Twitch is the world’s largest live streaming platform for video game content, attracting 15 million users every day (Perez, 2018). While Twitch is the choice platform for eSports and other video game-related events, it is also the platform which allows gamers to entertain the world, make new game-loving friends and even earn a living.

The success of individual streamers on Twitch can be epitomised by Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins. As a young man who previously worked at a fast food restaurant to support his college tuition, he now earns a minimum of $500,000 per month playing games on Twitch (Montag, 2018).

The success of individuals on Twitch is something that has always intrigued me. Why is watching other people play video games so popular? Why is it a viable and successful career option for some people? These are some questions I would like to help answer in this article.

Please note that this article will focus on individual streamers playing video games rather than eSports events; I will be exploring the popularity of eSports in a future article.

As usual, I will include a summary at the bottom if you do not wish to read everything. Please enjoy!

The World Laughs With You

Back in my article on The Psychology of Improving Online Gaming Behaviour, I talked about how part of the fun of psychology is gaining empirical evidence for classic idioms. The idiom I would like to talk about today is ‘laugh, and the world laughs with you’.

In a recently published Master’s thesis, it was found that a motivational factor for selecting a streamer to watch on Twitch is whether they used a camera (Sabia, 2018). Indeed, when you browse Twitch by most popular channels, it is very common to see rows of individuals playing games with a camera. Why does this help the entertainment experience? To answer this question, I would like to take you on a journey.

In 1962, a boarding school in Tanzania was shut down for over two months. It wasn’t due to a disease outbreak. It wasn’t due to structural issues in the building.

It was due to a widespread laughing fit.

What began as three girls laughing escalated into 95 students laughing uncontrollably. While the laughing fit initially started in one school, it spread around the region and eventually resulted in the temporary closure of 14 schools (Provine, 2001). This behavioural contagion intrigued researchers, encouraging them to investigate the outbreak and the nature of laughter itself. It was discovered that it was easier to be inflicted with the laughing fit if you shared things in common with the person currently having a laughing fit (Rankin & Philip, 1963; Ebrahim, 1968; Muhangi, 1973).

Fast-forward to the 1990s, where a team of neuroscientists make a discovery that is still marvelled at today. While measuring brain activity in monkeys, researchers noticed that the same neurons fired when a monkey picked up a peanut and when it watched a researcher pick up a peanut. These neurons, located in the F5 region of the frontal cortex, have been titled ‘mirror neurons’. Mirror neurons fire both when someone carries out an action and when someone watches another person carry out the action (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2008; Rizzolatti & Craighero, 2004; Miller, 2005).

Rizzolatti and colleagues later found support for the existence of mirror neurons in humans. Mirror neurons would fire both when hand and facial movements were made, and when the participant witnessed someone else making hand and facial movements (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia; Rifkin, 2009).

As further research is conducted on mirror neurons, they have adopted another name – ‘empathy neurons’. It is argued that it is mirror neurons that allow us to empathise with others and understand how they are feeling in the moment (Blakeslee, 2006; Dossey, 2010). As laughter is a social reaction to humour, this could act as an invitation to share in the person’s joy which is picked up by empathy neurons (Dossey). This theory is used to explain why biological arousal is doubled while watching people laugh during a conversation rather than simply laughing yourself (Marci et al., 2004).

So why is all of this important for streaming with a camera? There are two important findings here.

Not only is there evidence of laughter being contagious, but there is biological evidence that watching people experience emotions makes us likely to experience them ourselves. As seen in the boarding school example, this effect is more pronounced if we share more in common with the person. This could be anything: same gender, same taste in games, same sense of humour etc.

Simply put, if something funny happens to our favourite streamer and they start laughing, neuropsychology dictates that we’ll also feel like laughing with them.

Evidence suggests that having a streamer in your life that is a source of entertainment and laughter has both physical and mental health benefits. For physical health, laughter can reduce stress, increase immune system activity, and can reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes (Harvard Medical School, 2010). For our mental health, humour and laughter can induce the release of dopamine, serotonin and endorphins. These neurochemicals can improve our mood, relax us and can even act as natural pain relief (Harvard Medical School).

Play Hard

We have established that watching entertaining streamers can be beneficial for our health, but what other ways can watching streams benefit us? To dive further into this, I would like to introduce some research on the study of personality.

Two personality terms that you almost certainly have come across in your life are ‘extraversion’ and ‘introversion’. It is probable that you have heard them defined in the following way: extraverts love people and social contact, while introverts hate people and social contact.

Not only is this an oversimplification of extraversion and introversion, but it is simply untrue. Pioneered by Jung (1967), extraversion and introversion refers to how humans relate to and engage with the world around us. While social confidence and socialising comes naturally to extraverts, introverts tend to be more shy and reserved. This does not mean that introverts hate people or do not enjoy spending time with friends.

However, one interesting part of this personality dichotomy is how introverts and extraverts recharge their batteries. Extraverts gain energy by talking and spending time with others, while introverts would prefer to spend time alone to recover from exhaustion. In fact, introverts may struggle to socialise when they are fatigued and may experience social and emotional burnout more readily than extraverts (Eastburg et al., 1994; Francis et al., 2004; Michielsen et al., 2004).

This leaves introverts with a dilemma. Introverts like people and are capable of feeling loneliness, but the stress of life may leave them with insufficient energy to spend time with friends. To compensate for this, introverts have been turning to the internet to strengthen friendships and build new ones, whether it is talking to friends on Facebook or making new friends on World of Warcraft (Hu et al., 2017; Reer & Krämer, 2017).

