Capturing Play Beyond the Game. A Category System for Game-Related YouTube Videos

Abstract

Video sharing platforms have become spaces of game-related practices that extend beyond the player community and contribute to remixing, referencing or recontextualising videogames in diverse ways. However, academic research focuses largely on let’s plays and live streaming on Twitch.tv, ignoring a range of other game-related video sharing practices. Part of the problem is that such practices are difficult to map and understand, given the absence of any overview of the content hosted on platforms such as YouTube. The aim of our research is to develop such map of game-related video practices on YouTube and beyond. As a first step toward such aim, this article proposes an adaptable category system for evaluating the content of game-related videos available on the popular streaming platform YouTube across multiple game genres, language spaces and, by extension, game-cultural contexts. The category system was developed and refined over the course of two years, using several hundred popular YouTube videos related to Nintendo’s Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023) and Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 (2023) in the languages Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English as test cases. The category system introduced in this article provides a useful content discovery system, a tool for macro- and meso- level comparison between game-related media and language space, and a method for gaining a better understanding of the internal logic of YouTube.

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