Abstract
Twitch, a popular platform for social streaming in Europe and the Americas, describes itself as the leading community for gaming culture. As a window into said gaming culture, the women streaming on Twitch have the great opportunity to help shape the perception of female gamers within the gaming community but also in the eye of the public. This chapter gives an overview of Twitch and previous research addressing streaming. After presenting an argument for how and why female representation in this space matters, it describes three quite different women streaming on Twitch in more detail. Readers will take away an introduction to the possible risks and opportunities related to an increased degree of visibility for female gamers.
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Notes
- 1.
Flynn writes: ‘Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl’.
- 2.
Rankings are available based on different measures and they will slightly vary but the rankings used here are available on http://www.gosugamers.net/hearthstone/rankings?page=1 and http://www.lolesports.com/en_US/featured/top20.
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Uszkoreit, L. (2018). With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Video Game Live Streaming and Its Potential Risks and Benefits for Female Gamers. In: Gray, K., Voorhees, G., Vossen, E. (eds) Feminism in Play. Palgrave Games in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_10
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