Chapter 1. Broadcasting Ourselves
1. Lembo (2000) uses the language of mindful versus habitual viewing to signal just a couple of the varying interior orientations one might take to television.
2. Over the years I’ve come to see that this image can be troubling to some, and I certainly critically appraise offerings much more than I did as a kid. But overall, television was frequently a powerful positive force in my life.
3. To name just a few, see Gray 1995; Hendershot 2016; Lembo 2000; McCarthy 2001; Mittell 2010; Morley 1992; Murray and Ouellette 2004; Spigel 1992; Spigel, and Curtin 1997.
4. Throughout this work, I use the term “platform” in ways that are generally in sync with Gillespie’s (2018, 23) definition: “platforms are: online sites and services that a) host, organize, and circulate users’ shared content or social interactions for them, b) without having produced or commissioned (the bulk of) that content, c) built on an infrastructure, beneath that circulation of information, for processing data for customer service, advertising, and profit. For the most part, platforms don’t make the content; but they do make important choices about it.” He adds that “d) platforms do, and must, moderate the content and activity of users, using some logistics of detection, review, and enforcement” (ibid., 25). My case offers some slight variations to his examples, however. Twitch has diverged in minor ways by creating its own content and also hands off the bulk of moderation to the community, both of which I will discuss more.
5. For additional insight on patterns across channels, see Deng et al. 2015.
6. Tarleton Gillespie (2018, 24) argues that “most social media companies have discovered that there is more revenue to be had by gathering and mining user data,” and, though it has not happened yet, the Amazon purchase may be one way this comes to be a more powerful reality for Twitch, bringing it into line with non-gaming focused sites.
7. There have even been broadcasts of the classic game “mafia” (a variant on “werewolf”) that involve a group of people with a secret assassin in their midst that they have to uncover simply by speculating, guessing, and in the case of the killer, bluffing.
8. Vlambeer has been particularly adept at leveraging new platforms for development processes. Their use of Valve’s “Early Access” Steam program as well as YouTube to foster feedback and iteration has garnered interest, and praise, from both developers and gamers alike. The integration of Twitch, which Ismail described as “Performative Game Development,” was presented at the 2014 Game Developer’s Conference (http://www.edge-online.com/news/why-vlambeer-is-turning-nuclear-thrones-development-into-a-performance/). The company has a notably open approach to providing anyone authorization to not only use their games for creating videos or live streaming but also monetize that content (see http://vlambeer.com/monetize/).
9. See, for example, Linda Hughes foundational research from the 1980s.
10. Julian Dibbell’s (1998) book on the text-based world LambdaMOO in particular offered a deeply important entry for Lawrence Lessig’s (1999) now nearly canonical book Code Is Law—a work that helped articulate to an audience well beyond science and technology studies the deep interrelation between the technical and political. See also Lastowka 2010; Lastowka and Hunter 2004.
11. See, for example, Giddings 2008; Jakobsson 2011; Postigo 2016.
12. See, for example, Copier 2007;Mortensen 2006; Nardi 2010; Pearce 2009; Steinkuehler 2006; Sundén 2003; Turkle 1995.
13. See, for example, Gray 2014; Jenson and de Cassell 2008; Kennedy 2006; Kocurek 2015; Kolko 2000; Ruberg, forthcoming; Shaw 2014.
14. See, for example, Kendall 2002; Nakamura 2002, 2009; Gray 2016.
15. See, for example, Lowood 2011; Postigo 2003, 2015; Sotamaa 2007b; Wirman 2009.
16. See, for example, Banks 2013; Banks and Humphreys 2008
17. See, for example, Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 2003; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009.
18. While the majority of my focus was on Twitch, I did spend some time on competitor sites, and had conversations with those involved with them, to give me a broader context and sense of comparison.
19. AnyKey is an initiative of Intel and the ESL. Intel funded it from 2015–17, while ESL provided administrative assistance (helping make travel arrangements for events, bookkeeping, etc.). I was not paid for any of my time, though some of the Intel money, via ESL, supported a graduate student in my department for two years during this period (after the bulk of the data collection for this book).
20. Some interviewees articulate a value in being publicly known or recognized, especially in work that becomes a historical document. Being legitimized in a publication can be compelling. In this project, for example, I had an extensive conversation with a broadcaster who initially wanted to be named. Though my own ethical code compels me to anonymize, we spent time talking through both of our perspectives, and ultimately I offered to think about other ways I might help with publicizing their endeavors when appropriate outside the scope of this book or scholarly publications. I found the conversation valuable for talking through the issues with a participant as well as thinking about interventions those of us doing work in UGC environments might start to creatively consider as we navigate ethics and publications. For another look at the handling of reciprocity and esports in research, see Taylor 2016a.
