Let’s Play: Exploring literacy practices in an emerging videogame paratext

Abstract

This article explores the literacy practices associated with Let’s Play videos (or LPs) on YouTube. A hybrid of digital gaming and video, LPs feature gameplay footage accompanied by simultaneous commentary recorded by the player. Players may set out to promote, review, critique or satirize a game. In recent years, LPs have become hugely popular with young audiences, and currently make up over half the top hundred channels on YouTube. The authors identify LPs as emerging videogame paratexts with pedagogical potential. In particular, they ask how LPs function as sites of new literacies. They answer that question by discussing two key characteristics of LP practices: their emphasis on processes of meaning-making within games; and their mobilization of literacies associated with remix and appropriation. The final section of the article explores how LP practices might inform literacy instruction in schools.

Introduction

In September 2015, the world’s most popular YouTube channel reached 10 billion views. To the surprise of many, the channel’s content was devoted not to the powerful television, film or music industries, nor even to celebrity gossip. Instead, it was made up almost entirely of recordings of videogame gameplay. More specifically, the channel contained over 2000 Let’s Play videos (LPs) made by the 24 year old Swedish gamer and YouTube personality Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg – more commonly known to his fans as PewDiePie. PewDiePie’s site is just one of a growing number of channels on YouTube dedicated to this emerging hybrid of game and video. LPs vary in length, content and technical sophistication, but they almost always have two shared features : gameplay footage; accompanied with simultaneous commentary provided by the gamer. This running commentary may be recorded as audio or, as in PewDiePie’s case it may appear as inset video that captures the player’s voice, emotion and physical reactions. Audiences for LPs are huge; currently over half of the top hundred YouTube channels feature game play, a popularity largely fuelled by young audiences (Carpenter, 2015).

The content, purpose and platforms for LPs are as diverse as games themselves. While early LP creators often sought to draw attention to independent or older games, LPs now span a range of games, making it possible to watch a seven-year old player explore Minecraft, a teen gamer progress through levels in Grand Theft Auto, or a professional player expertly navigate her way through the rich visual world of Ico. The purpose of LPs is as varied as their content. Players may set out to promote, review, critique or satirize a game. They may want to display their skills, participate in a community, or make profit – or quite possibly, all three. But in almost every case, entertaining the audience is a priority. Thomas Smith et al. note that the ‘[t]he skill level of the player is not very important; it is the entertainment the player creates around the experience that draws interest’ (Smith et al., 2013:133). And while YouTube is a popular home for LPs, it is hardly the only one. LPs can be found on numerous other sites like Steam and Twitch, where players can livestream their gameplay, allowing viewers to watch and interact in real time.

Although it is frequently represented as a subcultural activity, in recent decades gaming has established itself as a significant force in popular culture. The game industry is now worth billions of dollars each year (Gaudiosi, 2015), and games hold a broad appeal that crosses generations, genders, sexualities, races and national borders (Shaw, 2010). Game culture also includes a wide range of discourses, texts and practices beyond games themselves, what Mia Consalvo (2007) has called games’ ‘paratexts.’ Drawing on the work of literary theorist Gerard Genette, Consalvo suggests these paratexts include both corporately produced materials (such as guidebooks, cheatbooks and mod chips) and user generated content (such as fan art, wikis, FAQs and reviews). She argues that paratexts are frequently more central to the experience of game play than games themselves. Indeed, Consalvo suggests that paratexts have unique ‘pedagogical functions’ (Consalvo, 2007: 22), for it is through paratexts that gamers learn how to play, judge and think about games and how they come to understand themselves as gamers.

While educational scholarship has addressed earlier paratexts – for example, cheat sites (Fields and Kafai, 2010), online forums (Steinkuehler and Duncan, 2009), and game reviews (Walsh and Apperley, 2012) – LPs have yet to be examined. This article, then, is a first attempt to identify and describe some of the ‘pedagogical functions’ of LP texts and practices, with a particular focus on literacy. Two questions are central to our exploration: How do LPs function as sites of new literacies? And how might the emergent processes of meaning-making and appropriation associated with LPs inform literacy education?

