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- Title
Twitch spouse: Livestreaming and the legacy of spousal labour in the video game industry.
- Authors
Tran, Christine H
- Abstract
Precarious careers in the games industry have long relied on the unpaid and largely feminized support of spouses and family members. This paper addresses the role of spouses and other domestic cohabitants in the production of live game broadcasts on Twitch, Amazon's world-leading platform in live video entertainment. I introduce the heuristic of the 'Twitch Spouse' to underscore the crucial role that domestic partners have played as invisible workers in the wider games industry, whose precarious conditions have been extended by the rise of at-home livestreaming. Drawing from 'playful' interviews and ethnographic observation with 12 Twitch creators located across the United States and Canada, I delineate three themes by which the partners of Twitch streamers vitally contribute to livestreaming: collaborative space production, the management of intimacy, and timekeeping. Herein, I show how a theorization of the 'Twitch Spouse' will build future pathways for recognizing the intertwined struggles of domestic and digital work within the precarious horizons of the game industry. This paper argues that Twitch streamers' conceptualizations of intimate partners' supportive labour reinforce domesticity and visibility as co-extended forces in the evolving relevance of digital labour to contemporary capitalism.
- Subjects
CANADA; VIDEO game industry; GAMES industry; UNMARRIED couples; HOUSEKEEPING; INTIMATE partner violence; SPOUSES
- Publication
Global Media & China, 2024, Vol 9, Issue 2, p173
- ISSN
2059-4364
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/20594364241247675