21. Though I do not spend time discussing the relationship between Twitch and YouTube content here, streamer Philipp “Moldran” Karbun (2015) wrote his bachelor’s thesis on live streaming, and discusses how broadcasters can leverage back and forth between the platforms to build their brand.
Chapter 2. Networked Broadcasting
1. For more on the history of interactive television, see Carey 1997; Jenson 2008.
2. As one of the first people to tackle esports broadcasting put it to me, “Frankly I’ve always been live, you know. I’m not one of the YouTube guys. Like I don’t really, I mean it’s not like I don’t care about my VODs, but for me the thrill of broadcasting always came because it was live. We gauge this all the way back to the early 2000s, when we were doing the live audio broadcasting, you know. At that point we didn’t really have places to put our MP3s either. So it was like if you didn’t hear it live, you probably missed out on it.”
3. One important qualification: Graeme Turner (2009) notes that it is all too easy for scholars to overreach in their analysis and imagine that US television trajectories hold true globally (which they don’t). My argument in the following is focused on the US context.
4. See also Ducheneaut et al. 2008; Hallvard, Poell, and van Dijck 2016; Wang 2015; Wilson 2016.
5. For a historical overview, see Lotz 2014.
6. This shift is also happening on radio. With the dramatic growth of podcasting, more and more audio content, often produced by amateurs, is being distributed and broadcast via nontraditional outlets. Apps such as TuneIn radio can also help producers even bypass places like the Apple Store and run 24-7 radio stations. These often focus not on music but rather talk shows covering everything from politics to UFOs.
7. For more on how digital and network technology is altering traditional broadcast TV, see Gripsrud 2010; Lotz 2014; Turner and Tay 2009.
8. For more on the reality television and labor angle, see Andrejevic 2004.
9. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2009, 109) also wisely prompt us to remember that “there is much that is new about YouTube but there is also much that is old. . . . [T]he emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of such platforms.”
10. For an overview of some infrastructural issues related to online broadcasting, see Sandvig 2015.
11. For a more extensive list of “life logging” activities that often included televisual content such as Steve Mann’s early experiments with wearables and cameras, see Achilleos 2003.
12. Live streaming remains a popular technology in sex work and the porn industry. A visitor to some adult live streaming sites would immediately notice the similarities in technological affordances and user interface conventions between them and game live streaming platforms.
13. For another discussion of JenniCam, “cyborg subjectivity,” and gender via an early cam project, see Jimroglou 1999.
14. Though Senft’s (2008, 38) work predates it slightly, she astutely anticipates how Justin.tv’s “‘featured channels,’ for example, shows how the site has managed to mix ‘reality ideology,’ micro-celebrity, and streaming video technology to create JenniCams for a new era.”
15. Alice Marwick (2013) picks up on these themes of celebrity and branding on social media.
16. The original site and assets were sold (after bankruptcy) in 2001. The current site, while still doing online streaming at the time of this writing, is a far cry from the prior one.
17. Niche, that is, at least in the public imagination. Sites like Chatroulette, which randomly connects people by video, continue to draw users (Kreps 2010). More significantly, adult live cam websites like Chaturbate or MyFreeCams are estimated to have in the range of several million daily hits.
18. See, for example, Burgess and Green 2009; Jenkins 1992, 2006a, 2006b; Kavoori 2011; Lange 2007, 2010; Snickars and Vonderau 2009.
19. See Jenkins 1992, 2006a.
20. The concept of vernacular creativity originated in Burgess 2007.
21. For fascinating historical analyses of arcades as both cultural and technological sites, see Kocurek 2015; Guins 2014.
22. Trying to understand why people watch is where the bulk of research on game live streams has centered thus far. Gifford Cheung and Jeff Huang (2011), for example, used the game StarCraft to explore why people enjoy spectating games. They found a range similar to my own (identifying categories like “the curious” or “the pupil”). In one of the earliest papers to examine live streaming specifically, Mehdi Kaytoue and colleagues (2012) analyzed Twitch streams over a hundred days and sought to understand patterns of viewership, particularly around esports. Thomas Smith, Marianna Obrist, and Peter Wright (2013) looked at how motivations might differ for viewers around genres like speedrunning, Let’s Play’s, and esports, and offered provisional reflections on notions of reciprocity or learning from others. Somewhat similarly, William Hamilton, Oliver Garretson, and Andruid Kerne (2014) tap into the power of “participatory communities” as a draw for viewers who value social and shared experiences. Enrico Gandolfi’s (2016) study echoes many of these same themes, situating viewership among the gaming habits and identities of the audience as well as the culture of gaming writ large. Finally, Max Sjöblom and Juho Hamari (2016, 6) adopt a uses-and-gratifications approach to understanding viewership, and conclude that “on a general level, our results reveal that all five classes of gratification (cognitive, affective, social, tension release, and personal integrative) were significantly associated with the main outcome variables related to how many hours and how many streamers individual users watch.” See also Sjöblom et al. 2017.
