live streamers themselves but also third-party graphics designers or programmers who have themselves sought to find a professional place in this new media sphere. The set of any given live stream is often constructed through the labor of a number of people, at times distributed globally.³

FIGURE 3.1. Ellohime broadcast with auto pop-up banner when the channel gets a new follower (dubbed a “Viking of Ellohime”), 2014.

Performance: Successful live streamers do not just silently broadcast their gameplay. Instead, they tend to mix together a “think-aloud” method similar to usability testing where the user speaks aloud their thought processes as they interact with a system and makes external that which would normally only be “in their head.” This is typically accompanied with humor, frustration, and suspense. Streamers talk about this as trying to be entertaining or engaging. They frequently use physical expressions and gestures, at times theatrically, accentuated, or held for effect, to punctuate their communication (see figure 3.2). Esports broadcasters stand as an exception to this general rule where, for them, the very act of showing virtuoso play is itself a performance. These streamers usually do not speak much but rather perform and build audiences through their expertise. It is an entirely different genre that offers a variant on performance, though it shares some elements with variety streams.

FIGURE 3.2. Futureman broadcast utilizing a green screen “set” that is part of the channel’s theme, 2015.

Critique and evaluation: While a portion of the commenting that live streamers do is rooted in their moment-to-moment actions, analysis is also an important component of the work of play. Reflecting on mechanics, design, gameplay, “feel,” and other aspects of the game itself can form a powerful part of the value of a stream. Astute streamers not only provide viewers with an entertaining performance of play but act as expert evaluators of systems too, conveying to their audience an independent analysis of the game as object.

Sociality: Live streaming performance is deeply interwoven with audience and community engagement. Core to this is the ongoing chat that takes place alongside and within the visual broadcast of the game and streamer. Viewers of the channel can talk not only to each other through text chat but the streamer as well. Accomplished streamers become adept at following this online conversation, keeping an eye on the chat window, talking to and engaging with their viewers, and all the while playing the game. This interaction can range from welcoming newcomers to responding to questions or soliciting feedback. In many instances, the audience becomes enlisted in the gameplay itself by giving input on choices within the game (see figure 3.3). These moments, especially in tense game scenarios, are particularly entertaining and regularly generate high audience engagement.

FIGURE 3.3. SuushiSam broadcast with audience weighing in on what choice the broadcaster should make, 2012.

The social and community layers of a production routinely extend beyond the live streaming platform itself onto other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as other gaming platforms like Steam that allow for streamers to set up groups for their audiences. Streamers can also send private messages through the Twitch platform to communicate with their channel subscribers.

Material and digital infrastructure: While it is easy to forget about infrastructures when talking about internet platforms, it is crucial for understanding the complexity at work in live streaming. Beyond the technical components provided by Twitch (such as video codecs, storage, servers, transmission nodes, etc.), at the individual streamer level, a range of material and digital components make productions possible. This includes computers, A/V hardware (including mixing boards), furniture, and lighting (see figure 3.4). At the software level, it involves everything from graphics and A/V processing software to bot and notification/trigger systems to network functionality. Many people I interviewed talked about experimenting with and piecing together their systems. When looking at support communities for streamers (such as the Twitch subreddit), you will often find them analyzing A/V setups, preferred devices, and discussions of many behind-the-scenes details to facilitate quality broadcasts. The level of technicity—“particular kinds of attitudes, aptitudes, and skill, with technology” (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 113)—involved in making more complex streams is key, and typically requires a tremendous amount of self-taught expertise and community-based learning.

FIGURE 3.4. MANvsGame broadcasting room setup posted to Twitter, 2014.

Economic and commercial frameworks: The financial structures at work in accomplished live streams are also important to consider. Twitch offers select broadcasters (partners and affiliates) the opportunity to monetize streams in several ways, including channel subscriptions of which they get a cut, revenue from ads and game sales, and money from the platform’s internal “Bits” donation system. Beyond these formal mechanisms, many streamers utilize third-party donation systems, sponsorship deals, and Amazon affiliate links.⁴

These various layers interact with and impact each other in meaningful ways. For example, in figure 3.5, while there is an economic framework being referenced (ads and subscriptions), the streamer also leverages a social as well as emotional valence with language of support, appreciation, and increasing chat functionality.⁵ Likewise, software infrastructures like bots and notification systems or set designs (utilizing cameras or microphones) are deeply tied to producing particular forms of interaction and community engagement. Performative qualities are connected to wanting to create better content and communities, which for those monetizing their streams, draws and retains viewers. Live streaming is a rich illustration of the assemblage of play, whereby a variety of actors (human and nonhuman), infrastructures, institutions, and interrelations make play, performance, and work possible.

FIGURE 3.5. Itmejp channel interstitial, 2013.

Producing a successful broadcast involves a great deal of cultivation.⁶ Balancing the audience and forms of engagement with the content, deploying a complex array of material and infrastructural components, and managing a variety of relationships on- and offline (including economic ones) all become part of the work of streaming play. While it is easy to see a site like Twitch as just people gaming, looking closely at the components of successful broadcasts, with the creativity, labor, and systems that make them possible, pushes us to reckon with something much more. The game, as produced by the developer, while a critical part of an overall production, is only one layer. Peering more closely, we can spot the often-invisible nodes: the infrastructure of hardware, video codecs, network protocols, and software layers. And we can begin to see how forms of interaction, performativity, and social engagement flow through as well as across it all, shaping these networked broadcasts. The empirical and analytic limits of a framework that centers the game artifact becomes apparent. Digital play is constituted through assemblage, as is the work of broadcasting it.

Entertainment and Expertise

The formal components of a broadcast are matched in the sophistication that accomplished streamers bring to carrying out a show. Streaming is not simply playing a game, though that is certainly a key node, but also working with the play moment as a performative experience. As one of my interviewees who ran a daily broadcast put it,

When I flip on the stream, I’m not just playing a video game. It’s not like you’re just sitting in your living room playing by yourself not talking to anybody. . . . It’s not like that. I’m an entertainer. I’m performing. I’m trying to keep things relevant, trying to keep conversation cool. I’m trying to make sure that the vibe is right, that nobody’s acting up in the chat. I’m trying to make sure that the gameplay is interesting, that I’m showing people things. I’m trying to make sure that I’m staying attentive to them.

For many variety streamers, a large part of what makes up the entertaining components of their play involves utilizing the speak-aloud method, enlisting humor, frustration, and performative action alongside interaction with viewers. The foundation of any basic stream tends to involve the broadcaster making external the range of internal processes that a gamer experiences when playing. They talk through actions or thoughts, typically giving the audience a glimpse into what might otherwise be hidden cognitive work. Indeed, new broadcasters are encouraged to “just keep talking” and rely on narrating their experience even if they have no viewers. At the base level, game live streaming is an exteriorization of an otherwise-unspoken ludic process.

Yet experienced streamers layer onto this an additional level of performance. Communicating with their audience in real time is a skill that grows as streamers not only gain more users but also refine their setups to allow them to more easily see the ongoing channel chat, and pull out key people or comments to interact with. This interaction may be focused on the game, such as asking for advice and strategies, or simply saying hello to fans and checking in with them. Amid this, streamers will also often “play up” a more performative interaction with both audience members and the game itself. Reactions, expressions, jokes, and even theatricality can form a critical part of successful live streams. Adept broadcasters engage in a kind of “crowd work” that involves not only the live audience but also the emerging experience of the game.⁷ As such, they are incredibly flexible performers who, while frequently having set conventions (language, in-jokes, etc.), are deeply attuned to the audience.

Another slice of the entertainment aspect of variety streaming comes from audience members developing a sense of the streamer over time—their personality, life, quirks and style—across many different titles over months. One streamer I spoke with described how this side of the broadcast is important, saying, “They [the repeat audience] are here specifically to watch you and your mannerisms, and learn about your life and like what you got going on in this moment. That’s what they are consuming; that’s their content. That’s their entertainment. You are the entertainment versus what you are streaming being the entertainment.” This work is resonant with what Walker identifies the “active streaming posture” in which “streamers are able to develop a public identity connected to play style, on-air personality, comedic repertoire, their relationship with teammates or co-streamers, or even a style of critique.” (Walker 2014, 439).⁸ The distinctive qualities that specific streamers bring to their shows highlight the fact that it is not simply the game that is the draw to a broadcast.

This entertainment orientation is not separate from overall game expertise, however. While watching your favorite live streamer learn how to play a specific title can make for a compelling show, on the whole broadcasters tend to be adept, committed gamers. People who pursue professional live streaming come to it with a fundamental interest and passion for games. Unsurprisingly, as they continue to develop an identity as a professional broadcaster, this deep feel for games only grows, solidifying their public identity as a gamer, and at times, bolstering their profile for companies and developers that seek to leverage it for promotional activities.

Esports streamers trade on a different form of entertainment—one not based on humor or particularly theatrical performances but rather game expertise. Even though like variety streamers they run regular channels, have subscribers, and engage in broadcasting with a professional orientation, their audience draw originates in the desire of viewers to see an elite gamer practice. While variety streamers may not be expert in a particular title, or even aspire to be (failure, in fact, can be entertaining), esports streamers occupy a slightly different stance where the pursuit of virtuosity and expertise is key to both their performance and audience engagement.⁹

One of the most unique contributions of live streaming to the development of esports overall has been its ability to connect fans to top competitors. Watching your favorite esports player’s live stream is a bit like what you might imagine it’s like to watch your favorite baseball player practice for hours a day. Though mundane, it can also be riveting. Audiences get to view pro players practice their game, refine strategies, and reflect on their own play along with that of the competitors they encounter during a session. For those watching the stream, this can be a powerful learning tool, tapping into competitive aspirations or the hope to improve one’s own play.

And while some esports streamers offer little commentary or engagement with their audience, others use the think-aloud method to make visible their processes, at times using communication with the audience to address their own limitations. As one streamer I spoke with observed, while there are better players than him, he uses interactivity to offset things: “I have a background in strategy so I can kind of explain the methodology behind decision making. So that’s basically why I went into that route instead of just playing the game.”

The ability to follow your favorite competitor in these ways is quite new. Rather than having to wait for tournaments to see a player, people can tune in to have a daily experience. One longtime esports competitor portrayed it this way:

Your tournament victories [can] have so much dead space in between, but the streaming makes people feel part of your journey at a very personal level. So instead of cheering for some idol, you’re cheering for a friend. You’re cheering for one of the people who you know very well. Sometimes I write something on Twitter and people say they’ve read it in my voice. So it’s become very much a part of them, following my stream. For them then to see me succeed, if it happens in a tournament, would be like seeing a really good friend succeed. Even if I may not necessarily know them, for them it feels like I’m very close to them. It will feel very gratifying and satisfying for them.

This regular connection proves to be valuable on the business front as well, both for players who are able to keep their name out there between tournaments and sponsors who are happy that the pro is able to provide daily logo visibility rather than just at tournaments or special engagements. As one top player expressed in regard to live streaming being picked up by esports, “Almost every player pretty much uses it as a tool to interact with the community and pretty much market their name brand a little better.” Another remarked that streaming has become a critical component of a longer career, pointing out that the actual life of tournament competition is finite: “You don’t have enough deepness or longevity if for eight, nine, years you would try only to win. For very few people will this be a successful endeavor. So in the end, you need something that ties everything together. It can be video content you upload, it can be projects you participate in, or it can be streaming.” And while not the norm, one tournament organizer told me that they had a player decide to drop out of a show match in which they would have received several hundred dollars so they could stream instead and make more money via ad revenue.

Of course, it is crucial to mention that watching an esports streamer is not a fully transparent window into their practice. Many pros will keep new tactics off the stream, practice on anonymous unstreamed accounts, and hide some important details of play. One pro described how he handles this, stating, “When I play on my own ID, and he [the competitor] knows it’s me and we’re both streaming it, I would rather not show how I’m gonna try and beat him the next time.” This kind of gambit can end with him intentionally losing, which while having long-term competitive payoffs in a tournament, can produce some frustration in the moment. He continued:

Then I read the chat, and people are like, “[You] lost to him!” and “He’s so good!” and then I’m really annoyed but I can’t show it because if I show that I’m annoyed or explain what I did, then the whole ploy would have failed. So there’s a necessary step of deception to both my fans and my rivals, and that’s regrettable but since it’s unavoidable I’ve accepted it and I’ve just tried to work with it, because the professional side is not just about how good you are but how good you are at deception. That’s a part of it.

Another explained how he was able to benefit from some competitors not being as savvy about streaming their practice: “I’ve seen a lot of openness in terms of what people have streamed. I will also say that it’s because of that openness that I was able to take advantage of another streamer because I got a lot of extra knowledge about what he was going to run and it did give me pretty significant advantage.”¹⁰ Balancing a professional esports identity, practice time, and audience engagement was something I heard regularly when talking to pros who were expanding into live streaming as a way to supplement as well as augment their competitive careers. Increasingly, it has become a way they not only leverage their expertise but also build economic models outside a more traditional team/circuit framework.

Affect and Connection

In trying to understand the work and experiences of live streamers, my eye continually caught the moments in broadcasts and on social media when they would not only express their joy or excitement but struggles, frustrations, and even weariness too. At times, these were deeply rooted in the experience of the body at play, at the screen, “onstage.” This expression was not always spoken but rather conveyed in a variety of ways. I was most struck by this when one popular broadcaster tweeted the following image (see figure 3.6), captioning it as how he prepares for a cast.

FIGURE 3.6. “Dressing Up” by Kristian Nygård, September 28, 2012.

While the image itself was powerful, the replies from his followers caught my attention. People responded with humor, concern, and encouragement, and shared other images that it made them think of. This moment of sharing, the circuit of connection it made, the depth and range of expressions it conjured, caused me to stop and think a bit more about the role that not only emotions and personal expressions play in streaming but also the range of experience, often inarticulable, that can produce unexpected connections between streamer and audience.

