Abstract

As online platforms are constantly being created and utilised globally, their ability to foster meaningful communities has become stronger points of discussion due to their ability to enhance, and in some cases become place holders for real life communities. This tendency to attract, build and maintain various communities can be attributed to the characteristic of ‘third places’, an idea coined by Ray Oldenburg, present in many online platforms. These third places are what Oldernburg believed to be integral in building communities, and their characteristics can be identified among many of the widely accessible social platforms we have today. In this paper, we will be exploring how the platform Twitch, being at the forefront of live-streaming content, is a prime example of a third place by comparing the core characteristics of both, and reveal their striking similarities as well as the slight adaptations that have had to occur due to the change in context.

What is community and what is Twitch?

When dissecting the discourse on communities In Real Life (IRL) compared to their virtual and online counterparts, the definition of community seems to have shifted and evolved overtime. The legitimacy of virtual communities have been put into question, some stating that this is the decline of “real” relationships and community (Dotson, 2017). The definition we will approach our discussion with will be contextualised in Ray Oldenburg’s idea of the ‘Third Place’, mentioned in his 1999 book, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. Oldenburg discusses the 3 ‘places’ of life, the first being the Home (Domestic), the second the Workplace (Productive), and finally the third place (Public or social places). He believes that the third place is the basis of forming communities. Third places are public places, accessible to anyone, that promotes conversation and sociability as a means to maintain community (Oldenburg, 1999). Whilst Oldenburg wrote the idea using examples of physical spaces, it wasn’t long before the characteristics of third places could be seen in the emerging online space (Hamilton et al., 2014). One of the online platforms that we will be focusing on in this paper is the American streaming service, Twitch.tv. Twitch initially started out as a way for people in the gaming community to share live footage of them playing video games, while people could tune in and could use an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system to comment in real time (Devlin, 2017). The site eventually expanded beyond gaming and now includes music, art, cooking and its largest category, IRL streaming, which all together encapsulates an endless variety of content (Perry, 2020). Within and across these growing areas of Twitch, we can see strong communities emerging and collaborating, further legitimising the function of online communities as third places.

The Importance of Twitch in the Gaming Community

The discussion on Twitch as the cluster of communities it is now,  should always start with its original and strongest community, the gaming community. Justin Kan and Emmett Shear were among the key founders of Twitch, originally named Justin.tv which was a platform that allowed users to live broadcast a variety of content, named after Justin Kan (Sydell, 2007). Justin.tv was launched in 2007, with Twitch later being released in 2011 as a spin-off platform focused on gaming. This spin-off proved immensely popular that in August 5, 2014, Justin.tv was discontinued in favour of focusing resources towards Twitch (Kumparak, 2014)

It was apparent early on that Twitch was very attractive to the gaming community and its characteristics that it shared with third places was one of the many reasons why. Firstly, the gaming community that already existed, whether it be first person shooters like CS:GO or Call of Duty, or MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) like League of Legends or Dota 2, already had huge followings. Watching your favourite games being played by someone else wasn’t a new concept. The rise of the “Let’s Play” genre popularised by YouTube channels like PewDiePie, showed video game playthroughs accompanied by commentary and a camera to capture the player’s reactions, an almost identical format as live-streaming on Twitch. Competitive gaming within esports also garnered huge viewerships, such as The International world championship for the video game Dota 2, which in 2021 reached a peak viewership of 2.7 million, with a $40 million prize pool (Daniels, 2021). The sheer numbers can be seen as a reflection on the magnitude of the audiences that support these events, games and players, showing that video games can and should be taken as seriously as real sports. 

One of the biggest capabilities that Twitch live-streaming brought, that set it apart from just watching a Let’s Play on YouTube or a live esports event, was the fact that it was a self-hosted program by the person playing the game. The mix of high fidelity (video and graphic overlays) with low fidelity (IRC chat) media created a dynamic and interactive environment and also fostered sociability and in turn, community building (Hamilton et al., 2014).

Similarities between Twitch the Third Place

Being described as a “participatory community” by Hamilton et al. in their 2014 paper, Twitch live streaming in and of itself was a gateway for people all over the world to be involved in an interactive and social environment, connecting over video games. Oldenburg outlines characteristics of the third place, explaining why communities are so readily formed and maintained within third places, which are characteristics strongly present on Twitch (Oldenburg, 1999) (Hamilton et al., 2014). Not all characteristics are absolutely aligned with, which emphasises the platform’s uniqueness and variety in its communities.

A third place should be a place where no one feels obliged to be there, where they do not feel the need to assume any positions of power and can simply join or leave at will. Being a streaming service, Twitch does its best to recommend streamers it thinks its users like, as well as encouraging them to explore its categories and streamers (Stephen, 2020). This explorative nature therefore does not pressure users to stay at a particular stream or watch a certain style of stream. This is important in creating a sense of community as it really is up to the user whether they participate or not.

A place that acts as a leveller creates a space of inclusivity, placing emphasis on an individual’s personality and not on their demographic (race, gender, religion etc.) (Oldenburg, 1999). This is crucial in creating a space of comfort and trust as it allows people to further express themselves without the fear of discrimination and unfair treatment. As a viewer on Twitch, users are already on the same level as the majority of the other viewers, as well as chatting in the stream, users are at a base level, limited to typing and sending emoticons just as everyone else. 