23. This is akin to longtime findings in television studies that the majority of people do other things while watching TV (Morley 1992).
24. It is actually possible to utilize a third-party program (like an IRC client) to tap into the chat directly. While moderators, streamers, and other high-end users will do this, average audience members are simply using the chat window off to the side within the channel itself.
25. For more on creative approaches to shared live streaming experiences (outside gaming) and collective annotation practices, see William Gordon Mangum’s (2016) work on the DeepStream platform.
26. Amanda Lotz does a good job of showing how changes in distribution channels frequently upset traditional audience measurement techniques and how engagement has become a new currency in the postnetwork era. This chase after engagement, which is something more than simply watching but also involves demonstrating your participation as a viewer through things like sharing on social media, has become a rubric around which a number of platforms now offer metrics.
27. See also Brody 2004; Kosterich and Napoli 2016; Burroughs and Rugg 2014.
28. Marcella Szablewicz’s fascinating research on esports in China gives a slightly different twist to the work of audiences in large events there. She asserts that the spectacle of these tournaments is not meant to serve spectatorship but instead is a “platform on which nationalism and ideology are displayed. It is in these public settings that domestic and international audiences encounter representations of Chinese ideal citizenship, technological development, and market principles” (Szablewicz 2016, 271).
29. For more on this concept, see Bourdieu 1984; Adkins 2011.
30. Kan and Seibel both went on to become partners at Y Combinator and founders of Socialcam, Shear became CEO of Twitch, and Vogt went on to start a company dedicated to autonomous driving that was purchased by General Motors.
31. All amounts in US dollars unless otherwise indicated.
32. It is worth noting that this is also an angle that is reasonably critiqued across the industry as sidelining potentially good talent who do not identify as a gamer (a category we know cuts differentially, especially across gender and age).
33. See, for example, Gillespie 2007; Postigo 2012.
34. For more on sports live streaming, see Birmingham and David 2011; Mellis 2008.
35. Unlike Justin.tv, a later platform, Aereo, which for a fee broadcast cable TV via its website, was not able to resist the serious pushback by the cable companies and closed after just two years in operation. For a brief overview, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aereo.
36. See Joshua Braun’s (2013) fascinating discussion of Hulu and Boxee as sociotechnical systems for more on how we might bring an inflected form of analysis about science and technology studies into conversation with considerations of media infrastructure engineering.
37. The economic issues at stake in live streaming are often invisible but critical. For example, Justin.tv’s “first web-server bill was $40,000” (Rice 2012). If it hit the maximum number of streams for a particular country, viewers would only be able to access the content by paying a $9.99/month subscription fee. The costs that these “free” platforms incur can be some of the most important economic challenges they have to navigate, especially early on.
38. Alongside the technical specifications and help, Twitch (2018) provides this brief note on aesthetics: “Design is subjective, so we do not dictate what ‘good design’ means on our platform. However, there are several best practices you should consider, to ensure that your extension is a good experience for your audience.” It goes on to discuss things like branding, color, layout, and other design elements.
Chapter 3. Home Studios: Transforming
Private Play into Public Entertainment
1. For a look at how some players new to game live streaming approach a broadcast, see Rainforest Scully-Blaker and colleagues’ (2017) research introducing people to the platform.
2. This is a video production technique whereby the subject is filmed in front of a green background that allows a new image to be inserted in its place. In the case of live streaming, the effect is that the face of the broadcaster is layered in front of the video game or other image.
3. David Chamberlin’s (2011) fascinating look at the interrelation between interfaces, metadata, and power within media is worth mentioning.
4. At the time of this writing, the biggest differences between partners and affiliates are not around basic revenue-generating mechanisms (though Twitch does cover the payout fees for partners) but instead features such as channel emotes, video delay settings and storage, priority support from the company, and access to the “partnership team.”
5. Conversations about ad blocking regularly take on a moral quality where streamers appeal to their audiences on the grounds of support or appreciation—something I discuss more later.
6. Anthony Pellicone and June Ahn (2017) analyzed streaming forum threads, and identified several similar components: assembling technology, building community, and adopting a gameplay attitude.
7. The term “crowd work” comes from the realm of stand-up comedy, and describes the interaction between the comedian and audience. Not all stand-up comics see themselves as good at crowd work, distinguishing it as an improvisational skill.
8. He also helpfully links this stance with strategies of management, highlighting that not all broadcast platforms promote active engagement. Walker contrasts the active posture with modes that inculcate passivity, simply offering people a way to broadcast play. This is resonant with my discussion of transformative play in chapter 5.
