Videogame Livestreaming & the Search for Identity

World of Warcraft (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

1,349 words

Videogame livestreaming platforms are strange places. If you frequent websites such as Twitch or Kick, you will know that they are equal parts autism, attention deficit disorder, and exhibitionism. They are toxic places full of profanity and performative video-game violence as automatic weapons are used to shred other players while hopping around in tactical gear on virtual battlefields. Conversely, they are also used by nerdy gamer girls hunting rare Pokémon. There are tanks, self-propelled artillery weapons, plasma explosions, and Lovecraftian monsters alongside cookie-baking streams and vacuous banter; repulsive gamer nerds with infinitesimal audiences share the platform with E-girls luring viewers to their social media pages.

Pepe emoticons abound as chatters Pog, LOL, KEK, and MonkaS slink their way into the hearts of streamers. Feelings are hurt and drama ensues, friends are made, and people are banned for “hate speech” or accidental nudity. It’s all being beamed out to millions of viewers every month. From Super Mario to Helldivers, World of Warcraft, DJ music, chess, Just Chatting, and sleep streams, it’s a simulacrum of the human condition with its own culture, parlance, politics, sponsors, etiquette, language, and cliques. It’s local but global, large, and small. Tiny streamers with a few followers stand alongside megastars such as Caedrel, Ninja, Amouranth, Caseoh, and the idiotic Kai Cenat, who attract thousands of viewers at a time. It can be politically correct, offensive, rude, rife with black stupidity, and/or corporate. It can be hyper-local or global. It really is a strange medium. First-person shooters, strategy games, Dungeons & Dragons, and flight simulators cohabitate with ridiculous hot-tub streams and “in real life” (IRL) trips to get fried chicken. It’s all very confusing, vacuous, and a colossal waste of time — and yet it can transfix people to the point where it consumes their lives.

Both viewers and streamers alike can become so immersed in the culture of Twitch, the videogame streaming platform that I know best, that it takes over their waking lives. It is a place that white people gravitate toward because their identity has been shorn from them. There is an argument to be made that, because white people have had their identities erased, flensed, and excised from them that some are trying to reconstruct some modicum of identity and purpose by way of these odd distortions. They are trying to create a community where they belong through videogaming and various other online activities. Human beings want to feel that they are part of a group. Even if they are introverted hyper-individualists in their everyday lives, many of them try to get their social interactions online.

In her book White Identity Politics, Ashley Jardina argues convincingly that human beings, generally speaking, want to feel part of a group. People are always searching for a sense of identity. She writes that

. . . an identity — a psychological, internalized sense of attachment to a group — can provide an important cognitive structure through which individuals navigate and participate in the political and social world . . .[1]

Videogame streaming platforms are degenerate, and yet there is a ray of hope to be seen. That ray of hope is linked to the very nature of identity and the innate drive of individuals to seek out sources of identity. Even though there is wokeness, degeneracy, simping, displays of cleavage for clicks and donations, and Left-wing sexual politics, these values have been imposed from on high.

Kevin MacDonald accurately describes the nadir of this escapist phenomenon as so many white people are pulled into the depths of pure escapism:

Those of us who are White advocates are horrified that the vast majority of White people passively receive media messages filled with distorted images of Whites and their history. And we are horrified that so many Whites are far more interested in escapist entertainment, ranging from football games to sci-fi thrillers, than they care about the future of their people. Far more young White people are deeply concerned about the death of pop music superstars than are concerned about the long-term future of people like themselves.^[2]

Videogame streaming — like videogames themselves — is a contested battlespace of the culture war. Thankfully, though, it is not entirely lost. There is hope. I might be an optimist, but I am hopeful that those who are looking for a sense of identity gravitate toward these alternative spaces and end up learning about themselves.

Grégoire Canlorbe asked Ricardo Duchesne in an interview about the importance of sport. Duchesne responded that an obsession with “polemic, hostility, confrontation tactics, clashes of personalities, competition, games, is indeed to be found mostly among Europeans from ancient Greek times.”[3]

It is significant to note that just as the ancient Indo-Europeans that Duchesne talks about in this interview as well as in his monographs The Uniqueness of Western Civilization and Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age, there is an emphasis on the heroic, winning prestige, and competition, including games.[4] It stands to reason that the vast majority of videogame players are white and male.

The search for identity that streamers and viewers embark upon has indirectly led many of our people to explore notions that will be invaluable going forward — ideas such as the heroic. The extroverts amongst them could potentially lend their skills to persuading others to take up the mantle of rebuilding identity. As Greg Johnson notes, extroverted performers are important for metapolitical movements:

But there are some people who hunger for an audience, who hunger for attention. These are the kinds of people who become performers. They become actors. They become musicians. They want to get up on stage. They want your attention. Once they have the ability to read a room and connect with an audience and capture their attention, the next logical step for some of them is politics. There’s a deep logic to that.[5]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s White Identity Politics here.

Online streamers have similar potential.

The heroic ethos is present in videogames and streaming, although in an attenuated version. Johnson emphasizes the importance of a heroic ethos in his book White Identity Politics.[6] The notion that while we may not necessarily be fighting for our lives in a literal sense, as the ancient Indo-Europeans who fought purely for prestige or territory, it is nonetheless necessary to be heroic in our metapolitical struggles in the here and now, as our future is at stake. Perhaps it is in the bizarre crucible of videogame streaming that some of our future metapolitical soldiers will be forged.

One of the crucial elements of successful deep metapolitics is to form separate social spheres, or alternative spaces. As Greg Johnson explains:

The key to creating an Identitarian movement is to create social spaces and activities outside the contemporary global system that allow the participants to come to consciousness of their identity, that uphold identity as something sacred, as the highest political value, and that can mobilize this new consciousness for political change.[7]

Videogame streaming is a contested space. For all of its top-down, politically-correct governing principles and those that adhere to them, there are also those streamers who only care about pwning noobs. And for many, consciously or unconsciously, there is an implicit white identity at play. For an even smaller group, there is white identity politics. As the exemplar of streaming culture, Twitch is a chaotic, dynamic place full of generosity, loyalty, community, humor, creativity, crassness, licentiousness, stupidity, exploitation, and nerdery. It is an odd amalgam and expression of what it means to be a human negotiating this digital age. And it is yet another front in the culture war. Like videogames themselves, streaming is a hotly-contested space that has not yet been entirely lost.

Notes

[1] Ashley Jardina, White Identity Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 4.

[2] Kevin MacDonald, “A Sympathetic Treatment of the Frankfurt School: Review of The Frankfurt School in Exile by Thomas Wheatland,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer 2019), 110.

[3] Grégoire Canlorbe, “A Conversation with Ricardo Duchesne,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 2 (Summer 2019), 26.

[4] Ricardo Duchesne, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Ricardo Duchesne, Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age (London: Arktos, 2017).

[5] Greg Johnson, “The Identitarian Matrix,” in White Identity Politics (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2020), 128.

[6] Ibid., 130.

[7] Ibid., 131.