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Let’s play something awful: a historical analysis of 14 years of threads
Abstract
The Something Awful Let’s Play subforum is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the Let’s Play (LP) media phenomenon. LPs typically involve people recording themselves playing games while providing commentary. LPs are an important media form in themselves as well as being an important antecedent to many contemporary and popular media forms such as live streaming, esports and speed-running. An examination of the Something Awful LP subforum can contribute to an understanding of the origins of LPs and the community that created them. In this paper, we report on a study of the Something Awful LP subforum and describe the kinds of engagement the community participates in the top threads, as well as looking to see if there are specific individuals responsible for guiding the subforum overall. We collected data from the thousands of public threads posted in the LP subforum, from its inception in 2007 to the end of 2020. The analysis of these postings presented in this paper draws on previous understandings of the behavioral roles, forms of engagement, and policing of practices that often occur on internet forums as part of the regulation and organization of associated online communities. Our results show that the LP subforum was not dominated by a small minority of users that dictated the community’s LP posting, recording and commentary practices, and that the content of the specific threads was much more important in determining what forms of LPs became popular.
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Performative Let’s Play gaming videos are a part of contemporary Internet culture through which morality becomes shared. Many digital games draw on Gothic traditions to feature human-like monsters who demand morally complex interpretations from players. This study examines what kinds of moral evaluations players form of ambiguous Gothic monsters in Let’s Play videos of the action role-playing game Fallout 3. With a discourse analysis of transcribed speech obtained from 20 Let’s Play series on YouTube, it argues that the moral evaluations that players actively produce impact significantly on the play experience, that players take diverse moral stances whose (in)determinacy varies based on what players assume of their audience, and that players are morally autonomous by not hesitating to disagree with the game designers’ moral ruling. Complex Gothic monsters function effectively as catalysts for the moral evaluations that can involve expressions of suspicion, sympathy for the underdog, begrudging acceptance, and betrayal.
This article is an investigation of the use of English-language swear words by Swedish, non-native speaker PewDiePie in the context of self-recorded, Let’s Play horror videos uploaded to the video-sharing website, YouTube. Situating PewDiePie within the greater media landscape to establish both his success and notoriety, this article addresses the local interpretation of the globalization of English and the use of English swear words in Swedish media. The practice of swearing in the gaming context is discussed, and swearing instances in a selection of three of PewDiePie’s horror game videos are analyzed. The article puts forth the argument that the use of English swear words contributes to the performance of PewDiePie as a specific, online persona, one that is both in line with the context of video gaming and conducive to a para-social relationship, allowing PewDiePie to achieve the overall goals of communicating with his viewers as peers and reducing the social distance between them. The article concludes that PewDiePie’s practice of social swearing not only simulates casual conversation between friends, but actively reduces social distance, creates the illusion of intimacy, and contributes to his unprecedented success on YouTube.
Online communities are new social structures dependent on modern information technology, and they face equally modern challenges. Although satisfied members regularly consume content, it is considerably harder to coax them to contribute new content and help recruit others because they face unprecedented social comparison and criticism. We propose that engagement-a concept only abstractly alluded to in information systems research-is the key to active participation in these unique sociotechnical environments. We constructed and tested a framework that demonstrates what engagement is, where it comes from, and how it powerfully explains both knowledge contribution and word of mouth. Our results show that members primarily contribute to and revisit an online community from a sense of engagement. Nonetheless, word of mouth is partly influenced by prior satisfaction. Therefore, engagement and satisfaction appear to be parallel mediating forces at work in online communities. Both mediators arise from a sense of communal identity and knowledge self-efficacy, but engagement also emerges from validation of self-identity. Nevertheless, we also found signs that the contributions of the most knowledgeable users are not purely from engagement, but also from a competing sense of self-efficacy. Our findings significantly contribute to the area of information systems by highlighting that engagement is a concrete phenomenon on its own, and it can be directly modeled and must be carefully managed.
There has been much debate surrounding the potential benefits and costs of online interaction. The present research argues that engagement with online discussion forums can have underappreciated benefits for users' well-being and engagement in offline civic action, and that identification with other online forum users plays a key role in this regard. Users of a variety of online discussion forums participated in this study. We hypothesized and found that participants who felt their expectations had been exceeded by the forum reported higher levels of forum identification. Identification, in turn, predicted their satisfaction with life and involvement in offline civic activities. Formal analyses confirmed that identification served as a mediator for both of these outcomes. Importantly, whether the forum concerned a stigmatized topic moderated certain of these relationships. Findings are discussed in the context of theoretical and applied implications.
Empirical studies of online debate almost universally observe a “dominant” minority of posters. Informed by theories of deliberative democracy, these are typically framed negatively—yet research into their impact on debate is scant. To address this, a typology of what we call super-participation (super-posters, agenda-setters and facilitators) is developed and applied to the http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ forum. Focusing on the first of these, we found 2,052 superposters (0.4%) contributing 47% of 25m+ posts. While superposters were quantitatively dominant, qualitative content analysis of the discursive practices of 25 superposters (n=40,044) found that most did not attempt to stop other users from posting (curbing) or attack them (flaming). In fact, in contradiction to the received wisdom, super-posters discursively performed a range of positive roles.
Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishing or diminishing. In this paper we use statistical analysis, combined with a semantic model and rules for representing and computing behaviour in online communities. We apply this model on a number of forum communities from Boards.ie to categorise behaviour of community members over time, and report on how different behaviour compositions correlate with positive and negative community growth in these forums.
