Navigating ambiguous negativity: A case study of Twitch.tv live chats

Abstract

On Twitch.tv, the gaming-oriented live streaming platform, users interact by sharing and viewing gameplay and participating in live chats. Negativity in online gaming is often explored on a large scale using broad categories. This study offers a nuanced look at Twitch.tv communities dedicated to the Dark Souls game series to examine the descriptive and injunctive community norms surrounding both aggressive negativity and ambiguous negativity, which involves interactions where the valence is not obvious and must be interpreted based on community-specific meanings and rules. This study systematically analyzed excerpts of chats and stream recordings of 22 live streamed sessions. It found ambiguous negativity was prevalent in cases of cursing, game jargon, banter, spam, and sarcasm. Aggressive negativity was rare but manifested in exclusionary language and banter gone too far. The response of community members and collective acceptance or rejection of such negativity was not clearly defined.

Toward a multidimensional streaming: A thematic case study of two Twitch channels

“…Beyond this dynamic, the interviews revealed various visible forms of gender discrimination, and this aspect would not have been encountered if this study had been strictly summarized in the content analysis. A possible implication of this approach is observed regarding the concepts of "trolling" and "spamming,," where previous results on context dependence are confirmed in order to delimit the two categories (Cruz et al, 2018;Mihailova, 2020).…”

“…Regarding the analysis units in this study, two streaming channels were systematically followed on Twitch: TFBlade and Nightblue3 . Both streamers are players of competitive games, especially League of Legends, and such competitive games are already known to cause more intensive activity on live chats (Cook et al, 2019; Mihailova, 2020). The actual analysis of the two channels was performed daily, between 19 January and 14 February 2021, with an average daily time of about 3 hours for watching each channel.…”

“…While in some studies they are used relatively interchangeably (Hardaker, 2010; Karhulahti, 2016), other studies insist on visible differences between the two types of behavior, such as the recent and available online study by Mihailova (2020), which falls spamming into the category of a large-scale spectrum, while trolling is included in the rather relational dimension of streaming. Although the label used by Mihailova (2020) to designate such phenomena, that of “ambiguous negativity,” refers to the difficulty of making inductions based on certain interactions on live chats, I think the use of adjacent qualitative techniques, such as the interview, could detail the extent to which the context of collective messages on live chats could be related to “negativity..” As it is repeatedly practiced, combating aggression under the anonymity of the nickname on Twitch can be achieved by actively moderating the content of comments. This moderation by the streamer seems to be a necessary effort in censoring hate-inspiring comments, since previous studies show that aggressive comments publicly exposed on chat have a high influence on subsequent comments (Cruz et al, 2018; Rösner and Krämer, 2016).…”

“…While most studies refer strictly to the viewer’s experience (Cook et al, 2018; Courtois et al, 2009; Pai and Arnott, 2013), very little has been written about the possible interactions that take place between streamers and their fans, and even much less about the motivational impact that the streamer has in order to strengthen its virtual community. Suggestive for the relational and motivational impact between the streamer and his community is the recent study conducted by Mihailova (2020), which shows that the synergy between the two virtual instances is visible: the streamer is often encouraged by his fans through live chat, which also determines some tales from the personal life of the streamer.…”

« Dans le chat, personne ne vous entendra crier ? » : Fonctions pragmatiques du bruit dans le streaming vidéoludique sur Twitch

“…Par notre utilisation d'outils lexicométriques visant à éclairer les interactions entre streamers et spectateurs, nous nous situons dans la continuité des études linguistiques et des analyses de discours qui portent sur le streaming vidéoludique (pour un état de l'art particulièrement détaillé des autres perspectives de recherche sur Twitch, voir Harpstead et al, 2019). Celles-ci se sont jusqu'à présent penchées sur la dimension potentiellement toxique des messages du chat (Poyane, 2018(Poyane, , 2019Mihailova, 2020), sur les effets de la modération sur ceux-ci (Seering, Kraut & Dabbish, 2017), sur leur articulation avec les discours du streamer (Pellicone & Ahn, 2017 ;Karhulahti, 2016 ;Recktenwald, 2017) ou sur leur rythme et leur vocabulaire (Ford et al, 2017 ;Olejniczak, 2015).…”