9. As J. P. McDaniel (2015), a popular streamer, noted about shifting from esports to variety streaming, “I had to retrain my brain with how to act when the camera’s on in front of me. And it was really weird to be able to think about that. I don’t know if anyone saw that or had to do that. For me, I never even thought about that I actually had to retrain everything. I’m still deadpan but it’s very monotone. I would have the ‘Welcome to the stream, I’m J.P. McDaniel blah blah blah.’ Now I’m just like ‘Hey, what’s up.’ Very social when it comes to that.”
10. The practice of “stream sniping”—taking advantage of watching a streamer’s broadcast while you play against them—is something that has grown over the years. At least one developer, Bluehole, the maker of the PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, has banned players for it.
11. As Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2014, 14) write in their helpful collection of essays on the subject, “Affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves.” Affect theory actually offers much to game studies more broadly, especially for those of us who regularly wrangle with data that are rooted in embodied experience and complex circuits of relation between human and nonhuman actors. I could certainly imagine going back to my own prior fieldwork, on both massively multiplayer online games and esports, and using the lens to reexplore certain domains.
12. It’s actually not uncommon to hear traditional entertainers characterize themselves similarly. I recall reading Steve Martin’s autobiography, and being struck by his own descriptions of himself as shy and reserved.
13. For more on her analysis of relational labor as it relates to musicians, see Baym 2015, 2018.
14. Kaelan Clare Doyle Myerscough (2017) observed that she has also noticed the term “nation” get used—something that “itself could spawn an entire essay.” This has certainly been used in sports, such as “Red Sox Nation.”
15. This comment is incredibly similar to one of the musicians Baym (2012, 294) quotes, who says, “‘I don’t like to call them fans,’ said O’Donnell, ‘Not anymore. They’re more like friends, people that are interested in my music and what I’m doing. [I get] three or four [emails] a day, and I’ll answer, and I have good conversations with people.’”
16. This reminds me a bit of Dibbell’s (2006) work in which he found that gold farmers in World of Warcraft would often, at the end of their shift, change location and log back into the game to play it for leisure.
17. While not formally holding back, I did at times hear broadcasters who had built their reputations around a single title (typically within esports) say that they at times struggled with boredom. After many years playing a particular title, some can come to feel that they are ready to move on, but know that making a jump to a new title can potentially pose a risk of losing some of their audience and having to perhaps compete against streamers who have already established title dominance.
18. Domestic space as the prime live streaming location for individuals has evolved in just the past couple years. With the advent of streaming via cell phones, broadcasting is happening now at all times and in a wide range of spaces. It is also being used to tap into civic engagement, protest, and documentation—from the live streaming of the Ferguson protests to the powerful and devastating Facebook live stream of Philando Castile’s shooting at the hands of Saint Paul, Minnesota, police.
19. I was fortunate to able to visit India during the course of this project and go to the largest game cafe in New Delhi as well as spend time with the folks working hard to build esports there. One of the ways that they were tackling the infrastructure issue was creating game cafes not only as a site of play but also as a place to produce live streams. The home studio model doesn’t fit in everywhere, and it remains critical to pay attention to material details.
20. When his grandmother died, he shared the news and his grief with his community. The fact that many of his audience had known or seen her online in some way surely made her death impact differently than if they hadn’t.
21. Broadcaster Ryoga Vee (2016), in talking about how he faced challenges even trying to find people of color to speak about these subjects publicly at TwitchCon, noted, “The people who I did reach out to turned me down for an interesting reason. They said, ‘That sounds like a great panel, but I can’t be a part of it.’ I’m like why? ‘I don’t want to alienate my fan base.’ They were absolutely terrified that if they spoke out about how racism makes them feel, about how the chat is, or just how the community is, that they would lose subscribers, that people wouldn’t follow them anymore, that they would be labeled a social justice warrior.” For more on how LGBTQIA gamers navigate complex relationships between their identity, games, and expectations around their tastes and preferences, see Shaw 2014.
22. Often in conversations about gender and live streaming, the popular broadcaster Kaceytron is brought up as a prime illustration of a failed system. Her streams, which can reach thousands watching her play games like League of Legends, also play host to a stream of misogynistic comments by audience members in her chat. For some, she is an example of the awful ways that women are treated on the platform as they face on onslaught of sexist abuse and commentary. Others use her as an instance of the worst kind of “gurl gamer,” a woman who trades on her sexuality in lieu of actual gaming expertise. I see Kaceytron as someone playing with the expectation game I’ve been describing, taking game culture’s misogyny, the expectations around what a woman should bring to the platform, and turning it back on itself. She is, as I am not alone in musing, trolling the trolls. For a closer analysis of her channel, see Consalvo, forthcoming.
