Never give up,never surrender: Game live streaming,neoliberal work,and personalized media economies

Live streaming, Twitch, and YouTube Gaming

In recent years, live streaming has become a potentially lucrative economic opportunity on various platforms, particularly Twitch.tv, where the individual streamer is able to be a content producer for a few or thousands of people at a time. Viewers or spectators in live streaming has always been a crucial part for gaming cultures and communities to congeal (Taylor, 2006, 2018). These communities are built over time through various interactions between streamer and viewers and where certain viewers will become moderators of the live chat or donators. Insightful research on Twitch has looked into the feelings of closeness that viewers feel with live streamers and the aspirations or ability of a streamer to potentially become an economically successful Internet celebrity or influencer (Abidin, 2018; Gandolfi, 2016; Johnson and Woodcock, 2017). Critical research on Xbox LIVE and Twitch has looked into the racist and sexist environments that online platforms provide for folks of color and women (Gray, 2011, 2017; Taylor, 2018). As evident, much of the current scholarship on live streaming has rightly so revolved around the problematics of Twitch, but has not considered the politics of YouTube Gaming. Although a relatively new live streaming platform, an empirical study on YouTube Gaming and its gendered politics and the personalization of media economies is crucial in expanding critical games studies scholarship and thinking how live streaming as a form of work is always in frenetic flux.

Unlike Twitch, YouTube Gaming shows nearly every game and gamer who is live on the site’s homepage regardless of subscribers or current viewers and a separate page for currently top live channels. ² This means one person with 150 currently watching and another person with 15,000 currently watching might be listed in close proximity on the same webpage. This way of showcasing live streams helps those with smaller viewership have access to those switching live streams to see who else is playing. Also, one’s YouTube Channel is the same for their YouTube Gaming channel and will link to uploaded and past streams, if the streamer makes them public. Jubilee has expressed this as being one of the main reasons why she prefers YouTube Gaming over Twitch since she gets an influx of viewers from those popular games, like Fortnite, as people switch streams to see who and what other games are live (see Supplemental Figure 6). Furthermore, she has made a name for herself on YouTube and her audience would not necessarily follow her over to Twitch’s platform. On its homepage, YouTube Gaming also has on-demand and previously uploaded content personalized for one based on one’s watching history (see Supplemental Figure 7).

When one is watching a live stream, there are several options to interact with the streamer. A person may simply chat in the chat box on the right side of the screen to talk with the streamer or other people watching. One may also become a sponsor for 5 dollars a month. Sponsors often get more replies from the streamer as well as exclusive and personalized emotes or emojis others don’t have access to. The most prominent feature on YouTube Gaming streams is the Super Chat button. A Super Chat is a personalized message that stays at the top of the live chat for a certain period of time, with larger donations earning more time at the top of the page and a brighter color (see Supplemental Figure 8). The live streamer receives 70% of the Super Chat donation while YouTube takes 30%. A Super Chat will always get a thankful response from the streamer and will be read aloud by the streamer, if it is not profane. For Jubilee and other Pokémon streamers, a Super Chat can get a Pokémon named after you or a sobriquet you requested. Here, one can perceive how the streamer becomes an embodied worker and must think how they can commodify their communication and attention (Lupton, 2 as in Hardt and Negri, 2001). For instance, viewers know that Jubilee will thank anyone who sends a Super Chat donation, even if it is .99 cents. As a result, Jubilee creates a personalized attention economy where she will read each Super Chat and even elaborate tie in a life story with some of them. Super Chats create a personalized attention economy.

Methods

Aligning with Hine’s, Pink et al.’s, and Gómez Cruz and Ardévol’s provocation of Internet Ethnography as an open event and embedded in the everyday online/offline interactions, I began this project by reflecting on my own reasoning why I enjoyed Jubilee’s streams (Gómez Cruz and Ardévol, 2010; Hine, 2015; Pink et al., 2016). As an avid Pokémon fan for over 18 years, I noticed after the release of the new Pokémon Nintendo 3DS games in late 2016 and late 2017, there was an uptake of shiny hunting live streams and various personalized revenue sources for live streamers, particularly colorful Super Chats. In early February 2018, I stumbled upon Jubilee Blaisdell’s live streaming of Pokémon while on YouTube Gaming. She was one of the self-identified women who had popular viewership (200–500 per stream) and our personalities clicked during the stream; we’re both a Taurus after all. I never had the patience to shiny hunt, but for years, I appreciated the enthusiastic and OMG reactions when people found them, especially when it took over a week and 5000 resets of one’s game to find one.

