Something weird happened to video game streaming in the early part of 2020. For a long time, platforms such as Twitch, Mixer and YouTube Live were clubhouses crammed with teenage and twentysomething dudes who ruthlessly guarded what they saw as their patch, trolling and hate raiding channels run by creators outside their demographic.
Sure, Twitch has worked hard to combat old stereotypes and foster a safe, inclusive environment by improving security, adding new stream categories, and rigidly enforcing community guidelines. But talking to streamers at TwitchCon Paris, a huge get-together for fans and creators, it’s clear that if the user-base is more diverse and welcoming now, one key reason has nothing to do with Twitch. It was Covid.
In March 2020, there were suddenly millions of people of all ages and backgrounds stuck at home with nothing to do, nowhere to go and no one to talk to. Video game sales increased, but players wanted to share their experiences – and so many turned to streaming platforms. Throughout 2021, more than 1,460bn minutes of livestreamed content were watched via Twitch. But just as importantly, the number of streamers grew from 3.6m in 2019 to 8.5m at the height of the Covid crisis.
“When lockdown happened I was training to be an opera singer,” says Victoria Adams who streams as MissVadams. “I was starting to work my way into the field, getting gigs, but then everything dried up. I needed work, but more that that I needed a creative outlet. So I thought, I like games, I’m creative, let’s see how streaming goes! I quickly realised there are a lot of transferable skills from the entertainment industry and I really enjoyed it. It’s now a full-time job.”
Molly Lynn, better known as MollyBerry, is an old school PC gamer who was in the aviation industry for 15 years. We meet on the Sega stand where she’s just been streaming Endless Dungeon with MissVadams. “I started as a flight attendant, then I was a customer service agent, a supervisor, a technical support specialist … I was in middle management during Covid and unfortunately I was made redundant. Losing my career gave me a way back into games – I had a bunch of what-if scenarios and becoming a streamer was one of them. When you’re in a corporate environment you have to be a version of yourself that’s appropriate, especially as a people manager – you have to conform. This has given me the freedom to find and become myself.”
Like Adams, Lynn found that her pre-Covid skills came in handy. “At the height of my career I was based at a very busy hub at San Francisco airport for a large airline and I interfaced with thousands of people a day. I was the one who got on the intercom and made mechanical delay announcements, then dealt with the public. I was the one they called when they needed back up to their back up. Twitch can be a very toxic, combative place, but I will talk you out of whatever mood you’re in!”
For other streamers, the influx of new audiences made them feel safer about sharing personal truths. “I talked about my ADHD diagnosis,” says Hannah Rutherford, known as Lomadiah on Twitch. “I was waiting for ongoing treatment and explaining symptoms and that was amazing, because there are so many people in my community who have ADHD too. I think neurodivergence finds neurodivergence, whether you try to or not. A couple of years ago we had quite aggressive hate raids targeting the LGBT community and off the back of that I tried to make sure my space is welcoming and safe – I’ve added extra banned words, I give onscreen warnings for content. Now we’ve created this beautiful community. They support each other.”
What’s interesting is the way streamers recognise that they’re often a background part of their viewers’ lives. A lot of people working from home miss the buzz of office life, and a Twitch stream can provide that combination of bustle and social contact. “For every 100 people watching, there might be 10 who are in chat, actively taking part,” says Matthew Ryan, who streams as Lionhart. “The rest are just going about their day with Twitch on their second monitor; they might drop in and say hello, but then they’ll be working or doing chores around the house. They’re just as much a part of the community as everyone else.”
“During Covid a lot of us didn’t really have a routine, and people suffered because of that – I know I did. So I literally had a ‘breakfast with Lionhart’ stream. I’d get up at 8.30 and people would come on to the stream with their breakfast and we’d chat, we wouldn’t even be gaming, we’d just be … there. My community is so used to that now that I have to chat for an hour before I get into games!” Adams agrees: “A lot of my audience are American and they come on to my stream at 9am their time. Often, they’re working from home, and they just need a noise in the background that they can relax to.”
The problem is that in this post-Covid era of intimate, honest streaming, boundaries are tough to enforce. “People who watch you will think of you as their friend, you have to be so careful,” says Kristýna “GhostArya” Fišerová. “It’s not like I don’t care about them but we’re not friends. That’s something that needs to be in the back of your head all the time. There’s a weird combination that happens in parasocial relationships – everyone thinks you’re a friend but they also have the anonymity of the internet. They feel close to you and they can see you and hear you, but to me, they’re just a name on a screen. It’s very complex.”
It’s interesting to see how different streamers enforce their personal boundaries. Some rely on moderators to police the chat. There’s also a new Shield Mode function on Twitch that lets the streamer immediately shut down chat if things are getting heavy or abusive. A lot of the time, though, it seems the widening audience for game streams is more supportive and protective of streamer wellbeing.
“When I started streaming there weren’t really any open, public disability gaming spaces,” says Lauren Radford, who streams as Radderss and is a Twitch ambassador representing disabled creators. “A lot of disabled streamers didn’t disclose their disabilities because they didn’t feel comfortable. It was the wild west on Twitch, there could be really vicious trolling. But my disability impacted my stream from the beginning so I realised I was just going to have to be open about it – that led to me having this amazing community where a lot of them have a disability of some kind, or a neurodiversity, and they feel like they belong here.
“I’ve found a group of people who understand me – there’s never any judgment. The community is always pushing me to look after myself more than I usually would do! They’re wonderful. I’m really thankful I was open about it now.”
The upper echelons of Twitch are still dominated by young dudes showing off their expert gaming skills to adoring fans. But beneath this strata is a vast swathe of communities built by diverse people, older people, queer people, disabled people, who were always there, but in the darkest days of the global pandemic, found a way to reach out to new people, new peers. What they found were others desperate for the same thing. Sometimes, it’s not about viewer numbers, it’s about connection.
While chatting to the streamer Nikoheart in Sega’s booth on the TwitchCon show floor, we cover the joy of speedrunning, and how he made a game controller out of a Cannon DSLR camera and completed Elden Ring with it. But then the subject of audience comes up. “Twitch is a social environment for me,” he says. “Knowing you’ve made someone smile is a huge uplift. Even having just one person watching you, talking with you, that’s a huge deal.”
• Thank you to Sega and Frontier Developments who helped in the writing of this article. Keith Stuart attended a press trip to TwitchCon in Paris with other journalists. Transport and accommodation costs were met by Twitch.
