Beyond Play: Towards a Non-Gaming-Centric Gaming Research

This article proposes a multi-level framework for understanding game streamers as intermediaries who connect three domains: the self (micro level), where streamers' identities, motivations, and affective labour are shaped by biography and platform dependency; the community (meso level), where audience co-construction, third-place dynamics, and shared norms shape streams; and the platformised industry (macro level), where gatekeeping, platform infrastructural power, and regulatory fragmentation define the conditions of work. Drawing on deep mediatisation and communicative figurations theory, the authors argue that existing research has examined streaming through separate lenses such as identity, audience, or platformisation without integrating them, and that intermediation is best understood as a continuous process emerging from interactions across all three levels rather than from any single one.

The framework is offered primarily as a conceptual tool to guide future empirical work rather than as a validated model. The authors contend that precarity and monetisation pressures recur across levels, with commercial practices such as the on-stream promotion of loot boxes illustrating how audience engagement and platform economics become entangled. Supporting data cited in the article include survey findings that roughly 18 million Germans watch gaming streams daily and that 54 percent report streams influence their purchasing decisions, alongside a 2023 industry figure that about a quarter of viewers consider buying a game they watch being played.

The scope is concentrated on Western platform ecosystems, with particular attention to German audience data and Twitch-centred research, and the literature under review spans roughly 2008 to 2026. The article explicitly acknowledges that it contains no original empirical data and that its applicability beyond Western contexts remains untested. Its principal contribution lies in offering a structured vocabulary for relating individual practice, community dynamics, and industrial power, with the authors identifying operationalisation of these interdependencies as the central task for subsequent research.