In order to examine the contemporary politics of Game Live Streaming, I conducted this study by attending and participating in over 70 hours of JubileeBlais’ streams during March and April 2018. I synced my phone and e-mail to get live notifications from Jubilee’s Twitter and YouTube channel when she was going to go live. Participation in her live streams took place threefold: (1) participation as a lurker where my screen was cornered, as I was at work or in meetings; (2) participated as a donator via Super Chats of 5 or 10 dollars each stream, when I was only able to attend for 30 minutes or less; (3) participated by chatting with other people watching the stream in YouTube’s live chat as well as liking and conversing with Jubilee’s tweets about a shiny interaction, successful stream, or a troll. After each stream, which lasted between 2 and 4 hours, I wrote reflective memos about the stream and moments I donated, chatted, or screenshotted. Also, I made sure to redact YouTube usernames in screenshots and replace them with Pokémon pseudonyms to match the theme of this article. I considered online and live chat as crucial as offline or face-to-face interactions would be considered (Senft, 2008: 56). This approach limits my analysis on race and sexuality as I do not have demographics for each stream; as such, systemic conversations about race and sexuality in game live streaming are bracketed for this research. After a month, I coded and analyzed the data using NVivo Qualitative Software to manage and store my notes and codes. Finally, I followed up with an hour-long interview with Jubilee on Discord (popular platform for gamers to chat by text or voice) to expand and confirm initial codes and findings. Interview questions pertained to Jubilee’s background, why she started live streaming on YouTube Gaming, is this her full-time job, does she enjoy her job, and does she think she gets different treatment and have different experiences than her partner, Mikey. These latter questions were crucial as to the idea of gender and live streaming since Jubilee’s partner is MandJTVPokevids (Mikey). He has over 600,000 YouTube subscribers but seldomly live streams. After organizing screenshots, transcribing the interview, and initial open coding, a grounded theory approach was adopted in the thematic coding of all content (Glaser and Strauss, 1967). I developed the following codes that pertained to Jubilee’s streams and my observational experience with her on YouTube Gaming (the underscores symbolize closely related themes): Freedom, Happiness, Flexibility_Mobility, Gender Demands, Moderating_Banning, Money_Success, and Personalization.

Women’s knowledges as always-on and flexible work

Federici describes women’s knowledges as “a world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women’s power,” which was de-valued and shunned within the transition to capitalism (Federici, 2004: 102–103). Regarding game live streaming, what Federici has described is seeing a new transition under neoliberalism, where women’s knowledges are being re-tooled to extract the personal, emotional and monetary value through the social media economy. With seemingly endless ways to monetize and brand one’s self on social media, women’s knowledges of collectivity and expression of complex emotions are re-purposed for professional gaming to thrust mostly white cis men into professional careers and influencer status. Oftentimes, the game live streamers who earn the most money on Twitch and YouTube Gaming are those with thousands of live viewers and ongoing, monthly donations. Although the Internet has been perceived as the great equalizer of economic opportunity, it depends on mining one’s emotions to cultivate a brand to stand out. Thus, disenfranchisement of emotional and reproductive labor has branded women and femme folks as those who will just pay attention and be “nicer” and more “casual” than their cis male counterparts on streams because it is innate for them instead of taking women professionally (Taylor, 2012a, Witkowski et al., 2016). Emma Witkowski has rightly noted that women are often met with the critique that they receive views because “they are a girl” (Witkowski, 2011; Witkowski et al., 2016). Although women, like Jubilee, and other marginalized groups are making a living from live streaming, the branding of lifestyle during game live streaming still revolves around an economy of women’s previously uncompensated emotional labor. Indeed, women in gaming and esports realms are often relegated to the margins of play and cast as novices, seen as less competitive, and experience toxic environments vis-a-vis verbal and sometimes physical harassment.

