Collaborate, Compete, and Broadcast: Gaming’s 21st Century Cultural Shifts from MMOs to Live Streaming and Online Platforms

***You can see the Korean version of this article at below URL:

https://www.gamegeneration.or.kr/article/caffe7a3-6d3f-40e0-9c16-99fb33d9ee75

The Same as it Never Was

If you’re a video game enthusiast born after the year 2000, chances are good that you grew up with relatively easy access to video game media. Though gaming still maintains some of its countercultural reputation, it has simultaneously become a facet of mainstream culture, and the sheer volume of player-produced video game content has done a lot of legwork to keep our favorite games alive in our eyes and ears long after we’ve signed off for the night. For even some of the most obscure games, it feels like there is a limitless amount of game content available for players to consume without even needing to play. Video gaming’s cultural spaces now weave in and out of games, online communities, and numerous digital platforms like Steam and Discord. 

At the turn of the millennium the situation was very different. As a young Canadian gamer in 1999, I have fond memories of waiting every week for two 30-minute television shows - Video and Arcade Top Ten and The Electric Playground - which were the only consistently available televised media about games in my area.

* Canadian video game television show Video and Arcade Top Ten - Credit to videoandarcade YouTube channel.[1]

To get our fix of game-related content outside of these programs we’d largely turn to monthly gaming magazines which came in three main varieties: proprietary magazines like Nintendo Power which essentially functioned as long-form commercials for recently released or upcoming products, review magazines like GamePro, or magazines directed at hobbyists looking for the latest hardware or industry details, like Next Generation. So how did we get from a handful of publications and two blink-and-you’ll-miss-them television shows a week that largely served to sell the newest games to players, to a vast repository of video game media that serves as a platform for numerous ongoing debates about various issues across gaming culture?

The consumption environment of video games and their cultural spaces didn’t evolve on their own. Games are one facet of what Henry Jenkins dubbed “Convergence Culture” –

effectively a whirlpool that unstoppably pulls disparate segments of culture together in new ways as our media technologies develop.[2] Video games are part of a complex media environment that involves film, television, magazines, and most critically, the emergent and novel forms of media content and game design affordances that the internet made possible. The first quarter of the 21st century saw an immense shift in how we experience games together, and the development of video game culture is a byproduct of the convergence era made possible by ‘web 2.0,’ and the democratization of the internet. Players became central figures as culture producers, and took on a more active role in publicly shaping culture through increased connectivity both in and out of game worlds.

Consider that the current market leaders for game-related media consumption - Twitch and YouTube - didn’t even exist until 2006; two years after World of Warcraft launched and popularized an already flourishing subculture of online gaming across the globe. It may seem unthinkable now that millions of players could congregate together without myriad videos explaining all the new class changes, metagame concerns, and boss strategies, but at the time players were experimenting with new ways of interacting with each other online, and improvised new ways to communicate complex ideas about how to successfully overcome challenges together, all while learning new social contracts and ways of interacting with fellow players. Players were participating in the construction of a new online society; one where play served as the connective thread that linked disparate people together. At the same time, esports was a novelty with some aspiring gamers and organizers in the West turning to Korea’s impressive StarCraft[3] scene both for inspiration, and to validate burgeoning aspirations that one day the hobby or passion project of gaming could become a profession at the level of play, and not just at the level of game production. These forces collided with legacy media and emergent internet-driven media production – alongside the continuing trend originally propelled by reality television in the late 1990s of ordinary people becoming increasingly worthy of celebrity status in the public eye – to propel us towards a new gaming cultural landscape.

MMOs and the New Normal of Connectivity and Sociality

 Though multiplayer gaming wasn’t a new phenomenon at the turn-of-the-millenium, the MMO boom of the early 2000s was foundational for bringing players together. In the same way that arcades were the central gaming spaces of the 1970s and early 1980s,[4] and home consoles and their respective brand wars were the focus of the 1990s, the 2000s became the era of the MMO. Earlier online multiplayer games like MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) connected players together through largely text-based RPG systems, and though these proto-MMOs connected hundreds of players, they were still a relatively niche gaming subculture. While games like EverQuest[5] and Ultima Online[6] achieved some popularity in the late 1990s, World of Warcraft[7] brought a new level of popular appeal through its graphical style and smooth, approachable gameplay. Though World of Warcraft built a strong following on its own, the South Park episode “Make Love Not Warcraft” in 2006 put a formerly niche genre into the public sphere in previously unprecedented ways. Not only was this an unparalleled promotional moment for a game of this kind, but it signalled a new kind of cultural presence for the MMO genre that countless companies would strive to achieve through their own massively multiplayer games.

