“Take the Keys to the Happy Hob Hotel”: Live-Streaming,Yingyeo Culture,and Affective Support

Abstract

Material conditions under global neoliberalism have increased youth precarity, and live-streaming has emerged as a form of “gig work” for young people as they broadcast their lives and social activities onto digital platforms. Studies have demonstrated that live-streaming often acts as a site of exploitation by corporate interests and self-commodification via platform capitalism where streamers adjust their behavior to serve the interests of capital accumulation. This article examines a subgroup of game streamers, “challenge runners,” who impose rules to increase gameplay difficulty thereby pursuing excellence in “unproductive” actions that relieve neoliberal isolation—categorized by the Korean youth cultural practice of yingyeo. By examining two popular British and Korean Twitch.tv challenge runners, The Hob and Lynn respectively, their streams and fan interactions, I identify how—in response to conditions under global neoliberalism—youth create meaningful relief through pursuing “valueless” behavior and affective support.

Introduction

“World Record!! We did it!” screams the British live streamer, The Happy Hob. He's just completed the first no-hit challenge run of FromSoftware's Dark Souls, an infamously difficult game. This feat demonstrated how youth challenge runners respond to demands for excellence and perfection amidst greater economic challenges and precarity. It also highlighted the push for youth to embody the motto of Team Hitless (The Happy Hob's challenge-run community): “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” The pursuit of excellence under neoliberalism fulfills the moral desire to celebrate the individual and their accomplishments.

The condition of precarity, characterized by unstable and sporadic employment, unifies the experiences of youth globally. From Japan to Canada, youth increasingly find fewer economic opportunities for growth and stability. These conditions, brought about by neoliberal state policies, place new expectations upon individuals to be responsible for their own well-being—both the architects and masons of their futures—absent many, if not all, the social nets that existed for older generations. This state of precarity arises as a direct consequence of neoliberalism, characterized as a “theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being which can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey, 2005, p. 2). Under the current conditions of late-stage capitalism, neoliberalism and its’ ill effects are recognized worldwide, fully within Eastern and Western spheres (Fuchs & Mosco, 2012). These material conditions have disproportionately affected global youth, and as a result, have identified new and novel means of relief and endurance.

Scholars of precarity have viewed conditions of labor in “post-industrializing” nations under neoliberalism through a lens of loss (as in “lost generation”) or non-actualization, where unstable labor opportunities leave many youth in adverse situations (Anagnost et al., 2020; Song, 2009; Standing, 2011). However, scholarship focusing solely on precarity eschews the potential for identifying resistance and redefinition among youth laborers, specifically as youth live streamers often coordinate with their audiences to cultivate methods and practices that resist neoliberal logics of productive labor (Ruberg & Phillips, 2018). Smith examined the conditions of Japanese workers in flexible labor markets where, contrary to views that placed youth as being solely victimized, youth retained agency, noting that “for many recent graduates, navigating the new economy is not so much a matter of choosing between unemployment and non-regular employment as it is one of maneuvering between the demand for flexible labor, middle-class norms of adult citizenship, and new ideologies of work, lifestyle, and self-purpose” (2018, 89). Similarly to Japanese youth, global youth are also identifying the conditions of neoliberal labor and adopting meaningful paths to endure, succeed, and survive. In other words, they navigate these labor pressures by changing the narrative of what meaningful life looks like under conditions of neoliberalism.

Coinciding with the rise of neoliberal policies and state development, technologically mediated work in “the gig economy”—short-term tasks advertised on online platforms performed by contracted workers (MacDonald & Giazitzoglu, 2019)—represent the global economy of immaterial labor. Digital media creators and live streamers constitute a growing sector of the gig economy that typically operates outside the traditional labor schema, often merging geographically and culturally distant societies into existing within a similar bounded space (Bourdon, 2000). Live-streaming operates similarly to other sectors of the gig economy, ¹ where the contingent labor of “gigs” allows laborers to maintain certain means of discretion when it comes to their labor time and wage rate. Still, despite these affordances the general experience of these workers is precarious (Muntaner, 2018). The intersection between the self-labor of the gig economy with the creation and maintenance of platform spaces, like those found in live-streaming and social media, is one that youth are utilizing as a site of interaction and development. However, the blending of leisure and labor can cause friction, where streaming can open streamers to discrimination and scrutiny (Garvey, 2024). In an analysis of Chinese live-streaming platforms, Wang describes how platforms, hosts, and spectators are enmeshed in the process of capital exploitation, creating profit chains linked to one another (Wang, 2022). It is within these linkages, coupled with the transnational capacity of game stream platforms, where streamers can create communities of relief in the precarious conditions of late capitalism. However, while scholarship establishes affective labor as a “best practice” in streaming labor (Woodcock & Johnson, 2019), it fails to examine how affect itself becomes a path to collaboration and collective relief. What begins to emerge in live-streaming is simultaneously collective and individual, where fans become central to the success of the streamer but also are in turn redeemed via their affective participation in these communities (Lamerichs, 2018, p. 18).