With every stream, Jubilee sets up her games and begins by asking, “How are you all doing today?” and shows us her brown tabby cat, Pidge. Perceived as a simple conversation starter, Jubilee is actually enacting what Federici has argued—collective relations. This how are you all doing today and showing us her cat or her Pokémon plushies in the background is a form of creating relational bonds with her across the globe. Although Jubilee and her viewers are not physically in the same space, the conversation that unfolds on her streams is not solely about the game, but is about her life and our lives. She is creating the basis for an inclusive, communal space where people can unwind from school, work, or bills, and express their everyday struggles or pleasures. Jubilee has expressed how she wants her streams to be friendly and has conversations with her moderators (mods) to avoid viewers feeling excluded. While I attend her streams, it feels as though I am able to momentarily escape from the demands of work. It’s as though I have built up a friendship with Jubilee and some of the continual stream viewers; indeed, we chat on a sponsor-only section of Jubilee’s Discord. Drawing from the late work of Michel Foucault, Tom Roach has argued friendship can be a way of life and a key site to critique repressive gendered regimes (Roach, 2012). Much like Federici’s provocation, friendship becomes integral to building relational bonds for game live streaming. These temporal fragments of friendship and conversation can serve as small moments of resistance to the neoliberal commodification of one’s emotions, time, and life.

Although the building of relational space and friendships are reminiscent of feudal modes of women’s knowledge production and can be a moment of resistance within neoliberal capitalism, it is also met insidiously with YouTube enticing one to make their own hours, play games and pay bills, and possibly become famous. Corporations like YouTube directly take part in pushing people to aspire to be always-on and connected across social media platforms in order to become famous and grow their income. When asked how YouTube is helping her, Jubilee responded,

Because of the way YouTube gaming works, whenever I go live, YouTube pushes me everywhere. I’m on the front page of their, “People who are live streaming.” I could never get that on Twitch. Even with 300 viewers [here], I couldn’t get that on Twitch either, but here, if I go live, I’m in like the top 20 of the entirety of YouTube. Seriously, the reason that I’m growing right now is because YouTube is pushing me so much.

With YouTube pushing and helping Jubilee grow, she had to decide if she wanted to keep her 9-to-5 job or do YouTube full-time. Prior to starting her YouTube channel full-time, Jubilee worked in accounting. When she started making content and live streaming, she asserted that she had a choice of keeping her accounting job and going part-time, which she said paid decently and was a stable, year-round job, but there was no chance to move up the corporate ladder. Furthermore, she would most likely have quit her YouTube channel because tax season was approaching. In late January 2018, Jubilee decided to leave her job and focus full-time on live streaming and some uploaded, edited Pokémon content. When asked what her overall goals and aims for the channel are, Jubilee said,

Of course, I wouldn’t mind being the next PewDiePie or something like that, but I don’t think just doing Pokémon is going to get me there. I don’t know, really. If I can make enough money to pay my bills and stuff, I’m pretty happy. Like, [now] it is how I’m paying my bills and student loans. I didn’t like my accountant job as I could not make or change my own hours. (Personal communication, 2018)

Jubilee’s testimony here resonates with what Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt have argued of neoliberalism as a “crisis state” (2008). Jubilee’s assertion of wanting to be supported enough to pay her bills and student loans is a feeling of precarity and scarcity that is quite common among many millennials (those born 1980–1995) who endured the brunt of the 2008 global financial crisis. This feeling of precarity in one’s job is essential since neoliberal logics after the 2008 financial crisis have been reconfigured to support loving one’s job, being flexible with hours, and taking on risks (Neff, 2012 in Duffy, 2017; Johnson and Woodcock, 2017). Furthermore, the crisis state of neoliberalism decimates organized, factory (office) labor in favor of what Negri has termed the “factory without walls” (Negri, 1989), in which all of society, particularly through technological shifts, is placed at the point of being mined for value and self-control (Clough, 2008; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Hardt, 1999; Read, 2003; Rose and Miller, 1992). In other words, this crisis state extends beyond the economic realm and into one’s emotional, everyday life where every moment needs to be made productive as it can be one’s big break to become a social media celebrity or influencer.