23. Jefferson (2014) recounts the history of the emote and how it has come to be linked with the trihard tagline in an Ask.FM answer: “Like 4 days later, a few Twitch Cops were lurking in my chat (which was a big deal because I was way smaller back then, like <300 viewer average), saw me going extra apeshit with the swag (because they were there) and asked ‘why is he trying so hard?’ The rest is history.”
24. Earlier I leaned on Ahmed’s (2004) notion of affective economies to talk about the social work that emotions do in building streaming communities along with connections between broadcaster and audience. But it’s instructive to note that the majority of her argument in the article I cite actually deals with the powerful “binding” role that things like language can hold in constituting hatred and fear as both social and material.
25. For more information on what Twitch provides to people seeking partnership, see http://help.twitch.tv/customer/en/portal/articles/735127-tips-for-applying-to-the-partner-program.
26. For an extensive overview of advertising in the digital age, see Turow 2011.
27. It is worth mentioning that this means a broadcaster will not get a big revenue bump if a special ad campaign is sold at a higher than normal rate.
28. The challenges to advertising online are without a doubt part of a longer struggle around television advertising (including the advent of technologies like the remote control or DVRs). For more on this, see Lotz 2014; Meehan 2005.
29. At the time of this writing, the info page for advertisers lists the following regions that SureStream currently works in: the United States, Canada, Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium, Poland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. I have been unable to confirm with Twitch if the old system, in which ad blockers remain effective, is still in use in the remaining locales.
30. They are not alone in their assessment. Journalist Doc Searls has also long been tracking signs that the online advertising bubble is about to pop. For a good overview, see http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2016/05/09/is-the-online-advertising-bubble-finally-starting-to-pop/.
31. Ethan Zuckerman (2014) has issued his own indictment of the advertising-centric model for the web, arguing against the broader corrosive effects that come from the data aggregation and manipulation: “I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.”
32. Though such figures are certainly impressive, live streaming insider and former Twitch admin Moblord (2017) noted in his analysis of the stats that when you break down the numbers, the folks at the topmost end of the streaming pyramid are akin to that thin slice who makes it into the NFL.
33. For a helpful overview of its use at the Evolution Championship Series in 2016, see Demers 2016; Steiner 2016.
34. The affiliate program was not yet in existence when I undertook the bulk of my research so I do not have any substantial data on if that group feels the same. Anecdotally, it does seem as if gratitude comes into play for them as well.
35. Twitch’s deployment of a brand identity meant to inspire a sense of belonging and loyalty is not dissimilar to Nickelodeon’s strategy (Banet-Weiser 2007).
36. Sections 317 and 507 are notable. For additional information, see https://transition.fcc.gov/eb/broadcast/sponsid.html.
37. It is worth mentioning that this event dovetailed with the rise of the GamerGate movement, which was supposedly focused on ferreting out what it identified as ethical violations in games coverage. One prominent content creator, John “Total Biscuit” Bain, was a vocal spokesperson around payola in the industry and seen by many in the GamerGate movement as shining a light on questionable industry practices. In the United Kingdom (where Bain was from), the British Advertising authority had also weighed in on the matter of undisclosed endorsements—in that case, “after several U.K. YouTubers were paid to praise Oreos, but none of the videos were clearly labelled as an advertisement” (Hawkins 2014).
38. This ability is possible because of the OpenID API that Steam’s trading system utilizes. For more details about how Valve handled the situation, see chapter 4.
39. For an in-depth analysis of the Steam platform with an eye toward labor and political economy, see Joseph 2017.
40. For an overview of Washington State’s regulatory rulings and Valve’s response, see Campbell 2016b.
41. One, Thomas “Syndicate” Cassell, is accused of not following FTC disclosure rules several times. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cassell.
42. In fact, it appears as if MCNs have been in decline as a serious organizing structure, even on YouTube, despite being tremendously popular and powerful at one period. As a TechCrunch piece noted, “It isn’t a YouTube-only world anymore. Now, of course, we have Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Amazon and a host of other behemoths that have significantly evolved into digital-first media companies themselves. These ‘off YouTube’ platforms are increasingly important to both creators and the former MCNs supporting them that want to distribute their content across as many platforms as possible (tailored to the specific DNA of each)” (Csathy 2016).
Chapter 4. Esports Broadcasting: Ditching the TV Dream
1. See, for example, the helpful collection from Wenner 1998.
2. For a detailed history of early esports, see Taylor 2012.
3. Both British Sky Broadcasting and Star TV were a part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.
4. For more on my visits to the CGS offices, attending its last championship, and an analysis of its fit in the scene at that time, see Taylor 2012.