Our answers to these questions proceed in five parts. In part 1, we review the growing body of scholarship addressing literacy, games and gaming paratexts. In part 2, we outline our approach to researching LPs, drawing on Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel’s (2007) call to create in-depth portraits of new literacy practices. The next two sections directly address the question of how LPs function as sites of literacy. Part 3 demonstrates how LPs reveal processes of meaning-making within games through collective practices of interpretation, while part 4 considers LPs as remixed texts that surface new modes of multimodal production, as well as tensions around changing notions of profit and ownership. Finally, in part 5, we build on these observations to consider how the literacy practices related to participation in LP communities might inform literacy education.

Literacy, gaming and the Let’s Play video

In recent years, a great deal of scholarly work has been done to consider video games as productive sites for the development of creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and collaborative skills (e.g., Gee, 2003; Hayes and Duncan, 2012; Steinkuehler, 2007). This work has challenged the video game’s reputation as a mindless diversion, and has instead shown that games encourage thinking and learning, and play an important role in the production of cultural capital amongst young people. Much of this work explores games as a form of literacy. As Julian Sefton-Green suggests, the use of the term literacy in conjunction with gaming ‘is intended both to normalize a proscribed cultural activity (playing games) and to critique normative uses of the concept of literacy as it conventionally applies in education’ (Sefton-Green, 2006: 291). Work that takes up the idea of ‘game literacy’ (Buckingham and Burn, 2007) has examined games, game play and game culture both in and out of school. While some scholars have explored how digital games incorporated into classroom teaching might aid the development of multimodal literacies (e.g., Buckingham and Burn, 2007; Carr et al., 2006), others have turned their attention to understanding how literacy is enacted through everyday participation in game culture (e.g., Hayes and Duncan, 2012; Steinkuehler, 2007).

Although much of this scholarship examines gaming through the lenses of literacy and learning, a number of education scholars have also engaged with the interdisciplinary field of game studies. This is evident, for example, in the work of researchers Thomas Apperley, Catherine Beavis, Clare Bradford, Amanda Gutierrez, Joanne O’Mara and Christopher Walsh. This Australian research team has shown how concepts and frameworks generated within game studies can be used to broaden our understanding of games’ unique pedagogies. The researchers take up game studies’ distinction between text and action, for instance, to reflect on the tensions that arise from incorporating games into English curricula, noting that games’ interactivity means that they cannot be approached in the same way as more conventional texts (Apperley and Beavis, 2011). They also draw on Consalvo’s (2007) linked concepts of gaming capital and gaming paratexts (Apperley and Beavis, 2011; Gutierrez and Beavis, 2010; Walsh and Apperley, 2009). Like Consalvo, they argue that paratexts are essential to the accumulation of gaming capital, for it is through the social space of the paratext that gamers interact with each other and gain knowledge about games. Moving this observation into the field of literacy education, they examine a range of classroom projects that use gaming paratexts, from developing game-based drama performances to creating game wikis to game modding (modifying games by rewriting code). Throughout their combined work, they demonstrate how paratexts take the focus off the often mechanical process of playing games, and instead focus on ‘the contemplative, creative, imaginative and productive elements of digital gameplay’ (Apperley and Beavis, 2011: 134).

More recent studies have added to these insights into the pedagogical potential of gaming paratexts. For example, in their analysis of transmedia storytelling, Jennifer Rowsell et al. (2014) note how gaming paratexts expand ‘story worlds’ and offer young literacy learners new ways of telling stories. In her study of Chinese gamers playing English- and Japanese-language games, Alice Chik (2014) found that many gamers produced or used gaming paratexts aimed at second language learners, such as translations of in-game texts or online forums devoted to discussions of language learning through game play. She concludes that through their use and production of gaming paratexts, ‘gamers created community pedagogical resources, and acted as language advisers, teachers and translators for each other’ (Chik, 2014: 93), an observation which confirms paratexts’ often explicit pedagogical function. Taken together, these analyses point toward paratexts as important cultural resources, productive sites of informal learning and potentially useful models for imaginative engagement with games in literacy instruction.

