Living Digital Media

It's an understatement that revision is a love-hate practice among scholars. In Chapter One, a number of scholars note that revision, including reading feedback and responding to it, is one of the most painful practices in the production cycles of scholarly webtexts. Often sent by editors in rounds, feedback comes in multiple waves; it's lengthy; it's ripe with comments of praise, confusion, and otherwise constructive criticism and usually comes from more than two reviewers. Moreover, feedback comes after an initial submission, prompting creators to revise code, designs, and textual passages. Not everyone reading this chapter will agree that revising a webtext is more affective and time-intensive than an alphabetic article. Still, many of us who publish have experienced similar pains related to revision, especially if we've sunk a considerable amount of time and energy into an article or book project and are expected to wait several weeks or months for a letter from an editor along with reviewer comments.

So if the practice of completing revisions is painful for webtext creators, what might we do in the field of writing studies to perhaps lessen that pain—or to approach it and process it differently?

In the early stages of this project, I wanted to answer that question by turning to game developer Michael McMaster's story of creating Untitled Goose Game (2019) with his friends at their company House House, based in Melbourne, Australia. When the team was preparing for the game's release, it sought out “playtesters,” reviewers who play various parts of a game and offer comments. Playtesting supports targeted revisions to a game. House House met in an office regularly for conducting playtests. During our call on Skype, McMaster speaks at length about relying on gamers in the Melbourne community for feedback during in-person playtesting:

[In-person testing] is one of the clearest examples of the way that we were able to rely on our creative community. We knew a lot of people in Melbourne; we didn't want to do any, or as little as possible, remote playtesting. All of our playtesting pretty much was done by people coming into our office, [all of us] sitting down, and us watching them play through the whole game, which we wanted to do just because it was more convenient for us, and we could actually see in real time what they were getting stuck on, and it wasn't about collecting feedback from them after the fact. We could just talk stuff through with them there and then. But also it was very good that we could draw on this community of people who would be interested in the game and were “games literate” and “game development literate.” We could talk stuff through with them in a fairly in-depth way, although we're also extremely conscious to also pull in as many players as we could who didn't have that same literacy because we wanted the game to be accessible to a really broad kind of range of people, ideally. This could be people's first game, basically. We brought in as many kinds of people who hadn't played many games as we could, as well. It's not like it was two camps of hyper-literate and completely illiterate. People across the whole spectrum, like lots of friends who we knew from outside of games, who we knew played games, but didn't know anything about game development or anything.

McMaster’s comments signal that inviting in and responding to feedback from myriad audiences can be quite beneficial for revising a game. This is the point I want to dwell on in Chapter Three. Although in-person playtesting has been a viable option for many game developers seeking out feedback for more effective revisions, it is not an approach I focus on in this chapter or recommend for writing studies scholars who are seeking feedback on digital works in progress. It often requires substantial time, funds, and space, and in-person and remote testing are rather akin to the traditional review process of scholarship. We need additional models of feedback.

Instead, to answer the aforementioned question of lessening the pain of completing revisions , I turn to stories of game developers and writers who livestream on social media platforms. By livestream, I mean the practice of composing and revising digital media in real time with remote communities on Twitch. Livestreaming is living revision on Twitch. Living revision animates intimate yet global interpersonal circulation because it requires the circulation of works in progress to online communities that offer feedback and support revision tasks. The work is there. Live. On air. For creators such as game developers, living revision is a crucial rhetorical-affective practice for resolving composing and revision tasks in temporally immediate ways well before a final publication.

When I was preparing this book in 2020 and 2021, we were—and perhaps still are—in the thick of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic. The coronavirus relegated many of us to our homes, forcing us into isolation and behind computer screens more often than we probably would have liked. (And as someone who revels in in-person fieldwork, this was really challenging for my research. More on that in the “Ephemera” section of this chapter.) For disciplines such as writing studies, we were forced to work remotely, whether on research, teaching, or digital media production. We were pressed, that is, to present our work, our voices, and our bodies to remote communities in engaging ways.

Combined with my research concerning how scholarly creators find collaborators and handle feedback, the pandemic created exigencies for turning to game developers who livestream their productions. Livestreaming is a vulnerable act for creators, who have been subjected to harassment and spam (e.g., London et. al’s discussions of women content creators). However, livestreaming establishes more public, real-time communities of feedback that support revision. Scholars engaging in such practices might help increase the visibility of their work, cultivate affective encounters in real-time, and enrich their revisions to projects from its early stages to its final delivery. Such practices might be productive counter-acts to the long tail of academic publishing. As noted in Chapter One by scholars, months of composing digital media and then awaiting peer-reviewed feedback add gravity to feelings of impatience and uncertainty about revision.

The heart of Chapter Three pulses with stories of creators in game development who stream regularly on Twitch. Game developers such as Justin Amirkhani and Lana Lux have documented their work extensively on Twitch. I turn to their stories and others, discussing their practices and projects extensively and contextualizing them with commentary from a number of creators. As noted earlier in this book, ground-level research into these practitioner stories is a both/and approach to studying practices and feelings. From watching and participating in their livestreams of real-time composing, I was able to better address moments in livestreams that were affectively rich for creators, using those moments as talking points for interviews. Interviews, in other words, helped us arrive at a shared understanding of livestreaming as a rhetorical-affective practice.

But before I turn to creator stories, I return to theories of emotion that posit the emergent, circulatory nature of affective responses and feelings. Alexandria Peary (2018), Laura Micciche (2016), and Zizi Papacharrisi (2014) are just a few whose work proves useful for theorizing Twitch as grounds for public, affectively charged feedback and revision with audiences. Staying with the present moment, dwelling in economies of feeling, and recognizing the power of affective publics are worth considering for digital media creators in writing studies. Without considering these practices, writing studies creators are missing opportunities to put their works in progress in circulation long before the final publication. This chapter details the strategies for taking on such opportunities.

After working through creator stories, Chapter Three ends with strategies for writing studies scholars who might be interested in livestreaming their digital media projects, as scholarly projects are virtually non-existent on Twitch. (This comment is not to suggest that scholars are totally absent from Twitch. Many game scholars, in fact, play and hold talks on the platform.) My discussion is based on my own experiences livestreaming for a series titled “100 Days of Writing” under the username and eponymous channel TheeRhetoric (later rhetoricrich). The aim of the series was to integrate my research findings into my own practices, embodying—and thus testing—the practices and feelings expressed by a range of creators.

Streaming and Feeling in the Present Moment

In whatever form or focus, there is more call than ever to stay with emotion—whether in our personal lives, classrooms, writing, or political commitments. Staying with emotion is staying with others, for, without others, emotion has no meaning or effect. In that sense I see the power of emotion studies still in its ability to foreground how coalitions of people, of causes, of diverse others come together and/or break apart.

—Laura Micciche (2016)

When I write, most of the time I do it alone. Most of 2020 and 2021 were spent in my home office in Toronto. I only turned to others when we scheduled writing group meet-ups on Zoom, Discord, and occasionally on a Slack channel. Only recently did I start displaying my own work publicly on Twitch, the experiences of which I describe later in the chapter.

