Livestreaming from the bedroom: Performing intimacy through domestic space on Twitch

Abstract

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.

Streaming Small Shared Spaces: Exploring the Connectedness of The Physical Spaces of Microstreamers and Their Audience

“…Unlike the performative nature of professional streams (Ruberg & Lark, 2020), microstreamers stream from their intimate and "lived in" first places. Streaming from a disheveled home office or messy bedroom adds authenticity to streams already understood in part by their amateur status.…”

“…For example, given their casual nature, microstreamers are much less likely to have invested in professional level equipment, or to have dedicated streamingspecific areas of their homes. Some scholars have argued that streaming from intimate spaces such as bedrooms can be considered performative (Ruberg & Lark, 2020), yet our current research questions the broad applicability of such findings, especially with respect to microstreamers.…”

“…What is a "third place" to the audiences is the "first place" for the streamer themselves. Professional streamers navigate this knowingly and intentionally (Ruberg & Lark, 2020) whereas microstreamers may not. Applying Goffman (1959), the shared spaces of microstreamers can be understood as an unintentional "leaking" of one's privately held backstage.…”

Behind the Streams: The Off-Camera Labour of Game Live Streaming

“…These comments draw our attention immediately to a potential gap between viewers' perception of streamer labour and the multidimensional labour reality for the streamers themselvesand that live streamers are aware of and perhaps bothered by this disjuncture. This is intensified by the apparent intimacy of live streaming which makes it appear that viewers have a clear and unblurred window into streamers' lives, even though how much of a streamer's 'domestic' life is deliberately (or indifferently) made visible on-camera varies tremendously across demographics of gender and game genre (Ruberg & Lark, 2020). This points towards the importance of addressing this kind of labour as an important factor in streamers' lives and in the construction of their public-facing broadcasts.…”

Streaming ambivalence: Livestreaming and indie game development

“…The body of academic research on Twitch and game streaming continues to grow, and scholars have investigated streaming services as platforms, the experiences of streamers marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and mental health, the diverse forms of visible and invisible labor involved in streaming, cultures of game spectatorship, the possibilities of streaming for game development education, and the intersection of streaming and competitive esports ( Consalvo and Phelps, 2021 ; Gray, 2017 ; Johnson and Woodcock, 2019a , 2019b , 2019c ; Ruberg, 2020 ; Ruberg and Lark, 2020 ; Ruberg et al, 2019 ; Taylor, 2018 ; Walker, 2014 ). These insights directly inform our approach here, and we hope to expand and nuance this body of work by directing attention to the experiences of game developers with streamers and streaming platforms, extending the project of indie game studies and game production studies ( Ruffino, 2021 ; Sotamaa and Švelch, 2021 ).…”