This vulnerability—both in terms of sharing your own experience and being open to hearing back from your viewers—is perhaps one of the most underdiscussed aspects of live streaming when it comes to popular coverage. Part of the rhythm of broadcasting, particularly for professional streamers or those aspiring to be, is having a regular, daily show. These frequently last for multiple hours, meaning that the streamers are on display for major chunks of time every week (including whatever social media presence they may maintain), and have to contend with normal ups and downs, often on camera. Popular streamer Adam Koebel (2016), speaking at a panel at TwitchCon, hit on the complexity of this emotional work when he remarked,

Some people run into a situation where their emotions become commodified, people will get upset on stream and it just becomes part of their thing. If that is [some]thing you find happening to you be careful with it, right? Find a space where you can be authentic with your own feelings that isn’t necessarily on stream, even if you want to be emotionally open with your viewers. Because we all have to have something for ourselves, even if we’re sharing a lot of ourselves.

Koebel’s comment insightfully highlights the delicate balance that broadcasters face. While their work is performative and they spend huge chunks of time “on,” it is also tied up with conventions of authenticity, connection, and immediacy in ways that can evoke powerful emotions as well as experiences with their viewers.

Because of the ways that streamers interact with their communities and fans across a range of media, it is not unusual to see them be frank at times about their own personal struggles, such as I described in the opening of this section. I have been struck over the years by the candor with which many streamers speak about issues like depression, personal or family troubles, or burnout. Sometimes these disclosures take place on stream, but just as often they come via other social media outlets. Subscribers to a channel can receive messages from the broadcaster directly, and this mode is used to sometimes convey more private, sensitive issues—a kind of middle ground communication space that only goes out to people who have signaled a next level of affiliation with the streamer. While there is frequently a sense that the show must go on (as one streamer put it, “There are definitely the days where I don’t necessarily want to do my broadcast, but I have to sort of zip on that smiling face or whatever”), given the way that notions of authenticity and presenting some version of yourself currently dominate genre conventions, streamers regularly share not only their highs but their lows too.

While the expression of emotions is part of what we regularly see on streams, work on affect theory opens up the analytic space to consider encounters and movement, the body, interrelations, “passages of intensities,” and an interest in the everyday or even mundane.¹¹ Though the domain of affect theory is multifaceted, contentious, and at times inscrutable, there is something there that speaks deeply to what we see in live streaming. It gives us a way to not only understand the emotional side of streaming but also much more. We are prompted to take seriously the experiential, performative, and visceral along with the interrelations and entanglements between broadcaster, audience, and technologies. Understanding game live streaming involves looking at the complexity of feeling and affect, embodiment, performance, relationality, and the everyday flows that make up the work as well as experience of both audience and broadcaster.

PERFORMATIVE PLAY

The entertainment stance that streamers frequently assume is deeply tied to a range of emotions and internal states as well as the flow experienced between player and audience. Enthusiasm, joy, anxiety, frustration, and even anger all become emotions to be conveyed and experienced together. Streaming is embodied work. As I noted earlier, being able to convey the often-inexpressible and visceral experiences that occur during play is a performative skill that accomplished streamers develop. They use evocative facial expressions, poses, gasps, or laughter to convey experience. While typically not as dramatic as some variety streamers, many esports players communicate tactical consideration or resignation though subtle gestures or expressions. A head held in both hands is widely understood as defeat, and an enthusiastic jump up and yelp at the end of a tense round is seen as victory. One streamer, in portraying the advice that he gives to new broadcasters, said, “I really hit hard on the idea of it being performance art. You are performing for an audience.” As the broadcaster Ellohime (2015) recounted during a panel hosted at the MIT Game Lab on the subject of live streaming,

People ask me all the time, “why do people watch you play video games?” And the answer is because people like how I experience, they like to watch me experience these games. And it’s different for every single streamer. . . . We’re all going to have a different experience walking through this together, and I think that makes it interesting as a form of entertainment. I think you don’t get that in a lot of other forms of entertainment.

This focus on conveying experience is a fascinating one, tied up with performance, expression, and embodiment. Streamers work to convey the moment by moment of gameplay, externalize the internal, make visible visceral experiences, and render the affective legible to spectators.

Perhaps one of the most important things to understand in discussing the performative elements of streams is that it is not framed in contrast to authenticity. Ellohime (ibid.) continued:

My girlfriend, I think she says it the best way. She says it’s a version of you. Like, it’s the more excited, more entertaining version of you. It’s still you, and people see you. I wouldn’t say I put on a persona. It’s not like wrestling where I run out and I’m like “AUUGGH!” . . . I’m not going to get in front of you guys here [at the event] and be like “Hey, is everyone having a good day!? Ok cool let’s play a video game!” You know, like the same kind of intensity that I give to my broadcast. That’s what she says, it’s a different version of you. It’s more honed in on those skills that you feel is adequate for what you need to accomplish, which is entertaining this large group of people over the internet, playing video games.

Much of everyday life is performative, and live streaming merely picks up on that theme and amplifies it for entertainment purposes.

Perhaps unexpectedly, quite a few of the streamers I’ve spoken with over the years identify as fairly shy or introverted, and often surprise themselves as well as families and friends by gravitating toward broadcasting. Streamer J. P. McDaniel (2015) described his own family’s reaction to his taking up broadcasting:

Growing up I was kind of the quiet guy who was always in my room, they had no idea how I was going to make money when I grew up. And now they’re like, “How did you . . . you don’t even talk to us twice a month, and yet you’re broadcasting,” and I’m always talking, I’m emotive, I guess, on screen. I guess a part of me is that talkative person on the screen, but as soon as it goes off I’m pretty, kind of keep everything to myself, I’m kind of a quiet person offstream.

He went on to note that “I think there’s something that needs to be said about being in a room with the door shut and the camera on you, and you don’t really think about how many people are actually watching you. You’re just talking to the camera.” Another esports streamer I spoke with said of himself, “I’ve usually always been an introverted person who just plays for himself. But now with streaming, it opened another layer, you could say, the interaction with other people and showing what you can do.” Navigating your shyness by broadcasting and connecting socially this way was a theme I repeatedly heard.¹²

These performances, in expressing the player’s internal state and experience, become an evocative tool linking the audience to the broadcaster. Finding a way to draw the viewer in and help them either directly experience a gameplay moment alongside you (such as when spectating a horror game) or vicariously (recalling your own memory of playing yourself) can be a powerful method of sustaining an audience amid a plethora of competing channels.

AUDIENCE, COMMUNITY, . . . FAMILY?

While at its heart live streaming is about broadcasting gameplay, a powerful component of the success of variety streams is linked to the relational. Engaging with the audience, feeling the vibe of the chat in conjunction with the game and your own experience, animates the channel. Perhaps one of the most fascinating, if perplexing, aspects of the labor of streaming is the way the mundane is amplified, tweaked, and transformed to draw an audience in and hold it. While “entertainment” is often a key component, the everyday feel of streaming can also play into performativity. For example, one streamer discussed how audience size and makeup shape a broadcast:

In the evenings, I’m much more willing to do more mundane activities such as crafting, running around, exploring, grinding certain aspects of a game or something. Much more mundane things. Because there’s less people there [watching], I feel like I have to. . . . I guess it is that I have to entertain less. I don’t have to be showing them like the craziest stuff. It’s a nice social stream. I’m spending more time talking to the chat. We’re being more personal with each other. The game is there as kind of a backdrop for what we do.

Broadcasters work to create a shared sense of presence with the audience, drawing everyone into a feeling of togetherness. Sitting together on a channel with fellow viewers, watching a streamer live, and seeing a flow of chat alongside their video becomes a collective social experience.

Streamers I’ve spoken with over the years emphasize, almost more than any other element, how central chat and interaction with the audience is. This engagement is critical to understanding the space. A theorist Sara Ahmed (2004, 119) argues about affective economies, “Emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments. Rather than seeing emotions as psychological dispositions, we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective.” Successful live streamers recognize this dynamic. Building a thriving community—that transformation of a passing viewer into a regular audience member who is “in” on the subculture of the channel—is a key goal. For some this is more like building a large audience of enthusiastic or “hyped-up” spectators, and for others the tone is much more akin to a “family,” and language gets used to help symbolize the connection not just between the broadcaster and individual but between community members as well.

Attention to the relational and affective is not unique to live streamers. Media scholar Nancy Baym, in her study of musicians, has analyzed the ways they navigate connecting to their audience and fans through social media. Baym (2012, 292) argues that “social media have made it all but impossible to practice celebrity with the aloof distance of yore.” She observes, “When we ask musicians to be direct, unique, and personal with their audiences, we ask them to redefine a relationship that has been structured in particular ways for decades. We ask them to do more work, work that requires relational, communicative, self-presentational, entrepreneurial, and technological skills that music work had not previously demanded” (Baym 2018, 11). The musicians she interviewed often constructed complex relationships with their fans online, including ones of meaningful intimacy and forms of social support. She terms this engagement a form of relational labor, “the ongoing, interactive, affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating with people over time in order to create structures that can support continued work.” Resisting a model that would frame the engagements between musicians and their fans as alienating, coercive, or hollow, Baym shows the ways that these relationships are woven through with professional labor. Rather than pitting the social and economic entanglements that creative artists have with audiences in opposition to authentic connection, she presents a more nuanced handling of the interactions between producers and audiences.¹³

This is deeply resonant with what we see among live streamers. How the broadcaster interacts with and builds connections to those watching them is a powerful component of the channel, and this is facilitated through the chat feature of the window, which allows audience members to communicate with the streamer and each other. Broadcasters will frequently keep an eye on who is on the channel via the chat window and call out hellos to regulars, sometimes asking them how their day is going or noting if they haven’t seen them in a while. Language is often rooted in forms of care and attention.

Offering recognition of “follows” (when someone favorites a channel), donations, and subscriptions forms an important part of the work that broadcasters do to enfranchise their viewers. Streamers also use other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to maintain additional communication paths to their fans. There they will post updates about broadcasts, things happening in their life, or the usual fare of social media like memes and funny GIFs.

The issue of connection and how broadcasters think about their audiences is something I regularly asked them about, exploring the language they used to describe the people who watched them. While esports players tended to mostly use the term “audience,” nearly all variety streamers preferred other words such as “community” and, on occasion, “family.”¹⁴ Usually this orientation was incorporated into their aesthetics, performance, and language, where they would address their viewers with insider terms to denote membership in a special group. Making regulars feel that they were a part of a stream’s community, that they were known and able to make use of special language or emotes to signal their affiliation, is something accomplished streamers spend a fair amount of energy on.

Though most of the broadcasters I spoke with (both esports and variety) acknowledged that there was a fan dynamic present in their relationship to the audience, they tended to shy away from this characterization, and I often sensed it left them uncomfortable. As one put it, “I tend to refer to people who watch my show as viewers. For some reason, I’m always careful not to use the word ‘fan.’ I don’t know. I think I try not to buy in to the whole thing of it, like, ‘My fans, they just adore me.’” Even though it would be easy to see this as a kind of false modesty or politeness about not touting one’s celebrity, there is nuance at work in this position.¹⁵

While celebrity can be a powerful motivator, and certainly many streamers are indeed famous in a specialized domain, most still feel very much on the outskirts of mainstream entertainment and are aware of their own professional precariousness. They also frequently derive significant personal gratification and fulfillment from their work, and genuinely enjoy connecting with their viewers as more than distant admirers. The language of fandom can feel as if it short-circuits this. It often doesn’t fully encapsulate the much more complicated and at times fraught relationship that broadcasters can have with those who watch them.

Many expressed that what shifts viewers from audience to something else, be it community or family, are gestures of reciprocity, familiarity, or intimacy. Given how much of streaming is a daily occurrence, often in a home, it is perhaps not surprising that broadcasters may share details about their lives. One discussed how he let his community know about his divorce and why it happened: “I explained it to them. We talked about it ahead of time. I let them know what was going on. I talk a lot about personal issues and that sort of thing on the stream. And again, it comes back to building a friendship instead of just a viewer base.” Sharing was part of the kind of connection he wanted to create with the people who followed his stream. Streamers regularly spoke about how viewers themselves in turn would share personal information with them, often about their own struggles.

Another saw sharing as an important service to his viewers, some of whom were younger than him. He told me,

I even have a Tumblr account where I sometimes just word vomit my feelings and my anxieties and stuff. I thought for a while like I shouldn’t do that, I shouldn’t let them know that I have problems, that I struggle with things like anxieties. But I was like, that’s a disservice, you know, because then they’re going to think like I’m always on, I’m always this person. That’s not true. If I let them know that, it’s going to make them feel closer. And like a lot of them, the demographic is pretty much like teenagers, so they’re going through hell right now, most of them, you know, and I’ve been through it so it’s kind of nice to let them know, “Hey, you’re not going to be fifteen forever.” Things will still be tough, but at least you know you can drink beer or something. You get treated with a little more respect in the world and you’re going to feel a little bit better.

Streamer AnneMunition described something similar during a TwitchCon panel in 2016. She spoke of having been out as a lesbian since the age of thirteen, though it was typically not something she talked about much. This was not because she wanted to hide it, but because she was “kind of a distant person naturally, and I just didn’t think it was anyone’s business.” She recounted how this changed during the course of streaming:

I don’t know, it was about a year in when I started streaming, when I opened up about—I had a lot of people messaging me about the struggles that they deal with in their personal lives, dealing with depression and stuff, and so I posted this whole thing about my own struggles with depression in the past and dealing with it. I had a friend commit suicide and I had a cousin attempt suicide. . . . I kind of was open about dealing with this part of my life that was really sad, and how I got through it because I wanted to, hopefully, help someone. I had a lot of people respond to that very positively, saying, “Even if it doesn’t fix the things in my life, at least I know there’s someone out there who’s like, has dealt with the same things, and has gotten through it.” And at that point was when I was like, OK, I don’t care if anyone knows that I’m gay, if I can use this to help somebody out there, I’m gonna be open about it, because it’s important to them and not necessarily because it’s important to me, because it’s important to them. I had this opportunity to be open with people, and let them see somebody who has gone through all this and has come out on the other side, hopefully better. (quoted in Koebel 2016)

That so many variety streamers report this kind of experience speaks to the ways that their relationship with their audience is built and how they come to think about their connection with them. Most of their viewers are not there to learn how to play a specific game better but instead for the streamer themselves. The real or imagined authenticity of the streamer, even within a performative context, becomes a powerful affective anchor in fostering supportive communities along with building audience connection and loyalty.

