What Lurks in the Dark

Social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on Twitch

“…As the majority of Twitch streams have a video game as the central content, it is natural that the gamefulness of Twitch is another aspect that has been investigated. As a platform that facilitates interaction between the streamer and the viewer, Twitch offers the ability to insert gameful elements into this interaction, as exemplified by audience participation games (Fanzo et al, 2017;Seering, Savage, et al, 2017). One example of a audience participation game that garnered large attention outside of Twitch was Twich Plays Pokémon, a phenomenon in 2014 where the users of Twitch impacted the playthrough of the original Pokémon Red/Blue through the chat functionality (Ramirez et al, 2014).…”

“…In fact, the whole concept of games being consumed by spectating rather than playing, changes the approach to game development significantly. Studies have already shown that streaming of games can increase sales (Hernandez, 2016), and that new types of audience participation games are emerging that facilitate spectator interaction (Fanzo et al, 2017;Glickman et al, 2018;Seering, Savage, et al, 2017).…”