The Vernacular Video Game Language as a Medium of Fandom Storytelling and Content Creation
Authors: Retez Riccardo 
Published: August 2022

This paper investigates the alternative applications of vernacular terminology through video game texts and paratexts within fandom communities. The focus is on the use of expressions adopted from the language of video game within online communities that orbit around groups of streamers. The research focuses on their activity within the game live streaming platform Twitch.tv and, in particular, on the cluster of Italian streamers known as Tomodachi CrewFormally established in November 2020, Tomodachi Crew proposes a typology of entertainment focused on video games, anime, and manga: The community and the streamers of Tomodachi Crew apply terminologies and languages typical of the products of popular culture mentioned above to their activity on Twitch. Specifically, one of the characteristic aspects is the transformation of the English term lore into a true creative-narrative tool employed by the community fandom. Derived from folklore, the expression indicates the set of knowledge and stories indigenous to a given place, told by those who live in it and handed down from individual to individual. As Majkowski (2016) and Wiik (2019) recall, the vernacular term has become a standard in video game language, indicate the silent narrative, secondary to the explicit diegesis and composed of the set of events and stories told in a non-linear way through objects and artifacts of various kinds scattered and hidden in the virtual world.Within the community of Tomodachi Crew, the expression is configured as a story composed of creative productions of the fandom that, crossing different media, follows the common thread of the content broadcast live by streamers: It is a multifaceted narrative, what Marie-Laure Ryan (2011) calls “layered narrative.”In a transmedia perspective of applying languages across media, from content creators to fans, the research method involves the semiotic framing of Twitch consumption phenomena through contributions from academics and critics (Bittani and Gandolfi, 2018; Antonacci, 2018; Woodcock and Johnson, 2019); followed by the semantic analysis of fan-content created by the Tomodachi Crew fandom archived within the subreddit – r/DarioMocciaTwitch. The analysis examines various types of content (fanarts, fanfiction, videos, and songs) made by fans with the aim of enriching the lore of Tomodachi Crew. In order to reconstruct the narrative behind their activity on Twitch, the reference framework restricts the study to content created within a given period of time and filtered according to the platform’s own classification indexes. It is possible to demonstrate that, in the relationship between streamer, fan, and video game, the boundaries between texts and video game paratexts are very blurred and the contextual dimension far exceeds the traditionally textual one. Finally, this study is an integral part of research the purpose of which is to understand and define the new identity of the “spectator-videogamer” developed on Twitch, through the analysis of consumption practices that its characters use.