Company Or Community?

Home , Achievement Hunter, Fullscreen (company), Gavin Free, Geoff Ramsey, Grace Helbig, Lazer Team

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

Company or Community?

Samuel Dekker 4/25/2018

Student number: 5893992

Master Thesis

Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences: Department of Anthropology

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements - Page 2

Chapter 1 – Preface - Page 3

Chapter 2 – An Introduction to Rooster Teeth - Page 6

Chapter 3 – The Attraction of Rooster Teeth - Page 12 • Vignette Gavin Rainbow Six Livestream • The Content • The Appeal • Becoming more invested in RT, a large group of ‘friends’ • Personality, Fame, Relatability and Intimacy • The Dream • The Promise of the Front

Chapter 4 – RT Corp. - Page 33 • Belonging and the ‘socially awkward and shy’ • The growth of RT and the rise of the fangirl • A changing (digital) landscape • Online Localities and Fields • RT Corp. and the Fullscreen Takeover

Chapter 5 – Conclusion - Page 63

Bibliography - Page 67

Acknowledgements Without the help, encouragement, moral support and, especially, patience of some people I could have never finished writing this thesis. Above all I would like to thank my parents and brother, who were always there for me. Next to that I would like to thank all my friends who supported me these last few years, especially Lisanne de Wit and Remy Koomen. The knowledge and patience that Peter van Rooden brought to the table as my supervisor has also been vital. And the guidance of Ron Heinrich, as well as Hilda Lanser, Sara Counts and Hilde Smit throughout the process of writing my thesis has been crucial. I would also like to thank all my interlocutors: Sam, Peter, Thijs, Terry, Femke, as well as all the people who welcomed and helped me during my fieldwork, such as everyone in the OCC, the If You’re New And Want To Make Friends group, the RTUK Facebook group and the wider RT community in general. Next to that I would like to thank Annika, Mirjam, Hanna, Emma, Wessel, Sien, Irene Stengs, Phil, Lucrezio, Idil, all of my roommates, everyone in my football team, the UvA anthropology department and my family. Without you I would not have been able to do this.

Chapter 1 – Preface In this day and age the internet has become a normal and everyday part of the daily lives of many, especially for the people who grew up with it already being so. Since the last twenty years or so the internet has provided a fertile ground for the creation and assemblage of groups and ‘communities’, based on hobbies and interests in particular.1 Often in contrast with their (offline) daily life, ‘gamers’ and ‘geeks’ found likeminded people on the internet, a digital landscape they were particularly more familiar with than others, including their peers. For some of them Rooster Teeth (RT) became the place of belonging, social network and ‘club-like’ company through which they connected with likeminded others. Almost from its inception in 2003 RT was marketed as a ‘community’ where everyone was welcome, where the community members were involved in the production process of the company, where its employees were like you. RT was and is a good example of the increasing interconnectedness between media and social media. Much more than in the early days of RT, today there is an even larger variety of online localities where ‘gamers’ and ‘geeks’, and everyone else for that matter, can find a place of belonging and where they can connect with likeminded people. More than ever are people able to organize themselves online. In spite, or because of, this development the internet has truly become big business. RT was one of the earlier companies that responded to the urge for people with similar hobbies, interests and consumer preferences to organize themselves online, to find like-minded spirits and a digital ‘place’ of belonging. What sets RT apart from other companies is that they found gaps in what the traditional media had on offer; niches that spoke to people like themselves: ‘gamers’ and ‘geeks’. In general this audience knew the ropes of the internet very well, which RT capitalized on by making their website their center of distribution and by facilitating a, for the time, elaborate social platform where ‘the audience’ could hang out with each other and with the people who worked at RT. To pay for all of this, and to earn some money too, they implemented a ‘Sponsorship system’ that made it possible for members of the site to become Sponsors, granting them early access to certain content, as well as giving them the feeling that they were supporting the cast, the personalities who worked at RT. It also made them feel like they were part of the production. Compared to traditional media the ties between the producers (and the cast) and its audience were strong, the lines were short and the division

1 Note: The success of Reddit is a good example of this.

between the public and private was relatively vague, for the members of the site as well as the cast. This was the template of the growth of RT and its community. Fast forward to today and these three cornerstones are still in place.2 RT is still finding niches for ‘gamers’ and ‘geeks’ to enjoy, and increasingly for other audiences too. RT still offers the promise of a community, a group and ‘place’ of belonging, a close connection between community- members among themselves as well as with the cast. The types and amount of content that RT produces has vastly increased, but its attraction is just as much about the content itself as the cast that features in it. RT differs from other (traditional) media in that almost every day a video is uploaded, even just speaking about one division of RT, which often feature the same cast-members. The ‘front’ of RT, the ‘group of friends who hang out, play videogames and have fun together’, has been ongoing for years now.3 For the community-members and fans this performance has given rise to the feeling of a deep connection and a ‘knowing’ of this ‘group of friends’ as well as your fellow fans and/or community members who have lived this with you, or in a similar way as you. Many fans feel a sense of gratitude towards RT (or a specific division like AH), because they have been performing and living their lives parallel to yours, exposing their ‘authentic’ selves for your entertainment, indirectly making it easier for the fans to show who they really are, to express themselves and to ‘put themselves out there’. This has instigated a reciprocal relationship between the fans and the cast-members. The new (and some older) fans gladly grant RT their success, and they gladly give them their money (through buying merchandizing or through being a Sponsor). They are happy with the entertainment and with the people they connect and share their enthusiasm with through fan- and community-activities. However, many ‘old-school’ fans/community members are less happy with their reciprocal relationship with RT. RT has grown a lot and has become different than it used to be: it has become more commercial, the distance between the cast and the community has grown, RT has been (indirectly) taken over by AT&T, one of the largest companies in the world, and on top of all that the old-school community have, in their eyes, lost their communal digital space (the RT site) to which they attached great meaning. They feel like that was the fundament of RT and its ‘community’, and in spite of RT knowing this they nonetheless ‘let it go’. Because of this they often feel like they have lost the close relationship that they once had with RT and its cast-members, as well as with other

2 Note: The three cornerstones being: The niches that RT caters to, the community-aspect, and putting the ‘authentic’ cast at the center of the production. 3 Explanation: In chapter three I will elaborate on Goffmann’s ‘front’.

4 community members. In this process they have also lost their powerful position in the production process of RT and in having a say in what direction RT is going. Community members and fans are central in my thesis, and I will use these terms a lot. To add emphasis I will use one or the other deliberately, but sometimes I choose to use one term for my, and the readers, convenience. Many community members and fans use these terms interchangeably in practice as well. In Chapter 2 I will explain what RT is and briefly summarize its history up until today. In Chapter 3 I will explore the relation between RT, its content and the cast with the community members and the fans. The purpose here is to show what the attraction of RT is, how the community members and/or fans get increasingly invested in its content and the cast, by the inclusive, friendly and familial presentation of RT, as well as the possibility of living the dream one day. In Chapter 4 I will show how RT changed and has become more commercial in the eyes of the old-school community members and what the community has meant for them as well as for the ‘newer’ community members. Then I will show how the digital landscape has changed, what different online localities mean and ‘do’ for the involved community members and fans, and what power dynamics are at play here. Chapter 5 will be the conclusion. Ultimately I hope to shed some light on the ways in which people interact and find belonging and ways of being together through the internet, and what this entails when a media company such as RT plays a central role in this.

Chapter 2 – An Introduction to Rooster Teeth It all started as a joke. In 2001 a group of guys who liked videogames from Austin, Texas decided to create a videogame-review website: drunkgames.com.4 The idea behind the website was that they could ask publishers for free copies of videogames, so that they could get drunk, play videogames that they normally would have to pay for, and maybe even make some money at some point. The plan failed however, because no company wanted to be associated with anything with ‘drunk’ in its name.5 A different approach was needed, so they made a short video in the then extremely popular Xbox game Halo, in its most popular multiplayer map ‘Blood Gulch’.6 For many gamers, especially in the US, this game and map signified having a good time together with your friends on the couch in front of the TV, while you were staying up late drinking beer (or something similar).7 In the video the red and blue team members (who in the game had to eliminate each other) philosophized about life and bickered over who could watch through a sniper rifle scope. On April 1, 2003 they released the short video on their new website roosterteeth.com, and this date came to be seen as the date on which Rooster Teeth is founded. This was at a time when videos could not be played on an internet page; you had to click on a link to be able to download it. The video went viral, not through Facebook or YouTube, which did not exist at the time, but mostly by word of mouth, and by people sharing the link with friends per email. Since that time 15 Red vs. Blue (RvB) seasons have been made, RT has become a company with over 250 employees, it releases multiple videos per day and has over 2 million ‘community members’ on their own website, of which about 200.000 are a paying sponsor.89 All ‘founding fathers’ of RT (Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum, Geoff Ramsey, Gus Sorola, Joel Heyman and Jason Saldaña) are still working at RT today, except for one.10 For the first few years after their first video RT continued to create RvB episodes (with the technique called machinima) while the series got an increasingly large and devoted

4 Note: See the archived website here: http://web.archive.org/web/20021017053539/http://www.drunkgamers.com/index.shtml 5 Source: RT podcast 174: http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/6/d/9/6d993bd317624917/Rooster_Teeth_Podcast_174.m4a?c_id=4692764&expi ration=1496758410&hwt=379d6162e599ad8e2b5eda50aec351bd 6 Note: Halo quickly became the Xbox figurehead game, and ‘Mater Chief’, its main protagonist, its mascot, in a similar way as Mario still is for Nintendo. 7 Note: For me it actually signified the same, although I did not come to know RT for over a decade later. 8 Source: https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/rooster-teeth-grace-helbig-hannah-hart-phil-defranco- million-dollars-but-1201997906/ 9 Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/29928-red-vs-blue-rooster-teeth-season-15-interview 10 Note: Except for Jason Saldaña

audience.11 RT managed to do this by adding extended social features to their website in 2004, the community part of the website, on which the ‘community members’ could create profiles, write journals, create groups and take part in forum discussions. RT also introduced a ‘mod point system’, which enabled community members to like and dislike posts. This created an incentive for people to further adhere to the prevailing norms and etiquettes, while it also helped the ‘mods’ in recognizing inflammatory and unwanted posts. Importantly, the ‘founding fathers’ and the cast-members of RvB actively took part in the community-activity. RT also implemented the option for community members to become a Sponsor, granting early access to the RvB episodes as well as a few exclusivities on the community part of the website. At first this was a necessity for RT, because at the time it was expensive to ‘host’ videos online, about 12.000 dollars per month to be precise.12 After the last episode of the first RvB season had been released RT made money by selling its DVD on their website, which aside from the sponsorships made up the majority of their revenue.13 Even though all episodes of RvB were free to download online, and even though the sponsorships did not grant much privileges, especially at the start, most community members bought the sponsorship and/or the DVD for different, or at least additional reasons: to support RT and to help out with the many costs they encountered. And thus a reciprocal relationship was initiated. For the next few years RT grew steadily, while they continued to produce the RvB series. Then, in 2008, RT expanded their production beyond RvB for the first time. They started to record a weekly audio podcast, which (usually) featured Gus Sorola, Burnie Burns, Geoff and Griffon Ramsey (the former wife of Geoff). In the podcasts they mostly talked about popular culture, with the emphasis on tech- and videogame culture, while consuming alcohol. In the same year RT launched its first separate division: Achievement Hunter (AH). This gaming centered division was founded by Geoff Ramsey (together with Jack Patillo) and

11 Explanation: Machinima is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. This meant that, in the case of Red vs. Blue (RvB), RT used the Xbox game Halo in the multiplayer mode, so not the main storyline mode in which you follow a more or less linear path while defeating aliens along the way, to create scenes with different camera angles, using the avatars as main characters. Other advantages of using machinima over ‘normal’ computer animation was that people could control (move, shoot, jump, etc.) the avatars just like in the original game, and the only thing left to do was to record it, edit it and add voice acting. It was edited in such a way that a logical narrative was created, while each character/avatar had a slightly different appearance and color and was voice acted by the different founders mentioned above, and a few other people. The duration of an episode was about three to ten minutes, and a season consisted of about twenty episodes. 12 Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238391 13 Note: This is something that still happens after each last episode of a RvB season, or any RT series.

mainly featured video-guides explaining how to get certain Xbox 360 achievements.14 2008 was also the year in which RT launched their first YouTube channel(s). Before RT had been reluctant to start a YouTube channel, because they already had their own website with its own community, and in keeping everything on their own website all the views and its add- revenue would go directly to RT and not partly to YouTube. But in 2008 YouTube was growing very fast, and even though RT would earn less money per view they had the chance to gain a lot of new viewers in total, as well as the increased chance of one of their videos ‘going viral’. So from that point on all videos were released both on their own website as well as on YouTube. The following years the growth of RT and the expansion of their production intensified. In 2009 RT started to produce their first live-action videos, in which the cast (mainly the ‘founding fathers’) played caricatures of themselves in an office setting.15 In 2010 a few new shows were launched, like Immersion, a show in which two ‘lab rats’ were being dropped in a videogame situation, but in ‘real life’.16 The first (non-machinima) animated show was introduced: a cartoon of funny and/or memorable stories and anecdotes from the podcast. And Gavin Free, an English former community member who was already involved in the production of RvB, started his own channel in which he and his friend Dan were filming things in extreme-slow-motion. Gavin did this to get a working permit to be able to move to Austin, to work at RT fulltime. But one of the first videos, in which a huge water balloon was blown up by Gavin jumping on it, went viral. Today it has been viewed over 170 million times.17 In 2011 the podcast became a video podcast, although the audio version of it was still available to download. The Ramseys stopped featuring in it and Gavin Free and Barbara Dunkelman, both former community members, replaced them. In the same year an event was organized at the RT offices where 400 community members gathered to spend the day with the cast.

