Twitching Laborious Play or: How Game-Streaming Changes Modes of Playing

Twitching Laborious Play or: How Game-Streaming Changes Modes of Playing

Twitching Laborious Play or: How Game-Streaming Changes Modes of Playing

Beate Ochsner, Markus Spöhrer, Harald Waldrich

Abstract

"The twitch gaming event is a multifaceted and multilayered participatory act, linking economic interests of platform owners, game industry and gamers with modes of playing games – a development that engenders gaming – especially twitch gaming – as a new form of ‘work’. In this paper, we will make an effort to develop a frame by which the interconnections between actors like media specific aspects of live-streaming, the aesthetic of performing – such as ‘self-portrayal’ and maintaining a ‘screen persona’ by the streamers –,mediatechnical equipment as well as social interactions with the audience and, last but not least, economic interests become entangled to produce what we call a ‘live-streamed gaming event (Giddings 2008)’ or, to put it simple, twitch."

Reference

Ochsner, B., Spöhrer, M., & Waldrich, H. (2020). Twitching Laborious Play or: How Game-Streaming Changes Modes of Playing. In Einspielungen (pp. 179-206). Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-658-30721-9_9

Keywords

playing, streaming, games, twitch, streamer