Broadcasting Ourselves

In May 2012, I was sitting on my sofa browsing the internet when I stumbled on a website showing a live feed of a StarCraft 2 computer game tournament taking place in Paris. In esports competitions, professional players compete in a formal tournament setting for prize money. Having done research and written a book on esports, I was familiar with game broadcasting attempts over the years, but this production particularly caught my eye. The event was taking place at the beautiful Le Grand Rex concert hall, and camera shots of an energetic, cheering audience of over two thousand people were interspersed with live feeds of the game competition. The strange world of StarCraft, populated and fought over by human Terrans, otherworldy Protoss, and creepy insectoid Zergs, shared screen time with the faces of the players, commentators, and audience that filled the large theater. Yet there was also another set of spectators — ones solely participating online. Along with thousands of others around the world, I was watching this match in real time over the internet. On our screens, alongside the video piping out from Paris, a chat stream (an old-school Internet Relay Chat [IRC] channel) flowed by with hundreds of people talking to each other about the event, and cheering through text and emoticons.

As someone who has not only studied gaming but also has roots in internet studies, virtual environments, and synchronous computer-mediated communication, my research ears perked up. What caught my attention was not only the spectatorship; it was also the forms of communication and presence among broadcasters and audience, both on-site at the venue and distributed throughout the network. I was intrigued by the experience as a media event. This show was being broadcast to a huge global audience, and as I came to learn over the course of that night, was being talked about in a variety of other online spaces such as Twitter. I had my television on in the background, but soon turned the volume down. This game "channel" being broadcast on my laptop captured my full attention. It was immediately clear to me that I needed to explore this space more.

That feeling — that I was not watching alone but instead alongside thousands of others in real time — was powerful. It was a familiar, resonant experience for me. I've long loved television, especially live content, and even as a kid I felt its pull. I remember getting a small black-and-white television in my bedroom as a preteen, and staying up late to watch Saturday Night Live and tap into an adult world I didn't have access to at that age. Breaking news frequently had the effect of helping me feel an immediacy of connection with a larger world. My father always either had on the evening news or a sports broadcast, and our family typically had the TV on from late afternoon through to bedtime. Beyond live shows, we constantly had on cartoons, sitcoms, and procedurals, and rather than going to the theater, watched most movies through it. The TV was an object our family shared and gathered around. We kept it on constantly. Much like Ron Lembo's (2000) account of "continuous television use" (including his personal reflections on how TV was situated in his own working-class home), my personal and social experience of television has ranged from the mundane to meaningful. Sometimes it held my full attention, while at other moments it was simply background noise, offering a welcome ambient presence. Television was not only a presence in my family's life; it connected me to the outside world, entertained and informed me, offered material for conversations with others, gave me broader cultural waypoints, and sometimes just kept me company.

This relationship with television is not, of course, unique to me. Scholars over the years have documented the profound role it can have in our lives — from politics, ideology, and mythmaking to socialization — structuring our domestic lives and mundanely offering its presence. Unlike some television scholars, I never undertook this object of my affection and attention as a site of research. It simply was. But that night, watching the game live stream and audience engaged alongside me online, I paused. Though I have remained a television viewer my entire life, like many I also came to spend a lot of time online and in gaming spaces. This broadcast seemed to weave together all these threads at once: it was an interesting collision of the televisual, computer games, the internet, and computer-mediated communication. Its vibrancy as a live media product, both like TV and yet very much something else, was captivating.

Within esports — formalized competitive computer gaming — there has long been a quest to see gaming make the shift to television, despite many bumpy attempts over the years. The hope has been that if it could get into broadcast, not only would its legitimacy be signaled, but the audience for it could grow significantly. In my prior analysis of that industry, I briefly discussed the use of streaming media to broadcast competitive play, and remarked on how "social cam" websites like Justin.tv and Ustream were being utilized by gamers (Taylor 2012). These sites were typically hosting people simply streaming their everyday lives via webcams, offering amateur talk shows or even mundane "puppycam" channels where viewers could watch litters of sleeping newborn dogs. Yet some gamers were also gravitating to these sites, pushing their personal computers to crank out live video of their play to whoever wanted to tune in and watch. Though they didn't easily fit in the model of expected use of the sites, they were there pressing it for their own purposes.

Things have since changed quickly in the world of live streaming. Twitch, a broadcast platform dedicated to gaming that spun off from the social cam site Justin.tv in June 2011, has in a handful of years dramatically reshaped the landscape. By 2017, the site boasted 2.2-plus million unique broadcasters per month with 17,000-plus members in the Twitch Partner Program and 110,000 "creators" in the Affiliates Program — content producers that receive revenue from their streams — and about 10 million daily active users (Twitch 2017b, 2017c). It hosts a wide variety of games from various genres. Major esports tournaments will, typically over the course of a weekend, reach millions of viewers. Variety streamers, those broadcasters who play a range of games, can pull in thousands of viewers per session. Though a thin slice of broadcasters get the lion's share of the audience and smaller channels often only host a handful of viewers, browsing the site you can find hundreds of channels at any time of the day. Though most major televised sports events still trump esports live streaming in terms of audience size, and specific numbers for any single session should be taken with some caution, the overall growth of live...