I probably started watching streams on twitch a few years ago when I transitioned from playing Runescape to World of Warcraft and Hearthstone. Although at first I only followed a few streamers who I found through YouTube, Twitch eventually grew on me as a platform and I now find myself tuning into Twitch streams when I multitask; instead of listening to music while I do homework or cook dinner I’ll have a stream playing in the background and occasionally look at the gameplay or interact with chat. I’ve met a lot of online friends in the gaming community through Twitch and I really value it as a platform for allowing members of the community to interact with one another. However, as I spend more time interacting with Twitch, I have slowly started to realize how toxic the community can be. On a small scale, when the streamer is small and pulling in less than 50 viewers, the chat tends to be very nice and, if there is trolling, it is usually light-hearted and is kept in check by the streamer and his mods who can easily keep up with the slow-paced chat. However, in the chatrooms of major streamers, racism and misogyny are everywhere, with many users spamming (usually) mild racist or sexist jokes in chat. I remember watching a vod of Reynad testing out text-to-speech on his channel for the first time, where viewers can donate a minimum of three dollars to have their message read aloud for the whole stream to hear; without the proper filters set up, the level of racism in the messages was obscene.

I didn’t really know too much about gamergate when it was new and relevant, only that it pertained to women in gaming and the prejudices they faced while trying to be part of the gaming community. I have noticed, over my years of gaming and Twitch consumption, that there is a void of women in the gaming community, and most of the only women who are successful on Twitch are very attractive. It’s really unfortunate that it seems like a requirement set for women in the gaming and esports communities is that they must be attractive and appeal to the predominantly male audience. I have made several friends on Twitch over the years who are women and occasionally they will experience more terrifying forms of harassment than online trolling; a couple of them have experienced cyber-stalking, with people going as far as finding their home addresses and personal phone numbers, calling them and breathing heavily into the mouthpiece. Thankfully, they both told me that they resolved their issues safely, but it is terrible that they had to experience something like that simply because they are female gamers.

Not only do women experience hardship when interacting with the Twitch/gaming community, but people of color who are not Asian do as well. Looking at the ESports teams that I know, I do not know of a single one who is neither white nor Asian. I keep fairly up to date with competitive hearthstone, and I don’t think there was a single non-white, non-Asian professional hearthstone player present at the Blizzcon world championships last year. Furthermore, when I look at the over 100 channels that I follow on twitch, I can only find one person who is a non-white, non-asian streamer and he is a Latino man. Much like how the gaming community excludes women, it appears that it has a tendency to exclude minorities who are not Asian.