The language of Twitch, an understanding of Twitch-speak
When I first started watching Twitch, I didn’t really pay much attention to the chat. Usually I would watch streamers who had thousands of viewers at a time and the chat feed would be scrolling so fast that it was difficult to keep up with any one chat entry. I tried to focus solely on the streamer and his gameplay to attempt to improve my own. This had worked for me for a long time, just put a stream on fullscreen so I didn’t have to look at the endless scrolling of chat on the right. But then I would notice the streamers addressing questions I had. I would quickly open chat to see how they were responding to the question and I realized in an instant that I could barely comprehend the words or emojis being entered into the chat. From this moment I decided to keep chat open while watching streams and I tried to gain a better understanding of what was being said. Twitch recently came out with a theater mode where the viewer can enlarge the stream while still being able to keep chat open on the side. To this day I still don’t understand some of the language on Twitch.
What I learned from keeping that chat open was that language and communication were being shaped to satisfy a certain viewership. Twitch-speak was an essential component of a person’s stream and if you wanted to be a successful streamer, you had better learn it. Much like regular emojis, Twitch emojis are used to express certain emotions. The difference is that certain Twitch emojis use the faces of real people rather than a generic yellow smiley face. These emojis have a significant backstory or are people who were crucial to the development of Twitch and have now become the face of an emoji. For example, the emoji “kappa” is a way to let the reader know that the statement is sarcastic or attempting to troll. Like if I said something along the lines of “Donald Trump is a great president kappa”. I could insert the kappa emoji at the end of the sentence to emphasize the sarcasm. But what some might not know is that the kappa emoji is a former Justin.tv (before it was Twitch.tv the company was called Justin.tv) employee that had helped develop Twitch into what it is today.
Twitch-speak is not only essential for comprehension of what is being said, but the emojis can also be commercialized. For the more successful streamers with subscribe buttons, most have their own emojis that were created for the subscriber to use. By subscribing to one stream, you gain access to emojis that another view may not have. This creates multiple situations of exclusivity in Twitch that encourages viewers to subscribe to gain the best emojis. The one thing I will say is most important to anyone attempting to understand Twitch-speak is context. Even outside of emojis, there are terms and phrases that are specific to a game or a streamer that one must have the proper context to understand. But does creating emojis or using emojis to connect with viewers fall into screen work or screen labor? I also wonder how the communication on Twitch viewers affects their communication in everyday life?