For esports broadcasters, the balance is slightly different. It is not that the personality of the esports streamer is unimportant—in fact, their fans can usually identify things they like about the competitor beyond their skill—but rather that the focus is much more centered on the game. Esports streamers, while often noting the value of community and even at times sharing aspects of their lives, may not put themselves at the center. As one popular professional player phrased it,

I had this really special feeling two days ago. I closed the stream, and there was this bunch of people that thanked me for streaming and I thanked them for watching. But then I saw there were a bunch of people that were going out of their way thanking the moderators for keeping my chat a really pleasant place to be and interact. And sometimes I see them exchanging contacts and I see them go play together. Then I realize it’s a little mini community, and every streamer has a mini community who watch them and who like each other because they’re attracted to basically the same person.

Community for esports audiences is typically a mix of their own focus on playing a specific title, a passion for competitive gaming, and finding a specific esports broadcaster whose skill they admire. On variety channels, the personality of the broadcaster is so central to the content of the channel that they become the anchor. This isn’t to say that variety stream audience members don’t form independent ties as captured in the above quote but instead that the core mechanism centers on the streamer first and foremost.

Yet variety streamers sometimes aspire to have communities that sustain themselves even when they’re not present, to have members connect with each other meaningfully or start producing culture independent of the streamer. For some broadcasters, engaging in relational activity serves to model behavior that they would like to see among their audience members. One streamer saw this kind of interaction as helping build a critical part of his stream, making it distinctive:

The idea is that everybody who comes to my chat can recognize one another, and [it] becomes a community. So I interact with a lot of them. I talk to different people on the chat very frequently, and I lose games because of that. I mean, I’m not always focused on the game since I focus a lot on talking to people in chat. If people on the chat recognize one another, I think that it adds an anchor to my stream that other streams don’t have.

The payoff for a broadcaster, both emotionally and professionally, can be powerful. McDaniel (2015) shared this experience of seeing such cohesion occur around his broadcasts:

That’s the weird thing, is when the community starts making things about your stream, where you didn’t prompt them to. Wikis start popping up, or crazy fan art starts popping up for characters that we do on our show. And it’s like, really, really talented stuff, and there was nothing to prompt them to do that. And I think that’s kind of, a lot of people wonder like, when is the “when you’ve made it” as a streamer. And I think it’s like, when your community starts making you things, without you prompting them to do so.

Amid this generative fan engagement, variety streamers themselves continue to occupy a core central symbolic role; bringing their viewers into their community is key. Broadcasters utilize special terms for regulars, in-jokes, channel specific emoticons, and even customized graphics that react to viewer engagement (for example, pop-up notifications when someone donates money) to foster feelings of connection between themselves and audience members. These connections can be powerful, building emotional ties between channel participants and streamer. Broadcasters I’ve spoken with talk about making friends with their viewers, thinking of them as a quasi-family, and even inviting them to personal events like their wedding. They also speak of the ways that their community members convey to them how meaningful the connection to the channel can be. One said to me, “You should see some of the emails that I’ve gotten where people will just pour out pages of describing how my broadcast . . . where people say I just changed their whole lives around, like they were suicidal and they found my broadcast. And so again, going back to the community thing, yeah, it’s very strong.”

This kind of affective inflection has practical implications as well. Having large audiences brings its own set of issues, and online chats can pose challenges to a broadcaster. While it practically speaking becomes more difficult to keep up with and respond to chats during casts, more important, it can complicate the task of fostering a tone that the broadcaster wants. Many try to walk a fine line between allowing people to speak freely and wanting to make sure the space is welcoming for newcomers. In practice this means that most broadcasters end up confronting the challenge of community management and moderation. As one described their audience and the tone they want to set, “I like to say they’re collectively a huge group of friends. You’ve got your strange ones and you’ve got your weird ones and you’ve got your happy ones. I like to say, ‘We’re all friends here, so let’s be nice.’”

While new broadcasters are often able to manage their own channels, toggling between playing the game and engaging with the viewers, including deleting comments or timing people out if the broadcaster is unhappy with their behavior, streamers will usually start looking for “good community members” to help them as the chat grows. These individuals are given special moderation privileges for a channel, with the ability to delete comments, time people out, and in the best case, help set an overall tone for the chat. As a channel grows, its moderation team frequently finds itself adopting third-party tools to help it communicate and coordinate internally. Many mod teams use applications like Skype, Slack, or Discord to facilitate behind-the-scenes discussions while they moderate a given channel.

Nearly all moderators I’ve encountered even at the professional tournament level are volunteers. These spaces, then, have a dual function: they help people feel special, and offer them a sense of having a more exclusive connection to the broadcaster they like. The ongoing work of moderators (something I’ll discuss further in later chapters) can involve nuanced skilled engagement with communities to be in tune with the energy of the channel and pacing of the conversation and a sense of the back-and-forth rhythm for large-scale social environments. Though typically uncompensated, they do a tremendous amount of valuable labor in helping maintain live streams as functioning social and communicative spaces.

There is a circuit of affective labor that flows through fans, moderators, and broadcasters, with each in turn drawing from and supporting the other. Streamers regularly talk about the energy or buzz they get from a good session when the viewer interaction, gameplay, and their own experience gel. Moderators express their commitment to and fandom for a streamer by helping manage that flow of engagement coming from the audience. And audience members, not only through their viewing activities, but also via interactions off the channel on social media, provide a fundamental component on which the entire system relies.

AFFECTIVE ECONOMIES

This turn to befriending the audience or, more conservatively, tapping into their positive feelings about the channel is, of course, a component of the financial side of the system. Subscription requests framed as “Do you want to show your appreciation?” or thankfulness from the streamer when donations are made highlight how the emotional connections between producer and audience are an important part of the economic system on the platform. Streamers regularly effusively thank their subscribers and donors for their generosity, noting how lucky they are to be able to do this thing they love so much while still supporting themselves and their families. Moderators will often frame their volunteer labor in terms of wanting to help the streamer succeed, including making the work financially sustainable.

The economic side of the equation for professional streamers is often riddled with ambivalence, though. Some articulate that they don’t want to feel like a “beggar” or find it running up against their own temperament, as the one who said, “I am someone who doesn’t push [donations] too hard and is actually somewhat shy when it comes to asking for them.” Others prefer to downplay the financial aspects of a stream, or delegate some of it to automated systems that notify when a donation or subscription comes in that the streamer then responds to.

Given it is a job that many gamers imagine they would love to have themselves, streaming can also include a stigma around discussing the difficulty of the financial or labor side. As one streamer noted, “There is no faster way to piss off my viewership than when I go ‘streaming is hard.’ There is no faster way to piss them off. What they see is a guy who sits down and plays a video game for a while, collects a bunch of money, and then, you know, rolls around on his bed in singles, I guess” (McDaniel 2015). Yet the challenges of managing the work of streaming, converting a passing viewer into a regular subscriber or donor, and building relationships with potential sponsors are ever present for professional streamers. And affective economies can be complex.

“Donation trains” (or “wars”) are moments during a stream where a collective energy to keep donating to a streamer takes over and donations flood in one after another. They exist in large part due to the way financial contributions have come to be integrated into broadcasts. For those who have set up a donation system, when an individual contributes, it can trigger an automated event on stream. The name of the donor, the amount they gave, and occasionally a message will pop up on the screen for all to see. Donation trains happen when viewer after viewer gives money, often in increasing amounts, such that the notifications keep flooding in. They tend to be special events that can overwhelm the streamer; expressions of both amazement and gratitude tend to dominate in those moments. Viewers frequently want to get in on the action, enjoying being a part of a group event and the direct recognition they can get from the broadcaster. As one person (who is both a streamer and viewer) described it on the Twitch subreddit:

Those donation wars are really kind of a hard thing to explain. ive done one with one of my fav streamers, bacon doughnut. some dude dropped like 500 bucks, so i dropped 1k in bitcoin, then the same guy upped me by like 500 more bucks. the rush that you get from doing it is different. there is a certain satisfaction you get that you just don’t get from donating. its hard to explain, but i would say its somewhat similar to gambling, except i know i am supporting a streamer i love. its endorphins, basically. and lemme tell ya, that ol slab of meat ya got up in that cranium loves itself some endorphins, to the point where logic and reason can become a very low priority. (Distortednet 2014)

When watching a donation train, you can certainly feel the energy of the crowd at work as both broadcaster and audience get excited by the expression of appreciation rendered in increasing amounts of money being offered. Pop-up notifications will keep appearing on the screen, often with an accompanying sound, which only heightens the experience. Sometimes an ongoing tally showing the largest amount, and the name of the donor, remains on screen during the broadcast. The financial base of the entire system is amplified and interwoven with an attention economy based in fandom.

At times, however, this excitement can leave the streamer feeling uneasy. In this same Reddit thread, people noted that the broadcaster in question had taken down his donation page and kept it down, despite his viewers asking that it be put back up. Some streamers feel it is unethical to benefit too much from what may be seen as irrational and spur-of-the-moment financial decisions on the part of viewers. They also regularly wrangle with “charge backs,” when someone who has made a donation contacts their credit card company to dispute the charge and the money gets pulled back from the broadcaster. Donation trains are seen as a vulnerable form of support, and in a system were streamers often already feel financial precariousness, the volatility of donation trains is sometimes not perceived as worth it. While the economic side of broadcasting leverages people’s care and enthusiasm for a streamer, there are moments where both viewers and streamer may feel this affective pull spin out of control.

HOLDING BACK

Over the years of talking to broadcasters and coming to understand the complexity of streaming, I’ve been drawn to trying to understand how it affects the experience of play for the broadcasters themselves. How, if at all, does streaming fold back on those producing it? How might it shape or affect their play, at times in unexpected ways? What do streamers get out of it, or have to deal with, in terms of emotion or experience? Depending on the genre of broadcast (variety or esports), and streamers’ own temperaments and communities, this unfolds in different ways.

Perhaps one of the most interesting things I encountered when talking to variety streamers about the games they broadcast was when I asked them if there were titles they would “hold back” or keep for themselves. Over and over again I heard “yes!” and a deep affirmation that this was an important part of navigating sharing your play. The reasons ranged. Sometimes it was because they felt a title was inherently not entertaining enough or they couldn’t quite figure out how to make it so. I was continually struck by the complexity with which accomplished broadcasters thought about whether a game would serve as a product they and the audience could work over within an entertainment frame. Given that the game itself is only one component of a successful stream, its ability to be transformed into a publicly performative artifact is crucial.

At other times streamers expressed a desire to withhold a game that they were particularly personally invested in, or wanted to experience in a more solitary or private way. For those titles, they wanted to have a space to play it in that removed the expectation that they would be entertaining. This can also be tied to a feeling of wanting to savor the experience. One streamer, speaking about a game they’d chosen to not broadcast, said, “I don’t want to stream that out. That’s for me. That’s my personal experience.” They went on to remark that because joking is one of the main ways they entertain audiences, they felt broadcasting this specific game would disrupt the play experience they wanted to have with it, saying, “I know that the story is going to draw me in.” Another reflected similarly on the pull that a game’s narrative can have, observing, “What’s funny is I will sit and play a video game for six hours on my broadcast, and then when I get done, I will sit [with it] for a few more hours because playing that game with the viewing audience, it’s such a stressful [experience], and for me, you really can’t get involved in the story and things like that. That’s why I tend to shy away from playing RPG-type games because I just can’t get enveloped in that world, which for me, that’s really everything.”¹⁶

Each of these cases of holding back highlights how live streamers balance their own preferred experiences (personal and professional) and public performance. The setting, stance, and tone of variety streams often signal an intimacy or familiarity with the broadcaster. You see their bedroom or living room, you frequently watch them failing or even growing bored with a title, and you observe them interacting with an audience, perhaps even you. One can easily slip into thinking that what we watch on a channel is a direct, unproduced conduit of a streamer’s experience. And yet for successful streamers, there is usually a considered stance about what they are broadcasting and how they are doing it. Some experiences they want to share with viewers while some games they may want to keep for themselves.¹⁷

Esports players also can also feel the effects of broadcasting—in their case, around streaming practice time to audiences. One, for example, described how valuable it was for him to have viewers as he played. He felt it helped his focus and upped the ante, pushing him to better perform than if he was alone. For some aspiring pros, having an audience can also act as an external form of accountability. They speak about it as making them commit to a goal (such as achieving a new rank) publicly. For single-player competitors, having a live streaming audience can in some ways fill in the gaps one may have by not having teammates to help with accountability and encouragement.

Others were more conflicted about streaming, often doing it out of a mix of contractual obligation or an abstract sense that it was simply what one should be doing now. Some felt that broadcasting their practice time converted it to entertainment more than they’d like. They felt a pressure to be engaging for the audience and not in a productive way. At times this could lead to an unwieldy mix of needing to engage in “real” practice outside broadcast times. It could cause them to feel a burden to be a “personality” in a way that was disconnected from what actually attracted them to esports, such as competition or a deep internal desire to always simply be better. It could also result in feeling pressured to behave in less natural ways, like censoring their own speech or reactions.

These experiences and feelings about live streaming, both satisfying and ambivalent, are a critical part of the broadcasting loop. They speak to how making one’s gaming public can have ramifications for the player themselves, sometimes in unanticipated or unwanted ways. Streamers do not sit outside the system but instead often confront how what may seem trivial at first, public gameplay, can actually have profound effects on them.