New media technologies are a refuge for youth amid rising job insecurity, climate change concerns, and other precarious situations. In the South Korean youth cultural practice of yingyeo [잉여] (Song, 2018), individuals reject neoliberal pressures valorizing productivity through engagement with unproductive activity. To understand how yingyeo manifests, we first must examine the neoliberal conditions in South Korea, hereafter Korea, whose unique responses to neoliberal policies and culture have manifested in correspondingly unique ways. Because Korea has been repeatedly colonized, directly in the case of the Japanese empire (1910–1945) and indirectly via the United States military occupation following its liberation in 1945, Korean culture straddles and complicates East-West binary assumptions. As a consequence of the 1997 IMF financial crisis, ² Korea has undergone a shift toward neoliberal policies under the guise of globalization (Cho, 2015; Ryoo & Jin, 2020).

Yingyeo, which directly translates to “surplus,” refers to individuals who have no desire to contribute to society meaningfully (Lee & Abidin, 2021). This phenomenon has emerged as a subculture in Korea as material conditions have made opportunities for youth more precarious (Song 2018). This culture, originating from online play cultures in Korea, emphasizes finding solace in those online spaces where people can isolate from the defeating narrative of neoliberalism (Hong & Park, 2016). In practice, yingyeo emphasizes developing skills that are “useless,” such as mastering a video game or gaining extensive knowledge of a comic's lore and history. The emphasis on non-productive activities functions as relief from neoliberal pressures to be one's best self—where activities such as exercise, healthy diet, rest, or meditation remain in service to neoliberalism's demand for subsequently greater productivity. Streaming culture and labor provide spaces where these new practices of relief are put into use. As conditions of global neoliberalism prioritize competition as the best means for social development, with distinct winners and losers, yingyeo acts as a unifying force for the “social misfits”(Lee, 2023, p. 150) who have failed to make “meaningful” progress in their lives. Through active acknowledgment of the unfair expectations for economic and social progress, yingyeo culture acts as a way of relieving the pressures of everyday life. This behavior creates opportunities for these communities to gather and organize to address these pressures collectively.

In the coordinated and complementary actions of yingyeo challenge-run streamers and their audience, we see the potential for communal relief in what I’ve termed affective support. This support can include messages of care and well-wishing, a crowdsourcing strategy to help the streamer overcome difficult portions of the video game, and the monetary acknowledgment of a streamer's gameplay as a valid form of (what might be otherwise deemed “valueless”) labor. This final component of affective support aligns with previous scholarship on how streamers create spaces of affect as a means of generating tips and profit (Guarriello, 2019; Johnson, 2021; Woodcock & Johnson, 2019).

To understand this emergent global phenomenon, in this study I look at two popular Twitch.tv (hereafter, Twitch) challenge-run streamers, one Western and one Eastern; British Twitch video-game streamer “The_Happy_Hob” (hereafter, The Hob) and his South Korean contemporary 스린 (hereafter, Lynn) to identify the ways in which both utilize yingyeo via self-competitive gameplay to create and maintain communities of affective support. By highlighting both Western and Korean streamers, I explore how, contrary to neoliberal norms which typically valorize individual accomplishment, self-branding, and microcelebrity, relief and solidarity can be found in the collective processes of community building, affective labor, and Joseph Jeon's concept of “subsistence faming” (Jeon, 2019), where the pursuit of celebrity is reclaimed as a viable strategy for managing the stress of life. For the purposes of this paper, I develop the concept of affective support—which itself arises from the confluence of the above processes of relief—to describe the ways in which the online communities that streamers cultivate around their immaterial labor produces reciprocal spaces of emotional support.