As a new kind of paratext, the LP video has so far received little attention from literacy or game studies scholars. Indeed, the majority of scholarship about LPs has been generated by legal scholars interested in LPs’ challenge to copyright law. A number of these scholars (e.g., Meija, 2013; Pfeil, 2015; Taylor, 2015) suggest that LPs are transformative works – that is, that they alter the original creation ‘with new expression, meaning or message’ (Campbell, 1994, cited in Taylor, 2015: 255). Sebastian Mejia, for instance, notes that LPs are ‘creative endeavours’ (Mejia, 2013: 6) that provide not only new commentary on individual games but also on the game industry itself. Mejia writes that LP producers contribute to ‘the larger body of work that surrounds the industry. These videos – whether they are silly, informative, or provocative – are helping to curate a historical record of the medium in more ways than one. By providing criticism, LPs and livestreams serve a similar purpose to book reviews’ (Mejia, 2013: 30). Interestingly, these legal arguments interpret LPs as texts that play with meaning and that review, re-interpret and re-imagine an increasingly influential media form. As such, they provide us with our first glimpses into the literacies associated with LPs, glimpses we develop into more detailed observations after briefly outlining our research approach.

A Let’s See approach to the Let’s Play

In Researching New Literacies: Web 2.0 Practices and Insider Perspectives, Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel (2007) outline four potentially fruitful research orientations in the sociocultural study of new literacies. Fittingly, we situate our discussion of the Let’s Play within the approach Lankshear and Knobel identify as ‘Let’s See’ research. They describe this research as

… aimed primarily at understanding in depth a ‘new’ social practice and the literacies associated with or mobilized by this practice. It adopts a ‘let’s see’ attitude that encourages the researcher to get as close as possible to viewing a new practice from the perspectives and sensibilities of ‘insiders.’ … . This involves attending to the ways that meaningful content and socially recognized ways of interacting, using expressive resources, and conveying meanings are engaged, monitored, realized and thought about by those who are ‘inside’ the practice in question (Lankshear and Knobel, 2007: 230).

For us, this Let’s See approach to new literacies means considering LPs not only as artefacts, but as practices and sites for the production of social relations. It also means taking into account the practices and perspectives of both producers and audience members. To attain these multiple perspectives, we identified and analyzed a range of texts and processes. We collected and viewed over 20 LPs, transcribing portions of their commentary and making notes related to their oral performances (e.g., tone, and address to viewer) and visual strategies (e.g., editing techniques, and style of game play), as well as our perception of their intended purpose (e.g., to instruct, to review, and to satirize). We also analyzed selections of the viewer dialogues that surround LPs (e.g., in YouTube comments and Twitter updates) and attended to the plentiful articles and interviews with LP producers that have appeared in mainstream and specialized media.

Inherent in the Let’s Play video is an invitation to viewers to join in the game play; here, we invite the reader to see the complex meaning-making and social practices associated with this emerging paratext. In order to achieve the kind of close-up portrait that Lankshear and Knobel suggest characterizes a Let’s See approach we have chosen to focus on a relatively small number of LPs, producers and audiences. By drawing on multiple sources to illuminate select examples, we hope to provide vivid accounts of ‘ways of interacting, using expressive resources, and conveying meanings’ amongst LP participants (Lankshear and Knobel, 2007: 230).

Although LPs now exist in a variety of platforms, our study is mostly limited to the pre-recorded LPs on YouTube. While livestreaming of games on sites like Twitch and Steam is rapidly gaining in popularity, addressing the novelty of livestreaming requires theoretical considerations that were not part of this initial attempt to understand LPs as sites of learning. Moreover, it is clear both from our own research and that of others (Getomer et al., 2013; Wadeson, 2013) that YouTube continues to be widely used by gamers as an important source of information, community and entertainment.

Fresh eyes and different ideas: Meaning-making in Let’s Play commentaries and conversations

As the legal scholars cited earlier suggest, most LPs alter the meaning of the games they appropriate. For viewers, games become a text to watch rather than a game to play, and interactions are with each other or the player, rather than the game. For producers, gameplay becomes a public performance that includes creating a persona, building an audience, and making decisions about tone, language and narrative as they play. Games themselves are also substantially transformed. An added layer of commentary can transform the game into a review, a parody or simply a new form of entertainment. Even the original medium is altered, as game metamorphoses into video. But before we take up the radical nature of this appropriation, we need to first consider the way that the LP does not simply transform meanings – it highlights the very process of meaning-making itself. That is, LPs reveal just how gamers create meaning from games. Through their oral commentary (which may be humorous, critical or instructional and may include questions, exclamations, profanity, sarcasm, feigned and real emotion, laughs, shouts, whispers and grunts) we come to understand how a player plays a game and simultaneously, what they think, know and feel about the game.

