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| Artist: Erin Frazier |
Rationale and Purpose of this study
Hopefully without getting too abstract, this document will introduce the ideas behind this study and make its purpose clear. As an active Twitch streamer, you probably already understand more about the site and its nature than most scholars who study it. That’s precisely why scholars such as myself want to talk with people like you, to understand this new phenomenon.
Media scholars have struggled to accurately describe creator-driven sites like Twitch. Is it an attention economy where people’s attention is processed into profit (Bueno, 2016)? A field of aspirational labor, where creators labor for little to no payment with the hope of someday breaking through (Duffy, 2017)? Or a form of play-labor where leisure and labor are blended for entertainment (Taylor, 2018; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019)?
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| Artist: Erin Frazier |
These models are far from perfect: within them, two more things appear to be at work. the parasocial relationships formed by viewers towards streamers (Wulf, et. al., 2020), and the management of streamers’ personal feelings during broadcast as a form emotional labor (Hochschild, 2012).
Odds are, Twitch streamers experience each of the terms listed above at some point. And they primarily do this using video games, a type of media conventionally associated with a specific audience in mind: a white, heteronormative, so-called “true gamer” (Gray, 2014). The resilience of this association (in spite of the diversity of game players) can be seen in dialogues around “real” and “fake” gamers (Consalvo, 2019), as well as instances of trolling, abuse, harassment, and beyond, which continue to occur across social sites.
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| Artist: Erin Frazier |
Twitch looks simple at first glance. But understanding how and why it functions is an ongoing conversation in academic circles. After over three years of observing Twitch and reading the small but growing number of studies of the platform, I want to study how the labor of streamers is colliding/interacting with the “gamer” culture associated with video game consumption.
To explore this, I am looking for streamers from different backgrounds and all walks of life. I am also looking for what I call the “middle class” of streamers: the kind who have built strong, vibrant communities that are interactive and growing. With these aspects in mind, your channel stood out to me, and I would like to learn more about your approach, thoughts, and experiences related to being a Twitch streamer.
References
- Bueno, C. C. (2016). The Attention Economy: Labour, time and power in cognitive capitalism. Rowman & Littlefield
- Consalvo, M. & Paul, C. A. (2019). Real Games: What's Legitimate and What's Not in Contemporary Videogames. MIT Press.
- Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: Gender, social media, and aspirational work. Yale University Press.
- Gray, K. L. (2014). Race, Gender and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins (Theoretical Criminology). Canistota, SD: Anderson Publications
- Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The Managed Heart. University of California press.
- Taylor, T. L. (2018). Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Woodcock, J., & Johnson, M. R. (2019). The affective labor and performance of live streaming on Twitch.tv. Television & New Media, 20(8), 813-823.
- Wulf, T., Schneider, F. M., & Beckert, S. (2020). Watching players: An exploration of media enjoyment on Twitch. Games and culture, 15(3), 328-346.
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| Artist: Erin Frazier |