5. One longtime broadcaster described how his sense of the power of live content had links back to his days listening to famed AM radio broadcaster Art Bell, who he considered a childhood hero: “I would listen to Art Bell all the time. I grew up listening to some other AM radio personalities. They were my inspiration for basically saying, ‘I want to do a gaming show obviously, you know, not with aliens and ghosts, but I just liked how Art was himself. I like that he talked frankly. I liked that he called people out when he interviewed them. I just, I liked that guy.’ AM radio was all live, right. I mean, occasionally you rebroadcast, but you’re listening to it because it’s like sort of an active listening and that’s just, I feel like that’s kind of the mentality that I was sort of raised on. So that’s just kind of why I tend to lean toward the live versus the archive and VOD.” In addition to doing more traditional commentating, he was one of the earliest people to do an esports talk show, complete with call-ins.
6. This is perhaps not dissimilar from the earliest days of computer game development birthed from the hobbyist community.
7. A notable exception was in South Korea, where broadcast television stepped in and had the infrastructure as well as money to make distribution possible.
8. The early history of arcade video captures is compellingly covered in the 2007 documentary King of Kong, directed by Seth Gordon.
9. For a glimpse into a proposed broadcast system at HLTV, see Otten 2001.
10. My field notes put this as 2004, but I defer to his date here.
11. It is worth noting that all continue to hold significant roles within the esports and game broadcasting industry.
12. Graham (ibid.) provides some fantastic historical tidbits in this post including insight into the earliest video broadcasting: “Another interesting fact is that at one point Nullsoft tried to create ‘Nullsoft Video.’ Before we broadcasted on Windows Media and Quicktime Broadcaster (and even before Stickam/Ustream/Twitch/etc) we attempted to stream our first major event using this technology, QuakeCon 2004, DOOM 3 1v1. The end result was a 320x240 presentation of Doom 3 that is absolutely LOL when you look at what is being done today (and how awesome the quality is).”
13. ATEM, despite seeming to be an acronym, is actually a name used by the Black Magic line of switchers. “M/E” does, however, stand for mix effects in this context.
14. For more on the concept of serious leisure, see Gillespie, Leffler, and Lerner 2002; Stebbins 2004.
15. I recall when Emma Witkowski and I did some research (2010) at the large LAN party DreamHack, and only cluing in late in the event that much of the multiplayer gaming was being organized not in person but rather online via several IRC channels.
16. There is yet another fascinating layer as well: the incredibly long shifts that these events require mean that people have to find time to squeeze in personal connection with family back home. Over the years I have seen backstage Skype chats with children and partners, Facebook windows open to connect with friends, and personal emails interleaved with work ones.
17. Fieldwork in these spaces was continually one of varying focuses and attentions, conscious and inadvertent over the course of several days. These are methodological and likely theoretical challenges when doing work on networked spaces. Where, exactly, is the field you are in? It is, quite literally, multisited (Marcus 1995). To actually be present is not only to attend to what is materially there but also how the production is made up of a range of distributed technologies and infrastructures. The technologies at work in broadcasting an event like this span from those we most immediately recognize to those who not only go unseen but are, quite intentionally, made hidden to most observers as well. This isn’t only a research curiosity; it is a powerful reality for those who do production work.
18. There is also a tremendous amount of preproduction work that happens that can include everything from making tournament brackets to laying schematics for all aspects of the event.
19. One of the best peeks into some behind-the scenes work in esports production can be found in the 2015 documentary All Work, All Play, directed by Patrick Creadon.
20. She did, however, note a broader range of frames across titles such that there was not an easy one-to-one correspondence with traditional sports. She additionally found that the ways that casters handle narrating pro players performances involves considerations of gender.
21. None of this is dissimilar from contemporary sports. Stadiums regularly have screens up showing closer views of the play, broadcasting for people standing waiting for food or going to the bathroom. We could also think of the attendee tuned into radio coverage while simultaneously watching (something I found myself doing at one event where the announcers couldn’t be heard well in the audience).
22. The training component of moderation is still fairly uneven. As one lead esports moderator put it to me, “[The guidelines are] common sense, really. I think over time, Twitch chat has just kind of like started to moderate themselves, like OK, no spamming, links, no all caps. And a lot of that can also be really just by bots. You have a bot watching the channel like, ‘Oh, this guy’s typing in all caps for the past five minutes. I think we should ban him.’”
23. See Dosh 2016; “Major League” 2013; Thompson 2014.
24. In addition, 2008 was when the “official Blizzard fansite WoW Radio broadcast live audio via SHOUTcast” (http://central.gutenberg.org/articles/eng/BlizzCon).
25. As Demers (2016) mentions in his analysis of crowdfunding, “Due to advocacy by him (and according to other accounts), this eventually was rectified for James and other talent. American talent reportedly received different contracts with a base. Russian talent did not know their base fee until they were paid.” The uneven handling of this is worrying. As a side note, it is probably worth mentioning that Gabe Newell, cofounder of Valve, ended up publicly berating Harding for issues related to his performance.