Public and Private

Despite the tone of authenticity, affective engagement, and connection to the audience, broadcasters aren’t just open books, exposing all aspects of their selves and lives; there is a delicate balance maintained between sharing and privacy. Given that so much of individual live streaming is done in people’s homes day in and day out, usually in domestic spaces shared with others, I have been curious over the years to watch this negotiation between public and private. Some broadcasters stream from little makeshift studios where no other people enter the frame while on other channels you might see people they share the space with in the background, perhaps even popping on screen to wave a hello or answer a question. Streams also move between a sense of knowing the caster in a more personal way—from their full name to details of their private lives—to a more distanced stance where the main form of self-presentation is that of performer and mostly under an online moniker. As I watched and interviewed broadcasters over the years, I spoke to them about how they navigate this. Everyone I talked to had given it consideration, and made active decisions about what they were and weren’t comfortable sharing.

EVERYDAY LIFE AND DOMESTIC SPACE

One of the most important things to understand about individual live streaming is that the home as studio shapes the form, content, and experience of broadcasts for both streamer and audience. Streaming has long been a way to invite a public into your private space, and the draw of seeing someone flip on a camera in their home and share their gameplay is powerful.¹⁸ As a form, it straddles two pulls: the everyday mundanity of gaming that many viewers know firsthand and special status of peeking into someone else’s experience in the most regular of settings.

At a basic level, the amount and configuration of space that a streamer has shapes the broadcast. It isn’t that streaming from your home requires a huge amount of room but rather that the materiality present is always a factor in what can be done. For instance, being able to use a green screen, appropriate lighting, or have a desk that supports multiple monitors is contingent on not only enough space but also basics like furniture, including items comfortable enough to accommodate long stretches of broadcasting. The infrastructures can play an unseen role as well; internet connection speeds can influence stream quality, as can the computer that is a being used. Struggles with video production or being able to manage multiple programs at once can affect the broadcast. Gamers in places that lack good network access are often unable to participate in live streaming as producers and mostly stay within the audience.¹⁹

The materiality of the space can also have affective and relational qualities. For many streamers, being able to stream at home has not only been practically advantageous (no huge studio cost and scheduling convenience are both significant factors when streams normally last multiple hours) but often fits a temperamental preference too. As one streamer who broadcasts from a desk in his bedroom told me, “My bed is right here, and then my computer and my office area is on the side here. It’s all one thing. I don’t really think of it that much because I’ve always been kind of a homebody. I like my space. I’m OK sharing my space with thousands of people.” For him, being able to bring others into where he felt most comfortable was the best of all possible worlds. Seeing such close quarter setups almost evokes a sense of a nest: a spot where a streamer can venture out over the network yet remain safely ensconced at home. For others who describe themselves as shy or introverted, such locations offer an interesting bridge between the comforts of home and a public endeavor. The domestic environment—surrounded by your things, items of affection or comfort, and your own fandom, often on display for the audience—provides a form of security and even safety to those who might otherwise find the idea of standing on a huge stage in front of thousands unthinkable.

The materialities of domestic space shape the content of streams and how broadcasters operate. One streamer, who started his broadcast in the living room of a family member’s house where he and his partner lived at the time, said:

I actually think that people enjoy that aspect of it. There are certain people out there that enjoy seeing the full picture up here. This is my grandma’s house so my family stops by sometimes and they’ll [his viewers] see like a train of them coming in. They’ll be like, “What is happening over there?” My grandma walks outside to take the garbage out. They start to know my grandma. My grandma will occasionally come over here [to his setup] and say something.²⁰

His girlfriend would similarly walk by sometimes, and the viewers would say to tell her hi. For him, letting the audience see into the everyday life of his home contributed to the tone of his stream; he told me, “I think it actually works really well with the community atmosphere.” Another, who has long had a streaming setup in his home and whose child also often broadcasts (both with him and on their own), says, “It’s a pretty normal thing in our household. Like I think more or less like I’m just happy that technology has finally caught up to kind of what we all like to do, and for me I see it as another way that I kind of spend time with my kid that’s, you know, that piques both of our interest. And I don’t know, I just see it as a really normal and kind of acceptable thing.”

Others find it trickier to navigate sharing space with those who may not understand or want to be a part of a broadcast, even as background characters. As the streamer above whose whole family streams went on to note, “I have friends that just, they kind of get weirded out with the whole concept of streaming, you know. They just don’t understand it. So that’s probably when it feels the most awkward is when someone else is at the house and they don’t maybe quite understand it.” One esports streamer described being happy with a recent shift he’d made where he and his wife were now living in a home with others who were part of the scene and understood live streaming. He said, “Managing space has become easier since 100 percent of the residents here are into esports. It was different when I was living with my mom. She was understanding, but we had one out of the three floors available so it was very limited space.” For others, the problem of sharing space stems from the challenges those negotiations pose for content production. Having to deal with noise from others or be self-conscious of one’s presence can create problems for streamers who might feel impinged on. One broadcaster, who had actually rigged up a makeshift physical barrier around his computer, explained, “I do live with people, and that is a major sticking point and something that is constantly frustrating. I mean, it’s only a problem because I’m streaming, but they’re so distracting.”

Sometimes rules, formal or informal, may develop as the use of the home for a public broadcast gets navigated. One streamer, who is fairly open with his audience about his private life, told me that the only rule in his home was, “If you’re not wearing a bra, don’t get in front of the camera. That’s our biggest rule. I think it’s the only rule that we really follow. Be appropriate when you walk past. Again, be cognizant that when you walk in this room, you’re in front of the camera.” Others manage the space by making sure doors are closed when they go live, utilizing a separate room, or using green screens to designate a stage area that people can walk behind to stay off camera.

PERSONAL INFORMATION . . . AND RARELY LOCATION

Though streamers often broadcast out of their homes and can regularly share deeply personal information about their lives, I found that some frequently drew other kinds of boundary lines. These tended to be tied to issues of offline identity and safety. Given the convention for streamers and gamers more broadly to let their online moniker be their calling card across lots of platforms, untangling what disclosure looks like online is not always straightforward. People may hide or downplay their legal names, but still share tremendous amounts of information about their personal lives. Or they may reveal their legal names or moniker, or even broadcast out of their homes, but still want to maintain some line of the personal that is not crossed with their audience.

Those who didn’t share deeply about their personal lives tended to want to make some, if blurry, distinction between their online or esports identity and their offline one. One pro esports player who broadcasts daily utilized the third person to describe his stance:

I’m not keeping anything super secret, but yeah, it’s always the person of [his screen name] that’s being discussed. So how did [screen name] come into existence, how did he grow through experiences? Yeah, sometimes I’ve gone very deep in some interviews, but it’s still [screen name]. I never present myself as [offline name]. And I wish actually for [offline name] to not be the name people call me because first-name basis is something that I only really do either with sponsors because it’s more professional or with people whom I first met through real life. And since my nickname is easy enough, there’s no need to go to the first name.

This player’s “real name” is actually widely known, and parts of his life are shared with his viewers. He broadcasts out of his home, and his wife regularly passes by on camera. Yet it is clear that there is a boundary line he does draw. The way he moves from first to third person when using his competitive moniker reminds me quite a bit of early work that I did talking to people about their relationships with avatars, where they had an adept way of shifting across how they wanted to present themselves as well as be known in the mix of on- and offline life (Taylor 1999). This is not an issue of the two domains being separate but instead of people understanding them as spaces unified by personal judgments and choices about what they want to disclose.

A nearly consistent theme I found across all streamers was the way that disclosing particular details about your offline identity was deemed a safety issue. A concern with “really dangerous or bad people” was one that came up regularly. This is not unfounded. The phenomenon of “swatting,” whereby a streamer’s local police department is called with a false hostage report at the streamer’s address, has led to some truly dangerous instances of police entering streamers’ homes looking for armed persons. These have been captured live on stream several times, and caused more than one streamer to think long and hard about disclosing any more than their region or city. The streamer I quoted above as having the one rule of “wear a bra if you are on camera” expressed concern about this, especially in relation to his partner, and felt a responsibility to make sure his family was safe despite his profession: “I try to make sure that my things are private, that my things are secure; my PayPal is secure, my email is secure, my game accounts are secure. That people aren’t delving into our public lives and trying to stalk us. . . . I’d rather my name not get out there.”

Interestingly, a significant part of his worry arose from his knowledge of how women in particular have experienced harassment and stalking; as his partner was a visible and known part of his life, he was acutely aware of this risk. He told me, “I think if I was on my own, I don’t think I’d care so much.” One of the women streamers I spoke with echoed how issues of safety influenced disclosures. She said, “I definitely have rules on what I’d like to share with people. I’m very limited on sharing my location just for my safety . . . Whenever I tweet something from Foursquare, I like to make sure that it’s not my house or around my house.” This tends to also mean that streamers, both men and women, do things like set up post office boxes for mail or deliveries, hide domain name registration addresses, and route voice communication through Skype, Discord, or services other than the telephone.

Yet many streamers are simultaneously aware of the delicate balancing act they do given the tone of authenticity and honesty they try to have with their audience. As one put it, “I am me 100 percent. Like when I get in front of the camera, I have no problem talking about my life and letting people into my life. A lot of people know I have a kid on the way. A lot of people know I live in [state’s name]. I’m outside [a major city]. These are things that people know about me because I’ve shared that with them. But I keep it kind of not so specific.”

This dynamic, perhaps sharing important life experiences and thoughts with people online, while maybe withholding things like your real name or where you live, is in fact not unique to live streaming but instead something that regularly occurs in online communities. It highlights the ways that tidy formal definitions of public and private rarely capture the complexity of how people navigate relationships with others online. Information science scholar Helen Nissenbaum (2010, 3) argues, “What people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately.” Her emphasis is on “contextual integrity,” which highlights privacy as a process undertaken by navigating, adjudicating, and balancing a number of concerns as well as conditions (rather than a priori universal frameworks). Although live streamers are not your typical internet users, the mode of nuanced disclosure is one that many can probably relate to if they’ve spent time in multiuser spaces, be they games or pseudonymous communication sites.

Viewer Expectations and Stereotypes

Live streaming audiences come to the platform with a range of experiences and expectations. They often select channels based on knowing something about the game being played or because of curiosity about the title. They may see large viewer numbers and want to check out what the crowd is up to. Longtime viewers who’ve sampled different types of content may find that they prefer particular genres of streaming—humorous ones, for example—and hit channels looking for that form of entertainment. Viewers may see a name or face that draws them in. Part of the power of live streaming is the immediacy of the broadcaster; you see them, hear their voice, and even usually get a glimpse of their home. Woven throughout this are the expectations that viewers bring to a broadcaster, ranging from the content of the show to who they imagine the streamer is in real life.

While most consider a microphone and camera pretty much a requirement for the platform at this point, their use does impact streamers differently. Women, LGBTQIA folks, and people of color regularly face harassment on the site, and choosing to broadcast, especially with a webcam and/or audio, is no small feat. As media scholar Kishonna Gray (2016, 366) notes in her study of Black gamers on the platform, “The mere presence of their marginalized bodies disrupts the norm of the space designated for privileged bodies. They participate as social agents that engage in a dynamic and ongoing process of producing and reshaping the discourse about what it means to be a true gamer.” They can frequently feel the additional burden of being visible and a quasi role model. The risks and struggles they face are powerful, and often take a real toll. Race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability thus all come to play critical roles as viewers confront actual streamers, some of whom may be outside a viewer’s social circle or everyday life. In this way, live streaming has components long heralded via television of connecting audiences to otherwise-unknown worlds and experiences. Unlike television, however, audiences immediately and directly engage with the person on the other side of their screen.

I’ve been fortunate to get to meet and talk to a variety of broadcasters over the years who are working hard to make a space for themselves on the platform in the face of a culture and audience for which they are typically invisible. The responses they receive range from enthusiasm or indifference to active opposition to their presence (I will discuss the issue of harassment further in chapters 4 and 5). While many have taken to heart the long-standing—and woefully insufficient—refrain of “grow a thicker skin,” their work and strategies remain important to examine more closely. As a form of media, live streaming should aspire to open participation and inclusion. Creating content and sharing it with others has become a powerful part of everyday experience as well as social connection. Yet for many who are marginalized, it remains a space where meaningful participation, and creative expression are emotionally taxing, contentious, and sometimes dangerous.

STEREOTYPES

One of the challenges that streamers can face is balancing their own sense of self against the demands of audience (and market) expectations. Because of the way that live streaming can trade on notions of authenticity, viewers can also bring to streams an assumption of who the broadcaster is based on what they look like. These may not actually align to the streamer’s identity, personality, or even desires for their content. Yet viewer expectations are oftentimes tangled up in stereotypes. Given that there is a transactional and economic aspect to the system, it can put streamers in tough or at least awkward situations. One Black streamer I spoke with illustrated one way that racial stereotyping regularly played out with his viewers:

People tend to request like a lot of rap music on my stream, for example [laughing]. I’ll play it if that means you stay. I’ll play it [still laughing]. I mean, I like hip-hop and rap as much as the next guy, you know? Personally when I’m playing, that is not what I would stream to. But I got a lot of interesting comments like, “Yo, what is this music that you’re listening to? Where’s my Drake at?” [laughing]. I was like, I don’t listen to any of that on my stream. I’m going to listen to like some instrumental stuff. I really like film scores, I really like classical music, so that’s what I listen to because I feel like it really puts me into the zone when I’m playing. Once I have a couple of people on my stream, I will change it to hip-hop and rap because that is what people like when they are on my stream.

He talked about finding this expectation surprising as well as out of sync with his own preferences. Speaking of how he didn’t experience his offline life as so constantly infused with questions about his identity, he remarked that “the internet is a very racially conscious environment, and being on the internet, it’s interesting how much commentary and how much people talk about your race and stuff like that.” He described having grown up amid a lot of racial diversity and so noticed when responses to him called out any distinctiveness. He spoke of the experience of playing an online game with someone who then visited his stream and realized that he was not who they expected. As he explained, he is routinely met with exclamations of “‘Holy crap! You’re Black!’ That’s like the first thing that they say, which is really interesting. I didn’t know that it was all that special, but when you start looking at the kind of people who are actually streaming and creating content, a lot of them aren’t African American.”