14 Explanation: The achievement mechanic was first introduced by the Xbox 360, and is currently used on almost all videogame platforms. On the Xbox 360 each game had different achievements that you could ‘unlock’, in total worth of 1000 ‘gamerscore’ per game. The achievements you unlocked and their accompanying points stacked up, so if you owned five games you could earn a maximum amount of 5000 gamerscore from them. Some of the achievements were difficult to unlock, and for many ‘gamers’ the unlocking of achievements became an important sub-goal while playing a videogame. An increasing amount of people were comparing gamerscores with others, and this created a competition, an incentive to have a higher gamerscore than your (Xbox-live) friends or even complete strangers. 15 Explanation: Live-action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action 16 Note: In its first season Gus Sorola and Geoff Ramsey were the ‘lab rats’. An example of an episode: the lab rats had to fight of four hundred zombies (all dressed- and made up community members) with toy guns, similar to a popular zombie game situation. 17 Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_OyHUqIIOU

In 2010-2012 AH expanded its production from just video-guides to a handful of shows, the most important being the Let’s Play videos. The term Let’s Play already existed before AH released their first one.1819 When the first AH Let’s Play came out Let’s Plays in general were quickly becoming more popular. The most famous Let’s Player PewDiePie released his first one about a year earlier, while Twitch.tv, the most popular videogame livestream platform, launched in the middle of 2011.20 AH also hired new cast members until it reached what came to be known as the main six or the main crew, who acted as hosts for AH’s shows. Aside from Geoff Ramsey and Jack Patillo the main crew consisted of Ryan Haywood, Michael Jones, Ray Narvaez, Jr. and, again, Gavin Free. Ray and Michael had, like Gavin, both been scouted from the community. Michael had made a few Rage Quit videos from his home before he was hired, and he continued to make them as a series for AH.21 At the end of 2012 the main crew started a weekly Let’s Play series in Minecraft, a game that was extremely popular at the time and became the second best-selling videogame ever, just after Tetris.22 This series is still continuing today, with over 300 episodes made. The combination of the increasingly popular Animated Adventures, Rage Quit and Minecraft Let’s Play videos, led to a huge increase in ‘Total Views Per Month’ on the RT YouTube channel. In the first quarter of 2012 the channel averaged at about 50 million total views per month, while in December this amount had already doubled to about a 100 million.23 In 2013 the popularity of AH and RT grew further. AH started their popular weekly and still ongoing Let’s Play series in GTA V, which at the moment is the third best-selling videogame ever made. And RT introduced a new anime-style series called RWBY. It was completely animated by RT itself, the four leading roles were al female, and, like most other

18 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Play_(video_gaming) 19 Explanation: A Let’s Play is a video in which one or more people play a videogame, while the viewer sees what they see on their screen. Sometimes a small part of the screen displays the webcam-footage of the person who’s in-game footage you are watching. The ‘Let’s Player’ usually comments on what is happening in the game, or is role-playing, most of the time with comedic purposes. A Let’s Play can be live, when it is streamed, but often it is a recorded and edited video. Most of the time a Let’s Play features the footage of one person, but some Let’s Plays are the collaborative effort of multiple people who all record their footage and audio, which is subsequently edited into one video. This is the case in most Let’s Plays of AH, in which the main six are central. 20 Note: PewDiePie is the most popular YouTube celebrity by far, with over 61 million subscriptions to his channel today. Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/about 21 Explanation: Rage quit is a well-known term in ‘gamer-culture’. It means becoming so angry, while playing a game for example, that you quit in a fit of rage. Michael did exactly that while recording it, although with humorous intentions. 22 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games 23 Source: See Socialblade statistics on page 11.

animated RT productions, the voice-acting was done by well-known RT cast-members. RWBY was an instant hit. The success of AH and RWBY drew a whole new audience into the ‘world of RT’, an audience that was younger and, in the case of RWBY, largely female. In 2014 I first encountered RT by watching a GTA Let’s Play.24 In that year RT moved into a new studio (and soon multiple studios) at the Austin Film Society.25 RT also started a crowdfunding campaign to make it possible to produce their first fully fledged feature film: Lazer Team.26 The campaign launched in June, and within 3 days over a million dollars had already been pledged, while at the end of the campaign almost 2.5 million dollars had been collected. The filming started in October. It was directed, co-produced and co- written by Matt Hullum, the CEO of RT, and it starred many well-known RT cast members, notably also three of the four lead roles (Gavin Free, Michael Jones and Burnie Burns). At this point RT understandably had caught the attention of larger corporations, and in November RT was acquired by Fullscreen.27 Fullscreen, which itself is owned by Otter Media, a joint venture of AT&T and The Chernin Group, calls itself ‘the global leader in social entertainment’.28 The takeover is exemplary for recent times, in which the ‘old media’, like the giant conglomerate AT&T, one of the largest companies in the world, try to get a foothold in the quickly emerging ‘new media’ landscape. This was a major change for RT and the community, since up to that point RT had been independent for 11 years. From 2015 onwards RT grew further and faster, propelled forward by Fullscreen. In July 2015 RT launched their new website, which turned out to have some serious consequences that I will discuss in Chapter 4. The ‘videogame side’ of RT, that before was mainly occupied by AH, expanded when the so called Let’s Play Family was called into life. New divisions, like Funhaus, were acquired to become a part of the ‘family’. Funhaus was the first division that did not ‘naturally’ emanate from the RT headquarters in Austin, but was acquired in its totality and based in Los Angeles.29 From that point on RT actively sought to ‘expand the family’ by contracting whole divisions like AH and Funhaus, as well as sole video creators and Let’s Players.

24 Note: In Chapter 3 I describe the experience of watching this video. 25 Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/3zwg9h/list_of_rt_offices/ 26 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazer_Team 27 Source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/fullscreen-buy-online-video-producer-rooster-teeth-155759682-- finance.html, https://fullscreenmedia.co/2014/11/10/welcome-family-rooster-teeth/ 28 Source: https://fullscreenmedia.co/ 29 Note: Funhaus mainly produces gameplay videos like AH, but targets an older audience with shorter videos with a more comedic and absurd approach.

On the 23rd of February 2016 my fieldwork had officially begun. The week after I already attended one of the few hundred simultaneous screenings of RT’s first feature film Lazer Team, after my interlocutor Sam invited me to come and see it in Liverpool during a livestream-chat conversation. Just after my fieldwork ended RT changed its Sponsorship system to the ‘First-membership’, which I will get into in Chapter 4. In 2017 RT had grown into a media production company that produces multiple podcasts, quiz shows, animated series, live-action series, Let’s Play series, videogames, board games, news shows, and a lot more. The small gathering in 2011 where 400 community members were present has grown into a yearly convention in Austin (over 60.000 visitors), Sydney (about 20.000 visitors) and London (unknown amount of visitors).30

Socialblade statistics: 31

30 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTX_(event) 31 Source: www.socialblade.com Note: At the beginning of 2013 RT started new YouTube channels besides their main one, the Let’s Play channel among others, so the views did not drop after that point, they just moved elsewhere.

Chapter 3: What is the attraction of RT for their community/fans?

Gavin in Livestream Playing Rainbow Six

It was the last round of the livestream and the winning team would win the whole match. Gavin was standing in the corner of a large kitchen. The body of Jeremy, who was gunned down only moments before, was lying beside him. The opposing team had only two players left alive, while there were still three Achievement Hunters defending the room. Then everything happened very fast. Within a second both Jack and Geoff were shot and killed, and suddenly Gavin, the ‘wildcard’ of AH, the person who I have seen die hundreds of times in the most stupid and unbelievable ways imaginable in almost every game I have seen him play in, was the only one left alive. In the top left corner of my TV screen I could see him tense up. I was sitting on the edge of my seat, seeing in real-time what he was seeing. Then the attackers came.. Gavin shot the first one down, reloaded while crawling back in the corner, and then skillfully killed the last one! The other Achievement Hunters cried out exclamations of joy and appreciation, while Gavin was punching the air at the same time as I was. Then I immediately closed the YouTube full screen view, to see the chat ‘going wild’ next to the small video player. I quickly wrote ‘MARK NUTT!!!!!!!!!!!’, pressed Enter, and saw it quickly move upwards in between other comments like ‘Gavin!’ or Well done Gavin!!’. I typed it again and

pressed Enter. Within a few seconds I saw a few other people write Mark Nutt in various ways, and soon there were just as many Mark Nutt as Gavin ‘shouts’ in the chat. I felt a rush of adrenaline and a sense of connection with AH and Gavin in particular, and with all the other viewers, the people in the chat, especially those who mimicked, or replied to, my Mark Nutt comment. It was a moment of collective effervescence, even though I was sitting alone in front of my TV.32

32 Note: My TV is usually connected to my laptop. The Mark Nutt comment I made is an old AH meme, a reference to a 5 year old Let’s Play of the London Olympics game. In that video Gavin represents the UK, and at the archery section he plays as the archer Mark Nutt. Even though he shoots erratically, his results are very good and he wins the gold medal (the only gold medal Gavin won throughout two whole videos). Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGz2_DhSQTM&index=2&list=PL1cXh4tWqmsFeTVW26DfywLCzAF2v4Cu 8

In this chapter I will try to explain what the attraction of RT, its ‘content’ and cast is. Next chapter I will go further into what the attraction of the RT community is, and how and why that has changed in the last few years. I will not pay attention to the people who have come across one or a few videos and never encountered or sought out RT content afterwards. My focus is on the people who are engaged with RT content on a regular basis. Whether that means they are into a single, multiple, or all RT ‘division(s)’ or ‘partner(s)’, or just one series. My focus also includes those who have not seen many, or even any, RT videos in a long time, but who still feel connected to Rooster Teeth and its community in some way. This includes the people who are still active in digital community spaces, like the RT forums on the official website, such as some interlocutors of mine in the Oxford Comma Café.

So what is it that attracts these people to RT? Why do so many people faithfully watch their videos every day, buy their merchandize, or fly halfway across the world to go to the RTX convention? During my fieldwork I found that what this ‘attraction of RT’ actually means depends per person, but I found that in most cases it was threefold.

1. You find/found the content entertaining 2. You connect/connected with the cast and/or producers of RT (or a division of RT) 3. You connect/connected with others who share point 1 and 2 with you.

First I will focus on the content itself. As explained in the previous chapter: RT offers a wide range of content, mostly videos, which speak to diverse ‘audiences’. However, aside from a few exceptions, almost all content revolves around videogames, from a greater to a lesser extent. Therefore I chose to take the content of Achievement Hunter, the first RT division focused solely on videogames, with the majority of their videos revolving around video gameplay, as an example for this chapter. I think what makes their content attractive in many cases also holds true for other RT content. To make the reader get a sense of what an AH video is like I start out by describing the experience of watching an AH video. Then I will focus on what the appeal of the RT cast and the company is. Then I will explain the dynamic of what I call The Dream (to work at RT), and lastly I will use Goffman’s theory of impression management to further enlighten RT’s appeal, as well as the implicit promise RT makes to the community members and the fans in the way it presents itself.

The Content Many people have asked me: ‘Why would someone watch somebody else play videogames?’ This was indeed something that even I never understood, before I started doing it myself. To get an impression of what an AH Let’s Play video is like, I will now describe how I experienced watching one. Incidentally this was also the first RT video I ever saw. At the time I was searching for information about an upcoming ‘Heist’ online feature of the game GTA V, and I digitally stumbled upon this video. It is called: Let's Play – GTA V – Heist.33 My description is from my point of view while already being familiar with AH, so not from the perspective of when I saw the video for the first time.

The Heist Unlike most AH Let’s Plays the video did not start with gameplay footage, but with live- action footage of five of the main six sitting in a real office, looking at the sixth, their boss Geoff, who is presenting the plan of the heist to them (and the audience) in front of a whiteboard. The setting is immediately recognizable as a heist set-up for any who has played the single player of GTA V, or indeed for anyone who is familiar with heist films and videogames. After about 6 minutes, which could have been just 2 but for the interruptions and jokes, the presentation of the plan is finished and the live-action footage switches to in- game footage. There too the guys, or rather, their in-game avatars, are sitting down while Geoff is standing in front of them, but they are located in a penthouse instead of an office, and Geoff is standing in front of a big flat-screen television instead of a whiteboard. In GTA the avatars are controlled from a third person point of view, and in the top left corner of the screen the name of the person from which point of view you are watching is edited in, like in most other AH Let’s Plays. In this and other GTA Let’s Plays the names are stylized using the same font as the logo of GTA.

33 Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ieu4UtpZFUI&list=PL1cXh4tWqmsGNiqO1RqGAt-uY2cVN8OpA

From top left to bottom right: Geoff explaining the plan of the ‘heist’ with the help of a ‘real’ map of Los Santos, the in-game fictional version of Los Angeles. The others sit down and listen. Geoff his avatar ‘still’ standing in front of the others after the switch to the in-game footage. Finally, the initiation of the robbery from the point of view of Gavin.

Also like in most other Let’s Plays of AH the audio of the video was the same as the in-game audio of the avatar you are ‘in’, with the volume turned down a lot to be able to hear the voices of the guys controlling the avatars better. When the situation demands it however, the volume of the in-game audio occasionally is turned up. It was not the plan to rob a high-profit target like a jewelry store or a bank, which like I mentioned above was not possible in the multiplayer yet. Instead Geoff had thought out an unnecessarily elaborate plan to rob a 24/7 store. As everyone who is familiar with the game would know, the in-game cash reward of robbing such a store is not large at all. Even the preparations of buying body armor and bullets cost them much more than the most prosperous of hauls could ever cover for. Clearly everyone knew this, and it made it all the more fun to see them taking the plan and their separate roles in it so seriously.

The guys were preparing for the heist at a leisurely pace in the game while talking and goofing around. Finally, at around the 32:30 mark, the heist was about to start. This meant that there were only about 6 minutes left until the end of the video.

The plan was set. The getaway vehicles, a large truck, several cars, a motorcycle and a speedboat, were ready and waiting. Everyone knew what to do.

Geoff and Gavin walked into the store and Geoff immediately pulled out his gun and shouted ‘Give us the fucking money!’ while Gavin reinforced their threat by shouting ‘Put the money in the bag you son of a bitch!’ while he stood next to Geoff with his fists up facing the clerk. The ’heist’, or rather, the robbery, had begun. Automatically Geoff and Gavin received a three star ‘wanted level’ so that the police would start looking for them and shoot on sight (The wanted level is visible in the top right of the screen, and goes from one to five stars. Each level increases the amount and changes the kind of police going after you and the effort they put into stopping you). After Geoff and Gavin ‘completed’ the robbery they were picked up by getaway driver Jack, and they fled towards an alleyway in the vicinity, where Michael was waiting in a large truck. Sirens could be heard in close vicinity and Gavin shouted ‘Oh! The filth are right behind us!’. Immediately after the getaway car arrived Michael ‘closed off’ the alleyway with his truck, so that the police would not be able to follow them. Ray, who during the robbery had provided covering fire from the top of a building opposite the store, was now on his way towards the others on a motorcycle, while Ryan was sitting in the driver seat of one of the two replacement getaway cars in the same alleyway the others were in. Then things started to get hairy. Around the time when Michael blew up the truck together with the first getaway car to create a fiery blockade the police arrived. Only not at the expected closed off side of the alleyway, but at the other side, which had been left completely open, and was meant for the escape of the crew. This unexpected turn caused some panic. Gavin, notorious for breaking under pressure, was now waiting for Jack to run to and get in the getaway car with him, where he was sitting behind the wheel. The other getaway car, with Ryan and Geoff in it, blasted past him and the police. Jack got in the car with Gavin, but then did something that would never happen in real life: he stepped out of the car accidentally after pushing the wrong button on his controller. Gavin drove of but slammed on the brakes once he realized that Jack was not with him, and he came to a standstill right next to a police car. At that moment, sitting there in the driving seat, Gavin was shot dead by the police, his screen turned black and white, showing the word wasted in blood red letters. Moments later,

Ray picked up Michael in a small side-alley and they hurried away on their motorcycle. Jack, with no getaway vehicle available to him anymore, ran away as fast as he could and turned into another small side-alley. Then he too was gunned down by the police. Or at least that is what I thought at first, but it immediately became clear, after Michael screamed ‘Oh shit!’ and ‘Friendly fire!’ while Ray simultaneously screamed ‘You killed him!’ even louder, that Michael was the one who had killed Jack while shooting wildly from the back of the moving motorcycle. As they were speeding away both of them had a hard time to stay in character and not to laugh too much. All the while Michael repeatedly tried to defend his actions towards the others who were still living (‘It was a dark alley!’) and Ray kept on emphasizing his mistake (‘You shot him right in the face!’).

