Let's Play with Academia: Overcoming the Limits of the Zoom Classroom via Video Game Streaming

This conference paper proposes using Let's Play streaming techniques to address the social and logistical limitations of teaching video games in online, Zoom-based higher education. Its central argument is that the performative, interactive conventions of gaming entertainers, particularly the "think aloud" method that blends humor and affect with critical reflection, can help build an engaging and participatory virtual classroom while offering a practical route for educators to incorporate games without institutional technical support. The paper situates this proposal within growing scholarship on commercial games as educational tools and the sharp rise in remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many instructors were required to teach online without prior training.

The study described is a small-scale, qualitative teaching project with undergraduate and postgraduate students at the University of Glasgow. Participants will attend Let's Play-style workshops that model critical analysis of games, bookended by questionnaires measuring what students learned and how effective the methods were. The intended outputs are seminar plans and a teaching guide shaped by this feedback, aimed at practitioners who want to teach video games with minimal technology. The paper frames its evidence base largely through existing literature, citing figures such as Twitch's 2021 average of roughly 105,000 streamers and 2.8 million concurrent viewers to underline the medium's reach.

The author is candid that the study cannot resolve institutional barriers such as budget, technology availability, and limited technical expertise in teaching with games, and that the research is preliminary, with results still to be gathered. The paper therefore presents its contribution as a theoretical and methodological framework, together with an honest account of implementation difficulties, rather than as a set of validated findings.