What is significant about watching someone create meaning from a game? To begin with, it reinforces the idea that meanings are constructed rather than inherent in games (or any other medium). As James Gee writes, we see that ‘the meaning of any event, object, artifact, conversation, written note or any other potentially meaningful sign is up for grabs’ (Gee, 2003: 84). Meaning-making in games includes decoding words, symbols, actions, pictures and procedures. It relates to one’s past knowledge about gaming and includes reading the context and understanding cause and effect (if I do this, then this happens). When LP viewers interact with each other and with producers through Twitter, chat or comments (as they frequently do), meaning is also collectively constructed. But above all, watching (and listening to) an LP highlights the messy and shifting nature of meaning-making, as the player continually makes and re-makes meaning from the game in response to complex semiotic, social, contextual and gestural cues.

Perhaps we can best see how processes of meaning-making are put on display by analyzing what gamers call a ‘blind’ LP – that is, an LP in which the player plays a game for the first time. In 2013, the LP producer Christopher Odd (known on YouTube as Mr. Odd) created a blind playthrough of the independent game Journey. Developed by Thatgamecompany, Journey has garnered praise from both critics and gamers. Within the game, which the developers describe as an interactive parable, the player controls a silent figure that glides through a beautiful desert landscape towards a distant mountain. Perhaps the most notable feature of the game is the way it creates encounters with unknown others. Moving through the landscape, a player is paired with other players. Although they cannot communicate, they can learn to work together to solve the game’s mysteries and progress through its levels. For many, this is the game’s unique draw. Laura Parker (2013) writes in The New Yorker that Journey signals ‘a new era of thought-provoking, meaningful experiences that stretch the boundaries of the medium,’ while games scholar Graeme Kirkpatrick writes that Journey prompts players ‘to think about how others share our experiences’ (Kirkpatrick, 2015: 522).

The Montréal-based Mr. Odd has more than 120,000 subscribers and 40 million views on his YouTube channel, which is made up primarily of gaming content. In 2013, Mr. Odd began a blind LP of Journey, chronicling his game play across a series of 6 videos, each approximately 25 minutes long (Odd, 2013b). Mr. Odd’s interpretive quest is clear in the very first video, which he titles ‘Who Am I? Where Am I?’ In the opening sequence of the game, as he steps into the role of the silent figure, he tells viewers ‘I don’t know anything about who I am,’ preparing us for the gradual discovery of his character. This initial video is peppered with questions. ‘Perhaps our journey is to get to the mountain?’ he asks as the distant landscape comes into view, struggling to understand the game’s purpose. The appearance of another character elicits more questions: ‘I’m pretty sure that’s another person who’s in my journey – or maybe I’m in their journey?’ In a game that contains no spoken or written language, Mr. Odd must make meaning from the game’s visual semiotics. He frequently struggles for words to describe the images and scenes before him. ‘I’m going to go grab this other … glyph. I’m probably calling it the wrong name, but … .’ he tells the audience, his voice trailing off as he picks up a mysterious illuminated symbol. As the game progresses, viewers watch as Mr. Odd becomes more certain in his grasp of its characters, narrative and purpose. In the final video, as the credits roll, Mr. Odd offers his own interpretation of the game as a story about a journey through the ruins of a civilization destroyed by war. ‘It was almost like a religious experience,’ he tells his viewers, ‘in the sense that you have these spiritual guides taking you through and showing you the way.’ While offering his own reading of the game, Mr. Odd also recognizes the possibility of multiple interpretations, saying ‘That’s probably why it’s called Journey – because everyone is going to interpret it differently.’

The comments' threads demonstrate that viewers understand the LP as a site for making (and debating) meaning. To date, Mr. Odd’s six videos have received over 61,000 views and 523 comments. Later threads, in particular, include numerous explanations of the game, like this one from the final video:

Since everyone else is posting their theories on this, I might as well, too. This game is the most freaking beautiful game I have ever seen in my life. I got shivers throughout the whole thing. It's like … this people based on sound and light, and they use technology woven into cloth, almost like liquid light, which is so pretty. And the people built up a wonderful civilization together, from plants to towns to cities. Then they had an argument, which led to a fight, which led to a war.