The aspirations of becoming a YouTube celebrity or influencer within a specific network, like gaming, serves as a sign of becoming a successful creative worker and has become a sought-after position. Following the latter of her response, Jubilee would love to be as recognizable as PewDiePie (minus the controversies, of course) and make it big within YouTube Gaming and not only as a Pokétuber. In addition, in one of her streams, she was telling us how her 10-year high school reunion is in 2019 and she really wants to walk in and have people know her or be famous enough to say “yeah, I have 1 million or 10 million YouTube subscribers.” This aligns with an aspirational narrative of future thinking about work and being recognized that Brooke Erin Duffy has argued aspirational laborers must be self-disciplined and likable (Duffy, 2017). More so, they must be flexible and make a name for themselves across social media and celebrate milestones (like hitting 50,000 subscribers), which results in tracking and posting their analytics like follower or subscriber count and happiness with small donations that contribute to their revenue stream. YouTube provides analytics to track one’s subscribers and sponsors. In April 2018, Jubilee “took” a week off of live streaming and said in a tweet, “why going on vacation gives me anxiety, a short story” and posted a picture of her gaining 600 subscribers before vacation and then going down to gaining only 1 subscriber after a week of no live streams (see Supplemental Figure 9). Jubilee created regular, non-live content of the shiny Pokémon she found from her recent live streams, but it was not enough to sustain a constant flow of gaining 600 subscribers a day. Although Jubilee, like other streamers, creates her own hours, if she misses a few days, people tend to unsubscribe and even un-sponsor, which causes a loss of monthly revenue. Few streamers can afford to take time “off” in this always-on, eventful style of work. Indeed, while Jubilee was on vacation, she kept in touch with us via Instagram and Twitter and to let us know that she missed us and could not wait to get back to streaming. This resonates with philosopher Jason Read’s theory of capital transformation from formal to real subsumption. Formal subsumption was dependent on the length of the working day (e.g. 9 am to 5 pm), whereas real subsumption is dependent on technology and changes the hours of the “working” day (Read, 2003: 108–109). Read’s emphasis of real subsumption and Federici’s provocation of women’s knowledges need to be thought of as not a single cause or logical transformation of capitalism but thought of as how social relations are reshaped to the overall neoliberal goal of making all types of labor more intense, productive, and covert. This results in the game live streamer trying to balance and market her or their lifestyle even when they are supposedly off the clock.

Moderating the live

Another way that Jubilee contends with the neoliberal demands of work that commodify women’s knowledges and personalization of content is moderating hateful and hurtful comments regarding gender and other social locations. When women are game live streamers or in professional gaming tournaments, they are often relegated to sexist comments or reduced to their looks, which exacts an emotional and psychological (and sometimes physical threats) toll that ultimately drives them away from streaming sites like YouTube Gaming or Twitch. Being part of the Pokémon community for over 10 years, it is generally understood that we are friendlier and less sexist and racist than other gaming communities. We tend to assert that we do not exude the toxic masculinity or unsportsmanlike behavior that is present in live streams of Super Smash Bros. or World of Warcraft. Breaking away from this notion of which gaming communities are less sexist or racist is imperative for interrogating the demand of moderating gender during game live streaming.

During our interview, Jubilee was open about the harassment she endures and moderates during live streams. When asked, as one of the most popular women who live stream on YouTube Gaming, does she feel different than her male counterparts, she replied,

Yes, I definitely get harassed more [by viewers] but that’s fine. It peaks when I do not respond to someone that has said the same thing like 3 or 4 times. Clearly not following the rules. They just get a ban whenever I or moderators see that. (see Supplemental Figure 10)

Indeed, Jubilee and her moderators (mods), who are usually sponsors that pay 5 dollars a month, engage in the uncompensated labor of having to scrub affective registers before they “stick” with the viewers. This “stick” refers to Sara Ahmed’s influential theory of stickiness that engages with the cultural politics of emotions and how certain objects or people can evoke certain emotions, like disgust, which will stick with people when encountering cultural and social (Ahmed, 2010b). Those who “look Muslim or Middle-Eastern” are more likely to be victims of racial assault or abuse because they are conflated with terrorism or could even be terrorists (Ahmed, 2010b: 98). With this in mind, cleaning up sexist and other hateful comments is crucial to keeping Jubilee’s stream an inclusive, friendly community. Sometimes, the comments that are deleted revolve more around spamming or demanding attention from Jubilee. Although one’s gender is unknown, one person commented after the stream was over how they were right about a certain shiny Pokémon and that they were rudely blocked though they were spamming the stream and considered that Jubilee must feel dumb for making her partner and her lose a sub (See Supplemental Figure 11). These senses of entitlement and unwarranted “advice” or explanations are something that cis men often demand from or give to women.