Twitch is an incredible platform for content creators to show their work process in situ, meaning they compose and chat about materials in real time with publics. Twitch started in 2011 and claims to have more than 7 million streamers each month (“Press Center”). The service is operated by Amazon, which offers incentives to those who subscribe to the Amazon Prime delivery and distribution service, such free games and related content. Twitch’s creators and audiences mainly come out of gaming and game development but also include communities of comics creation, writing, and “just chatting” streams. In fact, U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration was livestreamed on Twitch, further cementing the service’s prowess for distributing public content to thousands of viewers with a diverse range of interests. Twitch, in a way, is a dream for writing studies because content creators are self-selecting methods familiar to process studies: talking aloud about draft material and sharing multiple drafts, even doing so for multiple sessions over months and even years. What’s more, Twitch creators often archive their work for audiences. Researchers have access to at least two weeks’ worth of on-demand content for review.

There are myriad reasons why content creators stream on Twitch. Lisa Brown (2015) reflects on game studio Insomniac’s livestreaming practices for the development of its game Slow Down, Bull (2015). Twitch was a matter of holding the team accountable while building an audience for the game. As Brown writes of the team’s weekly stream:

It unified the team under a common weekly event (streaming yourself building the game is pretty stressful, so it bonded us together!) It also connected us with a curious audience of fans. Some of our favorite moments were letting our stream audience come up with names for the characters in the game, or meeting people at events like PAX who had been coming to the streams since the beginning, and who expressed how grateful they were for being shown “behind the curtain” of the development process. (“2. Developer Streams”)

The creators I interviewed say more about why they do and don’t stream in a later section. Right now, I want to emphasize that Twitch is no stranger to social science and humanities researchers.

Recent research has studied women content creators (London et al., 2019; Ruberg, Cullen, & Brewster, 2019), game-player streaming (Taylor, 2018; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019), and audiences/users of streams writ large (Sjöblom & Hamari, 2017; Kobs et al., 2020; Riddick & Shivener, 2022). As of writing this book, however, rhetoric and writing studies still has an opportunity to enter this rich body of scholarship more expansively, as do interdisciplinary scholars who study public affect. As a digital cultural movement, Twitch speaks to the field’s areas such as process and practitioner studies (Rule, 2019; Lockridge and Van Ittersum, 2020), circulation and audience studies (Silvestro, 2019; Bradshaw, 2018; Riddick, 2019), and public affect (Gries, 2015; Papacharissi, 2014). Twitch is an emergent confluence of creators, audiences, and feelings that circulate between them, all on public display. As Jamie Woodcock and Mark R. Johnson (2019) argue, “[I]t is the most gregarious, emotionally engaged, and outgoing individuals who find success in live streaming” on Twitch (p. 818). The warrant is that if emotion is foregrounded by content creators, then the chances of a successful stream are higher. However, Tabitha M. London et al. (2019) demonstrate that women who are popular streamers are “regularly engaged in a balancing act between fostering their communities and managing disruptive behaviors, which can undermine the very content of their channels” (p. 53). These studies are useful for understanding the emotional tensions that might emerge during a livestream.

Through the lens of affect theory, livestreaming is an act of staying with emotions in the present. To channel Micciche (2016), I find that Twitch involves:

thinking of emotion as active, rather than reactive or already formed in advance of expression . . . . to stay with emotion as one would stay with a single thought or image while meditating. When we stay, what can we learn about moving forward? What details do we notice? Where does our attention gravitate? Do we achieve clarity of any kind? (“Staying with Emotion”)

When creators livestream on Twitch, they are indeed working actively with and through emotions while onscreen. To keep your work—and body—onscreen in public is to refuse the privacy of emotion; instead, you talk aloud and let others notice the details of production that cultivate and shift feelings. It’s affective labor, as Woodcock and Johnson (2019) found in interviews with hundreds of streamers. They write, “Twitch affords new ways to mediate affective performance, allowing the audience to connect with facial expressions, voice, and immediate surroundings” (p. 816, 2019). Audiences can experience the ways in which creators attend to their practices and feelings, including how revisions help said creator achieve a kind of clarity with their project.

Real-time composing with audiences on Twitch also speaks to Peary’s (2018) definitions of mind waves and weeds. Rooted in Buddhist thinking, Peary defines mind waves and weeds as metaphors for affective responses that surface while composing. As Peary writes, “A splash of dread, pleasure at a good-fitting word, or a few seconds of a daydream pertaining to verbal achievement are not affective responses a student can premeditate or import into the writing occasion” (p. 134). In this light, creators who compose in real time and in public on Twitch might have a work plan before they start a livestream, but it’s more than fair to say that many don’t premeditate what happens in situ during a stream session. In other words, creators can’t always anticipate the myriad mind waves that ebb and flow. They can’t anticipate mind waves like:

irritation, envy, doubt, a pulse emitted by the connotation of a word or memory, the adrenaline flash of realizing that one is running out of time to finish [The reading of the block quote ends here.] . . . exhaustion, swoosh of pride, a sudden pain in one’s wrist, bolt of fear, strike of hunger or fog of low blood sugar, tug of guilt, a passing question about worth or purpose, any accumulated emotional build-perhaps from previous writing experiences, the prickle of self-criticism, the thrill of exceeding a word count, the satisfaction of hearing one’s rapid typing. (Peary, 2018, p. 126)

The aforementioned mind waves that Peary describes in her book Prolific Moment (2018) are the felt experiences and sensations that audiences outside of Twitch often do not see, read, or generally learn about until a project’s conclusion. Many mind waves have long subsided by then, meaning audiences and creators are less likely to convene over, say, flashes of confusion and wonder associated with a composing task. Although it comes with risks of being more vulnerable, the practice of livestreaming those mind waves knocks down affective barriers between creators and audiences. Livestreaming helps further demystify the composing process; the creator doesn’t write and revise alone but rather amid a confluence of feelings and partners, including audiences. Livestreaming is an open window for feelings about revision to pass between creators and audiences.

Peary’s theory is also useful for understanding the internal manifestations of feelings, but her theory elides the social dimensions of affect. In contrast to Peary, Papacharissi (2014) has written extensively about affective publics, a term that describes publics that post and circulate messages that cultivate ambient streams of emotion on social media. Streams circulate and intensify in digital environments, moving indefinitely and at times pressing on rhetorical bodies for better or worse (Shivener, 2020; Riddick, 2022). Intensification leads to what Papacharissi calls affective ambience, a kind of always-on flow of feelings across social media like Twitter. She writes, “[T]his ambience is essential in providing constant updates, even when not much is happening or other media are not covering the story” (p. 130). Papacharissi suggests that such an ambience doesn’t go away when we turn off our screens; rather, affective texts and their publics continue moving, evolving, subsiding, and intensifying. Livestreaming is a means of inviting affective publics into revision processes and building ambient momentum for the interpersonal circulation of a text.