Immaterial Labor, Affect, and Challenge Runs

Michael Hardt describes a postmodern form of labor production, immaterial labor, as “labor that produces no material good, such as service, knowledge, or communication” (1999, 94). Immaterial labor is commonly found in the digital economy, where a culture of sharing on platforms consolidates independent labor streams (Koloğlugil, 2015). The Internet and the digital economy give people with access to these digital platforms greater freedom by making their work “flexible.” Yet, as Terranova argues, the Internet is not a “free-floating postindustrial utopia, but in full, mutually constituting interaction with late capitalism” (2000, p. 43). The Internet, as a ubiquitous and atemporal entity, has strengthened tethers to productivity that have traditionally resided outside of the realm of productive capital. In addition to the paid immaterial labor on the Internet, there exists a reliance on free fan and user labor. Social media platforms, message boards, wikis, and streaming and broadcasting services attract users based on—and themselves profit largely from—the productions of their users. As they work, users become further trapped by self-created networks that limit their own access to paid labor (as their time is finite). Specifically, the digital economy operates as a part of neoliberalism in “its attempt to exercise control over not simply workers’ bodies and productive capacities but over their subjectivities as well” (Gill & Pratt, 2008, pp. 18–19). Creative laborers are often involved with work that is “profoundly satisfying and intensely pleasurable” (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 15), which is often termed affect.

In practice, affect appears in the ways that workers create strong attachments, derive enjoyment, and utilize various means of self-expression in their work (this, however, does not apply to all immaterial laborers). This can be seen in work done in the restaurant industry, where as part of their labor process, serving staff are often encouraged both formally and informally to create personal connections with customers as a means of developing a “dining experience” (Dowling, 2007). These personalized connections to their labor output then place the worker in a precarious position. Dowling argues that the “elementary communism” (Hardt & Negri, 2005, p. 147) ³ occurring during interactions between a server and customer (or server and fellow staff, for that matter), is not guaranteed, rather that capital co-opts affective labor and utilizes it for profit generation. As reputation and incidental labor functions of networking and socializing gain importance in creative industries like streaming, they entrench a rigid system of toxic practices. When pressured by the forces of capital, affective laborers can find their attachments being used in these toxic environments to justify overwork, stress, and anxiety. The exploitative nature of this toxicity manifests across creative industries like academia, television production, fashion, music, video game development, and the newly formed streaming industries.

To better understand how players and audiences develop networks of support via yingyeo culture and affective support I focused on live streamers who specialize in “challenge runs” ⁴ —playthroughs using self-imposed rules that transform the originally designed play experience—as these runs produce the affective climate for the building of community around a microcelebrity. Challenge runs represent a subsection of gameplay that relies on a strict adherence to structure. That is, they act as a foundation for the streamer's channel where the arbitrary restrictions and the subsequent success of overcoming them provide importance to both the community and the player. Scully-Blaker described these arbitrary restrictions as a collection of explicit rules that organize how play in challenge-run gameplay ⁵ occurs outside of normal playthroughs (2014) and demands new expectations for play. Essentially, as the conditions for success in late capitalism become ever more nebulous and ill-defined, relying upon restrictions, onerous and punishing though they may be, provides a sense of structure for the player and community to uncover a sense of accomplishment and understanding (McKissack & May, 2020). Put simply, setting “difficulty” is the process of how players interact with games. Jagoda (2018) further organizes and expands the concept of difficulty by organizing it into three subsections: mechanical difficulty, interpretive difficulty, and affective difficulty. Mechanical difficulty refers to the physical and cognitive challenges presented by games, interpretive difficulty relates to the process where players must engage in interpretation of gameplay as (un)intended by its designers. Lastly, affective difficulty captures how players navigate the emotions and feelings brought upon by gameplay. These facets of difficulty are central to challenge runs where difficulty is further manipulated to create new modes of play.