Although women make up about half of all video game and gaming communities (Chess, 2017), Jubilee, and most women live streamers, must take into account and moderate their own appearances for some of their streamers. Jubilee acknowledged that her viewers expect her to talk to them a lot and talk about her daily activities; however, some people constantly ask if Jubilee is tired or why she is not wearing make-up today. Jubilee commented,

My audience has an extreme expectation for me to interact with them. I don’t know if that’s because I’m a girl or if that’s just because that’s what I’ve been doing since the beginning and so now people just expect it, but I know one thing is like, if I don’t wear makeup to a stream, I will get so many comments saying I look tired, saying I look upset, you know what I mean? Like everyone will say something and that is really annoying. Definitely something most guys don’t have to deal with. Like, if you see someone and you think they look tired, think about [that person’s] life, work, or relationships first. If the first thing you think about is whether or not I am or they’re [other women] wearing make-up, just don’t say anything.

Jubilee’s testimony here ties into body and beauty management, where if she does not upkeep her appearance, she’ll look upset to some of her viewers. The opposite of looking upset is looking happy or glad to be streaming, which Jubilee is content with. Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill (2018) make an important point of how beauty apps turn questions of esthetics inwards to self-discipline the body. Gill and Elias note that one beauty app says, “do you think your friends just don’t tell you that you’re ugly?” Thus, one can use the beauty app to filter selfies or other photos and make one look rejuvenated and refreshed. These become feminized forms of beauty management that trigger “affective assurances” that discipline women into a state of gendered performativity (Berlant, 2008; Bayne, in press). These affective assurances are what make being a beautiful woman clear to some viewers; however, on Jubilee’s live streams, some viewers are upfront if she is not wearing make-up or did (not) do her hair.

The harassment and moderating the live do not end with Jubilee banning sexist viewers or deleting messages about her looks, but extend to using her to get to Mikey, her partner with over 750,000 YouTube subscribers. Jubilee expressed several times this happened during her streams,

During every [emphasis added] stream people will ask where is Mikey? Is Mikey going to come on camera soon? It’s no secret that I get so annoyed when people are like “Why aren’t you doing this with Mikey” or “When will you two post content together again.” Sometimes they’ll ask me about what Mikey is doing during my stream and even Super Chat that so I read it aloud to my audience. The funny thing is Mikey doesn’t even do shiny hunting as often, that’s my thing. Our content is pretty different and when I did try doing his uploaded, [non-live] content, like my favorite 10 Pokémon or my top 5 most beautiful Pokegirls, they weren’t nearly as successful [as my streams].

Obviously, Jubilee has her loyal sponsors and subscribers, but some viewers expect her to be happy by bringing Mikey into all of her streams. Jubilee sometimes comments saying they are on the wrong channel, but there is not one stream that does not request to see or hear Mikey. Essentially, some viewers abuse Jubilee’s relational building and pay her so they can get a chance to chat with Mikey during the stream instead of taking Jubilee seriously as a professional streamer.

The brutal requirements of neoliberal economies seeping into game live streaming demands that as a job it is bound up in a state of precarity and anxiety—demands that take on additional gendered dimensions. This precarity and anxiety is imposed on the game live streamer and creates an affective mandate of happiness. In order to build friendships and be casual with viewers, one must reconfigure their emotions, in real time (Anable, 2013). This mandate of happiness on live streams demands that women simply shrug off sexist or problematic comments and spin it back to the game or their life. This mandate of happiness blends with my final section on the requirement to personalize one’s media flows and revenue.

Personalized media economies

Jubilee’s labor while live streaming cultivates a personalization of media economies for her viewers that revolve around happiness, futurity, and relational building. By now, it is evident that women’s knowledges have been re-purposed to support neoliberal ideals of being entrepreneurial and emotional, yet there is a turn where live, casual content for the masses has to be personalized. Here, Joseph Turow’s definition of personalization in media culture is helpful in situating the expanding need for personalization from not only corporations like YouTube but also content producers. Turow (2017) defines personalization as “the emerging process by which a media organization tailors the content an individual receives based on attributes the organization believes it knows about the individual.”This personalization is seen across social media sites through cookies that track one’s browsing history across devices and what content a person sees next. For instance, if someone watches a Pokémon video on YouTube, the same and another PokeTuber’s content will show up in the recommended videos section. Personalization here is consistently invoking futurity to predict what the consumer will view or buy next. Expanding on Turow’s definition, I define personalized media economies as how content producers, like live streamers and YouTubers, are responsible for predicting and building their future by building the intimate space that allows them to capitalize on their labor and life events, while still working within the corporate social media economy; personalized media economies are deeply embedded within YouTube Gaming’s economy and refers to the relational building blocks that live streamers deploy so they can ultimately achieve fame and better, stable pay that might even occur across social media platforms. Indeed, these personalized media economies revolve around the idea that one can become a microcelebrity or influencer and continue doing what they love, so long as they are passionate and constantly innovative.