Don’t get me wrong. When I write, I find it safer to keep those mind waves to myself and forego livestreaming, closing off affective publics. When I livestreamed workshops for one of my digital writing courses in fall 2020, I experienced a range of mind waves. As depicted in Figure 13, I shared my screen, I kept my webcam and mic on, and I applied rhetorical definitions and strategies to digital projects. I had my fair share of hiccups (both real and technical), moments of hesitation and stuttering, and confusing glitches—all interchanged with celebrations and self-deprecation. Sure, it was a performance with an agenda (e.g., the lesson plan), but the sessions weren’t premeditated beyond that. After each session, I returned to the on-demand recording, noticing my ways of speaking, staying on task, and responding to students in chat. Each livestream helped me revise the next stream as well as the materials previously presented.

Figure 13
Livestreaming for a Writing Course

Mind you that these mind waves are commonplace when I teach online or in person. I suspect many of us in writing studies have had similar experiences when teaching—pandemic or no. But I’m suggesting more of us try displaying those mind waves in public when we work on our digital media productions and various writing projects. What’s at stake when those mind waves, including the rhetorics and affects that accumulate with them, surface amid affective publics? To shed light on that question, I move us to a focus on stories of game developers I spoke with for this project.

Why Game Developers Livestream Their Productions (and Why They Don’t)

Outside of writing studies, creators in professions such as games and comics have been livestreaming their projects for years. In fact, when I was drafting this chapter in May 2021, creators across both were coming together for a live-streamed event called Comics X Games, which is part of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and organized by the Hand Eye Society, a Toronto-based nonprofit organization that promotes experimental games and marginalized creators. Comics X Games unfolded over seven days, featuring livestreaming talks, game playthroughs, and panels over several hours each day. Overlapping with that event was the Toronto Game Jam (TO Jam), an online event in which game creators created a game with a 72-hour deadline. For TO Jam 2020, Attila “Gabriel” Branyiczky streamed his game development process under the name Bluish Green Productions. In our interview, he is speaking about the value of livestreaming during jams:

If I can’t get this game out in front of playtesters—because it’s a jam game and I have 48 hours to do so—then the two or three people writing back responses and giving a feedback in the chat saying, “Oh, that doesn’t really make sense to me, how’s that gonna work?” is super helpful, because then I can say, “Oh, all right, let’s put in an extra bit of feedback here and extra bit of feedback there.” Again, just all trying to smooth out the process of communicating the way that I know the game functions in a way that a player can understand as well.

This section of Chapter Three presents stories of creators and their commentaries from interviews I conducted in 2020 and 2021. All creators I reference here stream or have streamed regularly—say, a few hours each week—on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

Before we go further, though, I should probably start with a basic question that I asked creators.

Why Do Creators Livestream?

Staying on task and/or building communities of support—which, we can argue, invite feedback and support revisions—came up numerous times in my interviews with creators when I asked about livestreaming on Twitch. Talking over Skype from his home in Seattle, Danny Weinbaum said livestreaming on Twitch gave him momentum as he was working on tasks for his open-world adventure game, Eastshade (2019), about a painter who returns home after an accident at sea. Here is Weinbaum speaking about “cranking” in relation to audiences “watching.” His experience started at home and moved to Twitch:

The reason why I started Twitch-streaming this is because I noticed once someone’s watching me I basically crank non-stop. It started because my partner, Jacqueline—sometimes we would be working on something together, and we would get so much done because I was in the driver’s seat, and then we were discussing, and I would want to go as fast as possible because, you know, we’re moving, getting stuff done. I’m not gonna browse Twitter or whatever. And I thought, “Well, gosh. If I could just have people watching me all the time, I wonder if I would just, like, crank, if I’d be unstoppable,” and so I started Twitch-streaming, and it worked extremely well because the faster I went, the more interesting it was. For some really gnarly programming problems, the eyeball actually makes it harder to solve the problems, but for certain tasks, streaming works really well. And that’s basically why I kept streaming.

Weinbaum’s comments raise a good point about Twitch. In a way, it’s a performance space, with implicit expectations that you do something while on stream—chat, code, edit—let alone keep it interesting for audiences. Twitch affords self-surveillance and voluntary public surveillance for getting tasks done, for staying motivated to complete a project. Creators monitor what they do onscreen while being aware of the real-time audience reactions to what they do. It’s easy to get caught up in the metrics of the latter. The software Streamlabs OBS (open broadcasting software), for example, helps creators track the number of viewers and new followers on a live stream and replicates the live chat column available on Twitch and YouTube.

Enter the challenge, perhaps the paradox, of livestreaming. If a creator is paying attention to those aesthetics and metrics about audiences in their livestream, then they might do less composing than they do off screen. To shed light on this idea, I want to play a clip from an interview with Ian Endsley and Carter Lodwick, two game developers beyond the award-winning game Wide Ocean, Big Jacket, a short, narrative-driven game about music, camping, and relationships. Ian and Carter used to stream on Twitch but recently scaled back that practice to focus on a recent project. Here’s Ian, followed by Carter, talking about how Twitch affected their processes. They work together in an apartment in Los Angeles.

Enter the challenge, perhaps the paradox, of livestreaming. If a creator is paying attention to those aesthetics and metrics about audiences in their livestream, then they might do less composing than they do offscreen. To shed light on this idea, I want to play a clip from an interview with Ian Endsley and Carter Lodwick, two game developers behind the award-winning game Wide Ocean Big Jacket (2020), a short, narrative-driven game about music, camping, and relationships. Ian and Carter used to stream on Twitch but recently scaled back that practice to focus on a recent project. They work together in an apartment in Los Angeles. Here’s Ian, followed by Carter, talking about how Twitch affected their processes:

Rich: How do you feel about livestreaming your own work in development? I saw that you have a Twitch link and so forth. Yeah. What’s your take on that approach for game development?

Ian Endsley: I love watching people [stream], and I actually really liked doing it. I think it keeps me focused, and it’s fun to talk out what I’m trying to do while I’m doing it. But I’m also just not super comfortable in front of the camera in that way, so I really have to do a lot of prep work and planning to feel like I have a task to do. I’d like to get in a place where I stream more. I really enjoyed when we did that a couple years ago, and I think it’s awesome that people do it. I love watching people do that. But then, like, I don’t know—when it’s the morning and I actually have to do it, I clam up a little bit.

Rich: Carter, what do you think about that?

Carter Lodwick: I haven’t done too much streaming of my work process. I’ve done it a couple times, and I do enjoy it, but it generally to me feels more like a public service rather than as a way to help my own process, you know? When I do it, I’m 80% focusing on describing what I’m doing and trying to make it clear to people who are watching and 20% actually being able to, like, focus on the best way that I want to solve this problem.