26. For more on this, see Taylor 2012. See also some of the white papers on AnyKey.org, an initiative focused on diversity in esports.
27. We might also extend this to say that with a few exceptions, the model is racialized and it is white men in particular who are the imagined audience.
28. For an excellent overview of serious critical issues around this form of data, see boyd and Crawford 2012.
29. For more on this, see Ang 1991; Morley 1992; Silverstone 1994.
30. For more on how gender and age are often mistakenly conflated in game demographic analysis, see Yee 2008.
31. Similarly, I would not want to ground equity in esports around a case about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics training, education, or “pipelines”; access to esports should be seen as a basic human right like any other.
32. See, for example, Bleier 1986; Fausto-Sterling 1985, 2000; Laqueur 1990; Longino 1990; Tarvis 1992.
33. This also included women’s participation more broadly: “It’s not just viewership, but engagement. Fantasy football participation grew to include 6.4 million women in 2013, a 10 percent single-year jump from the 5.8 million who played in 2012” (Chemi 2014).
34. “Pink jerseys” epitomize a poor intervention and tend to be the shorthand for simplistic attempts. For more on the oversimplification of addressing women in the MLB audience, see Angi 2014.
35. For more on this, see Angus 2013.
36. For more along this line, see Applebaum 2014.
37. Frankly things are not much better for older men, not to mention women, either. As a 2014 New York Times article put it, “Working, in America, is in decline. The share of prime-age men—those 25 to 54 years old—who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. More recently, since the turn of the century, the share of women without paying jobs has been rising, too. The United States, which had one of the highest employment rates among developed nations as recently as 2000, has fallen toward the bottom of the list” (Applebaum 2014).
38. For more on this argument, see Taylor 2008.
39. This competition extends to hiring. Given the industry’s community and enthusiast roots (even within formal companies), it is perhaps not surprising that it has been a small world so far. While many begin their esports careers with scrappy grassroots start-ups, ultimately there are a handful of viable companies you can work for if you really want to build a long professional life in the scene. In much the same way that top players may move from team to team, business talent itself is a valuable commodity, and over the last few years it has been fascinating to watch people move across competing companies.
40. It is also rumored that informal nonpoaching agreements for employees have been utilized and at times broken.
41. For more on DreamHack, see Taylor and Witkowski 2010.
42. WME is the product of a 2009 merger between the William Morris Agency (which dated back to 1898) and Endeavor Talent Agency. Both agencies had a notable impact on the entertainment industry, from films to music. In 2013, WME acquired IMG, which is actively involved in multiple levels of sports talent and media deals.
43. Notably, other onetime television events have continued since the CGS. In 2015 alone, both the BBC and ESPN ventured into broadcasting major tournaments.
44. Astute readers will catch that this occurred about five months before the MLG purchase.
45. Interestingly, third-party companies are also getting into licensing scuffles with each other. In January 2017, ESL filed suit against Azubu for $1.5 million for breach of contract. ESL had sold Azubu the rights to stream its content and alleged that it had never been paid. In late March 2018 it was reported that the suit was settled in December 2017, though the terms were not disclosed (Brautigam 2017, 2018).
Chapter 5. Regulating the Networked
Broadcasting Frontier
1. See Lingle 2016.
2. This is a thread explored by game studies over a number of years. See, for example, some of my prior work on governance and control (Taylor 2006a, 2006b, 2012).
3. Though in online systems this is a difficult status to truly enforce as users can (if not IP banned) simply create a new account and come back onto the channel.
4. For a consideration of how pranking and trolling also cycle into live streaming performances, see Karhulahti 2016.
5. There is another form of bot (though not related to chat) worth briefly mentioning here: the viewbot. Viewbots are artificial “viewers” that inflate audience numbers, helping boost channel visibility and notoriety. Viewbots are cheap to buy online as a service via a website, and are regularly the subject of skirmishes, accusations, and rebuttals. People will accuse a streamer of using viewbots, and sometimes streamers will claim that someone has sent viewbots to their channel in an attempt to disrupt them. There are also countertools, such as the third-party “Twitch Bot Detector” that tries to identify channels that are utilizing bots and publicly tweets the information out (@botdetectorbot).
6. For more on the protest uses of DDOS, see Sauter 2014.
7. For the classic example of a call for net libertarianism, see Barlow 1996.
8. For more on this, see Taylor 2006b.
9. For more on GamerGate, see Chess and Shaw 2015; Dewey 2014; Hathaway 2014; Massanari 2017; Parkin 2014.
10. For more on this, see Uszkoreit, forthcoming; Witkowski, forthcoming.
11. Maddy Myers (2014) tackles some of these issues.
12. At times this even takes on a “think about the children quality,” as in the poster, Why_the_Flame, who wrote on May 22, 2015, that “Twitch has created an environment where it pays to be sexually suggestive (one prominent ‘cam girl’ has even unashamedly boasted about this on live stream chat with Twitch admins present), on a site that isn’t age gated to prevent hormonal youngsters from being suckered in by their actions.”