His reflections reminded me that many times when I talked to streamers who are members of marginalized groups, they expressed felt gaps between their own sense of identity, personal histories, play preferences, and social lives and how viewers (or indeed the culture at large) saw and positioned them. While he went on to positively talk about how some people followed him because of “my unique contribution being my skin color,” for many others this kind of dynamic is a regular source of resigned frustration.

Streamer DistractedElf, speaking on a panel at TwitchCon, discussed her disappointment with how some audience members had not been able to navigate her transition from male to female, visible through archived content she’s produced over the years:

So you can look back at my VoDs and be like, “Oh, that’s very different. Yes, she sounds different, her hair is different, she’s not even ‘she’ yet, hmm. Very interesting.” And it’s funny how, I’ve had an experience where in my chat recently, actually, where somebody said, “Oh, I really like your stream, I really like your content, it’s super awesome, but then I went back and looked at your VoDs and now I feel weird looking at you.” And I went, “Why? What has changed? Nothing! I am the same as when you looked at me the first time!” But it’s weird how that context, I don’t know, messes with some people. (quoted in Koebel 2016)

The sense that it was still her that the audience should be able to connect with is a theme that I’ve heard in various ways over the years from not just trans streamers but many others too. Broadcasters I’ve spoken with often talk about how they embrace the specificities of their identities (for example, a Black woman or gay man), yet also want audiences to connect with them as gamers and entertainers. Streamer AnneMunition remarked on that same panel,

I’m more than just a gay woman. There’s a lot more to me than just that. For me, it’s always been about—especially with streaming—I’ve tried to be this person who, if you enjoy that I’m playing video games, maybe I make you laugh, that’s what’s important. There’s all this extra stuff that isn’t that important, that’s just part of who I am. So it’s like, if I wanted to align myself with a community of people on Twitch, it’s just, I want to be aligned with the people who are entertaining, rather than just “those gay people.” (quoted in Koebel 2016)

Time and again I’ve heard people who are not white, heterosexual, or cis male streamers talk about the challenges that they face when they confront various stereotypes or expectations, whether it was about what kinds of games they were expected to enjoy or how they were expected to behave.²¹ Often I’ve spoken to gamers of color who have had, for instance, to deal with people being surprised about their preference for role-playing games and generally being more of a “nerd” than stereotypes might suggest feasible. Women also continue to face stereotypes and pushback when they focus on competitive games and have professional aspirations—both positions that still disrupt more traditional stereotypes about who women are, and what they like or are good at. It is also not unusual to hear from LGBTQIA gamers about how they struggle with wanting to be a broadcaster “like any other,” but the very fact of their sexuality, if publicly known, can make them a target or can put them in a position of having to constantly address it.²²

VALUING DIFFERENCE

This feeling of not wanting to be hemmed in by stereotypes does not, however, mean that these streamers want to stake out a color-blind, gender-neutral, or heteronormative position. It is not about eschewing their lives, identities, bodies, and communities. Nor is it about hiding things that may mark them as different from some audience members. Frustrations with stereotypes are about constraints and real costs: from devaluing specific embodied identity and experience (including ensuing microaggressions or bruising harassment) to the marginalization of difference. Fortunately there has been growing attention to the importance of diverse bodies, identities, and cultures within gaming. Powerful initiatives like I Need Diverse Games, Feminist Frequency, Not Your Mama’s Gamer, and many others have addressed not only the representational gaps within gaming but also the social impacts and costs to overly narrow conceptualizations of game culture.

Samantha Blackmon (2015), game studies scholar and cofounder of Not Your Mama’s Gamer, reflecting on the importance of diversity within live streaming, argues that “we need to hear diverse perspectives and we need folks from diverse backgrounds to see themselves reflected in the communities that surround the media that they consume. In other words, we need to know what women, LGBTI folks, and minorities think about games too and folks from these communities (and folks in general) need to see themselves reflected in these communities.” Another piece asserted that “black Twitch” actually offers spaces distinct from so much of what many find problematic on the platform. Columnist Andray Domise (2017) writes

that [it] seems to stand out as an exception—a garden with walls tall enough to keep out the toxic elements, but doors wide enough to accommodate the folks you want at the cookout. While popular (and often white) streamers often let gross jokes, sexism, and other bigotry slide unaddressed—or worse, play along—for the benefit of building an audience, many Black streamers have made a concerted effort to keep their streams and chats as relaxed and friendly as possible.

Interventions like these, including podcasts like Spawn on Me, which focuses on gamers of color and regularly features live streamers, bring to the fore the value of difference. Diverse participation and its visibility is not simply a side issue within gaming but instead goes to the heart of both a fair and just society as well as what a participatory media culture should be.

It is, perhaps not surprisingly, common to hear many of these streamers talk about the work that they do to be visible, educate audiences, and give people a chance to learn and grow. While they typically shy away from the term “role model” and don’t want to be pigeonholed as a “diversity advocate,” they regularly enact tremendous labor to try to make the platform better for themselves and others. Although broadcasters often talk about not being there to fix big social issues but rather to just stream, recognizing the nuanced work they undertake in engaging with at times clueless, hurtful, and even harassing audience members is important. AnneMunition, for example, describes a real generosity when dealing with people on her channel who may not be used to the types of conversations happening there:

Maybe this person just doesn’t have any experience with anything that we’re saying. Maybe they have literally no idea, and they’re coming to you from this place of just complete not, like, ignorance in a malicious way, but they just don’t know. So, taking that opportunity to explain that to them in a respectful way, versus just instantly shutting them down—I try and encourage everyone to have this conversation that’s respectful and not just about, like, “Well, you’re wrong, and we’re not going to explain why.” (quoted in Koebel 2016)

Navigating this terrain is work, and streamers sometimes talk about developing their skills at handling this side of live audiences. DistractedElf has said that “there are a lot of people who come to my channel and don’t have any idea what they’re watching, so to speak, so I do a lot of that. A lot of education” (ibid.). Koebel, asking his TwitchCon panelists about this move, cut to the chase and observed, “So how do you develop those skills around knowing when someone’s just being a shitlord, and when they’re actually just curious?” Streamer UGRGaming answered, “Usually it starts with, ‘Are you gay?’ And I’m like, ‘yes.’ And then you wait for the next question, when you’re waiting for the next answer, and it’s either, ‘Oh, I didn’t know’ or ‘Can you explain?’ or it’s, you know, f-word, f-this, blah blah blah. And it’s like, okay, alright, you’re out. Too late, too late. It’s easier than ever now” (ibid.).

There are limits to this work, though, and regular streamers will usually have to decide just how much time and energy they want to put into this side of their engagement. UGRGaming’s response shows that there is a balance most of these folks take to being open to educating people, and not wasting energy and time on them. As AnneMunition (ibid.) put it, like many in her position, she is clear about not overextending herself: “I feel like I’ll spend a little time trying to educate people, so to speak, but I mean, if your parents failed you, it’s not my job to fix you, you know? I’m not a teacher, I’m an entertainer.”

SURVIVING AND THRIVING

These streamers demonstrate resilience and creativity in coming up with strategies to keep doing what they enjoy. In her book on race, gender, and Xbox Live, Gray investigates not only the representational problems at work in so many computer games but also the experiences of women and players of color in the multiplayer space. She paints a devastating picture of the racism and sexism that these players routinely face, highlighting the ways that intersectionality can position particular gamers such that “the combination of statuses one holds in society can create a multitude of discriminations and challenges.” As she notes, “Interlocking oppression accounts for how awareness of race, class, gender (as well as other social locations) co-constitute one another in ways that cannot be separated in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (Gray 2014, 57, 58). Her astute assessment of the ways that sexism and racism are deeply woven through game culture is one we must all take to heart—and strive to change.

She goes on to describe the ways that women of color gamers have found to resist and speak back to an often-harassing, oppressive game culture. Drawing on digital activism literature, she identifies three branches of intervention that the women she studied took up: awareness/advocacy, organization/mobilization, and action/reaction. These women’s responses to a hostile game environment range from forming their own smaller communities to play with, publicly promoting other women of color, or speaking out and pushing back on harassers when possible. Gray also shows the flexibility of the women she interviews to mobilize resources, particularly around technology, in order to challenge the racism and sexism they encounter as well as carve out communities of play that can thrive within an otherwise-hostile culture. Though she wisely cautions us to also be mindful of the continued need for broader structural transformation, she underscores the power of these tactical interventions, writing, “Because of the discrimination and exclusion that many women and people of color face, they have created their own spaces within virtual worlds. Given the relative ease in which spaces can be created, this presents oppressed groups the ability of being able to control and create positive content influencing our own images (granted they are fortunate and privileged enough to have access to technology and have the skills necessary to create)” (ibid., 76). The active speaking back and resistive engagement she portrays resonates with what I’ve seen among women, people of color, and LGBTQIA live streamers.

Broadcaster Chinemere “Chinny” Iwuanyanwu has spoken about the power of finding others like yourself, the support that comes through forming communities, and leveraging tools outside Twitch to do that. Herself a woman of color, she said on a TwitchCon panel on diversity,

Women of color, that’s a minority within a minority, so you know there’s going to be problems there. But we’re all out there and we’re all here, and we just need to find better ways to connect, because if it’s a toxic community out there, then our group will want to stay away from Twitch. We want to feel included. But if we find ways to connect, we will come together and grow our community. It’s just [a] means of finding each other. (quoted in Vee et al. 2016)

From using Twitch itself to leveraging other programs (such as Discord or Steam), building communities has been a powerful method to find support and stay engaged.

Part of this is also enacted through supporting peer women, people of color, and LGBTQIA streamers. Hosting other’s streams when you are “off the air,” sending your audience over to another channel when you end your broadcast, or the creation of “communities” on Twitch (formal groupings of channels that users can create) or Discord have all become ways that broadcasters support each other. The use of Twitter, blogs, and podcasts are another way. In those venues, those who may not be reaching the front page of Twitch or getting much attention can be promoted to viewers who would love to watch their content but might not otherwise be exposed to them. As streamer Ryoga Vee (ibid.) put it, “We’re huge. The number of us is growing every day. But for us to continue to be participants, we have to support each other. . . . And the trolls are always going to be there. Whatever measures Twitch puts in place, they’re still going to find an avenue around it. But if we find ways to support the community, whether it’s Facebook groups, whether it’s Discord, we can find strength in numbers.”

As I’ve previously mentioned, the role of moderation in maintaining a positive channel community is also huge, and it’s certainly the case that many of these streamers make active use of these practices and tools. One player of color I spoke with talked about how he and his sister moderate each other’s streams. Other broadcasters bring friends or exceptional community members onto their team. In a 2016 paper analyzing speech in live stream chats, researchers found distinct chat differences between the channels of men and women who were broadcasting. This was not a matter of the streamers themselves talking about different things but instead how their audiences communicated in and about the space. They noted that while the channels of male broadcasters tended to be overrepresented in terms of game-related speech, women’s channels had a disproportionate amount of objectifying speech and warnings, signaling a high degree of having to constantly fend off problematic behaviors (Nakandala et al. 2016). This research echoes with what we have heard from women for a while now: there is a consistent onslaught of speech directed at them that has nothing to do with their gaming, and the work it takes to navigate and moderate it is nontrivial.

We also see how emoticons on the platform, small icon-size images (like emojis) meant to be fun in-group forms of shorthand and communication, can be deployed to ostracize, stigmatize, and harass broadcasters. Most notable is perhaps the use of the “trihard” emote, an expressive smiling image of the popular speed runner Mychal “trihex” Jefferson, who is a person of color. The picture, submitted in 2012 by one of Jefferson’s viewers to Twitch for inclusion in its global emote category, has come to serve not only as an enthusiastic cheer but also a stand-in for calling out the race of a broadcaster or in lieu of a slur.²³ This repurposing of what was originally intended for entertainment and even celebration is especially egregious. Over the years, the trihard emote has been debated, with occasional calls for it to be removed from the platform entirely. Chinny astutely notes, though, that removing it sidesteps both its original intent and the larger stakes at work:

I mean the trihard emote isn’t meant to be a racist emote, it’s not what it was created for, but people on the internet will look for any way to make something racist. Banning something like that emote would be the worst thing you could possibly do. . . . I mean look at the list of emotes we have on Twitch. Of course people are going to pick the trihard emote first. I mean how many black people are on emote faces on Twitch? So I think Twitch needs to see what they can do to make these emotes more diverse so trolls will have a harder time doing this. (quoted in Vee et al. 2016)

On a platform with so little diversity, ceding ground on one of the few emotes representing a person of color is a lousy option. And as Chinny emphasizes, it evades a more glaring issue: the overall lack of representation within these communication systems and persistent racism online.

The practice of flooding a channel with racist, sexist, or homophobic speech, emotes, or ASCII “art” works to stigmatize as well as police particular bodies and identities. It also attempts to constitute an alternate “center”—an erasure of the actual diversity at work in gaming.²⁴ Audiences will often leverage the functionality of the platform to enact boundary policing—one fueled by an emotional, angry, and anxious tenor. In turn, streamers are put in the position of not only doing the work of broadcasting but doing so within a context that requires them to be adept and creative resistors as well.

As with all broadcasters, there is real pride and relief when the community itself starts stepping up to help shape the tenor of the channel. AnneMunition remarked on this, saying,

I think both my mods and a lot of my regulars, subs, non-subs, anything, if they’re there all the time, they know what I allow and won’t allow, that kind of thing, and they definitely help groom my community. Because a lot of times, it’s kind of nice because I’ll sit back, and I’ll see someone say something and in my mind I’m like, “Oh my God, here we go . . .” and I sit back and I just focus on the game, and I’ll see my community handle it without me having to address it, and that’s really good. “Good job guys, you did it! I’m proud of you!” (quoted in Koebel 2016)

While the resilience and tactics these streamers deploy is impressive, it’s crucial to acknowledge the additional practices that marginalized broadcasters do as labor—materially, socially, and emotionally—to remain on the platform.