Endsley and Lodwick’s comments are interesting because digital rhetoric and writing process theorists have argued ad nauseam that the writer never writes alone—that external forces, tools, notifications, and audiences are fundamental, often unseen elements of composing. Livestreaming puts the external and internal on full display, mostly likely in public. Weinbaum and many other creators not mentioned here suggest that preparing and displaying their work as a live performance is worth the effort, especially if livestreaming helps push their work forward. Aesthetics and metrics, that is, are not distractions but vital, affective forces that support their work. This is not to say that Weinbaum and others only do work when they’re streaming on Twitch; Twitch is rhetorically and affectively additive to their composing practices.

However, for many streamers, livestreaming is not about focusing on tasks but rather about building conversations and communities that can support revisions for a work in progress.

Building Communities

Regarding communities, I’m speaking with Sarah Alfageeh, one of the founders of the gaming platform One More Multiverse (2023). One More Multiverse (OMM) is a platform that helps users transform their table-top roleplaying game (TTRPG) campaigns into visual worlds ripe with characters and scenes that often require verbal explanation and imagination from those who play. (If you have ever played a game of Dungeons & Dragons, you know that requirement can be difficult when playing a TTRPG with a large group.) As Alfageeh tells me, the idea for OMM started in a Boston living room and some pixel art that aimed to create more inclusive characters in the TTRPG landscape. In that pixel art, the group saw its collective itself—its racial-cultural diversity—in that universe. Here is Alfageeh talking about their initial ideas for OMM:

A lot of it came from the fact that me and a lot of my friends come from these marginalized backgrounds. Half our friend group is Muslim, as well. We weren’t seeing any fantasy out there or any sci-fi out there that spoke to our lived experiences. So it was a lot of, “if you want it done right, do it yourself.” We thought we could find that home in TTRPGs. After our first couple failed sessions, my friend—who’s a very extra person, bless him—he was like, “Okay, I have an idea. Everybody, come back to our house. I think I want to give this one more shot.” And he sent us all a link on our phones.

It was a low-stakes version of a game, and the friend group saw names and pixelated representations being displayed on the screen. Alfageeh tells me, “We’re seeing our characters move across the screen, and we’re receiving inventory [for the game] in this amazing, like, half-video-game, half-improvised-storytelling way. That day we played for seven hours. We’re like, “Oh, shit, there’s something here.”

Not long after that idea took off, a group of friends became a 20-person team that is international and working fully remote—and 17 million dollars in start-up funds—to build OMM. In a way, this willingness to build an inclusive platform is once again reflective of Sara Ahmed’s (2017) killjoy manifesto, articulated in Living a Feminist Life. Confronting racist and sexist barriers to creativity can take forms beyond speech, she writes. Ahmed posits that “killing joy is a world-making project. We make a world out of the shattered pieces even when we shatter the pieces or even when we are the shattered pieces” (p. 261). OMM is indeed building different worlds for creatives and audiences who participate in it. (As of early 2024, it’s a wonder whether this platform might be a healing space for communities affected by ongoing struggles in Gaza and Israel.) As demonstrated by Alfagheeh and her friends, the realities of game development led to their development of new worlds in digital spaces.

One fascinating thing about OMM is that the team works hard to involve its audiences and potential users in the platform’s development through live feedback and gameplay on Twitch, as depicted in Figure 14. It doesn’t have to worry so much about funding the development, per se, but rather its successful launch. When I speak with Alfageeh, the team is streaming weekly on Twitch, rotating between campaigns inside OMM and live development of new features available to beta users. On a recent weekday, Alfageeh’s colleague Meg McCurdy is streaming her practices as art director for the platform.

She begins with an underwater map, asking for suggestions along the way. With numerous viewers, the chat is active with ideas. What about sunlight? How about broken columns? Does that skeleton in the corner do anything? The map begins to look like the remnants of a sunken city, a kind of Atlantis.

Figure 14
Inside One More Multiverse

When Alfageeh and I are speaking on Zoom, I ask her why she and McCurdy do this kind of invention on Twitch, during which moments of real-time feedback emerge, with public audiences:

I mean, it is my job in the sense that as creative director on the team, it’s hard to explain what exactly I do, because I do a little bit of everything on the team. But if I can summarize it in a sentence: My job is to have a deep, well-earned intuition for what makes people want to play our games. Being a player, interacting with people through the different—we consider Twitch also a distribution channel in game dev. This is where people are going to organically discover the game, too. I need to know what that experience looks like top to bottom as a viewer, as the person streaming it, as a person playing in it as a guest—the whole thing. So for me, having that experience—top to bottom—is work. And of course, it is play because my job is to play. It’s the same way that I view, like, running games on our Discord; it is this fun, collaborative, very social experience. I’m a huge extrovert; this is where I get my energy from. And at the same time, I’m logging bugs, I’m getting feedback, I’m doing all this stuff. It’s all part of it. There’s no way to kind of sidestep that experience—I wouldn’t expect it of one of our engineers—but as someone who’s on the creative side, the [business development] side, my job is to know how to talk to people about this game. This is my forte.

In several ways, Alfageeh and McCurdy are embodying digital media, feeling collaborative feedback that circulates in public for several weeks, months, and even years. Channeling Ahmed, I suggest “when [they] create room, [they] create room for others” (2017, p. 265). They invent levels on the livestream, announce new updates to OMM, and manage campaigns with closed beta players and on the livestream. Alfageeh tells me more.

Our main way of feedback is through people playing games. Right now, closed beta has a priority on the games that we offer; they have priority towards the platform as it is in development. We release patch notes every week. We’re constantly iterating, adding assets to our library. We are building the game. They get to use the platform while it’s in development. We have a bunch of people who have concurrent campaigns right now. There are people who are streaming our game to their own small audiences.

It’s as if Alfageeh, in particular, is managing the constant circulation of OMM-in-progress as features and new campaigns are made available for audience feedback. Stacey Pigg (2014) frames this as “coordinating constant invention,” a practice in which professional writers are managing a network of writing tasks and public audiences. Studying a professional writer named Dave, Pigg observed that he was “juggling layered responsibilities of constantly inventing texts, alliances, and his own professional persona. To maintain presence in social networks, he must constantly monitor and participate in their symbolic exchange” (p. 70). I would argue that Alfageeh’s practices align with those of Dave’s, but I would also argue that her work is much wider and deeper in terms of audiences and participation with those audiences. Building inclusive worlds, she is doing much more than writing with and to OMM’s audiences. This is not to discount the important work that Dave was likely doing at the time of Pigg’s study. It’s just that Alfageeh and her team’s project is an ongoing, living one that unfolds in circulatory ways. Put differently, it’s a project that might manifest infinite possibilities and infinite updates for and by the developers and audiences before it is considered “finished.”

Alfageeh argues that OMM’s current and future success is dependent on public feedback and revising in response to that feedback:

Our top of the funnel [for inviting players] is you find us on Twitch or on Twitter through one of our trailers, then secondary, we tell you to go to the Discord. That’s how you can go talk to other people who are interested in this stuff. That’s how you can play the game; we get you into a game. We start taking notes on how you’re playing that kind of feedback. And then we wait for people to also tell us their own feedback. Then we begin that cycle all over again, after we implement that feedback. We go all the way back again to the top of the funnel, which is Twitch and Twitter in the most public-facing version of our game.