13. There are even YouTube videos documenting and celebrating these raids on women streamers.
14. The notion of transformation in play appears in several works: the transformational component of play particularly around learning (see, for example, Sasha Barab, Melissa Gresalfi, and Adam Ingram-Goble’s [2010] overview of this approach), child’s play as transformative (see TWC Editor 2009), Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2003), on transformation in play, and Olli Sotamaa’s (2007a) consideration of malleable rule structures. See also Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s (2014) overview of this concept within game studies relating to fan producers. The formulation that I am using here—transformative work—leverages a slightly different valence (both in terms of a legal conversation and the work of play), though it is certainly resonant with these other uses.
15. The fair use guidelines from the Stanford University Libraries (2015) helpfully relate that there is a “fifth [unspoken] fair use factor” to be aware of: “Fair use involves subjective judgments and are often affected by factors such as a judge or jury’s personal sense of right or wrong. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court has indicated that offensiveness is not a fair use factor, you should be aware that a morally offended judge or jury may rationalize its decision against fair use.”
16. The Stanford University Libraries (2015) site observes that “determining what is transformative—and the degree of transformation—is often challenging. For example, the creation of a Harry Potter encyclopedia was determined to be ‘slightly transformative’ (because it made the Harry Potter terms and lexicons available in one volume), but this transformative quality was not enough to justify a fair use defense in light of the extensive verbatim use of text from the Harry Potter books. (Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. v. RDR Books, 575 F. Supp. 2d 513 (S.D. N.Y. 2008).” See also http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html for more examples.
17. For a helpful listing of notable cease-and-desist orders that have hit fan communities over the years, see http://fanlore.org/wiki/Cease_%26_Desist.
18. See Castronova 2005; Dibbell 2006.
19. See Postigo 2003; Sotamaa 2007b; Taylor 2006a.
20. See Lowood and Nitsche 2011; MacCallum-Stewart 2014; Postigo 2015, 2016.
21. For more on this issue, see Banks 2013.
22. I found a similar argument articulated when I researched massively multiplayer online spaces where players spoke of emergence in a virtual world (Taylor 2006a, 2006b) and among professional esports competitors, who regularly identified their gameplay as highly skilled, virtuoso performances on a digital playing field, akin to professional athletes (Taylor 2012). For more on the complexity of performance and the law, see Tushnet 2013.
23. This is akin to Espen Aarseth’s (1997) notion of the ergodic and the unique properties of what he terms “cybertexts.”
24. Her book is a powerful answer to Cohen’s (2012, 66) call to pay attention to actual experience, such as when she observes, “The copyright system’s account of cultural development is relatively incurious about users and their behavior. . . . But if creative practice arises out of the interactions between authors and cultural environments—if authors are users first—failure to explore the place of the user in copyright law is a critical omission.”
25. Though the provision originated as a discussion around internet service providers, Fairfield (2009, 1038) observes that it is one invoked by companies beyond that scope (he was particularly concerned with how game companies might need to deal with it), and indeed clarifies that “companies that carry data without interfering or selecting the content are rewarded and protected under a net neutrality paradigm; companies that interfere with data distribution open themselves to risk.” He argues that regarding potential risks, game companies need to evaluate “if game gods merely repost or edit third-party content, then there is no liability. But if the game gods editorialize or recontextualize the content, then liability may result” (ibid., 1044).
26. For more on how platforms are approaching issues around content moderation and the safe harbor provision, see Gillespie 2018.
27. Twitch provides its users with a selection of royalty-free tracks through its Music Library service, but most people seem to prefer to listen to their own favorite music while they stream.
Chapter 6. Live Streaming as Media
1. As this manuscript was in the last moments of being edited, the NBA in fact announced its own esports league built around the NBA2K game, thus bridging the traditional and electronic version of the sport.
2. See also Kylie Jarrett’s (2009) discussion of the “hybrid discourses” of podcasting for a related conversation on the possibilities for public debate within new media.
3. As Turner (2011, 686) bitingly notes elsewhere, “I do not think anyone denies that the convergence of media and communications technologies is actually happening. Convergence culture, on the other hand, looks to me to be about 20 percent fact and 80 percent speculative fiction. The claims made for its significance are as dramatic as they are unconvincing.”
4. See, for example, Terranova 2000; Andrejevic 2009b.
5. Both Matt Hills (2002) and Jarrett (2008a) have written convincingly on this point.
6. See Taylor 2006a, 2006b, 2012.
7. See Henricks 2015.