Previous scholarship has examined how online communities have organized and managed affect support in response to challenging video games. Robinson et al. (2023) examined an online Reddit community, r/EldenRing, and how the difficulty in video games created opportunities for these communities to develop and organize its support for one another. Drawing upon Jagoda's (2018) framework on the types of difficulty in games, they examined how interaction with modes of “mechanically-induced affective difficulty” (Robinson et al., 2023, p. 16) can be understood from a design perspective to help assist and develop these forms of communities. Additionally, the meta-gaming that occurs to players in response to this demonstrates a collective opportunity for community formation.

Team Hitless, a popular challenge-run internet community, represents the accumulation of yingyeo behavior in being dedicated to the pursuit of valueless “excellence,” as well as providing the necessary difficulty and community to produce conditions of affective support. To address how affective support is created and managed in these communities I selected two of its’ members, one of its co-founder The Hob, and the first Korean member, Lynn. The Hob, rose to fame by being the first player worldwide to successfully no-hit run Dark Souls, a feat that drew skepticism from its’ game director Hidetaka Miyazaki (Frank, 2016). At the time of writing, The Hob has approximately 338,000 Twitch followers and routinely streams to an audience of thousands. Lynn, while only having less than 3000 followers, expresses his desire to be the best “Speed-Hitless runner”—a portmanteau of speed runner and hitless challenge runner where the objective would to complete games both hitless and within a fast time—as well as leave his name on the history of Souls games. This cross-section of The Hob's and Lynn's streaming practices provides a deeper understanding of how—irrespective of the uniquely precarious conditions of youth in Western and Korean contexts—online communities can identify valuable means of relief through pursuit of yingyeo culture and by means of affective support create networks of care. To conduct this research, I participated as an observer of The Happy Hob's stream from August 2016 through 2020 and again from 2023 through 2024, I was a Twitch subscriber for 25 months intermittently during that period. Observation sessions varied in length, from a few minutes to several hours. I participated in Lynn's Twitch broadcasts from September 2021 through March 2024, Lynn's broadcasts were less frequent and more irregular in scheduling which reduced the amount of time I was able to participate.

The Happy Hobbit ⁶

The Hob originally began his career as a Twitch streamer by streaming late at night in his countryside British home. At the beginning of his broadcasting career, he would attend work and school and then come home at night to play. Due to the nature of his household, there was only so much room for him to establish a broadcasting space, and as such he opted to play late at night to minimize his impact on the rest of his housemates. Over time, his Twitch streaming channel came to be his primary source of income, as he gradually devoted more and more time to streaming. While Twitch platform relies upon streamers like The Hob who generate and create the content that drives viewership and interaction with the platform (Bingham, 2017), typically most streamers work only part-time as broadcasters. Even as Twitch streaming became his primary source of income, replacing his day job, The Hob maintained the same time slot starting from 9 pm GST and running streams late often until after 6 am or later. The Hob has explained during broadcasts that even though it damaged his well-being, in that it was an inconvenience and potential health concern staying up so late in the evening, he felt obligated to those members of his community that made him what he is. It is in this instance that the construction of a community creates a shared sense of obligation: the streamer bends his schedule to the will of the viewer but in the same sense, the community becomes indebted to the streamer. These shared experiences take many forms during the stream, as The Hob replays the same game or selection of games most every night, the community has worked in collaboration with him to develop choreographies of in-game actions that are repeated in the same manner each time certain enemies or situations are encountered.

Originally a Dark Souls (FromSoftware 2011) streamer, The Hob incorporated other games in the Dark Souls series, other “Soulsborne” games ⁷ into his streams. The Hob specialized in challenge runs that followed the no-hit finesse run (Scully-Blaker, 2014) paradigm in which the player character is not allowed to be hit by any enemy. Certain player damage is allowed such as “fall damage”—where a player loses hit points from falling from a height—as well as environmental damage (i.e., poison, fire, etc.) provided it does not originate from an enemy. During a particular challenge run—the trilogy run ⁸ —The Hob broke down the gameplay into various “splits” or segmented sections of gameplay that revolve around a particular area of the game, a singular boss, or thematic event that takes place (Figure A1). These “splits” serve to provide the audience the ability to quickly discern the progress of The Hob at any given time, as well as indicating the daily “best run” as demarcated by a star next to the split. Much in the same way that a viewer can watch scenes of a film or television series the splits indicate when favorite events are about to occur in the stream. One such example is the “KHITD” split. In the split, KHITD is an acronym for “Kill Him In The Dick,” indicating a sequence in the game where The Hob fells a boss by stabbing it in the groin, afterwards a black bar covers the screen and the words “Kill Him in the Dick” fade in momentarily (Figure A2). What follows is a thematic cut-scene overlaid with The Hob singing a false operatic hymn alongside the video. Simultaneously, the chatroom bursts into its own chorus of chants as the game continues. This event takes place relatively early in the game and as such could occur repeatedly in a single night's broadcast. While the event in question appears on its face as nothing more than puerile humor—implying a young, male viewership—it stemmed from a position of shared history and resistance against cyberbullying. Originally there had been no title of KHITD but it had been suggested to The Hob in the stream chat, in what was perceived as bullying of the individual who suggested the tagline, The Hob came out in support of the tagline as a means of stifling the attacks against the individual and integrated it into his daily routines of gameplay.