One of the essential elements of a Twitch live-stream is the chat that allows viewers to not only talk amongst themselves but also directly communicate with the streamer. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) resides along the side of the stream window (or often time as part of the actual stream as an overlay), which allows for viewers to feel more involved with the stream as they spam emotes and messages as a reaction to something happening in stream, or as a chance to catch the attention of the streamer. One might not view the messages sent in chat as real “conversations” as the messages are often one sided, too short to form coherent sentences, or the flow of messages too overwhelming. However the conversation is oftentimes a back and forth between chat as a separate body, and the streamer, with initiation starting from either side. This dynamic also greatly depends on the size of the viewership. Entering a chat with around under 20 views, viewing messages and engaging in conversations between individuals can be quite manageable for the streamer. When viewership reaches to the tens of thousands and beyond, conversing with chat becomes more about reading the common, overwhelming responses, where the chat almost assumes a single ‘voice’ through the spamming of copy and pasted reponses and emotes (Mäkynen, 2020). This slightly varies between the third places Oldenburg was describing attendees to converse with each other, rather than collectively with another body, but despite this, lively streams have the common factor of conversation between the chat and streamer as core to the broadcast experience (Mäkynen, 2020).

For any third place, and especially for a streamer, ease of access to the space is a crucial aspect. Much like achieving a neutral ground, a third place should be easy to enter and also leave, and is accommodating to a person’s interests and preferences, providing a relaxed, sociable environment (Oldenburg, 1999). Being a free to access online platform, Twitch is essentially available to anyone with an internet connection, with variable resolutions allowing even someone with a slow connection speed to view. For there to be adequate interaction and socialising between persons, the place should be open for a long enough time, and regular enough intervals (Oldenburg, 1999). Twitch has an inbuilt scheduler for streamers, allowing them to not only stay consistent with their broadcasts, but provide an expected time for viewers to tune in, making it easier for them to watch and interact with other regular viewers. Streamers tend to be live for many hours at a time, with the typical broadcast lasting 3-6 hours (Emergence, 2020). Number ranked streamer XQCOW streams on average 9+ hours a day almost 7 days a week, with some streams lasting the entire day (XQcOW – Streamer Overview & Stats, n.d.). It is no surprise that he has one of the largest viewership on the platform as his stream and community are so readily accessible by being active so frequently.

When choosing which Twitch stream users want, finding what is personally interesting through the help of categories and tags, make it simpler for users to find content that resonates with them. The government enforced lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown an increase in the amount of online media being consumed, including live-streamed content (Narassiguin & Garnès, 2020). Finding that sense of social interaction and community is something that Twitch streamers are seeking just as much as viewers, as was identified by the interviews of streamers and viewers, conducted by Hamilton et al. (2014). The interviews were clear in revealing that viewers can generally identify with the streamers they watch, and this familiarity can deliver the feeling of “a home away from home”, especially when exposed to regularly. These feelings would be reciprocated by the streamer as they put in effort to maintain this sense of congeniality and fellowship through shared experience and interactivity (Hamilton et al., 2014). 

Regulars play very important roles in a third place. People who, as the name suggests, frequent the space, so in the case of Twitch regular viewers who most likely follow, and in some cases have subscribed to the streamer. Regulars are crucial for setting the tone of the space, and are the ones to introduce and accommodate newcomers to the space (Oldenburg, 1999). Twitch streamer communities can in fact be identified by their chat, not only in the way they speak but by the unique emoticons that can be unlocked from different streams (Mäkynen, 2020).  

Evolution and Expansion of the Twitch Community

Browsing through the number of streamers on Twitch, users would see that the platform now caters to a much larger variety of audiences, and that gaming communities are not the only ones present on the platform. In fact, to hark back to the Justin.TV platform where co-founder Justin Kan would have 24/7 broadcasts of his life, IRL streaming has become one of the largest categories on Twitch (Sydell, 2007) (Belous, 2021).

The plethora of micro communities on Twitch, if we consider each streamer to have their own community, displays a set of diverse but fragmented communities. The increasing collaboration between streamers then creates larger, dominant communities as they overlap and combine. An excellent physical representation of this is the “Twitch Atlas” created by user Kgersh on Reddit, who gathered the data on thousands of the top streamers and their viewerships, mapping their viewing behaviour algorithmically mapping communities and their overlaps (Gershenfeld, 2020)

Figure 1

Twitch Community Size and Overlap Mapped, July 2021

Note. From Twitch Atlas Vol. 3 [Reddit Post], by user Kgersh, 2020 (https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/mu8nyp/twitch_atlas_vol_3/) 

Each community is colour coded, their size representing the size of their viewership and the thickness of the lines connecting each streamer representing the size of audience that they share. 

It is widely common that a Twitch streamer’s community exists beyond the confines of the platform, with a lot of their growth coming from promoting and communicating on other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube (Stephenson, 2020). More recently, Discord servers have become effective tools for streamers to communicate and foster their communities. Discord allows for not only text and media sharing but voice and video calling, providing many avenues for interaction between viewers of a fanbase. This is one of the practical ways that viewers can grow and connect within the community outside of an actual Twitch live-stream (Kowert & Daniel, 2021).

Conclusion

It is clear that just through browsing Twitch, there are many streamers, and even more viewers on the platform looking for connection and community, whether it be large or small. The many characteristics defining a third place can be found in the communities and broadcasts that populate the platform. Whilst certain dynamics may vary from their physical counterparts, the many wants and needs that third places provide are achieved in Twitch broadcasts between viewers and streamers, such as acting as a home away from home, providing safe and comfortable spaces to converse with like minded people and just find a place to belong. The ability to engage and then grow the already massive gaming community further proves Twitch’s inherent function to foster and maintain communities.

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