That's Such a Show!: Constructing the Entertaining Spectacle in Game Live Streaming

This study examines how particular moments in game live streaming become entertaining spectacles that draw intense audience reactions. Rather than treating livestreaming as a general practice centered on viewer motivations, it focuses on highlight moments and argues that these are socially constructed within a co-performed, interactive environment. The theoretical framework combines Goffman's dramaturgy, interactivity theory, incongruity humour, Collins's interaction ritual model, and Debord's concept of the spectacle to explain how an ordinary event is charged with affect, amplified through collective participation, and transformed into a self-contained cultural product.

The central finding is that spectacle does not originate from the game itself but emerges through a two-part mechanism of trigger and interactive ritual. A trigger is an event that creates a sudden convergence of audience attention, but it becomes spectacle only when audiences collectively notice, imitate, and amplify it through chat responses while the streamer engages with those reactions. Based on this process, the authors identify four types of entertaining spectacle: reversal spectacle, where gameplay deviates from a streamer's persona or viewers' baseline skill assumptions; conflict spectacle, triggered by interpersonal confrontation during play; performative spectacle, arising from deliberate transgressions of play logic or non-game interstitial performances; and audience-driven spectacle, initiated by chat-generated memes.

The study is qualitative and draws on discourse-centred online ethnography of non-esports streamers on Douyin and Huya playing the mobile multiplayer game Honor of Kings. Its method relies on full-session screen recordings, verbal performances, and synchronous chat logs, analysed to identify highlight moments marked by surges of danmu activity. The findings are presented as preliminary, and the sample is limited to a single game and two Chinese platforms, which bounds the generalisability of the typology.