WHEN ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

The fight to retain a sense of your own authentic identity, to even just participate and be present, in the face of a harassing audience takes a toll. As game scholar Emma Witkowski (forthcoming) remarks in her study of women in esports, they are “persistently derailed as authentic participants . . . via both personal and community attacks alongside of institutional positioning and dismissal . . . often leaving it to the individual players to tough it out and devise methods to self-protect in her positioning as a woman who plays.” Many marginalized streamers decide, quite reasonably, that the costs are just too high to stay on a public stage. New broadcasters may, as Chinny put it, “look at their chat and see a racist mess going on, and they may find like ‘I can’t handle this, I need to stop’” (Vee et al. 2016). Vee, himself an experienced streamer, spoke about this dynamic, observing that he regularly sees other people of color take up broadcasting and build up a small community, but eventually stop due to the harassment. “When you feel like you’re the only one out there,” Vee (ibid.) explained, “you feel like you’re a small fish in the sea and everyday they’re coming at you, it weighs on you. Even me, I’ve got thick skin, but some days I wake up and I want to stream but I’m like ‘I don’t want to hear it today.’ There’s days I don’t stream specifically for that reason.”

Some reply to such frustrations by saying that everyone gets harassed online and in games, and expecting that women, people of color, and LGBTQIA streamers will be exempt is asking for special treatment. While some level of harassment does indeed happen to many on the platform, it is disproportionately distributed to broadcasters who are not white, hetero, or cis male. These streamers face consistent and focused attacks on their identities and bodies, not just comments about how or what they play. These attacks take a real toll, as already mentioned, and the exhaustion that comes from constantly confronting stereotype expectations and outright harassment makes walking away from broadcasting a completely understandable choice. As Not Your Mama’s Gamer columnist Sarah Nixon (2015) points out, for women broadcasters “the very act of streaming can be a political decision, one that makes it difficult to see streaming for the rewarding and fun experience it really is.” Harassment has the power to curtail participation, both for streamers and audience members (who themselves may not want to encounter the toxicity). At its worst, it drives people entirely off the platform.

The Business of Play

As perhaps is becoming apparent by discussing the layers of production along with the forms of less tangible but equally important relational, emotional, and affective labor, live streaming at any serious, even quasi-professional level is hard work. While we tend to think first and foremost about the playing that takes place on camera, there is much invisible labor happening before, during, and after a broadcast. Behind-the-scenes juggling, including coordinating with moderators, ensuring software is working, monitoring and engaging with social media, and even making sure that “people are kind of jiving to the music,” are all occurring while the show is live. The work to produce a stream also doesn’t end with the live components. One broadcaster notes that there is a tremendous amount of labor that gets done off-air, which only increases for streamers as they become popular:

I mean every time I log off, I have anywhere from 30 to 150, even sometimes more than that, private messages that people send me that I need to go through. I’ve got to make sure that I’m keeping up with my YouTube, keeping up with my Twitter, checking my Steam group, making sure that I am prepared my next day of streaming, what game am I going to stream, why I’m going to stream it at that time and for what purpose, are the viewers going to like that. Planning, secretary, admin, administration work, keeping up with my website, making sure I’m following the posts on my website . . . keeping up with other streamers, making sure that I’m talking to developers, talking about contracts and sponsors. There’s a lot of work that happens off stream. I would say for about every hour of stream time that you put in, I would say probably about half of that goes into work off stream when you get off.

As I indicated previously, live streamers currently act not only as content producers and performers but small business owners, designers, accountants, contract negotiators, agents, community managers, and technical staff as well. Aside from some notable exceptions, at the time of my research there was little division of labor at the “talent” node in the live streaming space, and broadcasters often run complex media properties with little to no help. Taking a closer look at this aspect of live streaming makes visible this crucial hidden labor.

ECONOMICS OF STREAMING

Getting paid for all that work, or at least attempting to, happens in a variety of ways. At a base level, the Twitch platform is organized around ad revenue, with commercials running on streams and the proceeds going to Twitch. This changes, however, if a streamer becomes an official Twitch partner or affiliate—an opaque process that is based on content, average concurrent viewership, and broadcast regularity.²⁵ Once admitted to one of these programs, the streamer gets a share of the ad revenue, which Twitch—though not disclosing figures—has publicly defined as an “industry-leading CPM.”

Online ad revenue is not the most transparent of systems.²⁶ At the most fundamental level, there is the cost per mille (CPM), which is Latin for a thousand. This is the rate that an advertiser pays for a thousand impressions of their ad. The more important term and rate for streamers, however, is the effective CPM (eCPM) (the more precise, although less used term, is revenue per mille). This is the rate that someone actually earns for a given piece of content. The rate can also be structured along a “revenue share” or flat-rate model; revenue shares provide both platform and broadcaster a percentage based on whatever the ad sale was while flat rates operate via a fixed price (for example, five dollars per thousand views). At the time of my study, Twitch noted on its Partner Help page that it operated on a flat-rate model “based on feedback from the majority of Partners that they would prefer more stability in monthly revenue. This helps protect Partners from the CPM factor in seasonality.”²⁷

There are a range of variables that intervene between the CPM and eCPM. In a 2012 post on the popular esports website Team Liquid, Twitch chief operating officer Kevin Lin laid out a clear explanation of how online advertising works for platforms like it. He explained a third key term for broadcasters to understand—“fill rate”—which is “Ad Impressions [ads seen] divided by Ad Opportunities [ads available]. In an ideal world, everyone sells every single Ad Opportunity to someone. This would mean 100% fill-rate. In the real world, because there are other variables like country of viewer, time of day, number of ads seen by a unique viewer, etc. the Fill-rate is always less than 100%” (Lin 2012). This detail is critical because the actual payout to a broadcaster can vary widely based on audience regionality, the use of ad-blocking software, or how many other ads viewers may have seen online that day. For example, in general, a viewer coming from Russia will not net the same amount for ads as one from the United States. Also, interestingly, a viewer who consumes a lot of online video may be worth less in ad revenue. As Lin (2012) explained,

If you as a viewer have been to other video sites or even other channels and see other video ads before arriving at a partner channel, then whatever ad you see on the current channel you’re viewing will be lower in CPM value than the first ad you saw that day. Most big brands frequency cap video ads at 1 per 24 hrs, which means you should only see their ad once per day as a unique viewer. So as you see more video ads through the day, the value of the ad decreases.

Ad revenue also fluctuates over the course of a year due to seasonal variability. As a Twitch (2016c) Partner Help page stated, “Advertisers typically spend opportunistically to reach consumers when they are most likely to spend,” and thus “start of summer, back to school, and of course the holiday season” are high points, as are big game launches.

While this may seem like an overwhelming amount of detail for a nonindustry reader, it is an important part of the real economic challenges that broadcasters actually face. While it’s easy for these platforms to be seen as offering incredible financial opportunities to content creators, the devil—and fragility of the system—is in the details. Indeed the complexity and even opacity of the advertising system may be lost on aspiring professional streamers. The system relies on a tremendous amount of data and situational complexity that broadcasters may or may not understand, much less even have access to.

Despite how central online advertising has been in the period since the web was opened up to commercial enterprise, there have been critics who warn that it is, essentially, a house built on sand. Ad-blocking software remains one of the strongest barriers to revenue from this source online. Once installed, it prevents many kinds of advertisements from appearing across all kinds of websites. From pop-up ads to embedded banners, ad-blocking software has a long history of being deployed by users to manage the commercialization of internet spaces. Starting around 2002 with Henrik Aasted Sørensen’s original Adblock code, and now used by around two hundred million people worldwide across a variety of devices, ad-blocking software continues to grow in popularity (Scott 2015). As a sociotechnical actor, it has a lineage tying it to things like remote controls as well as the work that humans do to use those remotes to actually flip channels during a commercial.²⁸

Ad-blocking software has historically had a profound impact on how people not only manage their experience of a live streamed channel but also discussions around the financial stability of streamers and viewers responsibility to support them. As a bit of software, ad-blocking browser extensions that were triggered in Twitch streams freed users from constantly doing the work of skipping around to other channels, and deciding each and every time if they want to support a stream by allowing a commercial to run. It often served to smooth out the viewing experience, though at a financial cost to streamers. Broadcasters regularly had to navigate around their viewer’s use of ad-blocking software (recall figure 3.5). Communities themselves debate the legitimacy of blocking commercials, and frequently wrangled with complex ethical issues that traverse considerations of commercialization, culture, and what one “owes” creative producers.

In 2016, Twitch launched a new system, SureStream, which integrated commercials directly into a broadcast rather than overlaying them, thereby circumventing most attempts at ad blocking. Though in its public blog post announcing the new technology it said of ad blockers, “As a company we are agnostic when it comes to the use of this software. You are free to use it, or not, as you see fit,” it is certainly clear that the actual infrastructure of the platform is not so neutral (Twitch 2016b). The rollout of the technology was also tied to a shift in the financial structure of the platform; Twitch would be taking over its own ad sales, thus bypassing third-party advertising systems.²⁹

Analysts Tim Hwang and Adi Kamdar (2013, 2), reflecting in part on ad-blocking practices, have offered a theory of “peak advertising” (a la “peak oil”) that posits “cracks are beginning to show in the very financial foundations of the web.”³⁰ They identify four fatal trends in online advertising that pose real challenges to its efficacy: changing demographics, the ubiquity of ad blocking, “click fraud,” and the growing density of advertising working to actually undermine it. In varying ways, each of these points touch the live streaming space and are in a continual dance with platform developers who race to mitigate them. Caught up in that dance as perhaps unwitting partners, however, are the broadcasters.

Hwang and Kamdar (ibid., 8) further suggest that standard web forms of banner and display advertising may need to be replaced by “less detectable forms of promotion”—that is, “content that is advertising but appears not to be.”³¹ These alternative forms of promotion are in fact part of the framework that Twitch now rests on. Live streaming pitched as a marketing tool has become one of the fundamental economic principles of the platform. This occurs through stories about how sales can be driven by spectatorship and deals that the platform makes with game developers. Twitch will at times facilitate its partners getting sponsored stream opportunities. It has also, as a result of its being purchased by Amazon, sought to reconfigure the platform itself such that a “buy-now” button will appear on channel pages, allowing audience members to purchase the game they are watching. Small freebies, in the form of in-game items for certain Twitch users, promote game ownership. While some of these forms of alternative promotional methods result in money to broadcasters, it is not a given.

One of the biggest upshots of this system—especially due to the early widespread use of ad-blocking software—is that streamers have turned to alternate funding paths to try to make ends meet. Relying on ad revenue alone is rarely enough. Partners and affiliates can take advantage of Twitch’s internal subscription option. Viewers of a channel may choose to subscribe to the streamer by paying a monthly fee (at the time of this writing, $4.99), of which a percentage goes to Twitch and the remainder to the streamer (the baseline is a fifty-fifty split for partners, but can vary widely given a streamer’s negotiating power). Or if the viewer is an Amazon Prime subscriber who has linked their Twitch account, they become Twitch Prime members and can dedicate one free subscription credit to a broadcaster each month.

Channel subscribers receive access to a special icon that appears next to their name in the chat, unique emoticons, and special messages from the streamer, and if the chat goes into “subscriber mode,” they retain the ability to communicate on the channel. This method of revenue generation thus becomes entangled with how broadcasters cultivate their community and foster additional layers of in-group identification. The affective economies of live streaming become embodied in the structure of the platform. Fandom and connection are interlinked with monetization.

Partnerships can also open up opportunities to run T-shirt campaigns whereby a streamer has a shirt specially designed, and then utilizes Twitch, which outsources the production, to run a sale and collect proceeds. Twitch takes a flat fee (at the time of this writing, $2.50), and the profit margin varies based on how many shirts are sold. Not unlike how bands and comedians often turn to merchandise as an important revenue generator, broadcasters can offer audience members things to purchase to display their fandom and in turn financially support them.

Many streamers actively use donation systems, sponsorships, and occasionally Amazon affiliate links to generate additional income as well. Donation systems have proven tremendously popular and lucrative for many successful streamers, making up a significant part of their revenue. Streamlabs, one of the primary services that many broadcasters on both YouTube Live and Twitch use to manage their donation systems, reported processing $80 million in tips and donations for broadcasters in 2016 (Hicks 2017). This was an 84 percent increase from the $43 million it handled in 2015. Given that it only handles tips for 78 percent of the top twenty-five thousand Twitch streamers, the actual numbers are higher (Le 2017).³²

Graphical elements overlaid onto the game denoting the name and amount of the highest contributor of the day as well as daily totals are common (see figure 3.7). Notification systems of when new donations are made—a pop-up image and/or sound—bring the activity into the core of the broadcast itself.

FIGURE 3.7. TrumpSC’s broadcast with donation tally box on the left, 2014.

Donation systems have become a central structure through which streamers tie their performances of engagement with the audience to financial contributions. One streamer explained how he took lessons from the TPP phenomenon, which was a compelling example of how viewers can be actively involved in gameplay. He spoke of tapping into this by weaving together the performative and economic side of his broadcast:

People want a different level of interaction. It’s like they don’t just want to watch. Interaction is huge with me, and I don’t mean just me talking to my chat. That’s one form of interaction. So it’s like putting up a donation thing on my screen where people can see when they donate and it makes a sound. I’m sure you’ve seen that before. That is interaction. So think about this. Let’s say I play a scary game and I put out a loud screaming sound for a dollar. If you donate a dollar, the sound is a scream sound. Now when somebody throws a dollar at me, not only am I making money to support what I do, but on top of that the users are actually altering the course of the stream based on their interaction. It’s a way of interacting.

This approach highlights how streamers can be adept innovators, literally playing with more expansive definitions of interaction and engagement with their audience. It also shows how they see chat as only one component of the overall picture, and how they think about new ways to shape their content and bring audiences in, including ways that may motivate people to financially support their work. They are playing with, tweaking, and transforming the platform not just for entertainment but also for economic purposes.