Disagreements amongst viewers about the meaning of the journey also lead to reflections on the nature of interpretation itself. In video three, after one commenter derides Mr. Odd for struggling to understand the game’s narrative, other commenters point out the variability of interpretation. ‘People play games and interpret stories in different ways,’ writes one commenter. ‘Just because he is not playing the game exactly the way you think is correct doesn’t make it wrong.’ Another viewer considers the gap between game developers’ and players’ interpretations. Calling Journey an ‘art game,’ the commenter writes that: ‘The artists and designers in a game may have a specific purpose, but like art in a gallery, it is the viewer (and in this case the player) who gets to experience it with fresh eyes and different ideas.’

Beyond questions of narrative and visual interpretation, viewers also comment on the nature of game play within Journey, frequently reflecting on the game’s emphasis on shared experience. After Mr. Odd abandons one of the other players he meets in the game, viewers debate the ethics of this decision. While one viewer calls him heartless and another comments that ‘your inability to stay with your partner is infuriating,’ other viewers interpret the decision quite differently. ‘Your reactions here give a great sense of this game's ability to remind us of these moments in our lives when friends & loved one's are lost to us, while also serving to remind us that we have no choice but to mourn & move on.’ These kinds of conversations demonstrate the affective and contextual nature of meaning-making, as viewers create connections between the game play and life experiences. We also see meaning-making here as a collective and dialogic practice, highlighting the way that paratexts frequently engage players in ‘interpersonal and social processes’ (Beavis et al., 2009: 169) that include affirmation, praise, disagreement and debate.

Such processes are generally confined to the written communication that surrounds the LP video (for example, in YouTube comments, Twitter conversations, or reddit forums). However, Mr. Odd has taken his commitment to interaction a step further by inviting viewers to take part in conversations via Google Plus at the close of an LP series. Afterwards, the recorded video conversations are posted online with the title Let’s Discuss (Odd, 2013a). In an interview on the Gamer Girl Presents (2013) blog, Mr. Odd explains his decision to begin the Let’s Discuss series. ‘I realized that people were having very intelligent and well thought out discussions on the last video of each series,’ he says, ‘and I thought, “What better way to end a series than to get viewers involved and chat about it?”’ And in fact, both the substance and the shape of the Let’s Discuss sessions do demonstrate a desire for significant involvement. For example, audience members who joined Mr. Odd’s discussion of the popular post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us (2013), not only discussed elements of narrative and character, but also raised questions about gender and race representation within the game. The two-hour conversation included 19 viewers, ranging from teenaged to middle-aged participants. Although moderated by Mr. Odd, the discussion is nonetheless characterized by broad participation. Bringing to mind James Gee’s (2004) characterization of ‘affinity spaces’ as spaces that encourage dispersed knowledge and socially-constructed meanings, participants took turns raising topics for discussion, shared interpretations of the game based in personal experiences, and brought new knowledge to the discussion in the form of research on the game’s themes (e.g., disease control).

Analyzing the broad range of paratexts highlighted in this single example, then, we begin to see how meaning-making is central to LP texts and practices. Videos like Mr. Odd’s blind playthrough of Journey reveal to viewers the complex, contextualized and highly personal ways one player produces meaning from the game. But that is not all. Through written and verbal online conversations, viewers themselves participate in shared meaning-making and reflections on the nature of interpretation. Their enthusiastic involvement reminds us that, as Sean Duncan and Elisabeth Hayes write, ‘interactive media are more than simply “consumed” by players, but serve as the basis for internet-situated discussions that can help to guide our understanding of 21^st century literacies’ (Duncan and Hayes, 2012: 3, italics in original).

Mixing up Mario: Remix literacies in Let’s Play production

Let's Play videos not only create spaces for collective meaning-making, they also mobilize literacies associated with digital appropriation – what some scholars have called ‘remix literacy’ (Dudeney and Hockly, 2016; Stedman, 2012). In this section, we explore two strands of remix literacy related to the production of LPs. The first strand is composed of the technical, aesthetic and critical capacities needed to mix gameplay, commentary and video into an effective LP. The second strand includes the knowledge and ethical considerations required to negotiate the complex questions about intellectual property (IP) and profit raised by LPs’ status as remixed texts.