Echoing Turow, Terri Senft (2008) has previously argued that the live presence of camgirls offered a feeling that web-based or uploaded content experiences could not (p. 56). A decade after Senft’s influential work about being live and microcelebrity, game live streaming and professional gamers have taken hold across social media sites and going live is expected by viewers in addition to creating uploaded content and web experiences, like tweeting. The move away from uploaded content to a hybridity of live streaming and on-demand content emphasizes a need to brand one’s life as authentic in order to stand out and become famous. Viewers get to see the real streamer, which take the form of storytelling and personal narratives of one’s everyday life, firsthand experiences, and social media presence (Abidin, 2013). In other words, when one is live, there is no hiding behind a script or edits per se as there is with uploaded content.

As referred to earlier, Super Chats during live streams provide additional, one-time donations or support to the streamer. Every time Jubilee receives a Super Chat she will read it aloud to her viewers and will express gratitude for the donation, regardless of how small it is (e.g. 0.99 US cents). Since it is impossible to see every chat in the live stream given how fast it occurs, I asked Jubilee how she and other streamers do it. Jubilee said “Super Chats and sponsors show up on a separate screen in addition to the live chat. This way if I miss one, I can scroll back and give thanks.” Super Chats become a personalized way of interacting with Jubilee’s streams. With a guarantee that she’ll read your chat, you get her attention. In most streams, if one brings up questions or conversation starters in the Super Chat, even if it is 0.99 US cents, Jubilee is more likely to talk about them. For instance, one viewer Super Chatted about “Jubilee, teach us to shiny hunt.” Taking it as an opportune moment, Jubilee told us to get out a pen and paper, and taught us how to shiny hunt and order fries at McDonalds; subsequently, a viewer tweeted that they took out a paper and wrote down all the shiny and life advice that Jubilee provided (see Supplemental Figures 12 to 14). During one eventful stream, Jubilee received over 300 dollars in Super Chats within 30 minutes of her stream. Jubilee could not contain her joy and disbelief that people wanted to support her that much (see Supplemental Figure 15). Super Chats become a way of building a more personal, friendly relationship with Jubilee while also providing her with monetary support.

With Super Chats, there are also non-human actors that promote getting Jubilee’s attention. Liking (thumbs up button) of streams is important as Jubilee archives her live streams (not the live chat though) so other users can like them as well. The more likes, the higher up she is in shiny Pokémon content when users search. To garner more likes, Jubilee has bots in the channel that periodically remind folks to like the stream or to Super Chat if they want their conversation read. As Supplemental Figure 15 expresses, one can get Jubilee’s attention and be read or noticed for the low price of 2 dollars. This automated message is a mode of non-human interaction or agents in the forms of bots within gaming that are crucial to understanding human relational building. This message from the streamer’s bot(s) can lead to an extremely personalized way of the viewer feeling happy or good about themselves during live streams, which lead to sustained forms of work.

To consistently pay her bills and build her following base, Jubilee has to engage in personalizing her content that goes beyond emotional labor. It is not merely enough for Jubilee to “stick” or put on a persona with her audiences or embody a type of entrepreneurialism. Instead, she must be relational, authentic, and personal with her viewers so she can be perceived as unique—as Jubilee. This personalization of media economic exchanges resonates with Nancy Baym’s watershed work on relational labor. For Baym (2017, 2018), relational labor is the ongoing and interactive affective, material, and cognitive work of communicating and developing intimate relationships with people over time in order to create structures of feelings that can support continued work. Baym has outlined six foundational tenets that relational labor includes that helps creative workers connect with their own fans or audience:

Indeed, this communicative and ongoing sense making elements of relational labor seemingly draws from gendered forms of unpaid, reproductive labor that women and femme folks have conducted, like listening attentively to others, being talkative and emotional, and genuinely concerned (Baym, 2017; Bolton, 2009; Fortunati, 2007; Gregg, 2011). However, unlike emotional labor when Hochschild (2003) discusses it, Baym argues that relational labor is not merely a one-time, specific performance of emotions, but is referring to the ability to build these friendly connections through continued effect that will support one’s job. The rise in usage of adblockers makes building relations to receive continued support crucial. In order to avoid the variable income from YouTube’s AdSense program, a creator or live streamer must be personable and passionate about their content, while platonically building connections and maintain interest with her or their audience. Furthermore, for any creator to start earning money via AdSense, Super Chats, or sponsorships, they must have 4000 watch time hours and over 1000 subscribers. Starting out, this can be difficult as YouTube Gaming is notorious at failing to let subscribers know when a content creator is live. For Jubilee, when she develops a rapport with her viewers some of us are compelled to be connected to her and receive alerts from her Twitter. I remember asking Jubilee in one stream, “why do I not get alerts for you on YouTube?” Jubilee replied on stream, “YouTube sends out a tweet and is supposed to send out an e-mail, sometimes I have to manually put in the tweet, but I have no control over the e-mail. If you liked this video, make sure y’all also click the bell icon [to get notifications]!” As a result, I as well as a few other viewers in the chat acknowledged that we also connected her Twitter alerts to our phone, so we can receive an SMS text the moment Jubilee goes live. By viewers connecting their phones to receive a notification when Jubilee tweets, we not only know when she goes live, but we learn about her daily life. Indeed, this personalized media economy is one that follows the streamers’ audience base. Viewers will not only know when she goes live, but get to know how Jubilee’s day is going, what content besides Pokémon she likes, and the political stakes when some viewers troll or harass her based on her looks or not catering to their needs enough.

There was one particular stream that resonated with me and made me want to support Jubilee with a stable, monthly donation. In mid-March, when I Super Chatted to Jubilee “This is for Pidge,” I was happy that Jubilee not only thanked me but picked up her cat and said, “look Pidge, you got your first Super Chat. You’re earning your keep around here,” something clicked for me (See Supplemental Figure 16). That became the moment where I did not want to support Jubilee only through liking her videos, disabling my adblocker, and the occasional Super Chats, but through ongoing, monthly income. As a result, I became one of her 100 sponsors ³ who would pay 5 US dollars a month for custom emojis, an icon next to our name when we chat, and more likely to get a response from Jubilee (see Supplemental Figure 17). This relational building through being attentive, grateful, and friendly resulted in a sustained form of income outside of one-time donations. Instead of a gig or receiving tips via Super Chats, Jubilee receives an additional 500 dollars total from her sponsors, which helps stabilize her flexible income.

Indeed, this personalized media economy is one that follows the streamers’ audience base. Viewers will not only know when she goes live, but also get to know how Jubilee’s day is going, what content besides Pokémon she likes, and the political stakes when some viewers troll or harass her based on her looks or not catering to their needs enough. The personalized media economy highlights symbiotic relationships, where viewers not only like her tweets but respond in support of Jubilee. For instance, we constantly remind her to “Never Give Up, Never Surrender” and to not let the trolls bother her. The significance of the “Never Give Up, Never Surrender” quote is twofold: (1) it references back to one of Jubilee’s earlier streams where she hunted for a shiny Kyogre for over 7000 resets and the excitement when she found it was electrifying (see Supplemental Figure 18) and (2) the quote pays homage to the 1999 science fiction parody film, Galaxy Quest where, surprisingly, Tim Allen says aforesaid famous words, which has become adopted in various streaming cultures. Jubilee even made a Teespring campaign afterwards and reopens it every few months with this slogan on the shirt or hoodie. For women and femme folks, the toll of deploying relational labor to build one’s audience and sustain income is steep, which cisgender men do not experience similarly. The harassment and constant moderation to maintain an inclusive space exacts a toll on Jubilee as well as her moderators. However, the building of friendships not only supports Jubilee monetarily, but also emotionally. Ultimately, game live streaming revolves around a personalized media economy that creates relational bonds to mitigate and support the always-on, embodied worker within neoliberal regimes.

Conclusion

Prior to Jubilee’s streams, I never clicked with a particular shiny hunter to the point of a fixed monthly donation as I thought their personalities were not as forthcoming as Jubilee. I found Jubilee to be more transparent and friendlier than other shiny hunters, as she was open about telling us this was her full-time job. Jubilee’s attentive listening and responding to us during the stream and even letting us know how YouTube Gaming would sometimes siphon 40% through 60% from each Super Chat (donation) ⁴ was crucial for us to understand how she makes a living. This also emphasized the importance and stability of a fixed monthly, 5 US dollar donation through sponsorship. After I conducted this research, I continued to watch Jubilee’s streams once or twice a week, sponsor her monthly, and converse with her on Twitter. The relationships built throughout the streams with her viewers lend support for when Jubilee has technical hiccups with Comcast or when someone tries to harass her. Her viewers, who usually follow her on Twitter, will come to her defense by reporting and blocking the harasser or will send her positive vibes in the case of technical hiccups that do not allow her to live stream. Personally, the lasting impact Jubilee has had on me is in November 2018 and after 18 years of playing Pokémon, I decided to finally shiny hunt; I was successful after 3 hours of hunting for a Shiny Vulpix and named it Jubilee in honor of my first shiny hunted Pokémon (See Supplemental Figure 19). I say this here to emphasize that relational building allows live streamers, like Jubilee, to possibly carve out pleasurable, friendly, and personalized spaces within always-on-the-clock neoliberal logics of work. Although this pleasurable and personalized space might fall within the realm of exploitation under neoliberalism, it is imperative to move beyond a dichotomy of pleasure and exploitation for game live streaming. As Hector Postigo (2014) argues, “the idea that digital labor might point to more than a dichotomy between exploitation and participation is taking root in new media research agendas” (p. 3; Fish and Srinivasan, 2012) which is evident throughout this article. Furthermore, women gamers still experience verbal and emotional harassment in live streaming and are perceived to be less competitive and professional than their male counterparts (Witkowski, 2011). To expound, scholarship must move toward thinking about relational building in game live streaming as not merely utopic or violent, but constantly in-flux between exploitation, participation, pleasure, and personalization. There is, what I call, a frenetic interplay between live streamer and viewers where emotions of pleasure and happiness are exchanged, as well as one-time and fixed monthly donations with personalized emojis filling the screen. This interplay asserts that relational building is obviously bound up in neoliberal modes of work, but through being attentive, grateful, and friendly along with being transparent about one’s financial situation, there are long-lasting, sustained forms of income and emotional support outside of a one-time donation that occur.

In recent months after this study, Jubilee has branched out to Twitch. Streaming on the two biggest live gaming platforms, Jubilee has gained a combined following of over 70,000 folks in 7 months. Jubilee is becoming always-on multiple platforms and appeasing several live streaming audiences. Her Pokémon shiny hunts on YouTube are still her biggest streams with consistent 300 or more viewers, whereas World of Warcraft Streams or other games on Twitch aren’t as popular. During her shiny hunts on YouTube, Jubilee has also taken a similar approach that most Twitch users do, and now has the whole screen project when someone sponsors or Super Chats her on YouTube Gaming (see Supplemental Figure 20).

To crystallize, game live streaming acknowledges traditional women’s knowledges and re-appropriates it for neoliberal capitalist purposes; however, it is not women or other marginalized folks who benefit the most. Furthermore, the constant stress and harassment that is put on women, as we have seen with Jubilee, makes daily live streaming a job of self-perseverance and intense moderation. As Witkowski has argued, viewers of live streams are able to invest in various aspects of Jubilee’s gameplay without having to play ourselves (Witkowski et al., 2016). With viewers so active with Jubilee’s gameplay, life stories, and the chat, some are elevated to moderator, who will remove hate speech or sexual innuendos that the bots do not catch. As a result, bonds or networks for donations and support against harassers are created and construct a form of cultural and political armor for the streamer. In addition, the invoking of new forms of emotional labor and personalizing of media content, enacts a new epoch in which emotions, free time, and one’s lifestyle must be branded to invest in one’s human capital (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Ouellette, 2016; Read, 2003). This investment in one’s human capital results in the deployment of relational labor to have the live streamer always think about her or their future and how to sustain their income while not challenging systemic dismantling and rollbacks to unionization, healthcare, and other social welfare benefits.