Gandolfi, E. Journal of gaming

From Digital Culture & Society

E. Journal of gaming & virtual world’s, Vol. 8, Number 1.1 March 2016, pp. 63-82 20)

Gandolfi, E. Has an interesting paper on his hands in which he helps to define Twitch.tv a digital streaming gaming site. His paper consisted of two research questions which were “how is Twitch.tv audience composed concerning gaming culture and related habits?” as well as “how is the interaction between twitchers and audiences handled during videos?” What was found was that the sense of community among people who use Twitch.tv was thought to be quite high despite the numbers and actual engagement stating otherwise. By engagement I mean if people are making companionships on the website and/or commenting on the people they are watching known as “twitchers” in this article. Twitch.tv is a livestreaming gaming platform which allows for multiple approaches to community engagement. With larger “twitchers” being more of a top-down approach and mid to smaller “twitchers” being more engaging. Ultimately this is an article looking at diffused audiences and how they perform in the gaming culture on this website, how much of hardcore fans are they, why is it they engage with the medium and things of that nature That being said the reason this article is of interest is due to its nature in situating what is a tool/mechanism for gaming culture and how mainstream media is viewing this somehow still emerging tool. I say somehow because some years ago Twitch.tv was acquired by Amazon some and has been a staple of the gaming community for at least the past half five years which I am aware of. RQ1 and RQ2 were addressed through the use of a survey of prominent and relevant gaming community forums and websites. As well as the analysing of twitch streams from many different forms of games, the list of these subgenres go from MOBA, RPG, and online FPS etc. etc. Part of the survey’s main findings were that gaming consumption is high among at least half of the people who answered the survey, is ten hours per week played or more, most of these people would either be identified or identify as gamers. The article has another interesting note that half of those surveyed played ten or more hours a week playing games meanwhile about 50% of people spent ten or more hours a week on Twitch.tv watching livestreams of other people playing. What I theorize as a native to gaming culture is that those who view themselves as experts in the game of their choice enjoy playing more than they do watching, meanwhile those who are average or less than would rather watch someone else play, to learn how to get better or more for the social and fun environment that the game provides as opposed to competitive aspects of the game. The website Twitch.tv has become not only a digital media and gaming phenomena but also a facilitator of economic growth within the gaming industry with rising attention coming to the platform, future articles would be interesting to develop the understanding of Twitch.tv and what it contributes to digital media. In some time research done by a digital native to the platform would be interesting as opposed to someone who did not grow up with the access to this new form of digital media. This article was written in 2016 when some would say that Twitch.tv is just emerging into mainstream culture, reading this article just about two years later and the website is really just on the cusp of mainstream culture right now, just weeks prior to reviewing this article and what inspired me to actually write this review, Canadian rapper Drake teamed up with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins to play Fortnite on Twitch.tv breaking the record for most concurrent viewers at 635,000 people. This exploded all over social media sites such as Twitter while it was happening and for the day that followed. Drawing in thousands of new viewers to the site and also somewhat legitimising the site into mainstream culture. It will be interesting to see where the website is at it in its life cycle in just two more years.