The Stories Told in Professional Video Game Live Streaming: What Does It Mean To Be a Professional Video Game Streamer? A Case Study of the Most Popular Twitch-Streamer Ninja
Authors: Rohde Paul 
Published: August 2020

The gaming industry is now one of the largest entertainment industries and one of the rising sub-industry is video game live streaming (Video Gaming Industry, 2018). Building on the work of Johnson and Woodcock (2019), who interviewed PVGLS to construct life and career narratives based on commonalities and differences, this paper reconstructed how journalists are representing the lives and careers of PVGLS. In addition to representational analysis, a single case study design was chosen to focus on the reconstruction of one original in-depth narrative. As the case subject, the most popular video game live streamer, Mr. Blevins was elected because he represents the most successful case of a PVGLS and usually this status also makes him the most influential opinion leaders in terms of culture and practices within one community. Thus, aspiring professional or already PVGLS tend to look at Ninja as a role model and heuristic for mindsets and best practices to adopt. Consequently, his thoughts about himself as a PVGLS, the community of PVGLS and the community of VGLS are espe-cially relevant. Ultimately, he represents also the whole PVGLS community as a whole when he gives interviews on big shows on traditional media channels (Cash, 2018). To enable tri-angulation 15 written news article interviews were collected from different news outlets.Compared to Johnson &amp; Woodcock (2019) analysis of past narratives that focused on the question how PVGLS moved to streaming, this study goes more in-depth in the past narrative of PVGLS by starting with Blevins childhood and identifying subsequent the crucial events and factors influencing his current mindset, behavior and successful position. His superior ability to perform and provide a high-level gaming and entertainment experience is influ-enced by his early on favorable social environment (i.e., parents, siblings, friends, wife), the personal inclination for competitive gaming and entertainment, high drive for learning and a vast amount of practice. After understanding the factors that got him to his current position, we reconstruct his current daily life with the potentials, challenges and his motivation. Mr. Blevins’s past and present narratives echo the finding of Johnson &amp; Woodcock (2019) that PVGLS’s amount of work-ing time devoted to streaming was significant, often far more than the 35 average job hours. However, compared to the PVGLS interviews by Johnson and Woodcock (2019), Mr. Blevins seems also to exhibit a more entrepreneurial and profit-optimizing mindset. Overall, the reconstructed narrative, based on the journalists' interests, explores more in-depth what it means to be a PVGLS. In fact, the focus is on his life as a PVGLS, his challenges and poten-tials as a PVGLS, PVGLS as a career path. Blevins narrative clearly outlines the importance of various factors to become and stay one of the most popular and successful PVGLS. There is a large overlap in the factors mentioned in the past narrative, namely intense work ethic, sacrifice of social and personal goals, supportive social relationships, the motivation for this intense work ethic of achieve a certain level of financial security and the pressure to perform and compete at a high level to secure these financial outcomes. Ultimately, we investigated his perceptions and ambitions about his future. In many areas, there is an overlap between the attitudes and topics found by Johnson and Woodcock (2019) in their interviews. Both Mr. Blevins and the interviewed PVGLS share (1) the enjoy of their work and want it to continue indefinitely, despite the substantial amounts of time and effort investment and the emotional and background labor (2) feelings of precariousness in their streaming activities, having a backup plan (3) the common belief that Twitch and streaming would only continue to grow. It is surprising that even with Mr. Blevins’s level of financial success, being the biggest streamer in the world, he shares the sentiment of precariousness indicating a more cultural subjective than objective opinion. Further, Mr. Blevins seems more confident and optimistic about his future overall compared to the interviews PVGLS as Johnson and Woodcock (2019). Compared to Mr. Blevins’s clear vision for the future of his brand, Johnson and Woodcock (2019) do not mention any considerations of PVGLS for brand strategy and further expansion plans indicating a lack of strategizing and vision.