Audience and Streamer Participation at Scale on Twitch Claudia Flores-Saviaga Jessica Hammer Juan Pablo Flores [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Universidad Autonoma de Mexico West Virginia University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA (UNAM) Morgantown, West Virginia, USA CDMX, Mexico Joseph Seering Stuart Reeves Saiph Savage Carnegie Mellon University University of Nottingham West Virginia University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Nottingham, UK Morgantown, West Virginia, USA ABSTRACT with an audience who can be globally distributed [40]. This dynamic Large-scale streaming platforms such as Twitch are becoming in- has created new types of experiences and interactions that we have creasingly popular, but detailed audience-streamer interaction dy- yet to understand. namics remain unexplored at scale. In this paper, we perform a We focus in this paper on Twitch both because of its scale and mixed methods study on a dataset with over 12 million audience popularity and because of its wide distribution of types of commu- chat messages and 45 hours of streamed video to understand au- nities; while Twitch is still primarily a game streaming platform, dience participation and streamer performance on Twitch. We un- it has branched out significantly in recent years to encourage cre- cover five types of streams based on size and audience participation ative streaming and In-Real-Life (IRL) streaming. There is vast styles: Clique Streams, small streams with close streamer-audience HCI research on audience and spectator engagement, including interactions; Rising Streamers, mid-range streams using custom within gaming [8], but our understanding of how audiences and technology and moderators to formalize their communities; Chatter- streamers collectively participate in live game streaming platforms boxes, mid-range streams with established conversational dynam- is still limited [8, 14]. Most existing studies have focused on small ics; Spotlight Streamers, large streams that engage large numbers of scale audience-gamer interactions, for instance how small groups of viewers while still retaining a sense of community; and Profession- gamers and audiences collaborate at home or in arcades [18, 26, 47]. als, massive streams with the stadium-style audiences. We discuss But, very recent late breaking work [14] has showed the signifi- challenges and opportunities emerging for streamers and audiences cance of this limitation, identifying critical relationships between from each style and conclude by providing data-backed design audience size and audience behavior. implications that empower streamers, audiences, live streaming While tens of millions of audience members participate on Twitch platforms, and game designers. [21]; many streamers struggle to engage with their audiences and grow their communities in ways they’d like. This has lead to situa- KEYWORDS tions where individual streamers have limited viewership or strug- gle to engage productively with certain types of viewers [9, 22, 49]. Twitch, Audience Participation Games, Data Analysis The desire to entertain and drive audiences to participate arises ACM Reference Format: not only because it generates better user experiences [51], but also Claudia Flores-Saviaga, Jessica Hammer, Juan Pablo Flores, Joseph Seering, because Twitch’s financial model rewards streamers with highly Stuart Reeves, and Saiph Savage. 2019. Audience and Streamer Participation participatory audiences [43]. at Scale on Twitch. In HYPERTEXT ’19: ACM Hypertext, September 17–20, Seering et al., propose the framework of “audience participa- 2019, Germany. , 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 tion”, specifically within game design, to explain the dynamic of participation on Twitch [42]. By better understanding how the 1 INTRODUCTION performance of streamers interacts with audience participants, we Live streaming platforms, such as Twitch and Youtube Gaming, arXiv:2012.00215v1 [cs.SI] 1 Dec 2020 can improve the design of live streaming platforms by bettering Periscope, and Hitbox, have become considerably popular in recent user experience, recruiting more viewers, and increasing as a re- years [16, 33, 40]. Streamers on these platforms each have a channel sult the financial feasibility of pursuing streaming as a career path. where they generally live stream themselves engaging in various Analyzing audience-streamer participation at different scales also entertaining activities from engaging at an event, creating art or facilitates the creation of tools for a wider range of individuals and music, or playing video games while interacting via chat messages audiences. For instance, it enables the design of platforms tailored not only for professional streamers who have massive audiences, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or but also for novice streamers who may use the platform as a part- classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation time activity or hobby and hence have more sporadic audiences on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the who participate with them. author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission To unpack this critical aspect of streamer-audience participation, and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. we take a case-study approach, examining Twitch, the most popular HYPERTEXT ’19, September 17–20, 2019, Germany and significant live game streaming platform [40]. Started in 2011, © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9999-9/18/06...$15.00 Twitch is now the world’s leading social platform and community https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456 for video game culture [15]. Twitch acts as a medium for audience HYPERTEXT ’19, September 17–20, 2019, Germany Flores-Saviaga, et al. members to watch highly skilled gamers play, discover new video Streamers can select from a variety of game content to deliver to game content, and engage and participate with streamers or other their audiences. When broken down into categories of gameplay, the audience members. Twitch enables us to investigate audience and most common include e-sports, "speedrunners" and "Let’s Play" [46]. streamer participation in game spaces at a range of scales. Much of the research on live-streaming communities focuses on We conduct a large scale data analysis on Twitch to understand esports [7, 45], which can range from individual amateur gameplay audience participation in different scales, as well as the techniques to large-scale tournaments viewed by millions of fans [7, 8, 12]. streamers use to drive participation of different sized audiences. Speedrunning streamers demonstrate a high level of gameplay skill, This analysis can help us to understand audience needs around and attempt to play through games at high speeds. Game “bugs”, spectatorship and participation, how differently-sized audiences are “glitches”, and “exploits” are exploited to facilitate the game’s speedy similar and different, and the effectiveness of streamer techniques completion [7, 46]. Let’s Play enables the audience to play games when used within different contexts. Specifically, we identified by converting typed chat commands into gameplay commands the following research questions as fundamental to understanding [24, 46]. audience participation in Twitch streams: Using third-party tools, streamers provide additional features and • RQ 1. How does audience participation on Twitch vary across enhancements to curate the stream content and game experience for different sized audiences? their viewers. Financial motivations exist for streamers to develop • RQ 2. What type of techniques do streamers use to drive audiences that are socially driven as they can add to the stream’s audience participation and how do these techniques vary? ability to generate revenue [6, 37]. We explored these research questions using one month of data from 130 randomly selected Twitch streams, totaling 2,700 min- utes of video of streamers in action and 12,150,866 audience chat 2.2 Audiences on Twitch messages. We used cluster analysis to categorize streams, tracked The success of Twitch demonstrates that a great demand exists for how audiences participated in those streams throughout time, and video game spectatorship [44]. However, viewer motivations for applied sentiment analysis to understand audience participation in attending live-streaming events are still being discovered. Hamilton chat. We also used qualitative techniques to examine more closely describes audiences’ potential motivations for joining the channel the techniques that a selection of streamers from each of the clus- of a specific Twitch streamer as a split between possessing ade- ters used to drive interactions with audiences. In particular, we sire for the particular content of the stream (including here the build off audience participation frameworks [25] to make concrete streamers’ personality, skill and game being played), as well as notions of how streamers “perform” for an audience, i.e., the type participating in the community built around the specific channel of techniques they adopt. (i.e., interacting with the other audience members of the channel) Through our analysis we demonstrate