This is not new in online video and UGC. Creators are regularly looking to find opportunities to not only improve their productions but monetize them in ways that feel both authentic and viable. Donation systems on Twitch and their integration into the very content of the broadcast (be it the “interaction” model proposed above or simply visualized in the graphics of the stream) represent an important case study in how the out-of-the-box design of a platform rarely addresses the full range of activities that users engage in.

This is a constant thread in game culture, where players regularly find that their preferences exceed that offered by the software or platform. Twitch, while supplying some mechanisms for revenue generation, can never fully anticipate either the aesthetic or economic practices of content producers who are seeking to go full time in the space. This is because as a creative activity, broadcasters are routinely shifting, adapting, and pushing the medium for new cultural production. Their aspirations and expectations may not fit with how the system is structured. Audiences, for their part, are always dynamically changing and adjusting expectations not only in relation to what broadcasters are doing but also to media practices well beyond the specific environment of Twitch.

For example, ads sometimes do not fit with the vibe that a streamer is going for, or how they prefer to carry out gameplay or interactions with the audience. As one broadcaster explained,

I can make more money if I played more ads, but [my viewers are] taking care of me enough with donations. Why am I playing ads to these people? I can play games straight through and not have to interrupt this because that’s my thing. I’m like, “Guys, when I come on here, I don’t want to have to play ads to you all. I want to be able to show you straight gameplay.” And they donate to the capacity where I don’t feel like I need to play ads.

Early on broadcasters began finding ways, typically utilizing PayPal along with third-party software and sites, to get additional financial support from their viewers. Ancillary businesses emerged to specifically cater to live streaming donations. Popular sites like Streamtip or Twitch Alerts offered services to help track and manage donations. While the sites have been at baseline free, they do charge PayPal processing fees. Part of the draw of these tools also lay in the ways that they could be integrated into the overall performance of the channel.

Audience decisions about how much they want to pay, or “contribute,” to content that they consume online is also continually in flux. Decisions can be tied to everything from their specific feelings of support for a particular streamer to their overall monthly media expenditures. For example, paying for HBO for a few months may throw off their ability to donate to a streamer or spend money on a game. Platforms such as Twitch are always having to contend with a multiplicity of factors—many of which they may not even fully understand—that go into why any given viewer might be willing turn off ad block, donate some money, or buy a T-shirt. Overall spending decisions on sites like Twitch are affected by a number of other areas people direct their money, from simply keeping up with their bills to other game, media, or leisure expenditures.

The platform does, however, try to stay on top and benefit from the new monetization paths that streamers are themselves creating. As is frequently the case with the cycle between user-generated modifications and formal developer uptake, Twitch launched its own system in 2016 to allow for donations, of which it takes a cut. “Bits” are purchased directly from Twitch at a launch rate of $1.40 for a hundred. Though the cut that streamers receive was not made public, at launch it was rumored to be around 70 percent (and as with subscription revenue rates, is likely to vary based on broadcaster negotiating power). Amounts are represented via different graphical icons and can be “tipped” directly on the platform to a streamer to “cheer” them. The donation is then visually represented in the chat via the graphic. The system mimics the public shows of support as third-party donation systems did and also assists streamers in bypassing PayPal, with which there have long been issues around charge backs.

Yet it has been met with mixed reviews. While Twitch rolled it out as a beta to some prominent streamers, there are those in the community—both streamers and viewers—who have criticized it. Among other issues, some decry it as a cash grab by the site, while others have expressed concerns about how it will be ethically integrated into tournament settings for the benefit of the competitors and talent.³³ Either way, it represents the company picking up on an emergent socioeconomic process—one that the content producers themselves developed and scaffolded from scratch—and formally integrating it into the system.

PLATFORM AND DEVELOPER DEPENDENCY

Twitch’s Bits system is just the latest in the linkages between the financial opportunity of the streamer and the platform. On the one hand, the site relies on its users to constantly produce new and interesting content that will draw in viewers who will provide an audience for advertising and game exposure. There is no Twitch without the broadcasters. And yet at a daily level, the control and self-determination that streamers actually hold can feel fragile; they have cautiously noted the power differential actually at work in this emerging media system.

Gillespie (2018, 26) points to the power that platforms have on user activities, arguing that they structure “every aspect of the exchange”:

YouTube connects videomakers with viewers, but also sets the terms: the required technical standards, what counts as a commodity, what is measured as value, how long content is kept, and the depth and duration of the relationship. YouTube can offer established videomakers a share of the advertising revenue or not, and it gets to decide how much, to whom, and under what conditions.

While the system on Twitch thus far is not so totalizing, we must be cautious not to downplay how much users are reliant on developers.

Streamers regularly spoke about the gratitude they felt toward Twitch team members who helped them continue to “do what they love.” This ranged from being seen by the company as talented and brought on as a partner—thereby giving them access to revenue possibilities—to brokering deals between them and game developers for paid promotional activities.³⁴ Top streamers as well as up-and-coming ones can be tapped for public engagements at events like PAX, or offered opportunities to work on early access or promotional gigs. As a platform, Twitch holds tremendous power to bolster someone’s career. Beyond deal brokering, the site can give a streamer front-page visibility, showcasing them on the main launch page. Just as often, the informal processes of a high-profile Twitch employee tweeting out about a new favorite streamer helps generate buzz around a channel. Given the connection and reliance that broadcasters can feel with Twitch employees, it is perhaps not surprising that they frequently express a loyalty toward and love of the company, perhaps best captured by Twitch’s own “bleed purple” (the company color) motto.³⁵

Yet there are moments of unease or caution. Streamers have commented to me about the frustration of paying out of pocket to attend events to speak about the power of broadcasting on the platform while not being funded by the company to do so. These engagements were often terrific promotional opportunities for Twitch, but the streamers felt that their labor went undervalued. There is a fragile balance around broadcasters being considered independent business entities (contractors) with expenses for travel and professional development who nonetheless usually do not make a lot of money—certainly not enough to front for activities that benefit the platform as much as them. As one put it, “That was the greatest irony. Here I was scraping up money, begging Twitch to help with this trip so that I could go speak on a panel about making it in broadcasting.” This move to situate broadcasters as independent contractors is not, of course, unique to live streaming. Platforms that rely on this type of work, which is provided without salaries, benefits, or other intangibles that come from employment, is something we are seeing across the internet, from Uber to Amazon’s own Mechanical Turk micro-work program. Broadcasters bear real costs, both materially and emotionally, via these labor models.

Twitch’s own business interests can also sometimes bump up against those of individual streamers. I found this most pronounced when the company began giving a lot of attention, including front-page positions, to large concert and esports events. Variety streamers would at times remark on how esports was taking over the site or how high-profile non-gaming music streams, like DJ Aoki’s, were being promoted. Competition for viewership is tight, especially for streamers still growing their audience, and while Twitch does support them, it also works to retain its position broadly as the live streaming platform. This can at times put the business interests of the individual streamer slightly at odds with that of the company. As Twitch itself has come to produce original content, or engage in partnerships to broadcast and promote particular events, it can at times feel to streamers as if they are competing against the very platform they rely on. Through such activities, we can start to see the shape of Twitch as a media entity in and of itself, and not simply a platform. It can thus at times sit uneasily along all the other media producers using its distribution infrastructure.

Streamers also place trust in the company to accurately pay them. I would query broadcasters I spoke with about auditing systems and transparency, asking if they felt they had a good way to keep on top of their own performance and revenue generation. I was regularly told that they rely on the company to accurately report to them. While broadcasters can use a variety of methods, both within the platform and via third-party tools, to track their numbers and performance, they regularly expressed that they didn’t always feel they had complete knowledge, especially around the location of the audience, which affects ad revenue. As one observed, “There’s this whole aspect where we have to kind of take Twitch at its word for the numbers that it shows us. A third-party sort of auditing system would be fantastic.” Another described it this way:

I do trust Twitch to an extent, not 100 percent of course, not with my life. It’s still business, and I have been burned so I know that idealism and naivety doesn’t really help. . . . I realize that even virtual analytics, which seem to be very trustworthy, even that can be cheated. So really when you get down to the core of things, there’s really almost no way to have a real auditing system except by reputation. Short of me seeing a person buy a T-shirt from a store and have visual evidence, I don’t see how digitally, no matter how sophisticated the auditing system seems, it could be completely free of cheating. At some point you just have to accept it is in essence an honor system based on trust. Sometimes you gotta realize even if you are being cheated a little, your end of the bargain is still good enough [laughs].

More often than not this kind of pragmatism infused my conversations with streamers when it came to issues of trust and accountability with the company. While Twitch has continued to improve its behind-the-scenes dashboard for broadcasters, giving them more data around their channel’s performance, the complexity of the systems has tended to mean content creators must rely on the platform’s integrity.

Aside from this issue of auditing, stronger criticisms tended to be directed at game developers who were seen as not paying enough for the exposure that a top broadcaster could provide. Increasingly, live streams are being used not only for entertainment but also as preview opportunities for people considering whether to purchase a game. In the case of developers who work directly with Twitch infrastructure to build in special in-game giveaways, ownership is incentivized even further. Broadcasters therefore hold tremendous promotional power in the games market. Given the competition for viewers, having early access to games has proven to be important for broadcasters; they get content others might not have while developers get exposure. One broadcaster explained it as follows:

There’s such a symbiotic relationship developing between streamers and developers. . . . They’re starting to realize what kind of influence we have in the sales of their game. So instead of coming to us and saying, “You’re using our gameplay footage or whatever, give me a cut of your money,” they’re coming to us and saying, “Here’s extra copies of the game. Give them out on your stream when you play my game.” So we’re playing the game. We’re showing the game off to thousands of people. And then we’re saying, “Hey, this company is so bad ass. They decided to come in here and they gave us five copies of the game to give out for free. Let’s give them away right now!”

Still, the balance that such a system relies on is delicate. Early in a broadcaster’s career, and indeed when sites like YouTube or Twitch were still relatively new, a beta key or preview might be enough compensation in and of itself. But for larger streamers, early access or free copies of a title may no longer feel sufficient. One streamer remarked:

It’s not as bad as it used to be because, especially like now, these developers and these publishers know that we are an integral part of their marketing strategy. Except they’re not treating it the way they should yet. They kind of do this thing where they’ll dangle free stuff in your face for promotions and stuff when, if this was Hollywood and you were, let’s say, a shoe company, you wouldn’t say, “Hey, Brad Pitt, we’re going to give you three boxes of shoes, and you go on Twitter and say you like our shoes, or go to this event and show your face there.” So right now they kind of treat it like, “Oh, these people are doing this as a hobby so they will take whatever we will give them.” . . . It’s just they are learning, and we have to be a little bit more stern like, “No, if I’m going to work with you, it’s going to be a contract type of thing and there will be payment.”

While the comparison with Brad Pitt may seem far-fetched, it’s not entirely unreasonable. Popular YouTube stars have huge audiences, often made up of the younger people that advertisers seek out. Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, for example, was named one of Time’s hundred most influential people in 2016 and is likely one of the few game content creators that average people have heard of. Before his awful behavior and ensuing scandals cut into his sponsorships and reach, he boasted forty-three million subscribers to his channel with an estimated earnings of $15 million (Berg 2016; Parker 2016). While Twitch live streamers have yet to make this kind of mainstream mark (or economic success), they are nonetheless increasingly important market actors. The sentiment that the streamer expressed above—that they deserve to be paid for their work—is not only reasonable but also acknowledges their growing role and influence in a larger media industry.

One of the more unfortunate but perhaps not surprising turns in this emerging labor and broadcast market has been the occurrence of both “payola” and staged gambling streams. Live streaming has encountered its own version of undisclosed endorsement deals, akin to those of the late 1950s’ and early 1960s’ radio scandals when stations and DJs did not tell the public that they were being paid to play particular records. Congressional investigations led to a revision of the Federal Communications Act, which “requires broadcasters to disclose to their listeners or viewers if matter has been aired in exchange for money, services or other valuable consideration.”³⁶ In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), spurred on by fashion blog practices, began formally going after undisclosed endorsements on websites and other new media. Over the years, it has continued to update its guidelines requiring online outlets to make sure “connections between an endorser and the company that are unclear or unexpected to a customer also must be disclosed, whether they have to do with a financial arrangement for a favorable endorsement, a position with the company, or stock ownership” (Federal Trade Commission 2000). While the blogging community had its own wake-up calls with these regulations a number of years ago, gaming has only just started to experience this legal pushback.

In 2014, the Wall Street Journal and a number of specialist gaming sites reported what appeared to be an undisclosed endorsement deal for Microsoft’s new Xbox One console. Ian Sherr, a journalist covering the story, wrote that “reports began surfacing over the weekend that Microsoft and Machinima [a large publisher and MCN] had offered an additional $3 per 1,000 views if they included at least 30 seconds of footage from the new Xbox One videogame console in their YouTube videos, and mention it by name. People who signed up were asked to keep all matters relating to the agreement confidential. Bloggers swiftly began complaining about the effort, which was seen as potentially misleading YouTube viewers” (Sherr 2014). Microsoft ended the program and said that it was not aware of the specifics of Machinima’s partner agreements, while Machinima stated that it was unsure why its usual policy of disclosure was not followed and promised to review the situation. This incident fueled continued speculation in the gaming community about how often these types of deals occurred and were never caught.³⁷ In 2016, Electronic Arts, a major game developer that had previously run afoul of FTC guidelines, announced it would be requiring any sponsored content on sites like Twitch to carry a designated hashtag and/or watermark.

