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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Twitch is a force to be reckoned with for online gaming content. The platform is, by far, the largest platform for game streaming. In 2020, Twitch reported three striking data points: one trillion minutes were watched; the site averaged 30 million daily visitors; and more than “seven million unique streamers” who went live each month. Twitch is one of the new faces of media, and it is the media industry that retains “control of the symbolic economy” (Taylor, 2018) and popular culture. The flow of content and who is represented presents an interesting problem for scholars who study marginalized identities: a participation gap is evident on Twitch, but what the participation gap means for broader conversations is still being actively discussed (Chan and Gray; Ruberg, Cullen, & Brewster; Schelfhout, Bowers, & Hao; Johnson; Gandolfi; Anderson).
As a content creation platform, Twitch has not only changed how digital media is shared but has mediated expectations set forth by the game industry’s marketing machine in defining who plays games, who games are created for, and who belongs—and, importantly, doesn’t belong—to the gaming community. In this presentation, I will weave existing and distinct threads of gaming scholarship together to examine how the industry’s exclusionary conception of gamer identity is replayed on and reinvented for Twitch, and how content creators and audiences play a role in enforcing conceptions of “gamer.”
“Hey, I’ve Seen This One!”: Replaying Gamer Identity on Twitch
Twitch is a force to be reckoned with for online gaming content. The platform is, by far, the largest platform for game streaming. In 2020, Twitch reported three striking data points: one trillion minutes were watched; the site averaged 30 million daily visitors; and more than “seven million unique streamers” who went live each month. Twitch is one of the new faces of media, and it is the media industry that retains “control of the symbolic economy” (Taylor, 2018) and popular culture. The flow of content and who is represented presents an interesting problem for scholars who study marginalized identities: a participation gap is evident on Twitch, but what the participation gap means for broader conversations is still being actively discussed (Chan and Gray; Ruberg, Cullen, & Brewster; Schelfhout, Bowers, & Hao; Johnson; Gandolfi; Anderson).
As a content creation platform, Twitch has not only changed how digital media is shared but has mediated expectations set forth by the game industry’s marketing machine in defining who plays games, who games are created for, and who belongs—and, importantly, doesn’t belong—to the gaming community. In this presentation, I will weave existing and distinct threads of gaming scholarship together to examine how the industry’s exclusionary conception of gamer identity is replayed on and reinvented for Twitch, and how content creators and audiences play a role in enforcing conceptions of “gamer.”
Bio
Victoria Braegger is a PhD student at Purdue studying games and technical communication. Her research focuses on gamer identity, game controllers and peripherals, and issues of accessibility in digital gaming spaces.