PhD Project: Massively Multimodal Communication and Space: A Case Study of Video Game Livestreaming

Nathalie Meyer was employed at the URPP Language and Space from 2015 to 2019 working on her PhD project Massively Multimodal Communication and Space: A Case Study of Video Game Livestreaming.

The aim of the dissertation was to conduct a qualitative linguistic analysis of live webcasting contributions through a case study of two Twitch streamers and their broadcasts. The analysis also included questions and concepts related to spatial reference, spatial usage, and spatial overlay, applied to the relatively new genre of live webcasting.

The technology of live media streaming gained popularity in recent years, primarily due to new platforms and opportunities for live broadcasting of major e-sports events and private video game sessions (Hamilton et al., 2014). In addition to YouTube Live, the platform Twitch, in particular, offered its users the ability to stream their gaming experiences to a potentially large audience in real-time. This platform, initially a subcategory of the general live-streaming site Justin.tv, was launched as a standalone website in June 2011, due to the growing e-sports community.

Among the few studies that had been published at the time was one by Cheung and Huang (2011), which addressed questions about the audience of large e-sports events. The authors analyzed the roles of the physically present spectators at these events and ultimately categorized them into nine "spectator categories." Two years later, Smith et al. (2013) built on these findings and demonstrated, using selected examples from different communities, that six of these nine roles could also be applied to the physically absent viewers on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. A more recent study by Hamilton et al. (2014) examined the emergence of online communities around a streaming channel, and through their ethnographic approach involving observation and interviews, the authors argued that Twitch could be considered a "third place" in the sense of Oldenburg, meaning a public place "that hosts regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work” (Oldenburg, 1997: 16, cited in Hamilton et al., 2014: 1318).

The dissertation project aimed to build on this definition by Hamilton et al. (2014), which categorized Twitch as a "third place." However, the ethnographically collected results were also intended to be expanded through the analysis of the linguistic and textual levels to explore how the formation or consolidation of and belonging to a specific community can manifest linguistically.

In addition to the communication channels offered by Twitch, some streamers used third-party programs and platforms, such as TeamSpeak and Twitter, for communication during their broadcasts, which were also referenced during the live stream or used to communicate with potential viewers. For example, streamers could comment on the events in the game through audio input into a microphone, provide spoken answers to chat questions on Twitch, or talk to other players or community members via TeamSpeak, with these interactions also being audible to all viewers on Twitch. This use of different communication channels could result in streamers constantly moving between different platforms and spaces during their live broadcasts.

Consequently, in addition to purely communication-related questions, the study of a mixed-media environment also raised questions regarding spatial reference, spatial overlay, and spatial usage of various physical and virtual spaces. For example, streamers who were physically present in a particular environment at the time of broadcasting would film themselves playing a video game. In this transmission of the self-image to the streaming platform, the digitalization was accompanied by another modification of the physical space. While some streamers would overlay the entire rectangular image captured by their webcam onto the video game window, others positioned themselves in front of a so-called green screen and modified the image transmission so that only they and specifically selected objects in the physical space were visible as overlays. Additionally, third-party programs were sometimes used, which could also be overlaid on the game stream to display statistics about subscribers, followers, etc. What the viewers ultimately saw in the video window was often a modified version of a virtual space consisting of multiple layers that overlapped each other. Therefore, both webcast producers and recipients could refer to one or more spaces simultaneously in their communicative actions and use them specifically if needed.

The primary data source for the study was the live streams on Twitch, including the integrated chat on the homepage, and secondarily the broadcasts or contributions via TeamSpeak. The data collection involved recording the contributions of one to two English-speaking streamers over a specific period during their respective streaming times. For data preparation, the linguistic content of the contributions was transcribed, as well as the gestures, gaze direction, and body or avatar position of the streamers, to create a written corpus that, together with the audiovisual material, would form the basis for qualitative analysis. In addition to ethnographic methods, methods of conversation analysis (see Sacks, 1992; Schegloff, 2002 [1970], 2007) and (multimodal) discourse analysis (see Baldry & Thibault, 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) were to be applied. Other concepts relevant to the study included Computer-Mediated Communication (see Georgakopoulou, 2011; Herring, 2007), Chatspeak (see Cherny, 1999), Space in Interaction (see Hausendorf, 2013), Space in Computer-Mediated Communication (see Beisswenger, 2013), and Audience Design (see Bell, 1991; Goodwin, 1986).