What the Spectator Expects in the Game of Watching: Twitch.tv, Materiality, and Game Consumption Through and Beyond Spectatorship

Coema's study examines how Twitch.tv has transformed spectatorship into a major form of game consumption, challenging traditional definitions of play that center on interactivity and player agency. Drawing on Newzoo figures showing game-stream audiences of 662.7 million in 2020, projected to reach 728.8 million in 2021, and a 2017 Google/Ipsos survey finding that 48% of YouTube gamers spend more time watching games than playing them, the work argues that watching can itself generate play-like engagement through chat, participation, and co-experience with streamers. Its central aim is to show how the material affordances of Twitch.tv structure these watch-and-play practices.

The analysis identifies the platform's interface, monetization tools, and community-driven practices as the mechanisms that turn viewers into co-creating participants. Features such as Bits, Channel Points, Polls, and Predictions foster intimacy and parasocial relationships between audiences and streamers. However, the study also highlights economic inequalities built into these systems, since paid contributions confer greater influence, and certain mechanics bear resemblance to gambling. Grassroots experiments, most notably Twitch Plays Pokémon in 2014, demonstrate how audience-led play pushed the platform toward officially supporting participatory formats and developer tools.

A key conclusion concerns the relationship between user creativity and corporate control. Building on Partin's concept of "platform capture," the study shows how Twitch absorbs community-originated innovations and reintroduces them as official features, most visibly through the 2017 launch of Twitch Extensions. While these participatory tools generate social pleasure and contribute to brand identity, they also reflect unequal access and centralized management of audience creativity. The work situates these dynamics within interdisciplinary foundations spanning HCI, media studies, play theory, and research on non-player spectatorship and gamblification.