Beyond what are commonly thought of as classic payola scandals, more recently issues have come to light around streamers not fully disclosing their ownership interests in sites that they promote during their broadcasts. Perhaps one of the fastest-growing trends in gaming has been the rise of gambling for in-game “skins,” cosmetic modifications for items that are either purchased or randomly “dropped” in-game. The popular first-person shooter game Counter-Strike Go (CSGO) has become one of the biggest titles offering this kind of virtual item modification: weapons in the game can be visually altered. Esports journalist Callum Leslie (2016) explained how the system worked and its importance:

These skins can then be sold on Steam, Valve’s game marketplace, for Steam credit or sold on third party sites for real cash.³⁸ Skins can also be gambled with on a myriad of sites, from casino-style chance games to sportsbook sites that take action on just about every level of competitive Counter-Strike. Many argue that this gambling culture around matches has served to boost viewership, particularly at those lower levels. It’s controversial because these sites operate without regulation. They’re not considered gambling sites under most current laws. That means minors and players in countries like the U.S., where traditional online gambling is illegal, can use these sites freely. It has long been considered a grey area.

It has proven to be a huge market.³⁹ An article in Bloomberg cited research claiming that “more than 3 million people wagered $2.3 billion worth of skins on the outcome of esports matches in 2015” alone and noted that “whenever CS:GO skins are sold, the game maker collects 15 percent of the money” (Brustein and Novy-Williams 2016). A number of prominent observers have commented on the correlation between the re-emergence of Counter-Strike as a popular title and growth of the gambling scene.

Live streaming and YouTube stepped into that mix. There were a number of popular streamers who broadcast or recorded themselves gambling on these sites, ultimately walking away with big “real money” payouts. Thousands watched these videos and saw firsthand the excitement as well as hype of CSGO gambling via websites like CSGO Diamonds, CSGO Lotto, and CSGO Lounge. Beginning in summer 2016, serious reports began to emerge that all was not as it appeared on these streams, and that several prominent gambling live streamers held undisclosed ownership or equity stakes in the sites, had been given advance notice of winning outcomes, or had been playing with “house money” and “creating entertainment” to generate traffic along with revenue for the site. The whole thing started to feel a lot like the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, although in this case actual people, including minors, gambled real money. The outrage about the lack of disclosure spurned videos, blog posts, and commentary across the internet.

Several lawsuits were filed, one against Valve, and eventually, cease-and-desist orders were issued to the sites and a new prohibition was created for this use of their application programming interface. Twitch, which regularly defers to game publisher rules of use, ended up issuing a statement in 2016 that CSGO skin gambling was no longer permitted on the site given Valve’s own terms of service. In September 2017, the FTC settled charges against two content producers, Trevor “TmarTn” Martin and Thomas “Syndicate” Cassell, for their role in nondisclosure around CSGO gambling. While some of the gambling sites shut down, others continued to operate. A number of the most prominent offending broadcasters promised future transparency, though with Valve’s prohibition on calling the API as well as growing concern from government regulators about its legality, it’s unclear exactly what the long-term future of gambling streams is.⁴⁰

MULTICHANNEL NETWORKS, AGENTS, AND LAWYERS

While it is hard to imagine that broadcasters who did not disclose their financial interests in the gambling sites were acting in good faith, it is perhaps easier to recognize that one of the challenges that beginning live streamers often face is a lack of business and legal savvy to navigate a web of financial systems, regulations, contracts, and multicompany agreements.⁴¹ As the wife of one streamer put it when I was speaking to them about the business side of things, “We’re just winging it because there’s no blueprint. We don’t have any idea what we’re supposed to be paid or what contracts we should be signing. We don’t know anything.” Popular streamer Ellohime noted that this lack of business acumen, particularly acute in younger people who are streaming, can lead to some of the undervaluing that I described above. As he commented during an MIT panel,

They don’t understand their worth. . . . And so when somebody says “here’s a free computer, just have this up for however many years and we’ll just put it right here in the corner of your thing,” and this and this and that, they’re like, “I get a free computer!?” They’re not thinking of the long-term here. . . . [L]ike any other legitimate business would go “ok, well that’s a great offer, but here’s what I was thinking” and boom boom boom lay it out. And I think as Twitch goes on and as these streamers grow, we’ll see less and less problems with that. But I think right now, there’s a big issue with people just not understanding how to be good businessmen. And the thing is it’s not really their fault! They flipped on a stream to play video games! (Ellohime 2015)

Much like with live streaming, early YouTube developers found themselves having to learn to navigate unfamiliar contractual territory. These content producers were often under eighteen years old and without legal representation; the results were a number of shoddy deals over the years.

A key part of the early media structure on YouTube was the development and growth of MCNs: “third-party service providers that affiliate with multiple YouTube channels to offer services that may include audience development, content programming, creator collaborations, digital rights management, monetization, and/or sales” (Google 2018). MCNs, especially large ones like Machinima or Maker Studios, sought to offer individual content creators early paths to monetization (for a cut of the revenue in return) via scaling up alongside other content producers in the network. One of the most important things that MCNs offered was a form of IP protection for UGC. MCNs regularly signed licensing or rights with major IP holders, and in turn covered their network’s producers under their legal umbrella. For new, frequently young content creators, joining an MCN could be a key step in building their brand, one that provided an umbrella of legal protection. MCNs were a significant form of organization on YouTube, and mainstream media and telecomm companies like Disney, DreamWorks Animation, Verizon, and Comcast eventually purchased the largest ones.

Yet over the years, more and more content producers became disillusioned with this model. Perhaps the most notable seed of discontent came from revelations that Machinima had included “in perpetuity” clauses in its contracts, essentially claiming the rights to its producers’ content—or in some cases, labor—forever. As content-creator Ben “Braindeadly” Vacas remarked in a video that kicked off widespread attention to the issue, “I can’t get out of it. They said I am with them for the rest of my life—that I am with them forever. If I’m locked down to Machinima for the rest of my life, and I’ve got no freedom, then I don’t want to make videos anymore” (quoted in Stuart 2013). It didn’t take much for analysts to compare the disputes to “the exploitative Hollywood studios of the 1930s and ’40s: Both used the lure of fame and cash to convince naive talent to sign contracts that left them at a disadvantage” (ibid.). That underage producers signed these contracts made them even more egregious. Many videos were made and posted to YouTube decrying what was seen as an exploitative system.

One Twitch streamer I interviewed had been caught up in this contractual issue and had only recently extricated himself, with the help of legal counsel, from a lifetime Machinima contract. For him, Twitch represented a jump to a platform with more freedom. Though the protections that might be afforded through an MCN could be appealing to producers, most streamers I have spoken with over the years had heard enough horror stories that such a model was not compelling.⁴² Despite the fact that MCNs had been a way that many navigated YouTube’s intense copyright management system, the people I talked to viewed them with extreme caution. For many who had spent time producing material for YouTube under an MCN umbrella, the early years of live streaming presented a feeling of greater autonomy without a lot of constricting rules.

Perhaps what has been most interesting is seeing how Twitch streamers have formulated a twist on the classic MCN model by utilizing things like friendly channel raiding and hosting one another’s content to build their own networks on the platform. Broadcasters at times band together to help audiences find what might otherwise be disparate small channel content. They may host each other’s streams when they are not on or send their audiences to a companion channel when they are wrapping up a broadcast. These types of initiatives often involve community spaces via Discord channels and meetups at gaming conventions. They tap into the conversation and community aspects of audience members, offering opportunities for viewers to express their fandom and support beyond a single streamer.

There is, of course, an important business side to these initiatives. They can become known as the go-to place for a particular audience and allow streamers themselves to start operating as “talent” in the broader media industry framework. These kinds of grassroots enterprises increasingly find themselves sitting alongside management companies focused on live streamers and other related content producers. Though not at all the norm when I carried out my research, companies like Online Performers Group, which was featured in a 2017 New Yorker article on live streaming, are now brought on by broadcasters to help manage their business (Clark 2017).

Content producers on YouTube also have a history of being picked up by major entertainment industries. While at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco one year, this became all too clear to me when I was contacted by an esports industry insider who had recently taken a position with the William Morris Agency | IME Group. When we met up, he told me about the work that he was doing on various new initiatives to bring esports content to broader audiences. Present at the meeting was one of his colleagues who represented YouTube talent, and I was amazed when I got the chance to thumb through a promotional booklet they had showcasing new media stars who could be hired for a range of activities. That people producing content online that brings in millions of viewers every day via online sites were being noticed by a traditional agency probably shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did. My time over the course of the last decade had been mostly spent with people on the fringes pushing hard to transform digital gaming into a larger media product. With the rise of both YouTube and Twitch, however, more traditional industries were finally taking notice, and stepping in to get a cut of the action. The era of networked broadcast was catching the attention of not just enthusiast audiences but big media players too.

Alongside the growth of agency representation, lawyers have entered into the scene, especially around esports. As with YouTube content production, competitive gaming has long been filled with hopeful young people pretty much willing to take whatever is offered so they can pursue their dreams of professional play. Though professional teams have long offered contracts with varying degrees of requirements and benefits, with the introduction of live streaming, new forms of obligation and labor arise that pro players contend with. These players are increasingly expected to broadcast their practice time, often with sponsor brands on display. The contracts that competitive gamers are signing are thus not only tied to in-game tournament performance but also the overall profile of the player as a media producer and object. While retaining legal representation is still surprisingly rare for streamers and esports players, it is a growing component of the industry. At times these lawyers are also spinning up their own agency services, akin to what we see within the traditional sports space.

Passionate and Precarious Labor

As I hope to have shown through this discussion of the work of individual streamers, we are watching a new form of media labor arise on sites like Twitch. Whether it is the variety broadcaster who plays a range of different titles or an esports professional who streams part of their practice time, both are transforming otherwise private play into public entertainment. For most broadcasters, this comes out of their deep love for gaming along with their passion to do as much of it as they can and, especially in the case of variety streamers, derive joy from entertaining others.

While understanding their activities as deeply tied to the specifics of gaming or even media practices, I have also been struck by how much it resonates with the work of scholars who look at other forms of labor that have nothing to do with gaming. Beyond how we might link up live streamers to other forms of contract labor, as I noted above, we can consider how its affective, relational, and “always-on” qualities resonate with other kinds of technology work. Media and internet scholars Gina Neff (2012), Melissa Gregg (2011), and Baym (2018) all offer research that is particularly helpful in situating what we see happening among professional live streamers. Their study participants, like mine, occupy the complexities of workers in creative, knowledge, and innovation sectors. They each tap into the difficult work that these professionals do as well as the risks and precariousness they face.

Neff offers a glimpse into the risk navigation that dot-com era entrepreneurial workers, including creatives, were willing to take. As she notes, “People’s desire and need to take economic risks stemmed from a lack of job security and an increase in employment flexibility—not the other way around (Neff 2012, 10). Though her use of the term “venture labor” is focused on “the investment of time, energy, human capital, and other personal resources ordinary employees make in the companies where they work,” I find it resonant for live streamers (ibid., 16).

The broadcasters I’ve spoken to over the years occupy the betwixt and between category of being independent contractors yet deeply tied to a specific platform and culture that is not of their own making. They are frequently not simply framing their actions as investing in themselves but rather on the hope that Twitch and the media form more broadly will succeed. Their success is tied with the platform, and as such, they are dependent on it both practically and often emotionally. They also regularly expressed their dissatisfaction with either their former work life or what their prospects would be if they had to try to resume regular employment. The broadcasters’ concern was not just around labor but personal happiness too, or more accurately, its loss if they stopped pursuing the creative work that they found in live streaming. Although they were usually clear about the precariousness, both financial and legal, on which this new professional identity was built, it remained a path they were willing to pursue despite hardship and risk. A sense of personal fulfillment, either through operating as a creative content producer or excelling at competitive play in esports, drove the choices they made to work outside more traditional paths.

Gregg’s research on how the online lives of professionals, and ubiquity of computing, is reshaping work, home, and relationships speaks to what we see in live streaming as well. She describes what she terms the “presence bleed of contemporary office culture, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities no longer apply” (Gregg 2011, 2). While she identifies this tendency for work to encroach on home life as something that white-collar professionals have long struggled with, Gregg links our contemporary version of it to online technologies and the growth of network life. She analyzes the ways that work often spreads out to overtake, practically, materially, and symbolically, what used to be designated as private time and domestic space. Gregg describes the ways that this process enacts itself as forms of emotional labor, intimate work, and reputational management with bosses and fellow employees. The “flexibility” and lack of boundaries between work and home form a compelling part of her story.

Live streamers regularly embrace many of the aspects that Gregg identifies in her research: relational work, blurred home/work lines, and a feeling of being nearly always on. Perhaps in part because these elements are so explicitly in broadcaster’s minds as a component of their labor, contributing to the actual value of their work, they do not figure in as vexing aspects for the most part. The interactions with audiences, the fact that you share your personal life and/or space, and the ways that you construct a sense of community through your broadcasts can certainly cast a more positive light on things. Yet there are glimpses of the toll it can sometimes take—the weariness at daily performance or having to buffer against the fans whose emotions can be too much. The complex navigations around your own sense of self or wishes for privacy can be tough to sustain over years.

Finally, Baym’s research on the relational work of musicians as they navigate social media use in a new economy also speaks to what we see among live streamers. Linking up to work on the gig economy, Baym (2018, 12) argues that musicians

exemplify the individualized risks, responsibilities, and precariousness of contemporary work. Gig work is inherently unstable, and questions about where money will come from now and in the future cause anxiety. The threat of poverty is ever-present. This is the context in which forming and maintaining friend-like relationships in which you share your “authentic” self with audiences, online and off, comes to be seen as a potential means of maintaining a career.

Much like what game and labor scholars Mark Johnson and Jamie Woodcock (2017) have found in their discussions with streamers, many I spoke with framed it as something that they want to pursue as long as possible but concede that it is no sure bet. At the 2017 TwitchCon, I heard people wondering for the first time, and questioning company representatives, about retirement funds. They recognize that their own fate is tied to that of the platform, the willingness of developers and publishers to let them continue, and the overall robustness of this new form of media. Having a backup plan can weigh on their minds.

Of course, it is also the case that my conversations have primarily been with those who continue to work in live streaming and are still trying to carve out a professional identity within that frame. It may be that the best insight into the long-term costs of live streaming will be undertaken in five or ten years, after perhaps some of the current cohort of broadcasters leave the system or retire. Only then may we get a real sense of how the delicate balance between passion and precariousness in streaming life plays out.