GAMEPLAY LIVESTREAMING: HUMAN AGENTS OF GAMESPACE AND THEIR PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS By Alex P. Leith A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Media and Information Studies—Doctor of Philosophy 2019 ABSTRACT GAMEPLAY LIVESTREAMING: HUMAN AGENTS OF GAMESPACE AND THEIR PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS By Alex P. Leith Gameplay livestreaming is an increasingly popular form of media, with tens of thousands of people choosing to do it as either a hobby or career. Once each of these individuals creates a Twitch account and starts broadcasting themselves, they become a media figure. This dissertation examined the chats from thousands of partnered Twitch channels. The two key areas of examination are parasocial relationships and gameplay engagement. Parasocial relationshxips state that media users can begin to develop perceived relationships with media figures as they consume content containing that figure. A series of Python bots gathered chat and stream data over a month from 30 Twitch categories (e.g., Hearthstone, League of Legends, Art, and Just Chatting). The bots logged a total of 321,189,309 messages from 6,564,307 senders and 117,943 channels. After cleaning the data for partnership status, stream language, and message count, coding divided the remaining 3,224,942 messages from 1,298,148 senders and 3,127 channels into their appropriate groups (i.e., messages target and stream content). The research hypotheses subdivided the dataset several times. All hypotheses had the messages separated between streamer-specific messages and other-specific messages. Streamer-specific messages are messages which include the at symbol (@) and the channel name, thus signaling message intentionality to the streamer. Hypotheses two further divided the messages between gameplay and non-gameplay streams, and hypothesis three divided the messages from gameplay streams into entertainment and expertise streams. The hypotheses persistently found that the message target was a reliable predictor of verbal immediacy, the metric used to identify parasocial relationships. Stream content either proved to be a counter-intuitive predictor or no predictor of verbal immediacy. Grounded theory methods addressed the research questions and produced two common distinctions for gameplay involvement. Viewers can engage with gameplay by asking questions but can also elevate themselves to human agents of gamespace through providing information or suggestions. Copyright by ALEX P LEITH 2019 This dissertation is dedicated to my grandfather, SGM Douglas R. Leith, who showed me the importance of lifelong learning and my mother, Janet V. Leith, who showed me the power of hard work. v TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES .................................................................................................................. viii LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................................. ix INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................1 GAMEPLAY LIVESTREAMING ..............................................................................................6 Gameplay Livestreaming Typology .........................................................................................7 Expertise .............................................................................................................................9 Tournament .....................................................................................................................9 POV .......................................................................................................................... 10 Professional ................................................................................................................... 10 Non-professional ........................................................................................................... 11 Entertainment .................................................................................................................... 12 Variety .......................................................................................................................... 12 Single-game .................................................................................................................. 13 Celebrity ........................................................................................................................ 13 Non-Gameplay .................................................................................................................. 14 PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS ........................................................................................... 16 Parasocial Interactions ........................................................................................................... 16 Social Media ......................................................................................................................... 17 Research Hypotheses ............................................................................................................. 19 HUMAN AGENTS OF GAMESPACE ..................................................................................... 22 Defining Gamespace ............................................................................................................. 23 Intrinsic Gamespace .......................................................................................................... 23 Extrinsic Gamespace ......................................................................................................... 25 Human Agents within Gamespace ......................................................................................... 26 Traditional Gamespace ...................................................................................................... 26 Players ........................................................................................................................... 27 Onlookers ...................................................................................................................... 28 Streaming Gamespace ....................................................................................................... 29 Streamers....................................................................................................................... 29 Viewers ......................................................................................................................... 31 Research Questions ............................................................................................................... 34 METHODOLOGY.................................................................................................................... 35 Data Collection ..................................................................................................................... 35 Category Selection ............................................................................................................ 35 Twitch Bots ....................................................................................................................... 36 Stream selection ............................................................................................................ 38 Stream variables ............................................................................................................ 40 Chat logs ....................................................................................................................... 41 vi Pi cluster........................................................................................................................ 42 Data Cleaning .................................................................................................................... 43 Data Analysis .................................................................................................................... 46 Parasocial relationships.................................................................................................. 47 Gameplay engagement ................................................................................................... 48 RESULTS ................................................................................................................................. 50 Research Hypotheses ............................................................................................................. 50 Research Hypothesis One .................................................................................................. 50 Research Hypothesis Two ................................................................................................. 52 Research Hypothesis Three ............................................................................................... 54 Research Questions ............................................................................................................... 56 Streamers as Objects.......................................................................................................... 57 Viewers as Objects ............................................................................................................ 58 DISCUSSION ........................................................................................................................... 60 Research Hypotheses ............................................................................................................