Throughout the stream, The Hob attributes the success of his gameplay, not only to his own personal skill, but also to the support of the community. Subscribers to the stream are officially entered into what is known as the “followship”—a pun on the “Fellowship of the Ring” of J.R.R. Tolkien's literature from which The Hob draws his name. Upon subscription, the follower receives a personal greeting from The Hob with the message, “Welcome to the Happy Hob Hotel: No longer eat shit in the forest.” The construction of “lore” around the channel deepens the subscriber's connection to the followship's imaginary (Anderson, 1983). While the entrance into this community grants little in terms of “state” support, the appeal exists for members to be able to interact directly with their leader—even as a single stream's audience can exceed several thousands of simultaneous viewers. The Hob frequently isolates individual comments for discussion and reflection, with this audience interaction bolstering the idea that all members are a part of a collective “followship” as opposed to mere individuals “eating shit in the forest.” The “followship” functions as more than just a means for extracting capital for the personal gain of the streamer but rather implements an “everyday communism” (Graeber, 2011) where followers are part of a robust, functional, and reciprocal community.

The everyday communism of “the followship” can be found at many different levels of play, and the support that is given in both directions extends beyond simple dialogue and platitudes. While the community regularly financially supports The Hob via the Twitch platform subscription model, they also frequently donate directly to the channel as a means of subsidizing the costs of broadcasting ⁹ . The Hob also makes extended and frequent efforts during the broadcasts to incorporate and interact with his followship these include phone calls, inviting members to meet up in-person, as well as directing attention to other members of the “Team Hitless” ¹⁰ community that supports him. This is achieved via in-broadcast “raids” where his entire channel goes to visit a different Twitch steam in the aim of boosting its viewership (Jodén & Strandell, 2022). The Hob also works with members of his followship to produce short films ¹¹ to thank and celebrate the audience. These films often remind the viewers of points where he had failed or was going to quit until emotionally supported by the community.

The affective support of the community is best indicated during The Hob's attempt to complete the trilogy run—Dark Souls, Dark Souls II, and Dark Souls III completed with no hits consecutively—an effort that takes roughly ten hours to complete. The Hob had been attempting to accomplish this feat for over 12 months with varying amounts of success, until his personal best run had him facing the final enemy of the trilogy without having been hit. Approximately thirty seconds before he would have successfully completed the run, The Hob made a mistake and received his first hit of the run, thus ending the attempt ¹² . Understanding how noticeably distraught The Hob was following this failure, the chat rallied around him and offered encouragement and emotional support, offering help on what to do in future runs, donations to monetarily incentivize, as well as an overall positive attitude. The type of support that The Hob received is similar to that professional eSports players receive from coaches and mentors during periods of struggling in professional play (Kim and Thomas, 2015). The interaction is one that is fluid and flexible in not maintaining the strict hierarchy of a leader and congregation but instead offering a flattened experience where positions of power are kept fluid as a means of implementing harmonious communication. This is not to say that hierarchies do not exist interactions with The Hob during challenge runs, similar to other media fandoms social protocols and interpretive competencies are central to developing meaningful progress (Lamerichs, 2018, p. 30). However, the culture of the stream in combination with the affordances of direct chatting allows all audience members access. It is through this shared pursuit of excellence, with The Hob operating as the main player and the audience as the supporting staff that unfolds during gameplay.

