Watch Me Play - Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology by T L Taylor Paperback

Book Synopsis

A look at the revolution in game live streaming and esports broadcasting

Every day thousands of people broadcast their gaming live to audiences over the internet using popular sites such as Twitch, which reaches more than one hundred million viewers a month. In these new platforms for interactive entertainment, big esports events featuring digital game competitors live stream globally, and audiences can interact with broadcasters--and each other--through chat in real time. What are the ramifications of this exploding online industry? Taking readers inside home studios and backstage at large esports events, Watch Me Play investigates the rise of game live streaming and how it is poised to alter how we understand media and audiences.

Through extensive interviews and immersion in this gaming scene, T. L. Taylor delves into the inner workings of the live streaming platform Twitch. From branding to business practices, she shows the pleasures and work involved in this broadcasting activity, as well as the management and governance of game live streaming and its hosting communities. At a time when gaming is being reinvented through social media, the potential of an ever-growing audience is transforming user-generated content and alternative distribution methods. These changes will challenge the meaning of ownership and intellectual property and open the way to new forms of creativity.

The first book to explore the online phenomenon Twitch and live streaming games, Watch Me Play offers a vibrant look at the melding of private play and public entertainment.

Review Quotes

"

Watch Me Play is an accessible text that both legitimizes academic inquiry into live streaming and provides a concrete base from which to build. Taylor uses comprehensible language to explain nuanced practices from
gaming, legal, academic, and financial contexts, making this book useful for academics and students, as well as consumers, producers, streamers, and designers.

"---Janelle Malagon, Popular Culture Studies

"well worth reading. . . [A] timely, wide-ranging introduction to, immersion in, and analysis of, Twitch and game live streaming."---Helle Breth Klausen, MedieKultur

"[Taylor's] work expertly builds a historical framework for Twitch and outlines how patterns of behavior have evolved on the platform without overcommitting to any last-word assessments of its influence [and] also demonstrates how invigorating academic scholarship can be when it tries to tackle a subject still in formation."---Jacob Merten, The Velvet Light Trap

"Winner of the CITAMS Book Award, Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association"

About the Author

T. L. Taylor is professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include Raising the Stakes and Play between Worlds.