Over the past decade, literacy scholars have shown an increasing interest in remix. Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear (2008) argue that remix is ‘a significant literacy practice,’ and Henry Jenkins and colleagues identify appropriation – or ‘the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content’ – as a central activity within the digitally literate practices of young people (Jenkins et al., 2006: 32). A body of work is now emerging to map those literacies, work that might help us to recognize the literacies at play in the production of LPs. Knobel and Lankshear (2008), for example, identify technical, discourse and evaluative dimensions to remix literacy. Expanding on their discussion, Kyle Stedman writes that ‘an effective remixer will show proficiency using the technical skills and tools needed for a task, an astute understanding of the expectations and generic considerations of a chosen discourse community, and a well-practiced system for internally and externally evaluating the quality of a given text’ (Stedman, 2012: 109). Dustin Edwards (2016) argues that effective remixes ‘are highly attuned to the sociocultural dimensions of the materials they use and the contexts from which they arise,’ pointing towards the remixer’s knowledge about both texts and contexts. Other scholars have emphasized the critical literacies required to re-design digital texts. As Lyndsay Grant (2010) notes, creating a remix requires critical insight into a text’s underlying ideologies and values, as well as an understanding of how to transform those messages to create counter narratives and alternative views.

As an LP producer on YouTube, a livestreamer on Twitch, and a frequent game reviewer, the American creator Ashley Soriano provides us with a characteristic example of the literacies required to successfully produce and circulate repurposed game content. Ashe (the name she uses most often in game contexts) has 62,000 subscribers and over 14 million views on her YouTube channel, and specializes in creating content related to role-playing games (RPGs). In 2015, Ashe produced an LP for the RPG called The Descent, as part of Bioware’s Dragon Age franchise (Soriano, 2015a). Her playthrough first appeared as a livestream on Twitch and was later edited and reposted to YouTube. We might examine this process of adaptation – from game to performance to video – in order to observe how multiple materials and literacies are recombined in a single LP series.

As a livestream on Twitch, the addition of Ashe’s oral commentary, physical presence and audience interaction transforms The Descent from a game into a performance (Soriano, 2015b). An expert player of RPGs, Ashe’s commentary brings new layers of meaning to the game as she introduces characters, narrates her gameplay and explains the game’s lore. She makes frequent references to other games and sprinkles her commentary with wry critiques, for example cursing BioWare for adding obvious piano chords to a sad scene and complaining that the progression of the story is mostly based on whether or not characters can jump. Spread over the six hours of gameplay, her commentary demonstrates an extraordinary knowledge of games, the game industry and media tropes that enriches the gameplay with textual, intertextual and contextual insight.

Ashe’s commentary is accompanied by her embodied presence in the LP, as she uses a video camera to show her face and upper body in the corner of the frame. She employs movement, facial expressions and gaze to signal her emotional responses to the game and communicate with her viewers. She smiles, grimaces, claps, buries her face in her hands, crosses her fingers and shifts her gaze between the camera and her screen. Occasionally, she stands up and leaves the screen altogether – to get water, stop for lunch or fix a technical glitch. These everyday actions complement her casual tone and her banter with viewers via Twitch’s chat function.

In a podcast series addressing diversity in gaming (Cypheroftyr and Redconversion, 2016), Ashe tells interviewers that: ‘It’s one thing to play the game yourself but completely another to enjoy it with others … . It makes the game so much more fulfilling.’ Indeed, Ashe’s welcoming tone, interactions with viewers, and down-to-earth persona transform the game into a shared experience and speak to her ability, as Stedman (2012) suggests, to respond to the expectations of her discourse community – in this case, the gaming community’s increasing appetite for engagement and sociability (Warren, 2013).

In converting her livestreams into YouTube videos, Ashe draws on a different set of technical skills and responds to the norms of a different platform. To begin with, she edits six hours of gameplay into 12 YouTube videos. But other editing also occurs. For example, a long segment of the livestream during which Ashe experienced technical glitches is cut and replaced with a screen capture from the television program SpongeBob SquarePants that reads ‘Twenty Minutes Later.’ In this way, Ashe both takes advantage of the technological benefits provided by pre-recorded video and speaks to her viewers, for whom SpongeBob time cards are a familiar occurrence in remixed videos. Each video is titled – for example ‘Crash, Ahoy!’ or ‘Arcane Horrors in the Wall’ – and given a short description that uses the insider-language of her audience, including references to mods, glitches and game lore. While Ashe’s interactions with her audience are less evident here than on Twitch, she nonetheless participates in the comments' threads in order to respond to viewers’ questions. Taken in total, then, Ashe’s process of creating LPs activates multiple literacies associated with appropriation. These include critical insight into gameplay processes and the game industry, as well as an understanding of the expectations of game communities. They also include the ability to modify game content using a variety of technological processes (e.g., modding, and recording and video editing) and communicative modes (e.g., oral, visual, gestural, and written).