Affective support is further given to The Hob via the real-life organizational support provided by the followship. The community often plays sections of the game acting as a scout team, implementing and testing strategies as well as communicating with other experts to facilitate the best way forward. Additionally, the followship routinely offers fact-checking information about the game environment, level design, or item location. This is an attempt to routinize the activities of play by “reinforcing a particular form of conduct in specific locations” (Seo & Jung, 2016, 645). The sharing of responsibilities continues the process of community building in ways that simple interaction via chats would not provide. The Happy Hob will often ask the channel to “Clip it!” indicating that the events that just transpired in the video game need to be recorded for breakdown and further examination. Giving support enables the audience to participate in yingyeo culture as well, where they can be considered valuable members of this unproductive activity.

The Hob also needs self-discipline and control to maintain focus to accomplish the task of no-hit runs. These organizational strategies take on many forms, but all act as a means of implementing order onto the body. The Hob developed several different means for accomplishing this task: namely, in-game reminders via pop-up videos, bets with chat, as well as physical and digital artifacts. Periodically, The Hob sends himself messages in video form that serve multiple functions, though all add to the “lore” of the channel. The messages would be in the form of characters that would express that they were under duress and the only way that they could be saved would be through the completion of a successful run. The Hob also utilized self-inflicted punishments as a means of establishing himself as a sympathetic figure, which further drove the community opportunities to provide affective support.

The plight of The Hob and the trials that he endures, work to liberate the community from the toxic valorization of the individual under neoliberalism. Video games create spaces that are inherently toxic due to their reliance on and valorization of meritocracy (Paul, 2018). The emphasis on individual skill is a key component to their design, “Video games are predicated on inequality, on the perception that some people are better than others and that when one is victorious it is precisely because of that player's actions” (ibid., 138). This concept of meritocratic excellence is challenged by The Hob, every achievement accomplished, while at face value individual, rather is the result of concerted and collaborative efforts of both the streamer and his community. The Hob's vehement acknowledgment of the reciprocal nature of his successes is demonstrative of his attempts to dismantle neoliberal logics that elevate forms of toxic individualism. The Hob's resistance to those pressures is rare in the streaming industry—particularly among cis, white men—where microcelebrity and the pursuit thereof acts a quasi-remuneration of the practice of streaming (Song, 2018). As the spaces of streaming and professional gameplay are often hotbeds of misogyny, racism, and self-congratulation, what we see with The Hob are actions that liberate these contested spaces and redesign them for communal care.

“Lynn” The Korean Challenge Runner

The efforts of The Hob to create online spaces that promote inclusivity and care demonstrate Western principles and values in practice. The Hob's Team Hitless contemporary—or more crudely his streaming competition—Lynn, represents an example of how non-Western youth are responding to similar conditions of precarity. Lynn attempts to resist neoliberal pressures found in Korea, creating space for yingyeo relief through the process of challenge running. His self-disclosed ambition to be “the No.1 Souls game Speed-Hitless runner in Korea” ¹³ can be viewed as a process of yingyeo culture. Lynn, like The Hob, is a member of Team Hitless, and incorporates similar methods of affective support. During streams he calls his audience his “believers” and repeatedly expresses his thanks for the receipt of mental and emotional support given by his community. Like many other streamers, Lynn works on developing relationships with his community. This behavior includes shoutouts, maintenance of a Discord server, and direct communication with the audience during streams; these behaviors rely upon the player utilizing skills that exist outside those that directly relate to playing a game (Johnson, 2021). This offscreen labor furthers the connection between Lynn and his community and illustrates the commitment to developing a space safe from neoliberal pressures. The interactions between Lynn and his community, in both streaming and chat platforms provides opportunities for reciprocal care and concern to be voiced. Lynn's Discord fans will inquire about his well-being, and routinely send well-wishes despite the infrequency of Lynn's streams:

I don’t care Lynn's pb [personal best]. I just want Lynn play the game on fun∼ relax and play∼ (MinZero, 2023)

I cheer the lynn will be back to normal sleeping time fast. (TheShado3dOne, 2023)

These messages are often responded by Lynn with attempts to explain why streams are so infrequent, or how life is going outside of broadcasting:

Sorry for worrying you. (Cat emoji) I don’t have any problems with my body, but streaming is starting to become a burden.