As Alfageeh indicates, OMM’s production cycle has many moving parts and people through which feedback circulates in public. OMM is living digital media that constantly invents room for others.

So what about development teams that are much smaller, even solo, and have limited resources?

A turn to developer Justin Amirkhani sheds light on these questions. It’s May 2020, and he’s calling on Discord from his Toronto apartment. Amirkhani is a co-founder of and lead developer for the independent company Vagabond Dog, well known for its role-playing games Always Sometimes Monsters (2014) and Sometimes Always Monsters (2020), about the rise and fall of independent authors and ways of managing such a career. Amirkhani streams his game development nightly on Twitch and manages a robust community on the Vagabond Dog Discord. Amirkhani’s Twitch channel also includes game playthroughs and industry chats with games creators. “I spent a lot of time from the first game [Always Sometimes Monsters] being treated as an auteur,” Amirkhani tells me.

Amirkhani is referring to Always Sometimes Monsters, which received praise across critics and garnered a massive following. Vagabond Dog bought a bus and toured the United States, offering demos of the game:

That was my first game; we came out and we did really, really well. We got all this praise, everyone was like, “Go, genius, go!” Then I’m supposed to go and hide in the cave and, like, work on something brilliant and then come back out, and then that’s it? But that’s not how real life is. It’s a myth. It’s a total garbage myth that we love in society, but I don’t think it’s healthy for the product or the creator, and I’m kind of tired of playing into it. So I’m now being super open.”

Amirkhani is referring to the open nature of streaming on Twitch. Leading up to our first conversation in May 2020, he was streaming his work on writing lines of dialogue and actions for characters through game development software called RPG Maker. RPG Maker was used for Always Sometimes Monsters (2014) and Sometimes Always Monsters (2020). It streamlines level design, character creation, and more for games that hark back to top-down role-playing video games in the ‘80s and ‘90s such as The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987) and modern games such as Hotline Miami (2012). On the stream (depicted in Figure 15), Amirkhani displays his webcam and his screen, clicking through fields and writing lines in text boxes in RPG Maker for an update to Sometimes Always Monsters (2020). Updates are, at their core, revisions in response to user experience. There’s some sighing about being tired, some laughing with viewers in the chat, and some pausing to think aloud about a line or a bit of code.

Figure 15
Vagabond Dog's Twitch channel

During our conversation, Amirkhani speaks of helping his Twitch audiences understand that even the most mundane of tasks can take hours. There is value in displaying the mundane, he tells me. Just having an audience witness the work is a form of passive, positive feedback:

People tend not to understand the depth and complexity of creating something and then they come on Twitch. They watched me spend seven hours creating a crab merchant who’s got the ability to sell crabs. But you can also haggle the prices with them, and other people there with you have their own opinions and commentary on seafood. That’s really benign content that took seven hours. That’s live development that they can witness. That’s a big part of the Twitch thing. But it’s also really, again, invigorating to have people care enough about your work to want to sit down and watch the program, which is not something I ever expected people to be interested in. But there is passion, and that passion feeds into me.

For Amirkhani, a seven-hour work session is full of mind waves and weeds and perhaps hesitations about whether or not crab-haggling is an interesting topic to stream. However, streaming similar work sessions—and thus staying with feelings associated with the mundane—parlayed into passion that accumulated between the developer and his audiences on Twitch. Put differently, feelings take time to accumulate in communities, and livestreaming is a practice that cultivates feedback that passes between creators and audiences.

I might suggest that Amirkhani is a streamer who handles accumulation well. In May 2021, he and his collaborators streamed for 24 hours straight on Twitch for Vagabond’s forthcoming game The Infinite Trial of a Hopeless Man Running, which promises—just as the title suggests and features—a rainbow-colored running track. Most nights, his streams run for approximately three hours. A stream on July 19, 2021 finds Amirkhani working on character cameos for Sometimes Always Monsters. Much of the screen is occupied by the game within the program RPG Maker, the bottom third running ads for Vagabond Dog’s games and merchandise. The bottom right of the screen features the live chat, where user feedback often lives. A user is suggesting audio clips for a character, saying, “let me know if you want a different audio clip,” and “I like this one better.” This back and forth between Amirkhani’s edits and the user occurs for about 30 minutes, when they settle on the character’s clothing and vibes. In our interview, Amirkhani reflects on Twitch.

Twitch has a two-fold effect. One, it humanizes us in a way; people don’t really pay attention to who made a game anymore, or maybe they never did, but they look at a game like ours, and they have no idea that it’s literally me and my partner Jake. And that’s it. They have no idea what I’m going through in order to produce even the most tiny amount of content. Because of our game and the way it works, the variance in it, even if I just want to have a simple interaction . . . oftentimes, if I want to have the person who’s with you [in-game] comment on something, I have to write at least 11 pieces of dialogue, because there’s 11 different characters who could come and say something. Or if we want to have the character have an animation, they have a cigarette or they drink a soda or something like that, I have to do 20 animations for that.

Amirkhani’s comment suggests that it takes time to work through even small tasks. It takes time to stream and ask for feedback. To be fair, Amirkhani isn’t streaming for explicit feedback from users but rather for building community and for being more transparent about his work, especially as he builds new content and revises it. In his case, revision is a by-product of streaming. Stream enough, and you’re going to generate conversations about your work, potentially revising it later.

Patrick Traynor, an indie developer who’s based in the West Coast in the U.S., brought forth this idea when we spoke in March 2020. Traynor was working on his puzzle game Patrick’s Parabox (2022), which is described as “a mind-bending recursive puzzle game about boxes within boxes within boxes within boxes” (Steam). Traynor streams his development practices on Twitch, displaying a range of tasks behind Patrick’s Parabox as well as I Wanna Be The Guy (2007), an open-source platformer developed by Michael O’Reilly and expanded on by many developers, including Traynor and friends. A recent stream displays Traynor on webcam, with windows of code and level designs behind him, the upper right corner reading “Bugs/Fixed,” and the bottom left corner displaying the soundtrack of his stream:

There are people who get different things out of it. It keeps me on task, and where I might not have done much work that day, it gives me motivation to actually get something in for a few hours. Also, if we have a good conversation going, and people are watching; it’s great to bounce ideas off of people and just ask for ideas. I’ve gotten a lot of important ideas for multiple games just from my viewers and chatters.

When we discussed his streaming practices, he said it’s not about hyping up the game as much as it is about producing or inventing ideas for a production. Traynor suggests that high expectations for lots of viewers is a means of disappointment:

If you’re streaming development or something, and you want a few people hanging out, it’s tough to have like 0, 1, or 2 viewers, which a lot of times you do. And there’s no easy way around that. You just have to keep doing it and make sure you’re being a good quality streamer that you would want to watch.

The common advice I would give that a lot of people can use when starting out is: just do it for reasons other than trying to be popular. If you’re being productive that day, that’s great. If you’re maybe bouncing some ideas off people, that’s great, but don’t set expectations too high.

