The Winner Takes It All: Dramatic Arcs in High-Performance Video Game Livestreaming

This paper proposes that livestreams centered on superplay, specifically challenge and speedrun broadcasts on Twitch, follow a cyclical dramatic arc in which tension and stakes rise as a run lengthens and collapse sharply after a failure, with the arc closely tracking audience volume. The author illustrates this model with the case of The Happy Hob's 2019 "God Run," a back-to-back, no-death completion of five Soulsborne games, which drew roughly twice the streamer's typical monthly audience at its climax. The argument situates superplay within broader scholarship on Twitch, including labour, gender, race, and influencer practices, and draws on concepts such as "practiced practice" and metagaming to explain how rehearsal, performance, and rule-modification blur together in these broadcasts.

The analysis proceeds along two lines of metagaming. The first examines how self-imposed rules shape the play itself, producing an arc of mastery under constraint. The second examines how the streamer's dual roles as player and performer generate tensions between completing a run and sustaining an audience, requiring strategic shifts between play-focused and spectator-focused streaming. The paper also argues that the cyclical structure of repeated attempts produces a distinctive temporality in which spectators witness iteration that is repetitive yet varied each time.

The study is grounded in ongoing ethnographic research within a larger project examining a small number of Twitch streamers, with attention to streaming personas and the collective identities they foster. Its evidence base is therefore qualitative and case-focused, combining close observation of individual streamers with viewership data from a single channel. The author frames the proposed model as a theoretical contribution to be tested against the broader population of superplay streams, and the paper's claims about the correlation between dramatic arc and audience volume rest on this limited, illustrative data rather than systematic cross-channel analysis.