The first two deaths had happened within a timespan of less than 30 seconds. During and around that time the audio had been very loud and chaotic because the guys were constantly yelling instructions at each other, using codenames like ‘Eagle One’ and ‘Bravo Two’, which incidentally caused even more chaos. They also shouted loudly at NPCs (non-playable characters) like the police and the store clerk. Gavin died first, and the absence of his British voice was telling. This was because they had agreed to keep quiet after being killed, to create a more ‘realistic’ and immersive experience. This agreement was not made clear to the audience beforehand, and this video was the first in which they applied this rule.

The black and white screen of Gavin, showing ‘Wasted’ after he died. And the point of view of Michael, sitting on the back of the motorcycle, right after he accidentally killed Jack, whose body you can see lying at the end of the dark alley.

To quickly sum up the remainder of the heist: Michael and Ray were rammed off their motorcycle by a police car on the highway, after which they were immediately gunned down while lying on the ground (Ray: ‘Oh I’m dead!’. Michael: ‘Noooo! *coughing-last-breath-

18 noise*’). Geoff and Ryan actually escaped with the loot on their speedboat, but Ryan, notorious for having a bit of a maniacal in-game persona, decided to double-cross Geoff and killed him pointblank. The loot however fell in the water. Ryan then blew up the speedboat with himself on it, deciding a ‘Viking funeral’ was best. At that point everyone was dead and they all started laughing and talking about how they had died, what went wrong and right, and what they thought had been especially funny.

The first time I saw the video I had not expected to enjoy it as much as I did. From the start of the heist until the last death less than five minutes had passed. But these minutes had been filled with action, funny moments and unlikely sequences of events. Unlike most movies and TV series all of this had been unscripted, which made it really easy to emphasize and immerse yourself in the avatars and associated players. Even though ‘the players’ had thought out a plan and prepared the escape in some detail, they were in the same boat as the viewers in not knowing how the game and the game mechanics would ‘react’ to it, because of the randomness that is inherent to an ‘open world game’ like GTA. In that way it is a little bit similar to watching sport, in the sense that doing this also entails ‘following’ one or more players who tactically try to accomplish a goal within the boundaries of what is possible, limited by natural laws and the rules of the game. The randomness of situations and sequences that the players are in and have to ‘deal with’ creates excitement and a certain narrative quality for the viewer. Aside from this, the creators of GTA put a lot of effort into making the game immersive and cinematic with touches and details like the black and white screen showing ‘wasted’ or a car horn sounding after a lifeless body falls over forwards hitting the steering wheel. On top of that the creators of the video tried to enhance this experience by editing in a cinematic way and by making it easier to ‘follow’, which is partly made possible by a relative high production value. Most of all though, the players, meaning the cast, purposefully tried to make it easier and more exciting to be immersed with the avatars and what was happening by, for example, staying in character, being quiet after being killed, or yelling at an NPC as if it was a real person. The cast do more than ‘just’ play, they actively role-play and perform with and as their avatars.

The Appeal When I asked my interviewees why they watched RT videos, all of them first answered saying something along the lines of: ‘Because it’s fun(ny)!’ or ‘Because it’s entertaining!’. For some of them RT was their prime source of entertainment, putting more time in watching

RT videos than, for example, watching films, series, playing videogames or reading. When I asked Sam about when and why he first started watching Let’s Play videos he told me that his parents, and he himself as well, had asked that question a lot. He then continued to explain how it had happened and why he continued to watch them afterwards.

Sam: So, I always thought the idea of Let’s Plays was really stupid. I had the same attitude that a lot of, I suppose.. parents would have now. It’s like: ‘why are you watching something when you could be doing something?’ It’s obviously a much more passive experience, especially if it’s Minecraft or GTA: I own those games! Why am I watching someone else do it when I.. for no expense, I could just be doing it myself? … It was the LP Minecraft episode, the first one, where Gavin burned down the house that everyone had built. It was only 20 minutes long and I was quite tired so I couldn’t be bothered finding anything else to watch, and I watched it and thoroughly enjoyed it. And within a few episodes I just continued to watch that series. By episode 6-7, you understand those characters, you know those characters. And that’s why I won’t watch, kind of solitary Let’s Players, because if you are one person on your own, you can just play the game yourself and replicate their experience. … A group of six people, like AH or Funhaus, they’ve got a group dynamic that you can never get if you are on your own. … So I suppose that’s why I really started to enjoy AH-content, because it’s got that group dynamic that you feel involved in, because after so many.. to be fair, it was a relatively short time afterwards that you feel invested in the group, but especially now, 2 years later, I’m a sponsor, I know all of the major kind-of people at the company.. I don’t know them but, you feel as though you do, because you can sit there and you can watch any of the content and feel engaged, you feel as if you’re.. not so much a fly on the wall, but just someone else who’s there, on the couch.. watching them play a game and.. (he pauses for a bit) and Gavin screws up. Gavin dives of a bridge, and misses the water! (I nod and smile, indicating I know what he is talking about) and just.. (Sam is laughing, interrupting the sentence) and yeah it’s involving and engaging. And I think that’s why it’s much less of a passive experience than people would think, and I think it’s.. it’s more interesting to sit and watch a group, than play on your own.

I have heard these and similar arguments for enjoying RT content so many times. All of my interviewees had similar stories, and in the digital RT community spaces they also kept coming back. When Let’s Play videos were the entry-point, the most important elements that constituted the increasing involvement of the fan- and/or community-member-to-be were: the entertainment value of the videos, their relatively unscripted nature, the humor of the cast- members, getting to know the cast-members and their onscreen and in-game personas, the unique group-dynamic, getting (and feeling) increasingly invested with this group of people, and ultimately the connection that you now feel to have built up with them, and, indirectly, with the people who like you did the same. The way people ‘consume’ RT content differs per person. This was also true for my interviewees. Sam usually watched RT videos on the large monitor of his PC, sitting in his comfortable office chair, without doing much else, like as if he was watching a film or a TV series. Terry however, usually watched Let’s Play videos at work with his headphones on. He coded at an IT company, and on his desk stood two monitors, one displaying the Let’s Play video, the other whatever he was working on. Focusing on his work he heard the voices of the main six, and whenever they got all excited or started laughing loudly he started watching that screen, sometimes rewinding the video somewhat to see what all the fuzz was about. Femke usually did all kinds of things at once. She often played videogames on her Xbox, while playing an RT Podcast on her laptop, while also occasionally using her phone to ‘Facebook’.

Becoming more invested in RT, a large group of ‘friends’ On RT Reddit and in the RTUK Facebook group every once in a while someone asks how others ‘got into RT’ and what their first RT video was, after which people share their ‘origin’ stories. Often, like with Sam (and incidentally with me as well), their first video was an AH Let’s Play, which they came across or was recommended to them. Usually the subsequent path to becoming a fan and/or a community member went something like this: Because they enjoyed the video they start to watch more, after which they start to be able to differentiate between the cast members, getting to ‘know’ these individuals a bit better each time. What is equally if not more important is that they start to understand the group dynamic somewhat, making them feel like they are ‘on the inside’ of a group of ‘friends’ having fun together. They start to understand the in-jokes, the personalities of the cast, and their onscreen and in-game personas, which may differ from their perceived ‘real-life’ personas. At some point they ‘come back’ for the entertainment value of a video and, in many cases

more importantly, this group of people who they now feel a kind of connection to. Like Sam says when he talks about the weekly podcast of AH:

To be honest, the content which is purely the people, or the personalities, without the gameplay, can sometimes be the best. … particularly with the way that the set is designed it really feels like you’re just at the pub with your mates. And their telling you all these ridiculous stories that you’ve never heard before, and it’s fantastic, it’s brilliant.

Through suggestions of YouTube, links at the end of every video, references of cast members, guest appearances, and in other ways, the RT fans- or community members-to-be are introduced to other kinds of AH content than the Let’s Plays, as well as the non-AH RT content. Because of the overlap of cast-members in RT content, the threshold in ‘getting into’ new kinds of RT content is lowered. In a way it is similar to a friend bringing you to a party where none, or only a few, of your group of friends are present. But your friend introduces you to all his/her other friends, who by association must be alright. The ‘friend aspect’ is crucial for the attraction of RT and all its divisions, and RT is very aware of this. In basically every RT production friendship is central, as a theme as well as in its presentation. The cast-members are (supposedly) almost always friends of each other, as are the main characters in every (animated) RT series, which coincidentally are predominantly (voice-)acted by the same most well-known cast-members. The ‘friend aspect’ is also apparent in AH videos, and is purposefully reiterated again and again in multiple ways. For example: at the beginning of a Let’s Play in a horror game Geoff explains what is going on by saying: ‘We’re hanging out together, five friends, in what appears to be some sort of an abandoned scary place, and we’re just, I don’t know, playing a game!’34 In series like ‘Battle Buddies’ and ‘Play Pals’ it is just two ‘friends’ playing a videogame together (by Ryan and Jeremy, and Michael and Gavin respectively). The set-up and layout of the AH office, different sets and videos also contribute to the ‘friend-aspect’ by mimicking ‘real-life’ activities that friends, especially within the target audience, would do together. It is important to note here that most of these activities are typical male activities (within the ‘gamer’ subculture), in which play is central, as well as joking and fooling around. Compared to RT AH is targeting a more masculine, or rather a

34 Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_Lj1LK-3AA

22 more (teenage) boyish audience. This of course does not mean that there are no older or no female fans, who sometimes feel right at home in this kind of atmosphere. The sets and accompanying activities:

During Let’s Plays the office looks like a LAN-party is going on. (Fan-art impression.)

In Theater Mode the guys are watching a bad movie in a cinema-like setting.

In Heroes & Halfwits the crew sit around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons.

And like Sam mentioned above: the set of the podcast Off Topic makes that it ‘feels like you’re just at the pub with your mates’.

AH goes out of their way to make their office working atmosphere seem more play- than work oriented. During Let’s Plays, but also in separate behind-the-scenes type of videos that they post on their YouTube channel, Facebook page or on Twitter, the crew appears to be constantly goofing around and having fun. All of the above obscures the fact that AH consist of colleagues working together at a company, and instead implicitly and explicitly supports

the message that AH is just a group of ‘friends’, hanging out and playing videogames together. Because of this, many fans and/or community members imagine AH (and RT) to be the perfect workplace, and consequently dream about getting a job there. Below I will explain this dream further. Like Sam says as well, potential fans and community members get increasingly invested in this group of people, and subsequently also in other RT groups, and ultimately in the whole company of RT. Many then take the step to literally invest in RT by becoming a Sponsor, or what is now called a First Member or a Double Gold Member, by paying a certain amount every month or year. What they get back from this is the ability to watch all videos a day earlier (or sometimes a week), a discount on merchandize, as well as access to ‘exclusive’ content. This enhances the feeling of ‘being on the inside’. What they also get in return is the feeling of being a part of the growth of RT, making the production of their favorite content possible, and supporting the people they have built up a connection with. I will go into more detail about this in the next chapter.

Personality, Fame, Relatability and Intimacy Through prolonged and regular ‘consummation’ of AH content the AH fan establishes a deep, if one-sided, connection with the cast members, particularly with his or her favorite(s). The fan gets a good, although often idealized, impression of what the ‘real’ person behind the onscreen persona is like. This is possible because of the huge amount of screen-time a cast- member is subject to, often in interaction with the other cast-members, playing, talking, joking, arguing, being surprised, being scared and getting angry with each other. Especially in the multiple hour long Let’s Plays, podcasts and livestreams it is just impossible for cast- members to ‘hide behind’ an on screen persona at all times. Particularly during moments when one or more cast-members fail to keep up appearances, due to uncontrollable anger, frustration, shame or laughter, the ‘authentic’ person behind the persona sometimes shines through. Their performance also extends beyond the workplace in multiple ways. In Let’s Plays, and even more so in podcasts, their conversations go further than talking about subjects such as the newest videogames or tech developments. Stories about their daily lives and anecdotes are very common. Furthermore, there have been many occasions in which one or more cast-members were tipsy or even drunk during a Let’s Play, Podcast, or even on

stage.35 Next to that most of them are very active on social media outside of workhours, like on Twitter. And last but not least: some of the cast-members livestream on Twitch a few times a week from their own home. Ryan Haywood does this twice a week for example, and every so often his kids walk into the room he is streaming from. Like with many other ‘internet-celebrities’ the cast-members of AH are in a way ‘closer’ to their fans than many other mainstream celebrities. There is a certain fluidity between the perceived private and public sphere of the cast-member that makes the connection with the fan an intimate one. According to Ellcessor this access to the private sphere is precisely what is so attractive to the (potential) fan (2012: 46-66). She states that ‘Internet-based fame depends on the authenticity of a star's self-representation and on the notion of intimacy, experienced through the possibility of interaction rather than through simple familiarity’ (2009: 51). Indeed, the experienced intimacy of the fans/community members with the RT cast-members is hugely influenced by the ‘authentic’ personalities of the cast-members, and by the perceived possibility of interaction with them. According to many of the ‘old school’ community-members I spoke with, the RT website used to be the digital ‘home’ of ‘The Community’, which included the RT employees and its cast-members. When I spoke with them they were often nostalgic about those days, because, among other things, the possibility of interaction with cast-members was not only likely, but relatively normal. The intimate connection between the fan and the cast(-member) is also enhanced by the specific personalities that the cast-members have, or show to have, which are close and relatable to that of the fan, particularly in their similar interest and experience in popular culture, and videogame- and geek-culture. The perception that someone like ‘you’, someone who is a gamer and a geek, is very popular, even idolized by thousands and thousands of people, is often in stark contrast with the lived experience of the fan. Today the prejudices towards gamers and geeks seem to have become less negative than they used to be, because these ‘cultures’ have increasingly become more enmeshed with mainstream popular culture. But during my fieldwork I noticed that for many fans and community-members it was and had been very important to have found RT with its relatable stars and role-models, and consequently also people like them in the community. It often had given them more confidence, self-worth, a sense of belonging, and like Sam mentioned as well, the courage to ‘put themselves out there’. They did not have to explain their love for

35 Example: During the Off-Topic panel at RTX 2016 Michael gets very drunk, after which he gives a few insights into his frustrations of working at an increasingly corporate RT.

videogames and geek culture to RT and its community, like they often had to do to their parents (among others). Furthermore, now they could even show videos of RTX or Let’s Play Live to their parents, in which the ‘stars’ of RT were on stage, with thousands of roaring fans in the crowd. This was something their parents could understand well, since it was very similar to a pop concert, only the rockstars were geeks and gamers, like their children.