For Traynor, livestreaming is about building a community of problem-solvers by grappling with the challenges of a game in real time with one or several dozen audience members. Feelings toward a particular task or idea fluctuate during a livestream as more people join in. Traynor recalls one stream in which a regular follower asked about a puzzle that Traynor dropped from the game. He later revised the game by reintegrating the puzzle:

Rich: Can you recall one moment that was pretty powerful with community members?

Traynor: Yeah, I have a great one actually. So for Parabox, two [puzzles] got really popular on Twitter. I don’t know which one you saw on Reddit. But one of them was showing a box-containing-itself mechanic. And I had cut that level because I thought, “Oh, it’s not that interesting.” I was streaming a few months after I cut that level, and I was kind of wondering, “Hm, I need to make some more introductory levels for this mechanic” and a viewer suggested, “Why don’t you bring back this level? You cut it a while ago.” A very astute person who pays attention a lot brought that up. And actually that level was a great level. So I’m really glad they brought that up.

In sum, the game developers I discuss here suggest that livestreaming is a kind of meta-practice because it opens a window into the rhetorical-affective practices of the day. And because audiences are engaging with the developer and what’s on display, feedback and associated revisions come alive in real time.

Streaming and Managing Myriad Feelings

Thus far, this chapter has told stories of content creators who livestream to the benefit of their work. For a wider view of affect in relation to such practices, it’s important to dwell on some of the negative experiences creators discussed. Besides feeling unable to complete a task, game developers opt out of streaming because of the very audiences they invited behind the scenes. Here is a clip from my interview with Gabriel Santos, developer of the game Stone Story (2019), an adventure game animated entirely with ASCII (ass-kee) text encoding, the kind that looks like black and white line art. This happened on the first day of his Twitch channel:

Santos: On the first day, we launched our Twitch channel, I personally kicked two people, in addition to other moderators. [On] Twitch, people are a lot more letting loose, you know?

Rich: I wonder why that is. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Santos: I think it’s more of the general internet culture that you see can be very toxic in a lot of platforms like YouTube and in Twitch and forums and a lot of randomness, you know, open, open forum-type discussion without accountability.

As London et al. (2019) demonstrate by reporting observations on popular women streamers, one of the biggest challenges of streaming on Twitch is moderation. Santos’ story reinforces this argument. Twitch is a kind of wild west of digital media production, given that more than 2 million broadcasters are working amid who knows how many public viewers in any given day. It’s no surprise that numerous women and marginalized creators have faced harassment and streams of spam in their chat windows.

To build on rather than simply cite the important work of researchers of harassment, this section of Chapter Three relays myriad feelings of creators who livestream. I want to return to Danny Weinbaum. Twitch streamers like Santos and Weinbaum aren’t afraid to kick out audience members for toxic commentary in the chat. Weinbaum recalls one episode:

Sometimes you get stinkers, which are always kind of memorable. I had one guy insisting that there’s no way that I modeled the assets in the game and that I must have bought them on the [Unity] store. And I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, dude.” And then for 30 minutes, he was just pointing out the discrepancies between the model like, “Oh, this model looks like it’s in a different style. So how would that be possible?” I mean, eventually you just ban the guy, but things like that sometimes are memorable.

It’s a scene of streaming like Weinbaum’s that terrifies me. The messiness of research and writing are on full display. What if someone critiques a line as I’m writing it? What if someone accuses me of plagiarism before I put in citations and such? The uncertainties of the live chat can manifest in real time, even if I’m not showing my feelings about it.

Some streams have restrictions that seem to temper toxicity. For example, streamers such as Ladee Danger and author Patrick Rothfuss have permitted “follower-only chats,” meaning you can only comment if you follow the channel. President Joe Biden’s 2021 Inauguration Speech livestream on Twitch was “emote-only,” meaning those in the live chat were limited to emote symbols (Riddick & Shivener, 2022).

Santos offers that Discord is a better space for moderating comments. Discord is a communication platform that allows users to text, video, and voice chat (a)synchronously and with real names or pseudonyms. It’s another platform used by game studios and fandom communities. Santos explains:

Discord is better because it keeps a record of what happened. And the culture of the community is very, very different. People are a lot more respectful in Discord because it feels more personal and the culture of such goes across servers. So people who come to my Discord servers, they’re very respectful generally. You’ll get one out of 200 people, you know, one out of 400 maybe. Even that is problematic, and you have to deal with that, and—in the core server—we’ve only kicked five people. So far we have something like 4,000 people, so everyone’s on their best behavior in Discord.

In other cases, creators choose not to stream their content on Twitch because it isn’t conducive to marketing their project. Creators place positive value in rhetorical secrecy, keeping their affective guards up. As developer Michael McMaster told me about declining to do streaming:

I think we feel very lucky that we’re able to make this sort of popular and successful game without our own personalities needing to be too public or anything. We’re four white dudes making a video game. I don’t think people need to see our faces any more than they’d like; there’s plenty of them already. We’re pretty happy to not be the kind of very public faces of this company and let it become just its own thing.

McMaster’s position is understandable. On Twitch and livestreaming services, it all hangs out in public. It’s raw, for better or worse. Rarely are streams edited in real time. That means things like microphone adjustments, glitches, and viewer commentary come alive in real time, prompting the streamer to respond accordingly, all the while trying to complete tasks at hand, whether writing or composing music. For example, on a recent Twitch stream, Chase Bethea, who goes by Gamercomposer on Twitch, was composing parts of a song while interacting with their live chat. About 20 minutes into the stream, someone called out that they couldn’t hear the music they were composing, to which Gamercomposer replied, “You all were just listening to me talk for 20 minutes?,” laughing about the gaff. In another case, Nathan Wulf, who goes by jitspoe on Twitch, was recording sound effects and musical bits for his game, Fist of the Forgotten (2022). jitspoe allows viewers to enter sound effect commands in the live chat, such as commands that generate fart sounds. Several takes failed because the chat continued to enter the “fart” command. It was indeed a distraction for a few minutes, but jitspoe completed the task, never getting upset at his audience.

It was indeed a distraction for a few minutes, but jitspoe completed the task, never getting upset at his audience.

When these issues arise, I’ve noticed that live chat audiences are rather patient with streamers. And they should, for these streams aren’t exactly scripted performances. Livestreaming does call for composure behind the screen, and it also calls for an acceptance, from perhaps both streamers and audiences, that the stream will be imperfect. I would argue that scenes of imperfection and failure are what audiences can learn from most, but I realize these scenes might not be in the best interests of the streamer. After all, advice from professional streamers maintains that viewership depends on engaging content on screen and in the chat, but failure as engagement isn’t a common topic (see Woodcock & Johnson, 2019). Observed another way, audiences are happy to call out errors, and streamers such as Gamercomposer and jitspoe indeed roll with their failures. As we heard from Patrick Traynor, feedback supports problem-solving. Feedback helps remedy moments of failure, even moments as minor as an unwanted fart sound. Real-time feedback is generative, a kind of affective glue between streamers and audiences.