Beyond mobilizing these literacies, appropriation also raises thorny questions about IP – what Edwards has called ‘the elephant in the room’ in discussions of the pedagogical potential of remix (Edwards, 2016: 52). Some scholars, however, have begun to suggest that questions about IP should not be overlooked, but rather seen as central to remix literacies (Burwell, 2013; Edwards, 2016; Palfrey et al., 2009). In the next paragraphs, then, we illustrate the shifting notions of IP and complex digital economies that LP producers must navigate. We consider this process of navigation a crucial literacy within new media environments ‘based on sampling, appropriation, transformation, and repurposing’ (Jenkins et al., 2006: 20).

Practices of appropriation associated with LPs are particularly complicated given the unique interactive properties of video games. While the idea for a game and the methods used to play it are not copyrightable, the underlying source code and audiovisual components are copyrightable (Pfeil, 2015). LPs, of course, reproduce and put on display these very audiovisuals, in some cases (as with Mr. Odd’s LP of Journey) in their entirety. But at the same time, there are marked differences. As we have shown, games become video, private play turns into public performance, and the mechanical action of gameplay is overlaid with personal commentary. These transformations are enough to suggest that LPs are substantially different from the original game, and have led legal scholars to argue that LPs appear to fall within the parameters of fair use. However, such claims have yet to be tested in court, leading to uncertainty amongst both game publishers and LP producers (Kohler, 2015).

Moreover, economic models associated with LPs signal new patterns of online profit distribution and new kinds of relationships between media industries and users that must be negotiated by young digital creators. Mainstream media outlets reporting on the LP phenomenon consistently adopt a tone of amazement – over the profits made, the age of the producers, and most of all, the idea that money can be made playing video games. A story reported by Canadian Press and headlined ‘Toronto man draws millions playing games on YouTube’ begins:

Twenty-two-year-old Toronto native Evan Fong is about to crack the Top 25 list for most YouTube subscribers, passing Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Bieber.

And he'll do it by playing video games.

Approaching 11 million subscribers and two billion views, Fong's YouTube channel is part of a massive trend: a subculture of young people are tuning out of TV and are instead going online to watch other people play and talk over video games (Canadian Press, 2015).

But the revenue associated with LPs is considerably more complicated and contentious than these opening sentences suggest. To begin, the vast majority of LP producers make no profit, yet their work serves as promotion for game companies, provides content for platforms like YouTube, and draws viewers to advertisers (Walker, 2014). Their seemingly unproductive play, then, actually generates considerable economic value – but only for others. A second complication lies in the appearance of new forms of funding. On YouTube, profit is made via the Partner Program, which allows uploaders to make 55% of the advertising revenue generated through ads that appear before or during videos. On Twitch, for example, gamers can monetize their gameplay through advertising, similar to YouTube, but they can also ask viewers to donate money, or to subscribe to their channel for a monthly fee. These kinds of financial arrangements place gamers in the role of entrepreneurs, even as they use (and add value to) platforms owned by two of the world’s most powerful corporations – Google (owner of YouTube) and Amazon (owner of Twitch). Finally, as we explore below, a few game companies have recently pushed back against users’ monetization of their content, citing copyright claims and in the process inciting anger, antagonism and even resistance amongst LP producers.

Once again, an example helps to illuminate our discussion. One of the most talked-about events within the LP community has been Nintendo’s 2015 announcement of its ‘Creators Program.’ Under the program, YouTube creators using Nintendo content must register with the company. Once they do so, any of their videos that use Nintendo content must go through an approval process. If a video is approved, revenue is split between the two parties. If Nintendo chooses not to approve a video, it claims 100% of the revenue (Ore, 2015). Critics of the program have two concerns. The first concern is that LPs may fall under fair use, and are therefore exempt from Nintendo’s copyright claim. The second concern is that by putting in place an approval process, Nintendo has created a mechanism not only to make profit, but also to censor or limit the kinds of representations created with Nintendo games. Technology journalist Chris Kohler (2015), voicing the views of many gamers, writes in Wired that Nintendo may be ‘creating a new media landscape in which it controls the message, and takes a slice of the revenue besides.’

