Game live streaming in the Japanese context: Initial findings

Game live streaming has become a major component of global game culture. Through interview data with Japanese game live streamers, this paper offers a first consideration of Japanese-language game streaming and its associated cultural norms, expectations, and streamer perspectives. We firstly show that Japanese game streamers mostly stream anonymously, and interrogate this preference and situate it within wider contexts of Japanese internet culture, gaming culture, and societal stigmas. Secondly we show Japanese game streamers do not only appeal to native Japanese speakers, but draw in viewers from both English-language and Chinese-language backgrounds. We examine this in the context of the widespread cultural perception outside Japan of Japanese ‘otherness’, demonstrating instead that Japanese game streamers are well integrated with global flows of game streaming. We therefore present a picture of a linguistic-cultural game streaming context that is in many ways familiar, yet also highly distinctive.