Why Game Live Streaming Matters: An Examination of its Cultural, Social, Economic and Political Impacts (So Far)
Abstract
Streaming is currently taking the world by storm, and has quickly become a major means by which people are engaged in online interactive media content. At the same time, the business of the videogame industry is understudied, as are the operations and mechanics of associated media platforms for the dissemination of live gameplay, particularly compared to work done to better understand games and players. Apart from attention to a few major companies such as Valve and smaller indie studios, we know little about how such businesses are shaping and reshaping how play happens. Even less attention is given to companies that support play, including services such as Twitch. Twitch.tv is currently the most widely adopted and influential platform for live streaming of videogame play in the West. Yet we know little other than popular accounts of how it originated and now functions. Beginning with a grounding in relevant theory and current research in cultural practices and online streaming behavior, this talk explores various components of Twitch such as its history of monetizing streaming activities including its Partner and Affiliate programs for streamers, its work with game developers to integrate Twitch API elements into games, and its ownership by Amazon. I argue that such platforms are attempting to reshape multiple aspects of the gaming experience, including how we play, how we watch others play, and how games themselves are made. This has broad potential impact when we consider games (and streaming itself) as educational tools, the impact of streaming as an education platform in tangentially related areas engaged in informal education such as art or computing, and the aggregation of audience in these new forms of interactive engagement.
Biography
Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-author of Players and their Pets, co-editor of Sports Videogames and author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. She has most recently completed the book Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context, about Japan’s influence on the videogame industry and game culture.
Mia runs the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players. She’s a member of the Centre for Technoculture, Art & Games (TAG), she has presented her work at professional as well as academic conferences including regular presentations at the Game Developers Conference. She is the Past President of the Digital Games Research Association, and has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.