The Dream Like I mentioned above: there existed the small possibility of what I came to call The Dream. Mirroring the American Dream it is still very much alive today, although the chances of ‘living it’ have become increasingly unlikely. The Dream was, and is, to get a job at RT, especially as a cast-member, or in close (physical) proximity of cast-members. Alternatively The Dream can also mean to successfully create your own popular channel with videos (or other kinds of content) by yourself, or, more often, together with a group of ‘friends’, mirroring groups like AH. Often the ultimate goal of this alternative Dream remains the same: to be scouted by RT, or a specific division like AH. The path towards living The Dream traditionally included being very active in the RT community and by ‘putting yourself out there’, for example by making RT-like and/or RT related media yourself. Quite a few of the employees of RT were ‘scouted’ from the community in this way, including half of AH’s main six. Often The Dream is juxtaposed against the everyday adult working-life. Even Sam, who when I met him had almost finished his Geology Master’s, still dreamed about working at RT. He was practicing how to edit videos regularly, almost as if he did this just in case… He was not the only one. I have seen and personally experienced many more cases like it. For example: in a post on the RT Reddit page a medical student wrote about possibly giving up on becoming a doctor, so that he could chase The Dream.36 And when I was involved as a participant observer in the forum-thread ‘If you’re new and want to make friends’ on the RT website, I was a part of a group in which some were seemingly chasing The Dream. At the time the regulars of the thread were very active, posting many messages each day, and someone proposed to set up a private Discord channel.3738 An invitation that lasted 24 hours

36 Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/6rzz6i/anyone_else_get_that_depressing_feeling/ 37 Explanation: Discord is a program for PCs, tablets and smartphones, which is used primarily by gamers to communicate with each other during online multiplayer games. It is a kind of a mixture between Skype and WhatsApp, meaning that you can communicate by talking into the microphone or by ‘chatting’ with one to up to thousands of people, in open or private channels.

was posted in the thread and most of the regulars, including myself, joined the channel. A digital space that was more private, intimate and personal than the public forum thread was thus created, in which most of the communication took place in the chat-group. Away from prying eyes the contact between the ‘regulars’ intensified: The banter became a bit more personal and more frequent, people started to play games together, we even drank alcohol ‘together’ (resulting in me being very worried about a girl in Finland who apparently drank for the first time, and drank way too much at that). But ironically this step back from the public sphere was done partly in service to take a leap back into it, to ‘put ourselves out there’. From the inception of the channel there were plans to occasionally join the voice-chat of the channel, not in order to just talk, but to record a podcast of our own in the style of the RT Podcast and Off Topic. To make a long story short: The group mimicked the behavior of groups like AH in almost every way, following the footsteps of many ‘dreamers’ before them. The dream to become famous has arguably only become more widespread among young adults in contemporary times, even more so with the rise of YouTube, social media and reality TV. For many RT fans/community members, even for the ones who often feel ‘socially awkward’ (to which I will come back in chapter 4), this dream had always seemed impossible, because it was thought to be reserved for the model-like pretty and extremely talented people. But not only did RT make them feel ‘at home’ and create content that aligned with their hobbies and interests, RT seemed to be a place where ‘gamers’ and ‘geeks’ like themselves could thrive and become famous, while the requirements to do so were in reach. You just had to ‘put yourself out there’, have fun and just be your ‘authentic’ self. So, like with reality TV and the recent ‘vlogger’ phenomenon, in this case the fame does not derive from the ‘stars’ being the embodiment of Aristotelian moral values such as courage or magnificence. Instead, it is partly derived from the exact opposite of such values. AH is not very good at videogames, a fact that they often underscore themselves. The morals that they do embody are, for example, cowardice and, more importantly, commonness.39 This is the fundament for why AH and RT in general are so attractive: morally they celebrate and embody commonness and are accepting towards everyone. This leads to a sort of psychological attraction: the fame of the ‘RT stars’ is based on the accessibility, on their commonness, on them being normal people, on them being like you (‘geeks, gamers and

38 Source: http://roosterteeth.com/forum/general-discussion/topic/2247494?page=1262#paginated-results 39 Example: In many in-game and ‘real-life’ situations Gavin Free embodies cowardice and fearfulness, a fact that many fans really enjoy about him.

nerds’), and them being fine about it, even confident. Furthermore, their attractiveness is based on them being famous. It is much easier to emphasize with someone like Gavin while he plays a videogame, than watching a professional gamer being extremely good at it. It is easier to root for the underdog, for he could be you. And if you try hard enough, maybe you could one day live the Dream.

The Promise of the Front In his famous and pivotal book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman introduces the theory of impression management: the ways in which people perform, intentionally or unwittingly on the frontstage in interaction with (or in front of) others, to influence the perception that the others have about you and/or the situation you are in (1959). Above I mentioned that the community member and/or fan is able to get an impression of what the ‘real’ person behind the onscreen persona is like. But naturally the RT cast-members are only visible on the frontstage, whether they feature in a Let’s Play video, in a two hour long podcast, or when they are sending a tweet. Although Goffman ‘placed’ impression management in the bodily presence of others, he wrote the book long before the internet even existed, and I think his theory is especially applicable to my (digital) case. All the (digital) performances that I researched during my fieldwork, whether from RT cast- or community members, were enacted on a frontstage in front of an ‘audience’. In ‘online’ impression management the audience plays a larger role than in Goffman’s times, because almost all performances are ‘done’ in front of a potentially very large audience. Furthermore, other than the spoken word the written one, or the one spoken in a video, stays visible and interpretable, and is therefore subject to possible scrutiny for a long time. As a side note, I would like to make clear that I am not saying that the impression management by RT, and its community and fans, is all just an act, just like Goffman is not saying that the frontstage performance is just ‘an act’. Goffman very openly borrows his terminology from dramaturgical studies and uses this to shed light on ‘real life’. However, in a way my case is somewhere in between theater and ‘real life’, which in my eyes makes Goffman’s theories even more interesting in relation to my research. The most important part of Goffman’s theory is that ‘any projected definition of the situation also has a distinctive moral character’, and that ‘Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way’ (ibid.: 24). But crucially: ‘an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics

ought in fact to be what he claims he is’ (ibid.: 24). In other words: When applied to this case the apparent authenticity of a RT cast-member and RT as a whole has a promissory quality towards the community-members and the fans. In my view, the most important implicit and explicit promises RT makes are:

1. A meaningful and inclusive community truly exists 2. They are like their audience: authentic gamers and geeks, you could basically be friends 3. The Dream is (still) possible 4. Their content is entertaining

So when disruptions seemingly take place in relation to these four points it results in friction. Next chapter I will explore the friction in relation to point 1. Point 2 is being taken very seriously by the cast of AH (which I still use as an example for the wider RT). Many of them have gaming related tattoos, they have bodies in all shapes and sizes and in their presentation they emphasize them being friends with each other and (potentially) with the audience. Point 3 is closely related to point 2. The best way to get the message across that they (AH) are like their audience is to recruit cast-members from that same audience. The last person who was recruited this way was Jeremy Dooley, who replaced Ray Narvaez, Jr. as a main crew member in 2015. In the eyes of many community members and fans he is seemingly living The Dream. He is a current fan-favorite, and many AH fans feel like they have a close relationship with him, for he in a way represents them, the reality of the Dream, and the fulfillment of RT’s promise at the same time.40 Point 4 is a difficult one, for what is entertaining is highly subjective. But when, for example, AH releases a sponsored Let’s Play video that features a videogame that clearly is not that good nor is it any fun to play, and they still have to act like they enjoy it but do not fully succeed in doing this, the ‘realness’ that is presented gives of mixed messages (ibid.: 28). When their genuineness is so clearly out of sync with their experience it sometimes sparks a backlash of reactions in the comments. On the one side people defend the sponsored nature of the video and on the other side people complain and say they do not feel taken seriously as fans, that RT has become too commercial, or that AH has lost its charm, because it has become too visibly ‘produced’,

40 Example: someone posts a message on Reddit only to say that he likes him as a friend. https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/805qdl/to_jeremy/. And even in April 2018 fans highlight and appreciate this: the most liked comment of a Minecraft Let’s Play says that Jeremy is ‘still a true fan’. In other words: one of ‘us’. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVjEhalxtE8

instead of them ‘just’ being friends playing videogames together.41 ‘They have literally becoming a production crew rather than entertainers’ (sic) sums up many of the critical notes I have seen about AH during my research.42 However, the promissory nature of the apparent authenticity of RT is not a one way street. The fans and community members must show themselves to be ‘authentic’ as well, towards RT as well as each other. What this ‘authenticity’ means depends per digital locality.43 To give an example of this promissory dynamic: I did participant observation in the RT UK Facebook group and in the Discord group, which were localities where people were less critical towards RT becoming more commercial than in other localities I did research in. People were very positive about, as well as very supportive towards, RT and each other. It was almost as if being negative, either about RT, ‘the community’ or community- members was a taboo. I think this was the case partly because these places were more fandom-like than the other places I researched, meaning that they saw themselves as ‘fans of’ RT, in a way separate from or subordinate to RT, while the old-school community members saw themselves as being and having been a ‘part of’ RT and its production and growth. In these fandom-like localities they took the implicit promises of RT very seriously, which meant that they treated RT and the fellow fans ‘in an appropriate way’, and they acted like RT, the community and the fans really were what and who they claimed they were. This meant that they acted like there really existed a meaningful community, in which everyone was welcome (Point 1). The cast of RT as well as your fellow community members and fans really were gamers and geeks, friends even, and should be treated accordingly (Point 2). There really existed the possibility of living the Dream, so you should never criticize fellow fans when they ‘put themselves out there’ in whatever way they try to achieve this (Point 3). And, last but not least, the content of RT really is entertaining, and to say otherwise, to RT itself or your fellow fans, would, in these localities, in a way disqualify you as being a real fan (Point 4).

41 Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLqzG_KLpM 42 Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/7545yq/do_all_the_latest_lets_plays_feel_kind_of_rushe d/ 43 Explanation: Locality is the concept that I will use from now on to describe online locations, spaces and platforms. It is a field where different norms and etiquettes apply, and these often change over time. The concept of ‘locality’ is currently used by ‘digital’ ethnographers and ‘online’ anthropologists to go beyond the ‘earthly’ term location and the ‘up in the air’ term network. Locality and localities are ‘inhabited places’ that are ‘knowable’ and can be digital as well as non-digital ‘environments’ (Pink et al.: 123-130).

When disruptions of a performance appear that undermine one of these four points, the legitimacy and the great meaning community members and fans attach to RT and ‘the community’ can be questioned. In the next chapter I will elaborate on this.

Chapter 4 – RT Corp. In this chapter I will explain how and why the ‘RT community’ has changed in a relatively short time, what this ‘change’ entails, and what it means for different RT fans and community members. I will reflect on the key causes of this change, which incidentally are often key effects at the same time. The key elements of the ‘change’ are: the growth and expansion of RT, the transition from the old to the new RT website and the acquisition of RT by Fullscreen. Ultimately, I will argue that over time the RT ‘community’ has changed into more of a contemporary ‘fandom’ than the ‘community’ it was before. And even though the distance between RT and its ‘community’ has grown, and the emphasis of RT production has shifted more in favor of profit and growth, the company is still entertaining its audience(s), while providing them with a binding factor through which they connect on a meaningful level, encouraging them to be themselves and to ‘put themselves out there’.

Belonging and the ‘socially awkward and shy’ When I posted my introductory message in the ‘The Netherlands Group’ on the RT website I was hoping to find at least a few Dutch RT aficionados to interview. At the time the group had about 98 members, but the last post that had been placed originated from more than a year earlier. It did not pay off: I received not one reply. As time went on I started to get impatient, so I opened profile pages of several group members and noticed that at least one of them had been recently active, though not in this particular group. I sent him, his real name is Thijs, a personal message requesting an interview. A few days later he replied saying that he was happy to participate. A few weeks later we met in the center of Eindhoven, where the terraces were crowded and the sun was shining. He had brought a friend, Peter, who was also an old-school community member. Thijs and Peter, 27 and 25 years old, knew each other mostly from the RT community, though over the 10 years that they had been members they had met offline on several occasions. We sat down at a table and for the rest of the day we talked about RT, drank beers and enjoyed the good weather. Thijs grew up in a small town in Noord-Brabant. Throughout his youth he did not have a lot of friends, mostly because none of his peers in school shared his interests or hobbies, which mostly had to do with videogames. When he was 17 he came across Red vs. Blue, and he quickly became active on the RT site, connecting with likeminded people in the forums and chatroom. At the time of the interview he worked at a microbiology lab in a

hospital in Tilburg, while he was still living at his parents place.44 Peter grew up in a small town in Limburg. Like Thijs, and for similar reasons, he also did not have many friends growing up. On top of that he was diagnosed at a young age to have Asperger’s syndrome. During our conversation he recalled a time when he had a fierce argument with his father because he was spending so much time behind the computer, on forums and in chatrooms. According to his father he was wasting his time interacting with others on the internet, because this was not ‘real’ interaction: it lacked the bodily presence, all the subtleties of tone and facial expressions. Peter replied that he did not understand these subtleties anyway, and that they only confused him. On the internet he was able to avoid all the ‘confusing stuff’, while at the same time he was able to convey what he was trying to say in a clear way. At the time of the interview Peter was living in Maastricht, where he studied at the Vertaalacademie. Peter was not the only person with autism that I encountered during my research: far from it. Terry, another interviewee of mine, was also diagnosed with it. Besides them I came across many others, many of which were openly writing about it on, for example, the RT site and in the RTUK Facebook-group. Besides (and sometimes also including) people with autism, there are a huge amount of people within the community/fandom who describe and/or introduce themselves to be socially awkward and/or shy. There is even a popular forum topic on the RT site specifically made For The Socially Awkward and Shy:

44 Note: At the time of writing this, about one and a half years after the interview, he recently bought a house in a small town in Noord-Brabant, in which he moved into with his girlfriend.

’For The Socially Awkward and Shy’: the second topic in the General Discussion forum (in ‘all topics’).

In this thread I often saw people overcome their shyness to connect with others. For example by discovering a shared fondness of a RWBY character, and starting a new group page on the RT website together:

A discovery of a shared love for the RWBY character Zwei.

It was a theme that kept coming back:

BenEeckman #33225665 - 11 HOURS AGO Hello, i've been watching RT content for about a decade now but never really been part of the community, something I would love to contribute more to. I'm somewhat of a shy person so I'd love to get over that fear and have a chat with you guys.

Two ‘socially awkward and shy’ introductions. One in the If you’re new and want to make friends topic on the RT site, the other in the RT UK Facebook group.

