Streaming in Character

               The article The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv looks at some of what streaming entails, from how streamers interact with their audience, to the basic idea of doing something that, in theory, is simply intended as entertainment for work and labor.

Woodcock and Johnson seem to be synthesizing and summarizing a large amount of research, some done by other researchers, about this topic. Their personal research was done through both interviews and ethnographic data (observing twitch streams) from a large variety of sources.

They start by looking at how twitch is different from things like vlogging, like having the streamers image in picture in picture, giving the audience a more direct connection to them. This is especially important as twitch streamers make most of their money two ways primarily, through subs and donations, and getting corporate ads and or sponsorships. Both require having a large, consistent audience, so they must find ways to attract that.

The way most looked at in this article is the formation of “characters”, often taking an aspect of their personality and enhancing it. This is used both to entertain viewers, but also to create parasocial relationships. Often, these characters seem friendly and casual, making viewers feel that they’re just watching a friend play a game. However, this can obfuscate the amount of work and effort it can take to work as a streamer.

While these characters can be used to separate their “stream life” from their real life, streamers can often have to maintain these characters for huge amounts of time, sometimes months or even years depending on how often and on how many platforms they interact with their viewers. These characters can be viewed as a type of branding, as it is how they both gain and maintain their audiences, which if they are using  streaming as a source of income are both essential.

Woodcock and Johnson also look at how the nature of playing video games for work is considered almost paradoxical, combining forms of play and work, morphing exactly what we consider video games into something new. I would personally argue that this is no different than what our society does with most sports, which while they do compare streaming to, don’t really go into it that deeply. General society, and even large parts of gaming culture, haven’t considered video games to be a serious media form, it is merely “entertainment”, allowing things like this to go mostly unnoticed until the last decade at most.

In their conclusion, Woodcock and Johnson state basically that everything they’ve discussed should be looked at in more detail. They especially stress the new pressures being placed on streamers as this form of entertainment grows more and more popular.

Looking at this article in terms of my own personal experiences, streamer characters are compared to stage acting, specifically looking at character work and improv. I have spent a good amount of time with acting, and while some aspects of normal stage acting are absolutely applicable, the type of character work can be quite different, as much of streaming involves reaction, while much of typical stage acting is not true reaction, it is planned, it is scripted. Improv, to me at least, seems much more applicable.

More generally, I am not particularly familiar with twitch, having done the majority of my viewing of it this semester for my project. However, I felt fairly familiar with most everything they discussed in this article. This suggests to me that a lot of this stuff is more common knowledge for those who are more active in the twitch community, and I’d guess it was primarily to bring it to the attention of other researchers. Either that, or I’m much more familiar with Twitch culture than I thought I was.

-Stormhaven