Playing With Videogames on YouTube in East Asia

In recent decades, digital game play has expanded notably into the space of video streaming and sharing platforms such as Twitch.tv,Bilibili, NicoNico Video, and YouTube.This shift has significant relevance for gaming cultures around the world.It renders more and more formerly private play experiences public, turning them into platform-mediated performances with the potential to generate revenues.It tentatively makes play experiences accessible to a wide range of users across the globe, thus making community practice transparent and providing information, knowledge and entertainment to diverse audiences that include players and nonplayers alike.However, while research on Let's Plays and live streaming exists (Taylor 2018; Spilker, Ask, and Hansen 2020; Radde-Antweiler and Zeiler 2015; Ackermann 2017), edited videos about games and their surrounding cultural practices remain understudied.YouTube in particular, despite being a frequently used resource in teaching and researching videogame contents, player practices and related cultural processes, it is rarely considered as a space of digital game and play culture in its own right.