In the field of digital anthropology much has already been written about the possibilities the internet has brought people with disabilities, and autism in particular, in relation to communication, self-expression and belonging. For example, Shapiro says:

Many of us have a lot of trouble with face to face interaction and are also extremely isolated. Like a lot of autistic people, I rarely even leave the house. A lot of us have trouble with spoken language, and so a lot of us find it easier to write on the Internet than to talk in person. There’s a lot of us where we might not be able to meet anywhere else but online, and so that’s been a lot of where we’ve organized. (Horst, Miller 2012: 102)

In the argument with his father Peter said roughly the same thing. One of the reasons that he and many other old-school community members rued the exodus of the RT site was that it had become a digital kind of home for them, where it was clear that the others you were communicating with were (literally) on the same page.45 It was a kind of safe space, but not necessarily the kind that you hear so much about these days, in which everyone goes out of their way trying not to hurt each other’s feelings. Thijs and Peter nostalgically remembered the days when a huge amount of people regularly engaged in flame wars,

45 Note: The ‘exodus’ of the RT website I will come back to later in this chapter.

spamming the group page and forums of the other color in an organized fashion with insults and obscene images. Because you either self-identified yourself to belong in the red or the blue team, just like in the Red vs. Blue series. But even though sometimes lines were crossed, at the end of the day you knew that everyone involved was one of you. Both Thijs and Peter saw the creation of their account on the RT website as the start of being a community member. For them, as for many old-school community members, the RT website was almost synonymous with ‘the community’. It was the digital home of the company, the community, and until 2008 also of all the content RT produced, which consisted almost solely of the Red vs Blue series. According to Thijs and Peter the community used to be a tightknit one in which people really got to know each other. They told me that it was common to write elaborate journals on a regular basis, to which many people would reply.46 Because of this, you knew that many community-members were up-to- date with your daily (online and offline) life, to the extent that you were prepared to share of course. The chatroom was always crowded, the forum threads (topics) were abundant. And although the forums spawned many separate groups and threads, like the OCC, and although there were a lot of people who frequented the site, you more or less knew most of the community members who were ‘active’. Furthermore, the (future) RT staff and cast were also ‘active’, so you really had the feeling of a close proximity to, and a shared space with, these people and the company. All of the news and updates of RT was presented to the community on the RT site and most of the time this was done by a staff or cast-member in a written journal. Like in the book Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media, most RT community members first started ‘messing around’, but after they got increasingly more involved with the community practices, like writing journals, communicating with others and actively expressing and exploring themselves on the RT website, they started to ‘geek out’, by which Horst means ‘a genre of participation that reflects deep commitment and engagement in a particular site, community or practice’ (Pink et al. 2016, Horst et al.: 2010). The level of involvement in RT, the community, the site, which for most community members was one and the same thing, had become an important part of their life.

46 Note: These journals were somewhat like public diary entrees.

The growth of RT and the rise of the fangirl Both Thijs and Peter agreed on one thing: the growth of RT was and still is a large factor, maybe even the largest, in the change of RT and its community. As if it was obvious and a matter of fact Peter told me that there is a certain breaking point for all online communities surrounding companies or organizations like RT. Thijs nodded in concurrence, knowing where Peter was going with this. ‘At some point, when a fandom gets too large, it all of a sudden attracts a different kind of person: the fangirl.’ Peter said. I was a little taken aback by this and asked what he meant. He explained that he had seen this happen many times in other online communities (surrounding ‘content creators’) he had been a part of. At some point these fangirls would appear out of nowhere, and their primary goal would be to catch the attention of one or more of the ‘stars’, in the case of RT that would be the cast. In this phase of time of the community the possibility of interaction with the ‘star’ is (still) very high, and ‘success’ of the first fangirls would quickly attract others like them. This slowly changes the atmosphere and the established etiquette of interaction in the digital space, while it drives a wedge between the ‘stars’ and their ‘fans’ at the same time. Because of the growing number of people ‘active’ in the community, the chance to experience an everyday digital encounter with a cast-member decreases. And because of the growing cries for attention by fangirls, the cast-members take steps to decrease the distance between them and the fans somewhat. Because of the growth of RT and its ‘community’ it inevitably started to slowly transform from a kind of ‘communal fandom’ to a widespread and contemporary ‘geek/gamer fandom’. The increasing distance between the fans and the cast-members, and the change in atmosphere and etiquette that the fangirls triggered, made these girls the ideal scapegoat in the classic feminine form: the slut, who steals all the attention away from the staff and cast- members, using her female body and her crooked charm… Of course fan behavior intent on grabbing the attention of the stars was not perpetrated solely by fangirls. Fanboys certainly were, and are, a thing. Furthermore, even at the start of a fandom / online community surrounding entertainment the so-called ‘common’ interaction between ‘star and fan’ is based on a fundamentally unequal relationship. On YouTube and on Twitch I have found many ‘gamer’ content creators with just a handful of (mostly male) fans, and even in those cases some fans acted in an almost uncannily positive and praising manner in regards to the ‘star’. A common theme in their comments was the expression of incredulity that the ‘star’ had so little fans while he (far more often than ‘she’ in this area of entertainment) was so talented. On top of that they often expressed the wish for the star to become famous. This reminded me of a time when I was about 15 years old and I always had a hard time falling asleep. Every

night I would listen to a niche radio show with a charismatic DJ and a very intimate and cozy atmosphere. Once I wrote an email requesting a song, and sure enough the DJ played it after he had mentioned my name and wished me a good night. I felt so jubilant that I did not sleep at all. What RT, the niche ‘content creators’ and the radio show all have in common is that the interaction between ‘fan and star’ really makes you feel a part of the content/show and connected to the ‘star’, as well as its (possible) growth or road to ‘fame’, although the latter is probably less true for the radio show. Importantly they also share the fact that much of the interaction takes place in a public sphere, for all to see or hear, however small the public is. Moreover, in all of these cases much of the (often public) interaction is not just interaction for interaction’s sake. The interaction contributes to the production of the content, which not only makes you feel involved, but also a part of the production process. You suggested that beautiful song (radio) / you donated a certain amount of money, automatically triggering a wacky animation at a funny moment (Twitch) / you sent in a video of yourself standing at the Machu Picchu, giving a shout out to AH, which then gets edited into an AHWU episode (RT). On top of that: in the case of RT through being a Sponsor, by participating in crowdfunding campaigns and by buying merchandise, and in the case of Twitch by directly donating money to the streamer, you are the one that enables them to make the content that you support. In the case of RT some fans / community members have contributed in the production process for over a decade, making them feel very involved in the creation of the content and the direction the company is going. Furthermore, RT has since the beginning had this unique feature that made the fans / community members get even more involved: the website with (for the time) advanced social features, which brought about all the community activity I already mentioned. The claim that fangirls changed the community for the worse has to be taken with a grain of salt. Undeniably though, the community on the RT website did change with the growth of RT and the growing amount of female fans and/or community members. RT itself used to be an almost exclusively male organization, based around the first-person shooter videogame Halo with the show Red vs. Blue. A single female voice-acted in that series from the first season onwards (Yomary Cruz), who, until season 9 came out in 2011, remained the only female voice-actor in the series. It comes as no surprise that the community/fandom surrounding a company with a ‘gamer-vibe’ like RT primarily consisted of boys and men. But over time the male ‘gamer-culture’ became, and is still becoming, more mainstream in general and more ‘female-inclusive’. RT changed with the times. Since its start in 2008 the

40 weekly podcast featured the first female RT cast-member: Griffon Ramsey (who was the wife of RT- and AH-founder Geoff Ramsey). Since its rebranding in 2011, when Geoff and Griffon Ramsey stopped doing the podcast, they were replaced by Gavin Free and Barbara Dunkelman, who were both fans and community-members before working at RT (making their dream come true). The release of the animated series RWBY in 2013 made the biggest impact on the community and fandom in terms of gender. RWBY was a hit, and with its anime style and its four female main characters, voice-acted by Barbara Dunkelman among others, it attracted a whole new audience to the community/fandom, an audience that was younger and predominantly female.47 Just like Thijs and Peter there were others who missed the ‘golden days’ of the community, in which abrasive and boyish behavior was not frowned upon, but part of the community-fun. When the topic of RT Corp., the abbreviation of RT becoming more corporate, arose once again in The OCC, I asked a few questions to which I got the following response from Dopp, a (prominent) community member for 11 years now:

Dopp ROLL TIDE #33171308 - 15 HOURS AGO @Melpomeneee

Do you feel you are a part of RT? The company? No. I've never wanted to be because I have no talents that would be useful to them.

What is RT in the first place? At first "RT" was nothing. It was all RvB. It must have been 7 or so years ago that things sort of started switching over to the "RT" description. RvB wasn't even just about the videos. It was a mixture of a very unique website with cool things such as mod points that you could build up and have contests to give them all away in bulk. We had cool people making absolute waves in the community such as Jeskid, Blawndee, and the cool art from Luke McKay. We had BARs that were pretty exclusive and no one had to worry about bullying because everyone was a bit of an ass to everyone (more on this in a bit).

So RvB was everything and everything was HERE. On this site. Well... a better version of this site.

Now that RT has grown so much, do you feel that the distance between the RT staff and the community has become larger? And if that is so, is that a problem? Oh absolutely! However, I do not look at it as a problem since I have friends who are in the employ of this company. I begrundgingly say that I hope the distance grows even more if it means they continue to be more and more successful. However, my wish is that they become more of a presence here. On this site.

If Gus had posted an actual journal, tagged me in it, and THEN said that I didn't have any online experience, I wouldn't have gotten nearly as livid as I did. At least he was communicating his

47 Note: In 2016 the podcast ‘Always Open’ was launched, which was the first RT podcast made for and by women. It is hosted by Barbara Dunkelman.

point toward me in a way that I could properly respond to him. I hate that the primary way of communication is via Twitter. I don't Twit. I don't 'book. I RT. Even though that has diminished vastly over the last few years, it's still my preferred means of communications with this community and the people I know and love here. +4 Ditto

The fact that Dopp was positively nostalgic about ‘everyone being an bit of an ass to everyone’, to which he elaborated on in another post by giving examples similar to those of Thijs and Peter, says a lot about what the RT site meant for Dopp. Especially because in the same post he expresses his frustration about (‘Founding Father’) Gus posting an angry message about Dopp on Twitter.48 In the eyes of Dopp ‘everyone being a bit of an ass to everyone’ meant that you did not have to worry about bullying, because this was all part of the etiquette of the RT site. And the site was a level playing field in which everyone was in the same boat, including the RT staff and cast, which lead to a more equal relationship between and among the community and RT employees (although naturally there still existed hierarchical differences). Dopp went out of his way, his comfort zone that is the RT site, to bridge the gap that has grown between him and Gus in the last few years, with the intention to help him. When Gus reacted to Dopp in the Podcast and on Twitter in an angry and dismissive manner, he reinforced the divide that many old-school community members have found increasingly problematic these last few years. Gus reinforced the inequality between the ‘star’ and the ‘fan’ and presented the new norms to Dopp, and in this process he erected new hierarchical borders. Or did he? Is it possible that the hierarchy had always been the same and that the ‘level playing field’ that the RT site offered, the way RT communicates with their fans and the idea of RT and its fans as ‘one community’ was just a ruse, a façade that masked the true hierarchical differences? In her study on hierarchical rhetoric between celebrities and their fans on Twitter, Kehrberg uses the notion of synthetic personalisation that Fairclough introduced in 1989 (Kehrberg 2015). She explains that ‘synthetic personalisation refers to the

48 Elaboration: Gus, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of RT, talked about his dog being sick on the RT Podcast. In the RT Reddit Dopp wrote about his dog showing similar symptoms in the past, and suggested that the dog of Gus might suffer the same affliction as his dog turned out to have. In reaction to this Gus posted a tweet saying that he was extremely annoyed with his post, and he also talked about it in the podcast the following week in an irritated manner. Dopp replied to all of this by updating his Reddit post and by sending a tweet in reply to Gus’, stating that he was only trying to help. Gus did not reply to either of these messages. Then Dopp wrote a journal post about it on the RT site, expressing his anger and frustration, while emphasizing that he had been a loyal sponsor for years. This sequence of events became a popular topic of discussion on the RT site, Twitter and Reddit. Links: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/47jote/about_gus_dog_being_sick_on_the_recent_podca st/, https://twitter.com/sorola/status/702939049753862145, http://roosterteeth.com/post/51202438,

simulated – not actual – collapse of hierarchies, a simulation that effectively masks traditional power dynamics’ (ibid.: 94). Both Kehrberg and Fairclough emphasize the important role that rhetoric plays in this simulation of equality. RT has, since its inception, communicated with its fans in a way as if they are friends, while constantly emphasizing the existence and worth of The Community. The website facilitated this tenor of friendship by functioning as a shared communal space. Kehrberg argues that this rhetoric enables the existence of a parasocial relationship, a concept that Horton and Wohl introduced in 1956. She explains:

It [the parasocial] refers to the perceived, pseudo-relationship between fans and media personalities or characters. According to Horton and Wohl (1956), these imagined relationships develop over time, fed by repeated viewings of media products; yet, as fevered as they may become on the part of the fan, they remain definitively one-sided (in essence, the fan is talking to him/herself). What is striking about parasocial relationships is that, in spite of their one-sided and imagined nature, they resemble in many other facets real, social interaction. (ibid.: 88)

One could argue that the relationship between Dopp and Gus is the perfect example of a parasocial relationship. Indeed, the way in which Gus replied to the well-meant advice of Dopp was by talking about it on the podcast, to which Dopp could not directly reply at all, and by sharing a dismissive post on Twitter, the platform where (Kehrberg argues) synthetic personalisation enables parasocial interaction instead of upheaving the traditional power dynamics, like some anthropologists argue (ibid.: 96).