* A congregation of players in World of Warcraft await a boat to travel to new lands - Author’s Screenshot.

The most important takeaway from WoW’s success and all the competing MMOs that followed would naturally be that MMOs were the next big thing – but MMOs afforded easier access to large-scale playful connection in a way that only a handful of MUD enthusiasts were able to access before. MMOs put both competitive and collaborative multiplayer opportunities in front of players, and most importantly they served as some of the first points of avatar-based online connectivity in play spaces for an entire generation of players. This kind of playful connectivity was a floodgate that could not be closed, and the DNA of MMO connection worked its way into countless genres as social media and mobile gaming leveraged the appeal of play for their own platforms. We could now join our friends, make new friends, and compare and share ourselves with others. More than ever before, it started to matter what and how our friends were playing, even on social media games like Farmville[8], or as we chased achievements in our single-player console games.

Video Game Broadcasting and Live Streaming as the Next MMO

At the same time, in the mid 2000s, most websites were continuing to release short editorials focused on industry issues or technological developments, alongside a steady stream of video game reviews. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 2000s, there was a visible pivot – particularly visible in the creation and development of the website Giant Bomb, following Jeff Gerstman’s departure from Gamespot, which was a more conventional games journalism outlet. Giant Bomb’s content was more focused on discussions between members of the website team as informed players and experienced games journalists, without much of the pretense or artifice of traditional reviews or articles. The visible authenticity of the individuals who were broadcasting together, and the unplanned moments that would arise within segments, became as central to the overall experience of video game media consumption as the game content itself.

In each of these cases, community is central to the audience experience. Twitch and similar live streaming sites aren’t the same without an active chat, and YouTube ‘Let’s Plays’ and Giant Bomb videos are a site for comment, discussion, and community. People identify with the personalities on screen and those who make themselves seen as members of these communities. This is often more important than the game that is being played or discussed – but that there is a game at all is an integral glue to that early 2000s connectivity: a society under construction linked together by play. While the MMO boom peaked in North America between 2008 and 2010, players of all kinds still clamored for the kind of communities that MMOs fostered, but now external sites had developed the infrastructure to support a play-based sociality outside of the confines of a fantastically rendered digital world. Celia Pearce wrote about the closure of the game Myst Online: Uru Live[9] and its players as a video game diaspora – as players maintained a strong sense of communal identification among one another even after they migrated to other games like Second Life and There.com.[10] Similarly, Mia Consalvo and Jason Begy found that players of the now defunct game Faunasphere stayed in touch and felt connected to each other as ‘Faunasphere players,’ finding new games to play together or ways to stay in touch. They noted that players “actively work to form groups and relocate their play activities elsewhere, often investing great energy in the search for a new virtual ‘home.’”[11]

This “new virtual home” isn’t necessarily a game even if the content might be play-related. Watching someone else play could be as satisfying as - sometimes more satisfying - than playing a game yourself, especially when this act of spectatorship is undertaken communally with friends and acquaintances from one’s own social network of prior gaming relationships.[12] Not only are viewers invested in the broadcaster’s success in the game they’re playing, but in their meta-success as a streamer trying to establish a career. Instead of trying to help our guildmates by providing them supplies or doing our part in a challenging boss fight, we’re now invested in the success of our favorite streamers. MMOs pulled players into shared social spaces through games, and once a similar playful connectivity was established outside the boundaries of virtual worlds, players and game fans alike were able to chase that connection and sociality without being tethered to a particular game and its digital geography.

The growth of live streaming also affected what kinds of games would become popular. The idea of a “streamable” game is just as important as a playable game, and games that are just as fun to watch as they are to play became a key segment of the market. Games like League of Legends,[13] PUBG[14], and Among Us[15] have tension built into every moment of gameplay through competition, and that tension is what makes experiencing these games vicariously as part of a collective audience their own pivotal gaming experiences. The success of Elden Ring,[16] for example, isn’t something we can attribute solely to the quality of the game, as streamers produce a bounty of viral moments of struggle through each challenging encounter attempted in front of thousands of viewers each, while the audience bonds as we share in our favorite streamer’s failures and (hopefully) eventual success.

