Defusing toxicity by disclosing vulnerability: the role of Twitch communities in changing gaming culture

Gaming is an embodied activity that takes place across a variety of sociotechnical assemblages, characterized by specific cultural codes that are the result of complex interactions between technological affordances and an emergent, collectively produced, ethos. In our contribution, we examine online multiplayer gaming and Twitch.tv as cyberspaces (digital contexts made of artifacts, interfaces, affordances and infrastructures) and cyberplaces (relational and semiotic contexts made of actors, discourses, values) (Galimberti et al. 2011). Together, they represent the key sites where current gaming culture is produced and transformed: online multiplayer games are the main arena for experiencing the social dimension of play and competition, and the lattice on which eSports are built, while Twitch is where gaming becomes a spectator activity and communities form around the experience of watching someone live-streaming their gaming. Many studies showed that online multiplayer games can feed a toxic environment characterized by harsh competition, trash talking and even harassment (Kim & Ortiz 2024; Zhang et al. 2024; Beres et al. 2021). On the other hand, despite the presence of toxicity on Twitch (Han et al. 2023; Kim et al. 2022), it represents a space that nurtures the formation of social ties between viewers and the development of communities (Taylor & Romine 2018). We previously analyzed female streamers’ strategies to deal with sexism and create healthy communities (Carradore & Pirola 2022), described how streamers face uncertainty and precariousness in building a career within a platform they have no control over (Carradore & Pirola 2024a) and discussed how Twitch represents the new battleground for long-standing conflicts in gaming culture (Carradore & Pirola 2024b). Here, we argue that there is a change in attitudes towards toxicity in gaming culture that can be read, from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, as a shift from “negative knowledge”, where certain topics are treated as illegitimate and rejected, to “non-knowledge”, where unknowable topics become legitimized as worthy of being discussed (Gross 2010). We contend that Twitch has become a place where vulnerability and disclosure on the part of streamers carve out pockets of agency and resistance against the toxic traits of gaming culture, giving voice and visibility to issues such as sexism, mental health and LGBTQ+ identities, that in turn transform the conversations around these issues in the wider gaming community. Self-reflexive conversations foster inclusive communities that question the dominant ethos in gaming culture, which frames toxic behaviours as harmless and immaterial and as an individual problem. Bringing together insights from the literature on toxicity in online multiplayer gaming and Twitch, we propose a theoretical framework to shed light on this process of change and suggest new avenues for research on the perception of well-being and self-care and the acceptance of discourses on mental health issues in gaming communities. All of these relational and discursive transformations can be thought of as a step towards embracing the materiality of the body, beyond the dream of escaping its constraints that characterized the techno-utopian ethos of geek culture.