A changing (digital) landscape During and after my fieldwork period, which started about half a year after the ‘messy transition’ from the old to the new website, I sometimes noticed that an old-school community member had ‘left’ the website.49 For me this was not as obvious as it was for Thijs or Peter, who told me they felt uneasy and somber seeing so many of their acquaintances leave, which consequently made them less ‘active’ on the site as well. When I was analyzing pages of conversations in the OCC after my fieldwork, I noticed that the links to the pages I had written down in my notebook did not correspond with the notes I had made

49 Note: I will explain what the ‘messy’ transition entails on page 45.

about them. I found out that this was so because two or three of the regulars in the OCC had deleted their profiles altogether, getting rid of every journal, post, conversation and message they ever had on the site. Because one page of a forum-topic always contains 20 posts, the topic ‘contracted’ and the total amount of pages were reduced. I could not help but to see the removal of their accounts as a kind of protest, especially since these people had been very vocal in their critique on RT before leaving. Before the ‘messy transition’ took place the increasing importance, especially for younger people, of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit and Tumblr, already caused the core activities of ‘the community’ to slowly diverse from the RT website in an increasing manner. For newer fans this was only natural, but not for all the older ones. Up to that point the RT website was truly the ‘hub’ of the wider community. Even though there was an increasing amount of community-members using the site, and, mirroring the expansion of RT and their new content and divisions, there were an increasing amount of peoples and groups finding their own ‘space’ on it, this all happened under the ‘umbrella’ of the RT site. At that time this shared digital space was still the relatively undisputed home of ‘the community’, which therefore was more united and had more of a singular voice, constructive and critique wise, in the production of the RT content and in the direction that the company was going. Established and well-known community members had powerful opinions and influential voices. On the other hand RT did their best to please the users of their site and to keep them at the center of attention, or at least make them feel that way, because they primarily were the hand that fed them after all. Over time RT started to reach out and expand on the upcoming and established online platforms to increase their presence and visibility, all the while spreading ‘the gospel’ about their community. It is important to note that the actors in this process were not solely working for RT. The community/fandom was probably even more influential in this. Like I mentioned before: fans and community members, including older ones, often expressly wished for RT to grow and for the cast members to become more famous. In a way RT felt like an extension and representation of themselves, in which the cast-members were living ‘their’ Dream. The possibility to reach a broader audience, and for videos, memes and basically anything else to ‘go viral’ on these platforms was greatly increased. People who were new to RT kept encountering the concept ‘RT Community’ through the recurring mentions by the cast-members in the RT videos as well as on social media. At some point the moment would arrive that a future RT fan/community member actively went looking for ‘The Community’, and these days they did not automatically go to the RT site

anymore, and if they did they found an ‘old-fashioned’ forum that was difficult to navigate through. Increasingly they found what they were looking for on other platforms like Reddit or Discord, or by regularly commenting under the videos on YouTube. In this way RT ‘community-enclaves’ outside of the RT website were formed, which slowly grew over time and attracted the (professional) attention of RT cast-members. Over the years the RT site had become more important for many of its users, who became more invested in it (and in RT), because they had found like-minded people, a space of belonging, shared experiences, self-expression and a feeling that their opinions mattered, to the other community members, but also to the RT cast and staff. It is important to realize that this started and went on for years before any of the well-known social media platforms existed or became so common to use. Furthermore, the RT site was a platform on which many of its users were ‘socially awkward’ and did not really ‘fit in’ in their daily lives. Thus, for many of the old-school community-members the RT site was, and sometimes still is, their online platform. Like Dopp said: ‘I don’t Twit. I don’t ‘book. I RT.’ Most of the long-time community members I spoke with during my (online) fieldwork were of the opinion that RT had changed a lot since they first got into it, and almost all of them pointed towards the same occurrence that marked the end of an era and the start of a new one: the transition from the old to the new website. Many of the community members who had been ‘active’ before July 21 2015, when the new website was implemented, always seemed to talk about ‘the community before’, or ‘the community after’. My interlocutors Thijs and Peter did the same when I interviewed them. The new RT website was supposed to be more in tune with the times, a lot more ‘mobile friendly’ and to feature a much improved video player. But the site did not work well at all immediately after its implementation, and a few weeks later, and in some cases months or more than a year later, this had not improved much. The site was ‘down’ a lot, the transition had erased some old forum threads, the navigation of the forums themselves was very difficult, notifications and tagging were ‘broken’, the video player did not work well, and I could go on. Furthermore, some of the well-liked aspects of the site, like the ‘karma-system’, never returned to the new site.50

50 Explanation: See the message of Dopp. Basically, the karma-system allowed community-members to award each other karma points, which would give privileges on the site when enough were earned. It also worked well to keep the digital atmosphere positive, since it encouraged behavior that was in line with the prevailing norms of the site. Negative karma could also be handed out, which resulted in decreased privileges and attention from the ‘mods’. An example of a privilege was the possibility to join topics that only people with a certain amount of positive karma could join.

In this period of unrest some community-members, for whom the RT site had been central, stopped watching RT content and ‘moved away’ altogether. Many others digitally ‘migrated’, or rather, their digital community/fan ‘activity’ and practices migrated, from the RT site to the already existing ‘community-enclaves’ on other platforms. A few well-known and influential British community members started a private group on Facebook named ‘RT UK’, and implored other British community members to jump ship with them. It quickly became the new community-hub for British RT fans, from which most British get-togethers were and are organized. Like many community members and fans, RT and its staff and cast members also increasingly focused their attention on other platforms than the RT site after the ‘messy transition’. Twitter became the primary platform on which they interacted, publicly, amongst themselves, in a way creating a new kind of Goffman-like frontstage. On the RT subreddit every now and again a cast member would interact with fans by reacting to a topic or comment, or by doing an ‘AMA’, a kind of interview.51 On the AH and RT Facebook pages RT shared the occasional exclusive short video with a ‘backstage-vibe’, as well as announcements about new content. The fact that the public interaction between staff and cast- members as well as an increasing amount of announcements about RT and their content had moved away from the RT site and was now shared on Facebook and Twitter was a thorn in the side of many old school community members. They felt bypassed and said they felt like they were treated like second-rate citizens, while in fact they saw themselves as the heart and soul of the community!52 The community, that used to be the ‘collective’ on the RT site, became digitally spread out and more fractal, in its online presence as well as its activity.53 Some old-school community members had left the RT site in presence, only to return for the occasional exclusive video. Their ‘community-activity’ did not stop, but moved away to different digital locations. For new community members this was normal, not knowing what it had been like before. For them it was, for example, common to follow the news about and from RT on the RT subreddit, while their interaction with other community-members took place in (often smaller) groups on Discord or Facebook, all the while following their favorite cast-member(s) on Twitter. The sense of a shared and more or less unified space with the RT staff and cast was a thing of the past, and the online community-activity had become more

51 Explanation: AMA means Ask Me Anything, a typical Reddit interview where anyone can submit a question that might be answered by the interviewee. 52 Example: Someone complaining about the lack of Cast-presence on the RT site: http://roosterteeth.com/forum/general-discussion/topic/3071083?page=1268 (Post #33542201) 53 Elaboration: By ‘now’ I mean during the time of my research.

46 similar to other online contemporary ‘fandom-activity’: separate from the company and spread out over all kinds of social media, . When the RT site changed in order to become more in tune with the times, RT prioritized its efforts to make it look and function in a similar way to VOD platforms like Netflix, while, except for the layout, the social features of the site did not change at all and in some ways even deteriorated. At the time it was already clear that ‘traditional’ social features, such as forums and journals, were becoming less popular in general.54 The old-fashioned forums may have spoken to the older community-members, but the new members and fans, and some older ones too, expected more and better functionalities of a ‘modern’ social platform. This led to the popular narrative on the RT forums that RT was not really ‘trying’ anymore, but instead was already accepting and embracing platforms such as Facebook and Reddit as their new community hubs, instead of modernizing their own social platform. Some old-school community members were more accepting of the ‘new times’ than others, and there have been many discussions on the RT site debating the pros and cons of the changes that the times had brought, and about what community and fandom actually means. During such discussions many people eloquently analyzed the larger trends that were happening with their RT. An example:

They purposely decided to focus on Content/Merch delivery with the new site....and while I'm sad to see the old site gone, the only time I've been truly put out by the new site is when it wouldn't play any video (including sponsor content) but I cut a ticket for that problem and they ended up fixing not only that one but all my other profile/account issues as well within a week, so at least I have been able to start communicating on the site once again. The new site is not built for community, fandom requires much less attention and spends just as much money.55

For many old-school community members the sense of belonging decreased, because for them it was tied to the digital locality that was the old site; more in line with the classic sociological definitions of community in which tradition and propinquity are central (Delanty 2003, 73). For many old-school community members the ‘RT Community’ died when the RT site lost its central position in it. Some argued it had become a ‘fandom’. For newer

54 Example: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/remembrance-of-message-boards-past/ 55 Source: http://roosterteeth.com/post/51266085

community members and fans the sense of belonging was not tied to the old site, but to the ‘imagined community’, to the idealistic idea of ‘the RT community’, and not to a digital locality but to communicative relations, ‘sustained by mass culture and aesthetic sensibilities and practices’: a postmodern community (ibid.: 132). Whether ‘it’ was a community or a fandom did not matter much to ‘newer’ community members/fans, and often fan and community member were used interchangeably by them. One could argue that ‘it’ was still a community, a virtual community, in the way that Urry envisioned it: ‘the new electronic planes can produce communion without propinquity, because people can imagine themselves as belonging to a virtual community’ (Urry 2000: 73- 74). With propinquity Urry means physical propinquity. However, when you look at the ‘old’ RT community, and take a closer look at the ‘new’ one, it becomes clear that digital propinquity remains crucial in the emergence and maintenance of belonging and community. The old-school (online) community-activity used to revolve around only a few types of content made by a handful of people, such as RvB and the RT Podcast, and this activity itself largely took place on the RT site. Thus, what being a community member entailed, and where this activity took place, was a lot more clear-cut than today. You were (literally) on the same page. The growth of RT, the many new divisions and types of content, and the many new kinds of activities on different platforms all facilitated new ways of being a community member and/or a fan. The experience of being a community member and/or a fan has become more diverse and personal, and what you do and how (or if) you see yourself as a community member and/or a fan differs greatly per person. It has become almost impossible to watch and keep up with every series of every RT division. For some people, and for old-school community members especially, this makes them feel like they are missing out and are not ‘getting’ many of the in-jokes anymore, because the in-jokes increasingly transcend different videos and divisions. To quote two community-members/fans in a discussion about this subject on Reddit: ‘Too much content is a valid complaint. If you can't keep up, you fall off.’ And: ‘Now you see one of them reference something and you feel left out because you don't have time to watch all of it.’56 And like I mentioned last chapter: the feeling of being on the ‘inside’ of, for example, AH, a ‘group of friends’, is crucial for its attraction. Especially for the ‘socially awkward and shy’. All different localities where community-members and fans are ‘active’, as well as the kind of events they are going to together ‘in real life’, which these days are predominantly

56 Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/4neexs/a_discussion_of_the_directions/

convention-style happenings (like RTX or Comic Con), influence the way in which people communicate and in how they are engaged in practices of ‘being’ a community-member and/or a fan. This in turn influences the way in which the online localities ‘work’ and what kind of norms and etiquettes apply to them. In practice these norms and etiquettes are constantly being renegotiated. This results in differences between community activities and what it means to be a RT community member and/or a fan, depending on where you participate in the activity and on which division(s) of RT you are focused on. There are a few ‘things’ that more or less transcend all of the RT localities though, such as knowing who the founding fathers of RT are, or understanding certain references to famous quotes, which often have become memes.5758

Differences Between Online Localities In each online locality communication is central to community/fan practices, although what this communication entails differs per locality, depending on the prevailing norms and etiquettes and on what the online locality enables you to do. Below I will compare the qualities of three different online localities that were central in my research. I will focus on the power dynamics within the localities, who is involved ‘in’ them, what kind of communication takes place there, what sense of connection and feeling of co-presence the people involved feel towards each other, and what role the level of publicness (or ‘privateness’) is playing all of this. Before I get to the three localities I will first explain in what ways I approached the concepts of power, sense of connection and co-presence.

Power During my research I sometimes thought it enlightening to view all of the localities in a Bourdieuian sense: as different fields. All of the fields require different behaviors to build op cultural and social capital. Especially because these localities are online and therefore lack bodily presence and a clear material location, communication is crucial in this process. Therefore the ‘cultural competence in communication’, as Gumperz calls it, is even more important in moving up the ladder within these fields, but also to be able to really connect with others, compared to an ‘offline’ community (Pink et al. 2016: 81). For the old-school community members, and especially for the very active ones who made a (nick)name for

57 Clarification: Famous within the community/fandom, such as ‘Why are we here?’ which refers to the first episode of the first season of Red vs. Blue. 58 Explanation: Meme here means internet meme. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_meme

themselves on the RT site, the diversification of community localities meant a loss of capital and status, because the field had become multiple fields. All the capital that they had built up over time was suddenly worth a lot less. The high position within the field of The RT Community that they held was now a position of only a sub-field of The RT Community. The power that they once had, as opinion-formers, but also in regards to the production process of RT, was largely lost, because they did not represent the (more or less) unified RT Community anymore. In the eyes of many old-school community members RT did not do enough to stop this, and even encouraged this development, which made them feel marginalized. In each different locality, on the RT site as well as on the localities that arose from the ‘community enclaves’, there were specific circumstances that influenced the power dynamics.

Sense of Connection and Co-Presence All the different online localities are ‘used’ for divergent purposes and in different ways. In the ‘old-school community’ most communication and attempts to digitally ‘be together’ took place or started on the RT site. Today there is a wide variety of localities to choose from, although the choice for one or the other locality is still a circumstantial one, influenced by chance and (digital) social surroundings. For example: when a ‘community member to be’ starts looking for this community he/she has heard so much about, the chance that he/she finds it on the RT subreddit is much larger when he/she is already active on Reddit in the first place. But if that person wants a more personal experience, to get a deeper sense of connection and a feeling of co-presence with a small group of community members, he/she could find it in, for example, a RT Discord group.59 The choice between localities is often driven by valuing the ‘content of communication’ over a ‘sense of connection’ and/or ‘co- presence’, or the other way around (Pink et al.: 2016, 84). For example: the choice for sending an email is almost always because you want to get a message across; it is about the content of communication. Most of the RT community members play videogames, and many find ‘friends’ to play with through the RT community, not just to have fun, but to feel a sense of connection and co-presence with them. When playing an online videogame together they often use platforms such as Discord to talk to each other (using headsets), while through their avatars they are physically co-present as well, albeit in a digital way.

59 Explanation: With co-presence I mean ‘a range of ways of being together that do not necessarily involve being in the same physical-material locality’ (Pink et al.: 84).

When a community-member and/or a fan participates in the activity in, or through, a locality, most of the time this leads to a feeling of ‘hanging out’ with the others who are also ‘present’ there, now or in the near future. This is also the case for a lurker, although arguably less so, who is not actively participating, but who is ‘present’ there. After analyzing the different localities I made a scale that in my view helps to understand where the emphasis lies per locality: on the content of communication or the sense of connection and co-presence. The scale between the two poles is an artificial contraposition and naturally does not capture all aspects of the different localities, but it does illuminate some of the attraction of participating in them. Some of the localities could have been placed differently on the scale, but I chose to focus on one part of the locality to emphasize certain characteristics.

Oxford Comma Cafe The OCC is a forum topic on the RT site and it is a special place. As a typical forum topic (or ‘thread’) it is a locality in which the posts follow after the other in chronological order, with 20 posts per page, however large the posts are. The people who are active in this topic, especially the ‘regulars’, who contribute to the majority of the posts, take pride in that their ‘café’ is a place of open discussion, where everyone is welcome, as well as every opinion, as long as people are civil and pay attention to their spelling. Many regulars have grown into specific ‘roles’ over time, like the founder of the topic ‘Priest’, who acts like a fatherly figure. He does this by having a username with an authoritative ring to it, by posting his thought-out views on everything, by trying to stand ‘above’ the discussions, by reminding people of the rules and etiquettes of the café, and by sharing anecdotes and photos about and of his children.