Delving further into streaming, I want to end this section of Chapter Three with a story of Lana Lux, a solo game developer and long-time streamer of her development processes on Twitch. I bring up Lux because she has an incredible amount of experience working through a range of feelings, of dwelling in the negative as much as the positive—and here’s why. Like Justin Amerkani, Lux streams daily. Not just Monday through Friday, but typically seven days a week for six or more hours at a time.

Again: seven days a week for six or more hours at a time.

It’s a humid evening in August 2021, and we’re talking about her latest project in development, Strain, an open-world “survival game that takes place in a city during an apocalypse due to a pandemic.” She started developing Strain in March 2020, just as the pandemic took hold of much of the world, including Toronto:

I really like survival games that lean more towards finding resources and making sure that all of your basic needs are met. And I think that’s something that became very real for a lot of people during the pandemic, so it really inspired me to make a game that focuses on some of those needs that we have met so easily in day-to-day life, but all it would take is one disaster for us to have to basically spend most of our time maintaining a good balance. So, the game is about that while also maintaining social relationships, which help you along the way and guide you through a storyline that you choose.

When streaming Strain and other side projects, Lux displays a range of tasks and feelings to viewers. When we speak in August, she arrives after a productive week of shifting between shading and coloring characters, writing dialogue, and constructing 3D models of buildings and various living spaces. Figure 16 offers an excerpt from her work. In one stream, a chill-hop soundtrack fills the air while she is designing green trousers on a character model. With more than 300 viewers, the live chat is . . . lively. As she works on the design, she maintains a conversation with audience members about working as a game developer. It’s like an open-office environment:

I get that comment [about co-working] a lot. I did a Pomodoro [Technique] stream the other day. So it was a little bit of an adjusted Pomodoro. I did 20-minute timers of work because I was actually doing writing. I didn’t want to share that part, so I did it offscreen. I just had a timer going to let people know what’s going on. And I’m like, “Okay, tomorrow, I’m doing Pomodoro. If you guys have something that you’ve been putting off, you’re having trouble getting to it, let’s tackle it tomorrow. We’ll do it in 20-minute sessions, and we’ll kind of do that tough work together.” And people were like, “Okay, I’m gonna do this. I’m going to do it… I can’t believe it.” The next day, people were like, “Another one. Another one. I’m getting so much done.” And since then people are like, “Can you do more Pomodoro? I need to get work done.”

Figure 16
Lana Lux's Development Log

For Lux, a full workday includes working on Strain as well as playthroughs and side projects—and they’re all there for public viewing and feedback. In what I think is a savvy business move, she makes her archived streams available to subscribers only:

I don’t really want a lot of attention. Like, ironically, I know, it seems like, “Oh, you’re on camera all the time, you must like attention.” I just want to build a community. I started this because I didn’t know other game developers in Toronto. And it felt kind of lonely. I was like, “I would love to talk to just one other person who’s interested in making games.” But I really wanted to have, like, friends who were doing this. And so that’s kind of part of what inspired me to start streaming.

Streaming so many hours and days comes with affective costs, Lux tells me. Although our conversation doesn’t address sexist and toxic comments, she recalls a day of feeling rather stuck on a task, during which viewers repeatedly said “take a break!”

I’m like, “I can’t just keep taking a break every time there’s a challenge. I’ll never be done.” So it kind of adds to the stress that comes up. So it can be a challenge, but I’m gonna do my best to try to be humorous about it. Because humor is a great way to get yourself out of your stuckness, your bad negative state, which often makes things worse and worse if you stay in it.

This isn’t to suggest that Lux finds her viewers annoying. It’s more that she is OK with displaying and dwelling on a confluence of feelings that surface and accumulate over a work day, even several work days. Many viewers, she explains, still come back and push her forward in her process. To boot, she has moderators and regular participants who bury the comments of naysayers. She recalls a stream in which a stressful task parlayed into an enjoyable conversation with viewers:

Actually, that happened not too long ago. I was really stressed out with the task. I think I was stuck on a bug. And I was like, “I’m sorry, I’m stressed out. Please don’t be offended at all. Don’t please. I don’t even know what I said. Just apologizing, I guess. It’s just the bug. I’m just stuck on it. I need to get through it because I’ve been stuck on it.”

And they were like, “We get it, we understand. Keep going. You’ll get it.” And it was so encouraging. And I was stressed out for a while. And I saw that it was so easy for me to turn around because I just had these people hanging out with me. It felt like such a relief. I knew they were all waiting on me and cheering me on to get it done. We can have a nice time now. And the rest of the stream was just so much more fun and enjoyable and comparison.

Creators such as Sara Alfageeh, Lana Lux and Justin Amerkani have demonstrated that livestreaming game development is an affectively rich, time-intensive practice, a practice that can cultivate waves of public, collaborative feedback and displays of feelings within. So for writing studies, is it simply a matter of turning the camera on and conveying our feelings and practices?

Should Writing Studies Livestream? Reflecting on the Start of ‘100 Days of Writing’ Project

The previous sections of this chapter emphasize that livestreaming is a rhetorical-affective practice that results in real-time feedback on digital media projects. This section turns back to the field of writing studies, operating with the question: What can we learn from regular streamers who livestream with public audiences, who have long developed collaborative feedback practices with those viewing and commenting on their work? Which tasks of academic research and webtext productions are appropriate for livestreaming and thus receiving feedback on in order to revise? To answer such questions, I discuss the start of the “100 Days of Writing” project I created on Twitch under the username TheeRhetoric (later rhetoricrich) in summer 2021. The takeaways that follow are for writing studies scholars who might be interested in doing this kind of work in public and with public audiences.

About 100 Days of Writing

The “100 Days of Writing” project was a series of 100 livestreams featuring scenes of composing this book, related articles, and conversations with writing studies scholars. Livestreams were first available on Twitch and later archived on YouTube, as the former deletes videos on demand between two weeks and 60 days (depending on your account). I streamed several times a week, typically Mondays and Wednesdays, broadcasting from my home and through the free Streamlabs OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) platform. During each stream, I shared my screen, which typically displayed a writing program and a work in progress. As depicted in Figure 17, I livestreamed editing, coding webpages, and freewriting for sections in a chapter. Streams lasted for approximately one hour, depending on the task at hand. If I had a guest on the stream, I also made their audio, webcam, and screen available if they were comfortable with that visibility. Here is a brief excerpt from the project. In this video clip, I'm coding and discussing some feelings about code.

Figure 17
Coding a Project on Twitch

I started “100 Days” with two goals in mind: 1) to put into practice the calls I made in a previously published article (Shivener, 2020) and in Chapter One, in which I call for the field to contribute more behind-the-scenes stories of scholarship, especially digital scholarship. Following that call, I was inspired by Jeremy Tirrell’s and Nathaniel Rivers’ Following Mechanical Turks project, which analyzes human intelligence tasks in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Since 2019, the scholars have been holding “live streaming video discussions to move through the composition process from initial idea to finished product” (“A Pilot Project in Open Scholarship”). Also including project drafts and annotations by publics, Mechanical Turks is indeed a model for doing open scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies. By echoing their commitment to openness, I hoped to offer another model for scholars interested in public composing and/or digital scholarship. Born-digital scholarship is not constrained by print boundaries and conventions, so several models might be useful for future scholars.