Many theorists have long extolled the virtues of public deliberation as a crucial component of a responsive and responsible democracy. Building on these theories, in recent years practitioners - from government officials to citizen groups, nonprofits, and foundations - have increasingly devoted time and resources to strengthening citizen engagement through deliberative forums. Although empirical research has lagged behind theory and practice, a body of literature has emerged that tests the presumed individual and collective benefits of public discourse on citizen engagement. We begin our review of this research by defining "public deliberation"; we place it in the context of other forms of what we call "discursive participation" while distinguishing it. from other ways in which citizens can voice their individual and collective views on public issues. We then discuss the expectations, drawn from deliberative democratic theory, regarding the benefits (and, for some, pitfalls) assumed to derive from public deliberation. The next section reviews empirical research as it relates to these theoretical expectations. We conclude with recommendations on future directions for research in this area.
Within the last decade, Let’s Plays, recordings of gameplay with commentary by the person playing, have grown in popularity and attention. The current research examining Let’s Plays has focused on the contemporary popularity of the phenomenon on YouTube. However, the origins of Let’s Plays as an influential media practice have not been fully investigated. In order to address this gap, we conducted a series of interviews with 34 creators from the Something Awful LP subforum—commonly identified to have originated the media form. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed using concepts of serious leisure studies and cultural/subcultural capital. As a form of serious leisure culture, the members of the Something Awful LP community displayed motivations related to extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, such as increased sense of self-worth and recognition. The analysis of this Serious leisure culture highlights how this subculture was subsequently adopted by larger YouTube communities.
This article examines the fan practice of Let's Plays—video recordings that video game players create of themselves playing that include live commentary or riffing. I argue that the riffing accompanying game play footage in Let's Plays highlights how players play idiosyncratically by constructing and performing game-playing personalities. These videos emphasize the performative nature of video game players as fans who actively negotiate with the video games that they play through presentations of individual playing styles and experiences. I show that in accounting for how and why they play the way that they do, Let's Players demonstrate what I suggest are various modes of playing in which players can engage with video games generally. Consequently, creating, sharing, and discussing Let's Plays can render visible a wider diversity of game-playing identities, experiences, and styles.
Let’s Players have emerged as a successful class of entertainers in the YouTube® universe. Most of their broadcasts not only relate to video games and gaming but also feature elements of talk shows and other modes of personality entertainment, including star–fan interaction through social media channels. Hence, they represent focal points of reference for gamers and important manifestations of contemporary gaming culture. The present contribution applies the concept of parasocial relationships (PSR) to examine how dimensional compositions and formation dynamics of audience engagement with Let’s Players are affected by the specific conditions of digital online media environments. Findings from an online survey indicate that PSR with popular Let’s Players are composed partially similar to “conventional” stars, but seem to rest more on interactive responsiveness and less on idolizing “larger-than-life” characters. Implications for PSR theory in hybrid mass/online communication settings and for digital gaming culture are discussed.
Social media develops a common asymmetry: few contribute much, the majority little. By “participatory asymmetry” we understand this long tail of participatory production as an interactive dynamic among two types of social media users, regular and sporadic, that shapes the curation of social media spaces. Examining online discussions surrounding massive, open, online courses (MOOCs), we observe interactive differences between regular and sporadic users that shape patterns of social media curation across the networked discussion forums of a major, online newspaper. Whereas regular users reply directly to other users to durably articulate discussions as “media objects;” sporadic users post one-to-many messages which aggregate in platform-reconfigurable cascades of social media or “media flows.” By mapping the relationship between regular and sporadic participation, one-to-one and one-to-many interaction, and the curation of social media spaces in patterns of media objects and flows, we propose a four-part typology of participatory asymmetry: broadcast, feedback, moderated, and dialogic.
This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let’s Play videos (or LPs) on YouTube. A hybrid of digital gaming and video, LPs feature gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. Players may set out to promote, review, critique or satirize a game. In recent years, LPs have become hugely popular with young audiences, and currently make up over half the top hundred channels on YouTube. The authors identify LPs as emerging videogame paratexts with pedagogical potential. In particular, they ask how LPs function as sites of new literacies. They answer that question by discussing two key characteristics of LP practices: their emphasis on processes of meaning-making within games; and their mobilization of literacies associated with remix and appropriation. The final section of the article explores how LP practices might inform literacy instruction in schools.
The Something Awful Forums (SAF) is an online community comprised of a loosely connected federation of forums, united in a distinctive brand of humor with a focus on the quality of member contributions. In this case study we find that the site has sustained success while deviating from common conventions and norms of online communities. Humor and the quality of content contributed by SAF members foster practices that seem counterintuitive to the development of a stable and thriving community. In this case study we show how design decisions are contextual and inter-dependent and together these heuristics create a different kind of online third place that challenges common practices.
This study addresses 3 research questions in the context of online political discussions: What is the distribution of successful topic starting practices, what characterizes the content of large thread-starting messages, and what is the source of that content? A 6-month analysis of almost 40,000 authors in 20 political Usenet newsgroups identified authors who received a disproportionate number of replies. We labeled these authors “discussion catalysts.” Content analysis revealed that 95 percent of discussion catalysts' messages contained content imported from elsewhere on the web, about 2/3 from traditional news organizations. We conclude that the flow of information from the content creators to the readers and writers continues to be mediated by a few individuals who act as filters and amplifiers.
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