Understanding Memetic Media and Collective Identity through Streamer Persona on Twitch.tv

oleh: Nathan J Jackson

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: Deakin University 2021-03-01

Deskripsi

Videogame livestreamers on the leading platform Twitch.tv present a carefully curated version of themselves - negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers - which result in “collective personas” centred around individual streamers. These collective personas emerge from a combination of live performance, platform features including streamer-specific emoticons and audio-visual overlays, and the games that streamers play and how they play them. In this paper I interrogate how these elements culminate in a complicated feedback loop between individual streamers and non-streamer participants that contributes significantly to streamer-based collective value systems. I do this by defining “memesis” as the performative process by which Internet users draw upon existing memes in order to create new memetic media. This renders visible how memes appear within games and emerge from them, thereby mediating game-spectator dynamics. Through two contrasting case studies, I examine how memesis reflects streamer agency and impacts the structure and values of stream collectives. In particular, I draw attention to the relationship between memes and stream collectives as it relates to the role of games in streams, streamer identity, memetic histories within streams, and the contrasting explicit and latent values within manifestations of particular memes.