The second goal I had for “100 Days” was quite simple: holding myself accountable. With every stream, completing 100 days of writing and Living Digital Media seemed more achievable. Also, accountability meant following through with the stories and related suggestions of creators I interviewed in 2020 and 2021. As game developers told me, streaming supports task completion, especially as audiences help you solve problems (i.e., complete revisions). Why not put into practice what they suggest? For me, answering that question meant streaming just to complete, say, a paragraph or a bothersome block of code. By streaming several days a week, I was working more diligently on the book and related projects. More importantly, the project held me accountable for streaming parts of the book that seemed interesting for public display and discussion. Not all parts made for a good stream, so I had to think ahead about the work I could do between offline sessions and on the livestream. Visually, doing line-editing was less interesting than doing a freewriting sprint in Scrivener or a writing prompt program like Written? Kitten!, which displays a kitten picture every 100 words written. Even if streaming supported my task completion, it came with an implicit expectation to be at least somewhat interesting for public audiences.

A Recommendation for Experimentation: Try Low-key Streaming to Combat the Pressure of Writing in Public

Completing low-key tasks can still be interesting and can combat the aforementioned expectations of performing in public. For example, working out an introduction to a section of a chapter might be less daunting to complete while streaming. On stream, deep thinking that often accompanies writing and coding might be quite difficult, especially if the composer is managing a chat room and the various controls and displays of the livestream. Even small sections, such as 100-500 words might work well in this space. Based on a review of many livestreams while streaming this book, as well as conversations I had with developers and creatives, I have found that regular, unfettered writing and composing doesn’t happen for long periods here—unless the microphone and camera are turned off. Some writers mute themselves when livestreaming, displaying their process and work for 25-minute sessions at a time. Streaming writers such as Supernaturalwriter, TheTigerWrites, and SwiftnessAuthor stream fiction and novel writing sessions. Their streams rely on what comes together, what comes alive onscreen, rather than on any reading- and writing-aloud protocols. Furthermore, the timed model might be a good model for focusing on deeper tasks at hand while offering an interesting stream. Some writers even keep their cameras off completely during streams. No-cam approaches might lessen the pressures of writing onscreen if the task, rather than the streamer, is the focal point of the livestream.

Furthermore, purposefully seeking out smaller communities might relieve some additional pressure from the expectation of offering an interesting stream. Here’s Gabriel Santos again, this time offering some advice about joining smaller communities on Twitch:

Another thing I recommend on Twitch is start with smaller communities. So in my case, one thing that’s worked for me is targeting content that doesn’t have that many viewers. The science and technology section is one that’s worked personally for me because I’m doing ASCII art. And so what happens is if I can get five or six people, suddenly I’m on the first row, I’m on the top row of the category. If a user is already watching some other science and technology thing, you might get raided by somebody in that category, as well, so if you’re doing something cool, or discussing something interesting, people in that category might raid you with two or three people, you know, and then you get up to nine or 10 people.

Santos was reinforcing what I heard from developers such as Patrick Traynor and Danny Weinbaum. Start small, and don’t let performance expectations preclude task completion.

Considering Ethics of Qualitative Research Data

To that end, I realized during “100 Days” that some tasks are simply out of the question for livestreaming. Simply put, it would have been unethical to livestream raw data I gathered through interviews, survey responses, and so forth. I didn't—and still don’t—see this happening in spaces like Twitch and YouTube. Creative writing authors are less likely to face this ethical issue because they’re inventing original content, such as fictional worlds and characters, on- and offscreen. The same goes for game developers and musicians who invent live onscreen. By contrast, qualitative researchers like myself are entwining the words of participants with our analyses, meaning we might have our research data next to our manuscript. Analyzing raw data, that is, was a challenge for livestreaming. For example, when I was livestreaming parts of my process for composing this book on Twitch, I resisted citing the names of participants from interviews, the main reason being that I was still drafting the chapter and planned to share it with creators before final publication. A temporary work-around was to use initials and other redactions until I returned to the manuscript. Even though Twitch deleted my videos on demand, I don’t think my concerns were moot. Someone could have still clipped and archived the streams, perhaps sharing it later with public audiences ahead of publication.

An exception to this practice might be working with anonymous and public data collected for analysis. A recent example was my and Sarah Riddick’s (2022) analysis of President Joe Biden’s livestream on Twitch. As depicted in Figure 18, we collected the chat room transcript and his speech transcript, which were part of the public record. Names in the chat-room transcript were removed before going on stream.

Figure 18
President Joe Biden's inauguration address

Toward Editing Webtexts and Moving Ideas

Lastly, for the purposes of livestreaming works like academic webtexts, the tasks of editing and coding a webtext seems very appropriate and ethical, perhaps more in line with the kind of work done by game developers who stream on a daily basis. These tasks are similar to the work of writing studies scholars who have livestreamed their work of editing pages for the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative (“CCCC Wikipedia Initiative”). These scholars displayed their webcam and pages in progress under Twitch name WP_Writing. Regarding these tasks for “100 Days”, I moved between editing webpages in Brackets, writing in Scrivener and Google Docs, Microsoft Excel, and even working with pen and paper and transcribing it onscreen. Editing on stream can be somewhat lower-stakes, perhaps an opportunity to crowdsource some editing. As referenced earlier in this chapter, game developers take chat-room suggestions gracefully, working together to, say, fix a sound module or resolve a pesky area of code. When I was revising the text in Scrivener for chapters in this book, that is, revising was a little less pesky when I was in good company. Figure 19 features an excerpt from one of my livestreams.

Figure 19
Livestreaming Changes to a Manuscript

Editing code and displaying live previews of webtext production is also visually appealing for livestreaming. No one, including writers and developers and audiences, want to stare at lines of code in a livestream, right? However, shuffling between lines of code and in-process webpages is more interesting for public consumption; audiences are learning how texts move between many platforms before final publication. The movement of a webtext has public appeal, and that appeal is amplified when streamers hold conversations and think-alouds about tasks behind a webtext. As I noted in previous sections, chatting about a task is a part of invention, a way to work out or move an idea forward. Without audience feedback, without acknowledging who joins you on these live streams, you might lose some valuable ideas.

A Final Word

Overall, livestreaming exposes the messy and sporadic nature of writing and composing webtexts. Whether it’s a writing sprint or editing session for what seems like an impossible paragraph, it might have an audience. Low-stakes activities such as freewriting and visual-editing seem more appealing in a space like Twitch. The “100 Days” project was a space to test rather than polish ideas, to initiate conversations about writing and to hold myself accountable for getting text on the page—or at least trying to do so before and after the height of the pandemic, a time when many content creators have longed for working with bodies in proximity.