Half of the time people in the OCC are engaged in a serious discussion about a serious topic, like politics and religion, or about a less serious topic, like comics and TV series. Besides these discussions the other half of the time people are engaged in banter and phatic communication.60 These serious discussions and the banter often share the same page, and multiple discussions and conversations can take place at once, like in a ‘real’ café. A surprising amount of communication, whether if it is small talk or serious discussion, could be seen as contributing to the comparing and gaining of the Bourdieuian Taste, or cultural capital. A discussion or some friendly banter often leads to the sharing of images about, for example, the ‘ideal’ OCC library or bedroom, after which people would share images of the most luscious and stylish libraries or bedrooms they could find. The taste pattern here was usually mostly ‘classic’, with leather and wood touches being very common. Aside from these playful ‘taste-tests’, as I came to see them, you could build up cultural and social capital by being well-spoken and critical about all topics including RT. Unlike most other localities on the scale, most people ‘hang out’ and post messages in the OCC from their PC, laptop or tablet, and not on their smartphone. Because the posts are longer and often more thought out than in a random chatroom, the interval between posts is also longer. In this way it is a ‘slow’ virtual café that you can visit all day. Interestingly, every ‘newcomer’ who visits the café and lingers for a while will be invited to sit in a chair and make him or herself comfortable, after which he or she will be stabbed with a knife, while some of the regulars laugh maniacally. This completely textual rite de passage sometimes scares of newcomers, but it also tightens the group feeling.61 Some of the regulars have stopped watching (almost) all RT content, but they keep coming back to the RT website specifically for the OCC. Even though those people are not really interested in the current content anymore, they are concerned and worried for the future of RT, including its content. In the OCC there was a lot of critique on the way RT was becoming more ‘corporate’.62 The fronts that people have created for themselves, and the setting that all participants created and continuously keep up by participating in the ‘taste-tests’, the rites de passages and simply by sharing posts, together constitute the environment that is the OCC. This way

60 Explanation: phatic communication is ‘staying in touch without content or information being disseminated’ (ibid.: 81). Example: small talk. ‘In these exchanges, the act of communication is more important than the content of the conversation. (ibid.: 81)’ 61 Note: Personally I also underwent this rite de passage. Not everyone reacts well to it: some people are scared off by the rite de passage. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/58erx1/new_to_the_rt_website/ 62 Note: It is also the locality where the term RT Corp. originated.

52 the OCC has become a conception, a performance in a way, of a group of people, a digital ‘place’ and a mental image at the same time. Compared to a ‘regular’ conversation the interaction between the participants is much more (stage)play-like. This is so because of four reasons: 1. The constant ‘setting of the stage’ (through the ‘taste-tests’ and the rites de passages among other things). 2. Because of the potential audience. In a non-digital café multiple ‘regular’ conversations can take place at once, but ‘participants’ can only follow one, maybe two conversations, and only ‘in the moment’. In the OCC all the participants can see and read every post, even at a later date, so all conversations are public. And not only can all the participants see every post, so too can potentially anyone, including lurkers, RT employees, or random strangers who happen to come across the OCC. 3. The ‘conversations’ are textual, aside from the sharing of images and GIFs. Because of this you can think before, and while, you ‘speak’. The OCC specifically commends participants to do this, by praising creativity and by one of its two main rules: proper spelling. 4. Because almost all participants in the OCC did not know each other before ‘arriving’ in the café, everyone can choose to be who he/she wants to be, or rather, show a side of him-/herself that he/she likes to show, and experiment with behaviors and role-playing.

All of this results in a virtual café that welcomes a wonderful mix of characters, in which a girl in her early twenties feels free to share drawings she made, and in which an anti- establishment anime-loving conservative middle-aged Texan regularly posts haikus. Because of the rite de passage and the written (and unwritten) rules and norms in the OCC, the power dynamics work in favor of the insiders of the OCC, and the regulars in particular. For it is difficult to join in on a serious discussion if you did not yet get the hang of the way the OCC ‘works’, and you might even be scared off. And despite, or due to, the rule of respectful but open discussion, the consensus or conclusion of serious discussions and the ‘taste-tests’ usually end up in favor of the regulars, and the authoritative ones at that, because they are well-spoken, and simply because they put more time and effort in their posts (and usually have the last word as well). Because the most vocal of these regulars are relatively conservative, especially in relation to RT which in the American political landscape falls into

the ‘liberal’ spectrum, the strongest (socio-political) voice in the OCC is a conservative one. Even still, the OCC truly does provide a platform for open discussion where all opinions can be and are challenged, and at the end of the day the regulars are (usually) still on friendly terms with each other. Many of the regulars have even met each other ‘in real life’, and have gotten to know each other quiet well. Sometimes someone wants to get something of his or her chest, or asks for advice on something they are dealing with. The responses to such posts, of which there usually are many, are empathetic and helpful in most cases. This is also why every once in a while a regular posts a message in appreciation of the OCC, and the others join in with praising the OCC to be the antithesis of ‘The Internet’, where supposedly every discussion between liberals and conservatives, or even people with slightly different views about anything, turns toxic and volatile.

Facebook group RT UK The RT UK group is a private Facebook group with almost 4000 members (who for obvious reasons are mostly British). There are two other groups that are related to it, the RT UK Gaming Community and the RT UK Events groups, in which people find other community members to play videogames with (online) and in which all the events are organized, from get-togethers in a pub to convention visits. There are also a few smaller related groups, such as the RTUK - LGBT+ group. The majority of the communication takes place in the main RT UK group, which since February 2017 is called the RT UK – Chat group. The RT UK group is a lively part of the wider RT community, where many people overcome their ‘social awkwardness’ and find others to talk about RT (and life) with. Every now and again people organize get-togethers, for example at conventions such as the Comic Con, during which many of the participants dress up in RT related Cosplay, representing RT, but more importantly: having fun, bonding and overcoming social awkwardness together. Before and after such events photos of the participants and their cosplay-outfits are often shared in the Chat group. Interestingly cosplay does not just provide the RT community members and fans with a chance to overcome their social awkwardness and to become more comfortable with their own bodies and self-image, it also gives them the opportunity to experiment with how they relate to (their) gender. Often people will cosplay as someone from the opposite gender, like Savannah does when she cosplays as Blake from RWBY (see below).

Besides all the events that are organized here people are also constantly talking about their interests, which of course include RT but also almost always popular culture, such as the Marvel movies. They also often share thoughts about how they feel as a community member and/or a fan of RT and what it means to them. Many of them feel like people in their immediate surroundings, like their parents, do not understand them and their relation to RT. Therefore questions like the ones below are asked and discussions are started, to which many people usually reply.

I'm a 21 year old adult/"child"... Let's go with mature child. 😂😂👌👌 I still live with my parents. Ya'know free roof and all. Does anyone else, that lives with their parents still, find it difficult to explain to their parents what Rooster Teeth is and why it's such an important aspect of their lives? Or is it just my difficult parents?

And little post for the evening. What made you get into Rooster Teeth, and why is it such a big part of your life?63 In this case 45 people ‘liked’ this post, while it also brought about 48 comments, as well as a whole stream of other posts of people sharing how and why they got into RT in the first place. Generally people in RTUK are very positive and supportive towards one another, and towards RT as well. The front that is actively being maintained, by its members as well as its admins, is that they are a community, often mirroring the family and friend discourse that RT itself is propagating. The RT UK group already existed on the RT site since 2009, but since the messy transition the activity has largely moved to the Facebook group. I don’t know exactly how the leadership worked in those early years, but at the time of my research there was a single manager of the group, the Head of RTUK, who was the leader and spokesperson of the RTUK group, who, together with the RTUK ambassadors and admins managed the RTUK groups on Facebook, as well as the group on the RT site and the RTUK Twitter page. Two new RTUK ambassadors for every ten regions in the UK are chosen yearly, and are supposed to help spread the news of RTUK, as well as help organizing local and national meetups (though I do not know just how active these ambassadors are in all of this). The admins moderate all the different groups and make sure that everyone sticks to the rules and etiquettes.64 Not often during my fieldwork I noticed that a post was removed by an admin, though when it happened it was almost always for spoiling an episode of a RT series or show. Big decisions are made with the Head, ambassadors and admins together. The short version of the rules of the RTUK Facebook group are:65

1. Don't be a dick 2. Don't spoil things 3. Have fun

In practice I think that more normative powers in the RTUK group emanated from the ‘positive etiquette’ that members of the group itself monitored, than from the official ‘authorities’ like the head and the admins.

63 Source: RT UK Doc page 11 and 12. 64 Source: Here the rules of the RTUK Facebook group can be found: https://www.facebook.com/notes/1392252241024814/GROUP%20RULES/1788408864742481/ 65 Source: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RTUKchat/about/

Twitter Twitter is a bit of a strange fish in this comparison, because unlike the RT forums, Discord and Facebook groups, the communication does not revolve around group interaction amongst community members and fans as such. Like I mentioned before, on Twitter the RT ‘personalities’ interact publicly amongst themselves as well as with other (internet) ‘celebrities’. Most community members/fans that I observed using Twitter, and who I talked about Twitter with, ‘used’ Twitter to stay up to date with the ins and outs of RT, but more importantly to stay in touch with and ‘follow’ their favorite RT personalities. Like some of my interlocutors I turned on notifications during my research, so that I would instantly notice when a RT cast member I was following had sent a tweet. Many people ‘follow’ RT personalities without participating much in the communication that is taking place, except maybe for ‘liking’ and/or ‘retweeting’ a tweet. But some do reply to these RT personality tweets (and some do this very often), to get even closer to their favorite(s), for the rush of exposure to other RT aficionados who might read (and like or reply to) your tweet, and even more importantly, for the possible reply or acknowledgement of your favorite RT staff and cast members. The feeling of connectedness, propinquity and sense of co-presence that a (possible) reply or a ‘like’ to your tweet from one of your favorite RT personalities gets you is very appealing to some.66 This means that most of the replies to a tweet of a RT staff and/or cast member are of a praising and positive nature, which reinforces the hierarchical differences between the ‘fan’ and the ‘star’, like Kehrberg argues (2015). As a field, Twitter is interesting because the RT ‘celebrities’ share and compete for exposure in relation to all other ‘celebrities’ on Twitter, for a chance to go viral and/or gain exposure. But there is also another interesting thing happening which is what I call the ‘suckerfish dynamic’. Suckerfish are the type of fish that live their whole lives attached or in close proximity to larger fish, of which they consume the skin flakes and feces, and benefit from the flow of water and protection they provide.67 There are community members/fans who become well-known by RT staff and cast members as well as in the community. They have gained a lot of cultural and social capital in the RT Twitter field as well as consequently in the wider RT community, most of the time by ‘putting themselves out there’, for example by creating fanart. The other ways in which community members and fans ‘put themselves out there’ is by cosplaying, by

66 Example: https://www.facebook.com/groups/RTUKchat/permalink/1662109624039073/ 67 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suckerfish

creating RT related videos such as ‘best-of compilations’ or animated versions of funny moments in RT videos. The popularity and almost exclusively positive feedback towards the fanartists and their work have prompted many other community members and fans to also ‘put themselves out there’ in similar ways. In the last few years some of these fan-practices have spread from the wider geek and gamer subcultures to the RT community. Like Jenkins mentions: ‘once ‘alternative’ fan practices have become increasingly mainstream with the merger or convergence of ‘traditional’ and digital media forms (Jenkins 2006, Pink et al. 2016).’.68 This is also why, aside from fanart, for many community members and fans, especially the more recent ones, cosplay has become an important part of expressing themselves, even though this used to be an almost exclusively Asian fan-practice. Through replying to a lot of RT tweets, often first by concentrating on one division and later by expanding to others as well, the fanartists gain exposure to the community as well as the staff and cast. They do this by creating ‘art’, which they attach to these replies or to their own tweets, which directly appears in the notification bar of the staff/cast member(s) who it is directed to (by adding ‘@(Twitter username of staff and/or cast member(s)’. Most of the time the RT staff and cast members they tweet to are featured in the art itself. Some of these fanartists become so popular, after many likes, retweets and shares in other digital localities or even RT videos, that they have gained a ‘following’ on their own. Like many other internet ‘prospectors’, such as Twitch streamers for instance, the fanartists sometimes turn to crowdfunding to be able to fund more projects, to spend more time on them, to possibly make a living from it and, ultimately, to follow their Dream. Some of them actually get hired by RT. At the moment Patreon is the most popular crowdfunding service that is used by these fanartists, and people who support them can pledge 1 or more dollars per month to their ‘cause’. I found the reciprocity dynamics in these emerging digital markets to be very interesting, but I cannot divulge any more on the subject in this thesis.

68 Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oowOTm4juiE and https://www.youtube.com/user/HemboHero

Example of the suckerfish dynamic: Naomi C has made plushies, costumes and other kinds of fanart for the past years and has gained a following. Since June 12, 2017 she is on Patreon. Note that she addresses the tweet to Gavin Free and waited for an RT event to happen so she could gain more exposure by adding #RTExtraLife.

What I do want to add is that interaction between fans the ‘RT stars’ does sometimes happen on Twitter, especially if you have made a name for yourself, like the suckerfish. But every once in a while ‘RT stars’ actually reply to messages of community members/fans, unlike the stars did in the research of Kehrberg (ibid.: 93). She took the most followed Twitter users as her research group, so the chance of interaction between a fan and a star in those cases is almost non-existent. But her argument still stands concerning the hierarchy differences, which is further exemplified if an ‘RT star’ does not like a certain message or Twitter user and blocks this person from ever sending a tweet to him or her again, as well as in the Dopp vs. Gus dog-debate.

