Gender and Streaming - A comprehensive study on how gender impacts experience

Merrick Hall Room 203

Video games are one of the fastest growing forms of entertainment in the 21st century. Because of this massive rise in gaming, many people have turned to watching people play video games as a form of entertainment. This is known as streaming and it has quickly taken over as a dominating form of media during the pandemic. Twitch basically has a monopoly on streaming platforms making it a very important media source to study to make sure that people are being treated equally. The purpose of this study was to study how different genders (male, female, and non-binary) are treated differently on Twitch while they are streaming. Using grounded theory, a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted to find out what kinds of experiences these people shared and didn’t share. It was found that the similar experiences were being treated differently because of gender and experiencing harassment across a few common games. Using these findings, a documentary was made to demonstrate the scope of the issue in hopes to persuade an audience to take action to combat the injustices that take place commonly on this platform.