Boston Indies: “From Private Play to Public Entertainment: The Rise of Game Live-streaming” w/ TL Taylor

Sponsored by the MIT Game Lab

We are hosting the monthly Boston Indies meetup again this month, this time featuring Professor TL Taylor!

In this talk I will present my multi-year project researching the growth of game live-streaming. From variety broadcasters to large e-sports productions, live-streaming has had a profound impact on game culture. I will discuss the growth of a new media genre on the Twitch platform and how broadcasters and audiences are taking what might otherwise be private play in the home and transforming it into an public entertainment product. I will discuss the work of streaming, why people spectate, and raise some issues around ownership and governance of content. Broadcast play, and the boom in spectatorship possibilities, gives us a terrific opportunity to think about changes happening with gaming, as well as broader trends at work in media industries; this talk will present research findings addressing both these domains.

About the Speaker
T.L. Taylor is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She is a qualitative sociologist who has focused on internet and game studies for over two decades. Her research explores the interrelations between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure environments. Her book Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) chronicles the rise of e-sports and professional computer gaming. She is also the author of Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) which used her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to massively multiplayer online games. Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, her co-authored book on doing ethnographic research in online multi-user worlds, was published by Princeton University Press (2012). She is currently at work on a book about game live-streaming (under contract with Princeton University Press). More information about her and her work can be found at http://tltaylor.com.

About Boston Indies (www.bostonindies.com):
Boston Indies is a community of dedicated independent game developers in Massachusetts and the surrounding area. Boston Indies works to foster a sense of community among Boston’s independent game developers, facilitate monthly meet-ups and other related community events, encourage developers to create games independent of large budgets and large company ties, provide a safe environment to obtain critical feedback on game development works in progress and serve as a brain trust for important information sharing among local independent developers.