Twitch Streamers’ Compunctions about Streaming That Wizard Game

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

Twitch has made the individual easier to reach (and achieve reach) than ever before; most streamers are not backed by major gaming companies, but act as single agents who create gaming broadcast content and in doing so must adopt and follow certain performance practices: this may include humour or other parasocial interactions, as expressed both through the live video of the streamer alongside the main broadcast, and the text chat functions alongside this.

This is a form of affective labour, and requires emotional responses to gameplay from the Twitch streamers; it commodifies immaterial labour and requires the performance of identity and legitimacy within the stream. Kyle’s focus here is especially on the open-world Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy, whose development involved J.K. Rowling and which therefore became controversial due to Rowling’s slide into abhorrent anti-trans activism. Gamers are therefore conflicted about engaging with this game: while the game actually includes the first trans character in the Potter universe (to head off potential controversy), Rowling also financially benefits from its sales.

The game did turn out to be the most popular single-player game on Twitch, however, so (in spite of some activism encouraging this) a boycott of the game did not eventuate. It did produce what can be called a ‘crisis of pleasure’, however, where straightforward consumption of the game by gamers was threatened by external factors; this also encouraged a kind of conspicuous virtue signalling by both game designers and players.

Some streamers said publicly that they would not stream on Twitch while Twitch was showing ads for Hogwarts Legacy, for instance; others asked on Reddit and in other fora about the ethics of buying or streaming the game. A site called Have They Streamed That Wizard Game, calling out streamers who did play the game on Twitch, was taken down after 24 hours of operation; and the Twitch channel Girlfriend Reviews, which played the game to donate its Twitch revenue to an anti-LGBTIQ+ suicide project, was attacked by Twitch users.

Where does the power lie here? How can audiences navigate these these complex dynamics? What is the impact of a boycott of such a game, and where does it insert itself into the games streaming industry (where there are plenty of other gamers who will stream the game)? Can we understand these questions through brand management theory, when J.K. Rowling presents a credible threat to trans streamers’ political and physical lives?