Yingyeo culture has become an increasingly relevant component of online digital culture within Korea (Lee & Abidin, 2021). While misogynistic attitudes on online streaming platforms like Twitch and AfreecaTV have been linked to corresponding rises in misogyny in online spaces(ibid). Lynn's streams of challenge runs, represent opportunities for collective security, friendliness, and kindness via the giving of reciprocal affective support. Streams like those created by Lynn, are becoming more common as the guarantees of success and security in Korean society have eroded, halting social progress and retarding wage momentum. Yingyeo attempts to provide space and respite from the unique pressures of Korean neoliberal conditions yet can also further alienate and isolate. Lynn operates similarly to many other Korean youth as he is representative of the frictions and bricolage that compose the modern Korean experience. As a Twitch streamer Lynn exists within both English and Korean spaces; operating within that liminal space, and under the pressures commonly found by Korean youth, Lynn attempts to escape societal pressures, collectively producing value for himself and his community. While in this case the value generated is partially financial in nature for Lynn, the larger value is the collective pursuit of excellence and shared support given and taken by the community and Lynn. The development of supportive and collective communities via yingyeo culture is reliant upon shared division of labor identified by affective support.

Despite the commonality of precarity in digital youth labor, these conditions are increasingly borne out by those at the margins of empire. On December 5, 2023, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy informed the world, and Korea specifically, that Twitch was closing its business in Korea effective the end of February 2024. Citing excessive costs at operating within Korea, where operating costs are “10 times more expensive than in most countries”(Clancy, 2023). The shuttering of Twitch in Korea has resulted in Korean Twitch broadcasters losing the ability to monetize their streams, while Korean viewers would no longer be able to make purchases on the platform. These changes threaten the viability of streaming as a profession ¹⁴ within Korea and further highlight the need for affective support within streaming communities, as well as demonstrate how labor conditions on streaming platforms are subject to the larger, volatile conditions of platform capitalism.

Conclusion

Global conditions of precarity pervade the consciousness of youth worldwide, while local responses to these threats remain separate. Social media and streaming act in concert with games to create veneers that valorize celebrity and the social capital it comes with. Yet, while the value generated is increasingly only social in nature (offering no guarantees of financial or economic security) new forms of relief are manifesting. Affective support unites communities through collective pursuits in a neoliberalist world with few opportunities for social or emotional climbing. Through processes of care-giving, communities can recognize the gross exploitation of the player/performer at the hands of the crowd, and find opportunities for redemption or solace within that same space. That is to say that as conditions of global neoliberalism demand greater competition, yingyeo amplifies that competition while simultaneously transforming it into a vehicle for communal care and affective support.

Live-streaming crosses cultural and territorial boundaries, providing opportunities for communal collective sharing and growth among a predominantly youth-dominated subculture. Players demonstrate various cultural understandings and perform resistance to neoliberal norms via seeking out and supplying support to their digital communities. Conditions of precarity under global neoliberalism operate in a similar fashion worldwide, with youth increasingly looking to non-traditional sites as a place to develop coping strategies as well as communities of support.

The digital economy only functions on the collective efforts of users in sacrificing their time and energy to provide content that can be dispersed for sale. As the co-founder and head of American game studio Valve, Gabe Newell says, “We look at every single person in the game as creating user-generated content[…] A person who just plays the game is generating some value for the other nine people playing” (Boluk & LeMieux, 2017, p. 265). This approach leads to the development of networks that provide space and access to the means of production that can then be capitalized on by those maintaining control of the network. In the instance of Twitch, you have most streamers who become cannibalized by the system and create value at the most basic level, subsequently lining Twitch's own pockets at the cost of their own. However, through the practice of affective support, under the auspices of yingyeo, relief to these capitalistic advances is occurring. Streamers like The Hob and Lynn develop content that is reliant upon manufactured toil. Arbitrarily enhanced difficult challenge runs provide space in which both the streamer and the audience can examine failure and the vulnerability that stems from it. Conditions under global neoliberalism manifest in different ways locally, yet precarity and struggle remain constant. In refusal of hyper-individualism, we are seeing that supportive communities are creating space where the attainment of “excellence” and success are attributed to collectivity. Live-streaming communities like Team Hitless through their embrace of yingyeo culture are redefining excellence under neoliberalism. After all, as the Team Hitless motto goes, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”