“He Tried Being Me For a Day”: A Window into Twitch Live Stream Chats
The YouTube video “He Tried Being Me For a Day” by Twitch streamer and YouTuber QTCinderella features her and her boyfriend, fellow streamer Ludwig 1 “swapping” live streams, meaning that she was live from his Twitch account and vice versa. The video is a compilation of clips from these two streams in which QTCinderella and Ludwig independently go through each other’s unban request forms.2 This video is helpful in understanding what harassment on Twitch is like for men as compared to women since the video consists of seeing the reasons individuals were banned from each Twitch chat. Furthermore, the video captures the relative impermanence of Twitch—Twitch is, by its nature, somewhat difficult to analyze on its own because chat logs and VODs (videos on demand AKA a video of a full live stream) expire and are thus not permanently available.
Throughout the video, the unban requests that came from QTCinderella’s chat were more likely to be sexist or sexual comments, frequently using words like “slut” and making comments about her body. In comparison, the unban requests from Ludwig’s chat were significantly less likely to have sexual comments directed towards the streamer. In fact, the two comments that were explicitly sexual in Ludwig’s chat were directed at QTCinderella, not directed towards Ludwig. However, with that in mind, Ludwig’s unban forms had significantly more homophobic remarks, for example calling the streamer and his other male friends gay. When QTCinderella noted the volume of homophobic comments in Ludwig’s chat, she remarked “I don’t remember the last time I’ve ever seen a ‘gay joke’ in my chat.” This distinction is important in informing the kinds of harassment that streamers face in their communities and can perhaps illustrate some of the differences in the way that harassment manifests among streamers of different genders.
This video is significant in understanding harassment on Twitch for many reasons. Primarily, the video emphasizes some of the differences in the kinds of harassment that men and women face while live streaming on Twitch. Throughout the video there were a total of six accounts banned from both chats for sexist and/or sexual comments. Two of these users were in Ludwigs chat compared to the four that came from QTCinderella’s chat. However, it is important to note here that the two examples from Ludwig’s chat were both banned for making sexual comments directed at or in some way involving/mentioning QTCinderella. This is significant because even in these instances of sexualization taking place in a man’s Twitch chat, the comments were directed towards a woman, not the male streamer. Of course, there are certainly instances of sexualization directed towards men on Twitch, but the fact that in a video dedicated to examining the reasons why individuals were banned from Twitch chats, this did not come up once but the sexualization of women came up multiple times indicates the frequency that the two events occur.
Another common theme throughout the video is a minimization from the individuals who were banned in the video. There are many instances in which users, when given the opportunity to appeal to the streamers, complain that what they said “wasn’t that bad” or other similar sentiments. This sentiment minimizes the impact that harassing comments in Twitch chats have on streamers. On the internet, there can be a tendency to assume that comments are not as impactful as they are in real life. Imagine going into work and having individuals holding up signs with sexist comments directly behind your desk so that you have to see them, and it continues to happen every day, every time you go into work. This is pretty clearly disruptive and harassing. So why is it the case that comments in a Twitch chat are not treated as similarly severe? Furthermore, in the context of sexism in the gaming world, there is a tendency to frame women as overly sensitive to “jokes,” in particular when the jokes are in some way sexist, and diminishing or down playing harmful comments feeds into this narrative. These instances illustrate the notion that harassment on Twitch directed at women is often written off as “just a joke,” as outlined in Ruberg and colleagues piece “Nothing but a ‘Titty Streamer’: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate Over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate Over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming.”3 In addition to supporting the argument made in this piece about the severity of jokes, the over sexualizing of QTCinderella in both her own and her partner’s chats illustrates the broader arguments being made about the sexist environment that female streamers face within the Twitch community.
Overall, QTCinderella’s video “He Tried Being Me For a Day,” is helpful in illustrating some of the different kinds of harassment that streamers on Twitch face during their streams, specifically highlighting some differences in experience between men and women on the platform. The video can provide insight and perspective into what the experience of streaming on Twitch is like by showcasing a subset of the kinds of messages streamers receive. Additionally, the video also illustrates some of the nuances of moderation as all of the individuals who submitted unban requests had to be banned by a moderator or the streamer themselves. Female Twitch streamers frequently face sexism on the platform, and this video demonstrates just that—the amount and kinds of sexism women face on the platform on a regular basis.
Footnotes
- Note: As of writing this, Ludwig is a streamer exclusively on YouTube, however at the time of the video, he was exclusively a Twitch streamer, and the video in question is compiled of clips from Twitch.
- See methodologies section for a full description of what constitutes an unban request.
- Kathryn Brewster, Amanda L. L. Cullen, and Bonnie Ruberg, “Nothing but a ‘Titty Streamer’: Legitimacy, Labor, and the Debate Over Women’s Breasts in Video Game Live Streaming,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 36, no. 5 (2019).