Another Hypomnesia: Spatial Understanding in Game Streaming
摘要
By analyzing GeoGuessr live streaming on Twitch, this study reveals how players make sense of space through the game and streaming platform in real time. A postdigital lens frames game live streaming as postdigital literacies, emphasizing entanglement, digital materiality, and spatiotemporality. Digital ethnography and multimodal thematic analysis guided the process and rationale of data collection and data analysis. Three key findings emerged from the analysis of approximately 40 h of video recordings from Twitch channel chessbrah. First, digital geolocation was recognized through relational and entangled elements. Second, digital materiality blurred the boundary of the real world and games, creating an alternate reality. Third, game streaming transformed players’ spatial understanding through encountering, disintegrating, and reborn stages, illustrating the evolving, co-constitutive and situated nature of knowledge production within gaming contexts. This study implies that screen-based digital games like GeoGuessr create imaginary places intertwined with digital and non-digital realities, producing reconfigured spatial knowledge and highlighting the need for postdigital inquiry.