PLAYING GAMES FOR OTHERS

Gameplay live streaming is a rapidly growing area of new media through such platforms as Twitch and YouTube. When gamers choose to stream their gameplay, they regularly alter their play style to be more appealing to their spectators. This study examined the variation in play styles for gameplay live streamers to construct a usable typology. The foundation for the typology is rooted in prior research that identified streamers generally being either experts or entertainers. The expert-entertainer spectrum provided to be insufficient in properly representing how streamers present their gameplay on stream. Therefore, standard streams refer to streams that are definable by their orientation toward expertise or entertainment. Nonstandard streams are streams which provide characteristics sufficiently unique to distinguish them from the expert-entertainer spectrum.