Prophylaxis for surgical site infection (SSI) is often at variance with guidelines, despite the prevalence of SSI and its associated cost, morbidity, and mortality. The CareTrack Australia study, undertaken by a number of the authors, demonstrated that appropriate care (in line with evidence-or consensus-based guidelines) was provided at 38% of eligible SSI healthcare encounters. Here, we report the indicator-level CareTrack Australia findings for SSI prophylaxis. Indicators were extracted from Australian and international clinical guidelines and ratified by clinical experts. A sample designed to be representative of the Australian population was recruited (n=1154). Participants' medical records were reviewed and analysed for compliance with the five SSI indicators. The main outcome measure was the percentage of eligible healthcare encounters with documented compliance with indicators for appropriate SSI prophylaxis. Of the 35,145 CareTrack Australia encounters, 702 (2%) were eligible for scoring against the SSI indicators. Where antibiotics were recommended, compliance was 49% for contaminated surgery, 57% for clean-contaminated surgery and 85% for surgery involving a prosthesis: these fell to 8%, 10% and 14%, respectively (an average of 11%), when currently recommended timing of antibiotic administration was included. Where antibiotics were not indicated, 72% of patients still received them. SSI prophylaxis in our sample was poor; over two-thirds of patients were given antibiotics, whether indicated or not, mainly at the wrong time. There is a need for national agreement on clinical standards, indicators and tools to guide, document and monitor SSI prophylaxis, with both local and national measures to increase and monitor their uptake.

Video game livestreamers on the leading platform Twitch.tv present a carefully curated version of themselves - negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers - resulting in collectively performed personas centred around individual streamers. These collective personas emerge from a combination of live performance, platform features including streamer-specific emoticons and audiovisual overlays, the games that streamers play, and how they play them. In this paper, I interrogate how these elements culminate in a feedback loop between individual streamers and non-streamer participants, specifically how platform features mediate and facilitate interactions between users. I also examine streaming persona as both a product and expression of this dynamic and the subsequent emergence of streamer-based social arrangement and collective value systems. I do this with particular attention to how memes operate uniquely within the livestreaming mode.

In this exploratory paper, we consider the phenomenon of gameplay live streaming by nonhumans. The live streaming of games, exemplified by the platform Twitch.tv, has emerged in recent years as a major and growing component of gaming culture. Although previous research has addressed some agential dimensions of streaming, scholarship has yet to examine the unusual phenomenon of watching streams lacking any kind of human agent. Ordinarily a human streamer operates gameplay and directs the flow of conversation, curating the content of the stream and mediating the agency of other participants. Removing the central figure of the human streamer thus creates what we call an ‘agency gap’ to be filled by other users. In this article, we explore different ways this occurs through four case studies involving the broadcast of gameplay by biological and digital nonhumans. These range from random number generators and automated controller inputs, to a live fish with a motion tracker observing its movements around its tank (with these movements then being used to attempt completion of a digital game). Through these case studies, we argue that the absence of a human streamer democratises video game play through ways of experiencing games which were not possible until the emergence of game live streaming. To this end we interrogate when and how nonhuman streamers can also be influenced by the agency of human spectators, and how the stakes of these streams are understood in relation to the game being played and spectator motivation. We further characteristic the distinction between human and nonhuman agencies in terms of affective intentionality. Game streaming allows for an unprecedented visibility of nonhuman play which merits close attention; this paper consequently problematises current understandings of nonhuman play in an era of gameplay streaming, and extends and challenges scholarship in both of these areas.

This panel presents ongoing research into online “live streaming” platforms, which offer the live broadcast of individuals’ activities - primarily but not exclusively digital gameplay - over the internet to potentially massive worldwide audiences. The largest platform in this area (on which we focus) is Twitch.tv, already the 30th most-viewed website in the world, with comparable platforms boasting large viewing numbers in China, Korea, and Japan. Our first talk examines Twitch as the dominant leading live streaming platform, outlining its evolution and historical origins while unpacking some of the fundamental user-platform relationships manifested on the site. The second addresses itself to the sociality of live streaming, which unlike traditional video media formats enables a rapid live exchange of comments and conversation between live streaming producers and consumers. The third paper presents an overview and typology of monetization methods in live streaming, focusing in particular on the gamified and “gamblified” elements of making money through the practice, as well as how these practices have evolved through a three-way dialogue between viewers, “streamers”, and platforms. The fourth paper builds on this by examining the on-platform currency of Twitch, known as “Bits”, and how the platform captured donations from viewers through the implementation of this currency system. The fifth and final paper will then further develop these critical enquiries into monetization methods and platform dynamics by presenting a number of extremely contemporary developments in this area on Twitch, exploring new the routes for capital flow enabled by new platform infrastructures and technological systems.

Videogame livestreamers on the platform Twitch present a carefully curated version of themselves negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers. This persona is encoded not just through their live performance, but also through other platform features including streamer-specific emoticons and audio-visual overlays triggered by stream events such as donations and subscriptions. From these customisable features emerges a complicated feedback loop between the streamer and non-streamer participants that ultimately results in a set of collective values performed and refined by both parties over time. In this paper I interrogate how the incorporation of Internet memes into streaming personas creates accessible avenues for communication with and between members of this collective that contribute significantly to this value system. I do this by defining the term memesis as the cultural process by which Internet users draw upon existing memes in order to create new memetic media. Through two contrasting case studies of Twitch streamers BrownMan and PaladinAmber, I examine how memesis reflects streamer agency and impacts the structure and values of stream collectives. In particular, I draw attention to the relationship between memes and stream collectives as it relates to streamer identity, memetic histories within streams, and the contrasting explicit and latent values within manifestations of particular memes, among others. Further, understanding how memesis renders visible the encoding of meaning and value into manifestations of meme by emphasising the creation process over the memetic product, I argue that the concept has value not just on Twitch, but within broader digital cultural spheres.