RT Corp. and the Fullscreen Takeover Besides the growth of RT and the messy transition from the old to the new website, the third big factor in the change of RT and the community was that RT was acquired by Fullscreen in November 2014. For the first time since the inception of RT the company was not independent anymore. RT lost much of its autonomy, but it gained an immediate capital injection, and the resources to keep up with the fast growth that RT was experiencing. Moreover, in hindsight it seems clear that Fullscreen was making RT grow and expand even

faster than before. Not long after the takeover RT started to acquire new divisions, like Funhaus, which was the first time RT started operating outside of Austin. Furthermore, it seems that the priority behind the new website, that launched in July 2015, was for it to become a kind of VOD platform like Netflix, instead of maintaining and/or updating it as the hub of the community. This seemed especially clear when a year later Fullscreen hired three ‘executives’ into ‘three pivotal leadership roles’ within RT, to supervise a profound change in the RT sponsorship.6970 At the time there were still many complaints about the functioning of the ‘new’ website, and now it seemed that RT, or Fullscreen, focused their efforts not to ‘fix’ the community part of the website, but to double down on changing the website to a VOD platform. This entailed the change of the sponsorship: Sponsors were now ‘FIRST members’, paying 5 dollars per month, while there was also a new strand of membership: the ‘Double Gold membership’, which costs a whopping 35 dollars per month, but did get you ‘$60+ in exclusive merch every month’. Before the change in sponsorship the Sponsors already had a few privileges, like early access to episodes of a few series, as well as access to ‘exclusive’ content. The FIRST name emphasized changes that were about to become a reality, then and in the course of the next few years.71 Many more series, including RWBY and RvB, became exclusively accessible to FIRST (and Double Gold) members for the first week after its release, despite a big backlash from the community, who argued that the change put a wedge between paying and non-paying community members. In reaction to this development I saw a lot of skeptical and negative posts and comments on the RT forums, such as in the OCC. Many old-school community members also did not like the change because they had not become sponsors to see things first or to get access to exclusive content; they did it to support and sponsor RT and their production because they wanted to support them, in a more equal relationship, during a time when ‘The Community’ was more homogeneous and essential in the revenue stream of RT. In a way they felt that their importance to RT was taken away by Fullscreen and the sponsorship change. They were not necessary anymore. A few comments in reaction to the ‘sponsorship change’ describe this feeling well:

Not that I really care about the name, because a name is really just a name, but it was kinda cool to claim to be a "sponsor." It made it feel like your contribution really made a difference in producing the content where as now that's it's branded

69 Source: http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/fullscreen-rooster-teeth-svod-executive-hires-1201821781/ 70 Source: http://roosterteet h.com/post/51272680 71 Source: http://roosterteeth.com/post/51300187

more as a "video subscription service" it feels more like a business interaction than being a part of the community that wants to see RT succeed and do greater things. And: I remember the days when I looked up to RT and my dream job was to work with them some day. Now I'm watching podcasts with like six advertisements and looking at more expensive subscription options. These changes have "corporate decision" written all over them. I agree with the sentiments expressed by many others. I feel like a customer more than anything now. I thought RT was the one company that would never sell out.72

More and more many of the old-school members felt like they had changed from a contributing and important part of RT to a ‘consuming member’. In the many discussions about RT becoming increasingly commercial, and the role of Fullscreen in this, there were usually people defending RT with the arguments that they had always seen themselves as consumers of the content of RT, and that RT always had been a company. Then there were also the people who thought differently, and argued that RT and its community transcended mere consumerism and fandom. Most people had opinions that fell in between these two camps. These people often felt conflicted, because usually they had always encouraged RT to become more successful, and had always supported RT in their decisions and in the direction that is was going. Like the person above who contradicts him/herself in the first sentence: he/she does not ‘care about the name’, but does feel a sense of loss in not being able to ‘claim to be a “sponsor”’ anymore. In my view this disconnect is the result of two related things: The first is the promissory nature of RT’s front that I introduced last chapter. RT’s explicit and implicit promise that a meaningful and inclusive community truly exists is in a way at odds with RT becoming increasingly corporate, and the ‘wedge’ that increasingly divides the community between paying and non-paying members goes against it being an inclusive community. The second source of the ‘disconnect’ comes from an underlying mechanism: an unbalanced reciprocal relationship between the community member/fan and RT. In their text about gift-exchanges on crowdfunding platforms Galuszka and Brzozowska argue that ‘the relationship between project initiators and contributors is more than simply a producer– consumer relationship’, that ‘these relationships are an extension of artist–fan relations’ and

72 Source: http://roosterteeth.com/post/51272680

that these platforms are ‘a place of coexistence and interpenetration of ‘paid’ and ‘free’, ‘commercial’ and ‘non-commercial’’ (2016, 744-755). They conclude by stating that through the exchange of gifts interpersonal bonds are built and strengthened, which results in a more equal star-fan relationship. But in this process the contributors (fans) do form expectations that the creator (star) has to live up to (ibid.: 751). The authors argue that:

Motives such as participation in the production of culture and deciding what kind of product will make its appearance on the market is what is important to them. Both parties are coupled by the mechanisms of gift exchange and the flow of money. (ibid.: 744)

The perceived strong personal bonds that the RT community members and fans have built up over the years with RT and its staff and cast is weakened by the Fullscreen takeover. Especially the old-school community members feel like they are not as important as they used to be, because their ‘sponsorship’ is not as crucial for the revenue stream of RT as it used to be, their built up identity as a ‘Sponsor’ is being taken away from them, while their relative power to make RT live up to their expectations has also weakened considerably. All of this has diminished the more or less equal relationship that they thought to have. The reciprocity between the old-school community members and RT has become unbalanced. Some of the community-members and fans have become disillusioned with RT, for they had given so much to RT in the past, in the form of sponsorships, the buying of merchandizing, by ‘spreading the gospel’ about RT to others, by sending RT fanart, or simply by spending so much time ‘consuming’ their content, while they now rued the commercialization of RT and the direction that it is going. A good example of this lack of sensible reciprocal awareness of RT was the getting rid of the ‘karma system’, something that old-school community members mentioned often. After the Fullscreen takeover and with the launch of the new site the ‘karma system’ was left behind, and with that all the privileges that community members with high karma had built up as well, like exclusive access to certain forums and chatrooms. After the new site launched very similar exclusivities were granted, but this time it was not based on karma, but on if you were a paying FIRST member or not. Did RT ‘sell out’ with decisions such as these at the expense of the community?

Chapter 5 - Conclusion There were several things that I was aiming to do with my thesis. I wanted to make anyone who reads it to understand what, and how much, Rooster Teeth means to so many different people. I wanted to show how RT has grown and changed in recent years and what this has meant for the ‘community members’ and ‘fans’ involved. I wanted to show how RT community ‘activity’ has branched out to many different digital localities, how and why this happened, what power relations are at play here, and how these different localities influence the ways in which, and what kind of, divergent community practices take place and how these are experienced and shape the feeling of being a Rooster Teeth community member and/or a fan. Lastly I wanted to show how the growth of RT, the ‘messy transition’ from the old to the new website and the Fullscreen takeover changed the more homogenous RT ‘community’ from before, to more of a divergent contemporary ‘fandom’ with community aspects after. To be able to do all of this I first had to give the readers who are unfamiliar with RT an impression of the history of RT and an idea of what RT actually is. What is the attraction of RT and its content? And what is the attraction of the social side of RT, the community? There are several reasons for why the content of RT holds such appeal for many. First of all: ever since RT started out it catered to niches that really spoke to an audience that was previously largely overlooked. Secondly, the ‘authentic’ personalities of the cast is central in almost all content. The cast-members, especially the popular ones, feature in a large amount of the productions. Importantly, these ‘gamer and geeky’ personalities are relatable to many of the viewers, and are sometimes even ‘scouted’ from the community itself. Because of this acceptance of RT, this embrace of their audience and the praising of commonness as a virtue, the fans/community members are indirectly appreciating and loving themselves, individually and collectively. RT knows this, and tries to emphasize it by using a discourse that speaks to its fans, its ‘community’, as if they are friends, or even family. Many community members and fans even start to dream about working at RT as well, and start to ‘put themselves out there’, in chase of The Dream. This Dream is so appealing to many community members and fans because fame used to be regarded as unfeasible for them, and because the majority of them are at a crossroads between the adolescent and the adult phase of their life. RT makes it seem like you can stay a child while being an adult, that having fun and playing videogames is a viable career path, a way of life. What strengthens all of the above is that RT produces a huge amount of content and releases it in a regular fashion. Because of this the

63 community/fans get the impression of being up-to-date and in touch with the cast, who go out of their way to make it seem like the public-private divide is not really there. And ultimately, for many part of the fun of watching RT videos lies in knowing that other fans and/or community members share the same moments of laughter, ‘get’ the memes that you ‘get’ and understand the personality-bound (in-game or real-time) behaviors of cast-members, such as a panicky and erratically behaving Gavin. Often this knowledge in itself is enough, but if you want to you could talk about it or share it with others afterwards.73 This brings us to the community. Even though RT has grown a lot and has become more commercial, and even though ‘the community’ has become more fractured and more ‘fandom-like’, the one thing that has stayed the same is that RT and its ‘community’ means a lot for many people, especially for the ‘socially awkward’ and shy. I (digitally) came across a lot of people who shared their stories about how RT ‘helped’ them, either in overcoming difficult times, in coming out of their shell, in becoming more comfortable with themselves, or in finding friends and likeminded people. They were helped by finding role models who they could relate to, and by finding others like them, who went out of their way to include them in the community activity as well as offering help and guidance, and sometimes friendship as well. And they always had something to talk about: RT content. This was the case in the ‘old-school community’ as well as in the community today. I have found such stories in all localities that I researched, and I have personally experienced this in all the places that I did participant observation in.74 For people like Peter, who had trouble communicating and finding ‘real’ connections in ‘real life’, the RT community had meant a lot. Aside from in the digital world it had also brought him friendship in ‘real life’ (with Thijs among others). RT also provided him with a platform on which he could express himself more clearly and in a far more comfortable manner than he was able to in ‘real life’, where he could not share his enthusiasm about his interests and hobbies in the first place, because he did not know anyone who shared these with him. For some people, like for Terry, the community part of RT did not matter much (yet), because for them RT was mostly just their favorite go-to entertainment. However, like Terry, some do go looking for what this ‘RT

73 Note: Or you could talk about it/share it with other live, for example during livestreams or in a group-chat. 74 Examples: http://roosterteeth.com/post/51202623, https://www.reddit.com/r/funhaus/comments/52qvgw/theres_just_something_about_this_place/, https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/63yx2g/thank_you_roosterteeth/, https://www.reddit.com/r/roosterteeth/comments/6rufe7/geoff_mentioned_having_diverticulosis_on_the/

community’ is all about at some point, possibly getting more out of it in the future.75 I can imagine that there are also people for who RT has a negative effect, like for people who get addicted to the vast amount of content that RT produces and has produced. If such people do not engage in the social side of RT (The Community), but have built up a one-sided friendship, a parasocial relationship, with RT cast-members, then I can imagine that it can have a negative impact on their online and offline social lives. However, this does not have to be the case, because finding role-models who make you feel accepted and better about yourself can also have a positive effect on your ‘real life’. But ultimately this is difficult to say and falls out of the scope of my research. I could not find people who were into RT and its content, but who had never gotten into the social side of RT, because such people had never left a digital ‘footprint’ for me to find. There was friction as well. RT did not manage to grow and commercialize as much as they did without alienating a part of the community. Some community members, particularly some of the ‘old-school’ ones, had become thoroughly disillusioned with RT at the time of my fieldwork. Over the many years they were active in the community it had become a part of their daily life and often their identity too. For many of them a large part of their social life had formed around RT, a ‘community’ that during that time was ‘grounded’ in the RT site. When the site stopped being the center of the community they lost much of the cultural and social capital they had built up over the years. Many of them left the site, and the ones who were left behind felt like their social life had partly collapsed. The company, or the community, that they had invested so much time, money and effort in, that in a way represented them, understood them and supposedly stood for so much more than just any other company, had in their eyes sold out. Many disillusioned shared their frustration on the site through writing journals or in topics such as the OCC, openly questioning what their loyalty had truly meant for RT. They were the ones who had made it possible for the cast to live the dream, but aside from not recognizing the dream anymore in the way that these community members used to envision it, they felt like RT did not reciprocate anymore, but instead just wanted more and more money from them. Personally I also had my reservations about how RT as a company increasingly ‘preyed upon’ the money of its ‘fans’ and ‘community members’. That being said, I feel like the majority of the community members, including the ‘old-school’ ones, were well aware and conscious of the fact that RT had

75 Note: That is how Terry found me: looking for the ‘community’ he stumbled upon my post about my research in which I asked Dutch RT fans and community members to contact me if they wanted to do an interview.

65 always been a company that was looking to grow and make money. The meaning, fun and comradery they had found and the (shared) memories they had made throughout those years did not just disappear when the RT site lost its central role for the community. It did mean that it had become more difficult to connect with others with whom you shared memories with, that you had partly created on the ‘old’ site. For many it felt like their favorite local pub was torn down, destroying the locality in which the shared memories and their accompanying nostalgia had been built up and localized for all that time. But, similar to ‘real life’, if they wanted to they still had the possibility to find or ‘move with’ other community members to other cafes or pubs, such as the Oxford Comma Café on the RT site, or to RTUK or the RT subreddit, to find other nostalgic souls, to create new friendships and to engage in similar or different community-practices than the ones they used to love. During the time of my fieldwork, which started about half a year after the new site was launched, I often saw community members who were reflexively discussing what ‘the community’ truly (had) meant for them, and how them ‘consuming’ the RT content, conventions and merchandizing could go together with it meaning and being more than just the consummation of a product. For so many people I came across RT almost always (had) meant something more than just any other company. For some of them it was just their favorite lazy entertainment. For others it was a big part of their (social) lives, had helped them deal with and/or overcome their ‘social awkwardness’, and had been their company in more ways than one.

Bibliography

Boellstorff, T. 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press cop.

Delanty, G. 2003 Community. London: Routledge.

Durkheim, E. 1965 [1915] The elementary forms of the religious life. (transl. from the French by Joseph Ward Swain). New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan Paperback ed. Ellcessor, E. 2012 Tweeting @feliciaday: Online Social Media, Convergence, and Subcultural Stardom. Cinema Journal, 2012 Winter, Vol.51(2), pp.46-66.

Galuszkaa, P. and Brzozowska, B. 2016 Early career artists and the exchange of gifts on a crowdfunding platform. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 6, 744– 753.

Gee, J.P. 2011 An introduction to discourse analysis [electronic resource] : theory and method. New York, NY : Routledge 3rd ed.

Goffman, E. 1990 [1959] The presentation of self in everyday life. London: Penguin

Horst, H. in Ito, M. et al. 2010 Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 149-194.

Horst, H., Miller, D.

2012 Digital Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury

Jenkins, H 2006 Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Kehrberg, A. 2015 ‘I love you, please notice me’: the hierarchical rhetoric of Twitter fandom Celebrity Studies, 07 February 2015, p.1-15 [Peer Reviewed Journal]. Lempert, M. 2014 Imitation. Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 379-95.

Nardi, B. 2015 Virtuality. Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 44: 15-31.

Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., Tacchi, J. 2016 Digital ethnography : Principles and Practice. Los Angeles: SAGE.

Potts, A. 2015 ‘LOVE YOU GUYS (NO HOMO)’: How gamers and fans play with sexuality, gender, and Minecraft on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies, 03 April 2015, Vol.12(2), p.163-186 [Peer Reviewed Journal].

Radde-Antweiler, K., Waltemathe, M. and Zeiler, X. 2014 Video Gaming, Let’s Plays, and Religion: The Relevance of Researching gamevironments. #1 (2014): Inaugural Issue 1-36. http://nbn- resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:46-00104169-12.

Robards, B., Bennett, A. 2011 MyTribe: Post-subcultural Manifestations of Belonging on Social Network Sites. Sociology, Apr 2011, Vol.45(2), pp.303-317 [Peer Reviewed Journal].

De Rooij, V. A.

2002 Displays and Displacements: Some Thoughts on the Uses of Interactive Screens and How They Affect Mental Maps of Space and Self Etnofoor, 1 January 2002, Vol.15(1/2), pp.70-78.

Snodgrass, J.G., Dengah, H.J.F., Lacy, M.G. 2014 “I Swear to God, I Only Want People Here Who Are Losers!” Cultural Dissonance and the (Problematic) Allure of Azeroth. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2014, Vol.28(4), pp.480-501.

Urry, J. 2000 Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge.

Verrips, J. 2002 ‘Haptic Screens’ and Our ‘Corporeal Eye’. Etnofoor, Vol. 15, No 1/2, Screens, pp. 21-46.

Wesch, M. 2008 An anthropological introduction to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU)