Non-male Game Streamers Still Feel Less than Welcome
by Cristianna Libby
Throughout the pandemic, there has been a longing by everyone for a community to reach out to, whether it be their friends, family, or an online space. In the Fall of 2020, online game streaming began soaring in views and popularity, reaching averages of 100,000 viewers on YouTube and Twitch.
The gaming world has always had issues with acceptance, with what has seemed like a lack of space being made for queer people and anyone who presented in a feminine manner. Yet with big content creators like Nihachu, Valkyrae, and LilSimsie taking off in their streaming careers, it seemed as though the gaming world was opening its doors to a more diverse crowd than it had already welcomed.
Recent events on Twitch show that many gamers, especially LGBTQ+ and feminine-presenting creators, still face harassment and an uphill climb in viewership. To find out what it's like, I spoke with FoxgloveVulture, otherwise known as Emma; Sier, and Key, all of whom present in a more feminine manner, are the LGBTQ+ community, and have been streaming on Twitch’s platform for about a year. Each primarily streams the game Minecraft, but plays other games, as well.
Key, Sier, and Emma are not what you would consider big streamers; Key has the most followers on Twitch--about 1,400-- but they are all within the affiliate program, meaning they are able to make money through Twitch. Since the profits from the platform are split between the creator and Twitch, creators within the affiliate and partner programs tend to get their content pushed out to more viewers in hopes of making more revenue.
In addition to their own streaming, they moderate other streams, checking messages, deleting inappropriate ones, banning people who breaking stream rules or Twitch's terms of service, etc. Sier has moderated consistently for a couple of "pretty big" female streamers: “The difference between moderating these chats [and more masculine ones] was immense.” When moderating for more masculine presenting streamers, “it was more casual," they said. "It was mostly me chilling, watching the stream … just messing around, kind of vibing.” “When I moderated for the female streamers, there was a point in time where [during] every single stream, there were hate raids.”
Key described hate raids as, “[sending everybody from your] chat to go spam [someone else's] chat,” by sending the same message several times in order to flood that streamer's chat with any message, but usually one meant to mess up someone’s stream so bad that they might not want to come back onto the platform.
Key has also dealt with problematic raids in her stream. On her birthday, she was bot-raided -- in this case, over a thousand bot accounts were forced to follow her account by someone who had come into the stream chat to try and ruin her birthday. Key wondered if it was actually a tactic to mess with her algorithm, since she gained and lost 1,000 followers in one day (she had to go through and force the accounts to unfollow her, due to the fact that you can get in trouble with Twitch for these followers, as it can seem as though you are buying them). Twitch has actually stopped pushing out her content as much, probably because it seems on their end as though a lot of people lost interest in her content.
Feeling Vexed by Analytics
A big part of content creation is needing to bring your numbers up, so a lot of people end up looking through their own analytics to see what their viewers are enjoying. Emma, 23, has been engaged to Jared for a while. There have been nights where Emma might have been a bit too tired to stream, or perhaps she set up a goal with her community that if she were to reach it, Jared would be the one to do the next stream. On those nights, Emma had noticed “every time he streamed, his average view count would be higher than mine.”
Maybe her community was excited by new content, or they wanted to see what kind of jokes Jared made, or they happened to be free that night. It can be confusing. Say new viewers are mixed with old viewers on a stream where Jared happens to be the one playing a game; maybe he drew some new people to the community, or the sight of a different face brought some old viewers back out of curiosity. If so, where do the viewers go when Emma streams on her own?
One night, when Jared had gotten some new followers for Emma and the average viewership up, she ended up having to take a break and reflect on whether she had done something wrong in her own streams to not see that same growth. She said she "probably watched that vod like, 3 or 4 times to try and like… self-criticize. Like, am I not talking enough? Am I not being entertaining enough? Is there something I could do differently?”
Tip: Find Your Own Moderator
Female and LGBT gamers face different kinds of negative behavior. There are a lot more people trying to cause some issues for these people just because they think it’s funny. There’s usually much slower growth, as Emma pointed out through her own streaming experiences. Oftentimes, the responsibility to prevent these kinds of actions falls onto the creator themself. It's important to find your own mods to keep your community in line and go through other sites to block known bot accounts. If you can’t do these things and something gets through that shouldn’t, you risk your channel being terminated.
Bigger names in the content creating world will always face harassment due to their large size. Oftentimes, you'll find these people trending on Twitter-- people with millions of followers like CorpseHusband, Dream, and Ludwig. These names, along with others, are often thrown around online in the heat of different arguments. When there’s thousands of eyes on you, it’s statistically impossible to avoid some of them not liking you. When these people with large numbers face harassment online, it is more often than not quickly dealt with. Through talking to smaller names in the space, it becomes glaringly obvious just how little is being done to protect feminine and queer creators when they’re just beginning to grow. When there’s a lack of protection towards people early on in their journey, then there’s a less likely chance that they’ll ever make it bigger.
The unfortunate part of the streaming world is that at the end of the day, it is a business. Businesses will always choose profit before anything else in an effort to have the most money in their own pockets. Perhaps if this were different, if there was less corporate greed and more care and empathy for the people around us, then there would be more people able to grow and get their names out there. For now, even when there’s steps forward to better these communities, it will still continue to feel like there’s 10 steps back until there’s real action taken to provide a safer space to all those in it.