In a moment of peak convergence, esports and live streaming were perfect partners as Twitch served as a new centralized platform for putting competitive gaming in front of interested players. In my prior work, I note that this connection helped both sectors grow:

"Esports grew from having “about 10 tournaments in 2000 to 696 in 2012,”[17] to have an estimated 523 million viewers across the globe.[18] While gaming has had a competitive element for decades, it reached new levels of saturation. Live streaming itself grew substantially during this time, as individual personalities began to broadcast their own gameplay for others, forming participatory audience-communities[19] and parasocial relationships.[20][21] "

The Platform Era and Uncertain Futures

Taking a page out of the tech sector playbook, companies with a foothold in online gaming began to operate as ecosystems, such as Valve developing Steam into an all-encompassing market for games and cosmetic goods crossed with a social platform. In my work on toxic game culture, I outline the cultural impact and shape of gaming’s platform era:

"Early voice communication software that players used like Ventrilo and Teamspeak were barebones VoiP programs, a far cry from the user-friendly multi-server social media-like hub that Discord has become since its release in 2015. There were fewer channels for players to connect to one-another across games, fewer broadcasters of gaming content circulating ideas about what the culture should look like, and there were also fewer online games overall for players to move between. Now, following in the footsteps of larger media companies like Disney and HBO, video game companies like Valve and Blizzard have become less interested in keeping players within individual games, instead opting to invest players in various games that are housed in their proprietary platforms (Steam for Valve, Battle.net for Blizzard).[22] [23]"

Players are now living through the effects of platformization, which are still developing and ongoing. What is clear at this point is that over twenty-five years, players have been pulled much closer together across game, platform, and genre. We have been conditioned to socialize online, but we have done so through a combination of internet culture and a social environment whose very language has developed out of the online gaming lexicon. There has never before been more access to vast libraries of games, and an even greater number of players with whom to share our gaming passions. In many ways the linked networks that run through Twitch, Steam, and Discord, alongside all our favorite games, have connected us in a second-level persistent virtual world. This world is one made up of live streams, YouTube videos, esport team fandoms, and other subcommunities, each with different stakes in what gaming means, and who the cultural space should belong to. Is our current gaming landscape of unprecedented online proximity set to pull us even closer together in even more realistic and immersive environments through VR, or are we primed in what many are calling gaming’s “culture wars,” to be driven apart? As of now there is no clear answer. The only thing that can definitively be said, is that the future of gaming culture is as unpredictable as its past.

[1] Videoandarcade YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWFm2qU0k5o&ab_channel=videoandarcadetop10 (accessed March 26th, 2025).

[2]Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

[3] Jin, Dal Yong. “Historiography of Korean Esports: Perspectives of Spectatorship.” International Journal of Communication 14 (2020): 3727-3745.

[4] Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

[5] Sony, 1999.

[6] EA, 1997.

[7] Blizzard Entertainment, 2004.

[8] Zynga, 2009.

[9] Ubisoft, 2003.

[10] Pearce, Celia. Communities of Play. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009, 7.

[11] Consalvo, Mia, and Begy, Jason. Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 91-92.

[12] Consalvo, Mia, Marc Lajeunesse, and Andrei Zanescu. Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming on Twitch. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2025.

[13] Riot Games, 2009.

[14] Krafton, 2017.

[15] Innersloth, 2021.

[16] FromSoftware Inc., 2022.

[17] Hiltscher, Julia. “A Short History of eSports.” eSports Yearbook 2013/2014 (2014): 9-15.

[18] “Esports Ecosystem in 2023: Key Industry Companies, Viewership Growth Trends, and Market Revenue Stats.” Insider Intelligence article. January 1st, 2023.

[19] Hamilton, William A., Garretson, Oliver, and Kerne, Andruid. “Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play within Live Mixed Media.” CHI ‘14: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 14th, 2014, 1315-1324.

[20] Sherrick, Brett, et al. “How Parasocial Phenomena Contribute to Sense of Community on Twitch.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 67, no 1 (2023): 47-67.

[21] Lajeunesse, Marc. “Transgressive Positivity in Four Online Multiplayer Games.” PhD Dissertation, Concordia University, 2023.

[22] Zanescu, Andrei, Lajeunesse, Marc, and French, Martin. “Gaming DOTA Players: Iterative Platform Design and Capture.” Proceedings of DiGRA 2019. Kyoto, Japan, August 6-10, 2019, 1-3.

[23] Lajeunesse, Marc. “Transgressive…”, 2023.