Open Collections

Christy, A. H.

University of British Columbia

Social gameplay environments are fruitful grounds for studying situated learning, within and beyond gaming environments. Further, live streams of gameplay, including popular broadcasts hosted by expert-level gamers (e.g., players with professional gaming experience), on platforms such as Twitch, regularly draw vast audiences rivalling those of established media houses. Scholarship suggests that expert-level gamers can play an important role in advancing knowledge within learning communities. Additional research illustrates the rich potential for live streaming to facilitate learning; however, despite such scholarship and the prominence of live streaming, little is understood about the role that expert-level gamers play in fostering opportunities for learning in live streamed settings. Through an analytical framework drawn from affordance theory and situated learning theory, this exploratory study investigated the following research questions: In what ways do Twitch streamers with professional gaming experience foster opportunities for learning in their streams? What are some of the social characteristics of the stream environments that may serve to promote such opportunities for learning? How do streamers contribute to shaping these characteristics? Ethnographic Content Analysis was used to analyze 14 hours of data from two Twitch channels hosted by expert-level gamers. The study found that streamers fostered opportunities for learning in their channels through their in-stream actions and via 10 distinct forms of commentary. Opportunities for learning also arose through social interaction in the streams involving a process of enculturation into the stream community. Further, social characteristics of the channels with potential to promote learning included mutually assistive behaviour, a strong sense of community, in-stream conventions, and gaming conventions; streamers instantiated these characteristics in their channels and upheld them with support from the stream community. Finally, the study identified forms of apprenticeship, cognitive apprenticeship, and legitimate peripheral participation in the channels, documenting these in the novel context of live gameplay streams. The study shines a light on the educative potential of live gameplay streams hosted by expert-level gamers, and opens new questions around how such streams might be leveraged to enrich contemporary learning.

Text

2024-02-15

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87432

Interdisciplinary Studies

University of British Columbia

Graduate

DSpace