Online communication is helpful for introverts because it grants them social contact without the overstimulation and exhaustion that may come with offline socialising. When it comes to Twitch, this gives introverts the best of both worlds. They are able to sit in the comfort of their own home, engage with the chat, engage with the streamer and reap the health benefits of watching someone have fun while recharging their batteries. Engaging in streaming communities can also be helpful for extraverts who are unable to spend time with friends offline. This ability for social offline butterflies to also become social online butterflies has been referred to as the ‘rich-get-richer’ hypothesis (Kraut et al., 2002).

Work Hard

Evidence suggests that streams are good for us during our leisure time, but what about our work time?

Sticking with extraversion/introversion research, fields such as Educational and Cognitive Psychology have explored the optimal working conditions for these people. The typical consensus is that introverts perform best during silence, while extraverts don’t mind a bit of noise while working (Campbell & Hawley, 1982).

However, a criticism of this research is that ‘noise’ is typically measured using recordings of unpleasant noise such as construction work. What happens when we introduce more pleasant noise to the work environment?

A study by Dobbs et al. (2011) did just this. Introvert/extravert test performance was measured under three conditions: silence, unpleasant noise and pleasant noise (music). While introverts still performed best under silence, test performance was better under pleasant noise than unpleasant noise.

For extraverts, the findings were interesting – they performed best under pleasant noise.

This finding has two implications. Firstly, if an extravert is working and notices their favourite streamer go live, their productivity may be boosted by listening to them in the background. Secondly, the world is sometimes not able to provide introverts with the silence that they need to work. If an introvert finds themselves unable to escape a noisy situation (such as people talking loudly), drowning out the noise with something more pleasant will offer a boost to their productivity.

Is Kindness Its Own Reward?

So far in this article, my focus has been on the health, enjoyment and productivity of the audience. Now I would like to switch the focus to streamers and dive into why Twitch may be a successful career option.

Excluding corporate sponsorships, streamers may be reliant on the financial support of their audience through subscriptions, Twitch Bits and donations. What encourages people to financially support a streamer that they could watch for free anyway?

To answer this, I would like to explore another idiom: ‘kindness is its own reward’. Or is it?

When someone chooses to financially support a streamer, it could be said that they are engaging in altruism. Altruism is typically defined as engaging in behaviour that is beneficial to another person while disadvantaging ourselves (West et al., 2007). In this scenario, it could be sending money to a streamer instead of treating ourselves to a game. We sacrifice a reward for ourselves because it is good to be kind to others.

But is this really true? Do we receive no rewards from sacrificial behaviour?

This is incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, streams are typically structured in a way that acknowledges kindness. If someone subscribes or donates during a stream, the streamer and the audience will be notified through a fun jingle, an amusing GIF or an automated message reader; the streamer will then take the time to thank the person for their generosity. Secondly, biological studies of altruism suggest that we do indeed receive rewards for good deeds.

When we are altruistic, we are rewarded with bursts of serotonin and dopamine (Breuning, 2015). As mentioned above, these neurochemicals can help us feel happy, calm and can even act as pain relief (Harvard Medical School). However, being altruistic provides us with yet another helpful neurochemical – oxytocin (Kim et al., 2010).

Oxytocin is a neurochemical that helps us forge social bonds, feel closer to one another and gives us a secure sense of belonging (Yang et al., 2013). When we choose to financially support a streamer, our brain tells us that we are a valuable, wanted and helpful member of the community. This is further cemented by the streamer taking the time to personally thank the supporter in front of the community of viewers. By helping their favourite streamer pay their bills, a supporter is rewarded with several positive neurochemicals that relaxes them, makes them feel good about themselves and tells them they are a loved member of a community.

In conclusion, the evidence suggests that Twitch may be popular for a number of reasons. Watching people laugh and have fun is very good for our health and wellbeing, can help us feel socially connected, can provide us with energy and can boost our productivity. When we give back to content creators that entertain and energise us, we are rewarded with several neurochemicals that elate us and make us feel like a valuable and wanted member of a community.

Thank you all very much for reading! This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Matt Demers, Albert S Calderon, Kyle T, Kyle Ryan, Andrew Shirvis, redKheld and DigitalPsyche. Thank you!

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Summary

The success of Twitch encouraged me to use psychology to help explain why it is so popular, what keeps people coming back and how gamers can earn a living through it.

Watching people laugh and have fun playing video games causes the same neurons in our brain to fire as if we were the ones having fun – these are called mirror/empathy neurons. These neurons help us join in with the fun of the streamer and we may laugh along with them as laughter is a social contagion. Having fun and joining in with the laughter has physical and mental health benefits for the audience, including reduced stress, improved mood and even pain relief.

Streams are helpful for introverts who are too fatigued to socialise in the offline world and can help them feel more socially connected. Extraverts can be energised by engaging with streamers and the chat if they are unable to spend time with others.

Watching streams in the background while doing work may boost the productivity of extraverts. While silence is still the preferred working condition for introverts, pleasant background noise such as streams can help drown out unpleasant noise and boost productivity.

Streamers are able to earn a living through Twitch due to the rewards provided to an audience member by engaging in altruism. Someone who chooses to support a streamer will be rewarded with a cocktail of positive neurochemicals that help them feel relaxed, happy and loved by a community.

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