A number of young LP producers have spoken out about the Nintendo program. One of these is Nic Truong, a Canadian LP producer known on YouTube as Tetra Ninja. Truong is a prolific producer, with over 7,000 uploads, 1.2 million channel subscribers and almost 500 million views. Truong began creating LPs as an undergraduate, and now produces LPs full-time. Although he has not disclosed his income, he reports that he has been able to make ‘a comfortable living’ from his videos that includes paying off his student debts and buying a house (Off, 2015). While some gamers like PewDiePie draw audiences with their frenetic gameplay and over-the-top commentary, Truong has a reputation for ‘chill commentary’ (MishkaNYC, 2015) and an easy-to-follow, even instructional playing style.

Nintendo looms large in Truong’s personal narrative. He has told journalists that the first video game he ever played was Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda. He also credits the success of his YouTube channel to his series of Zelda LPs. Despite (or perhaps because of) the role that Nintendo games have played in his development as a gamer, Truong has critiqued the Creators Program in a series of interviews with mainstream media, focusing on issues of profit, promotion and labor (Off, 2015; Ore, 2015; Turoc, 2015) . He has explained to interviewers that the program ‘doesn’t make sense,’ since LPs act as ‘great marketing tools’ (Off, 2015) for game companies. Perhaps more unusually, Truong also makes clear that producing LPs, while a ‘dream job,’ is still a job, and he reminds interviewers that he does a full day’s work of playing, commenting on, editing and uploading games.

While Truong does not make direct reference to fair use, similar to Chris Kohler (2015), he understands the Creators Program as a way for Nintendo to both increase profit and police their IP. ‘They don’t want people mixing their characters such as Super Mario, Kirby and Donkey Kong,’ he says, ‘and portraying them in some kind of negative light’ (Off, 2015). At the end of each interview, Truong explains that he has made the decision not to submit his videos to the Creators Program, as the program is ‘ambiguous’ and the policy is ‘open to change at any time they feel they want to change it’ (Off, 2015). He also worries that other companies may take Nintendo’s lead and begin claiming profits from LP producers. This, he says, is ‘the main problem and fear of all the people who do gaming content on YouTube’ (Off, 2015).

The ambiguity and changeability that Truong recognizes in Nintendo’s attitude towards LP creators might be seen as representative of the current online environment as a whole. In her study of millennials, fandom and media, Louisa Stein writes that the landscape of millennial media is ‘a volatile one, a constantly shifting process of negotiation’ (Stein, 2015: 23). This volatility is evident in both what is said and unsaid in Truong’s interviews. The absence of references to fair use, for example, speaks to the current uncertainty around LPs’ status as transformative work. This is an ambiguity that game developers and LP producers alike may exploit, as both sides fear a legal precedent that is not in their favor (Kohler, 2015); Truong’s understanding of his own role in relation to the games he plays and from which he profits are marked by similar tensions. In interviews, he holds to a view that LP creators produce ‘honest’ and ‘genuine’ reviews of games (Off, 2015), placing the LP within a long tradition of fan appropriations that review, critique or subvert the texts of popular culture (Jenkins, 1992). At the same time, he also admits that his LPs act as marketing tools for game companies. This seeming contradiction reveals the new modes of profit-making made possible by emerging digital economies, and suggests that young producers must increasingly negotiate how their appropriated work is used and the role it plays in promotion and branding.

The circumstances faced by Truong and other LP producers are complicated and frequently paradoxical, as corporate media interpellates young, active audiences as ‘liminal yet poised to be mainstream, expert at media yet potentially malleable for advertisers, willing to go the extra mile in terms of textual investment yet happy to play within the officially demarcated lines’ (Stein, 2015: 18). So while LPs make it amply clear that meaning within digital environments is frequently created through collaborative practices that include repurposing digital material, it is also becoming clear that participating in such practices means facing questions around not only the use of digital material, but also the (re)use of one’s labor, creativity and expertise. The critical ability to recognize power relations in digital environments based on appropriation and to make informed decisions about one’s own place in these environments should, we argue, be understood as an essential aspect of the literacies mobilized by LP production.

Let’s Play videos and literacy instruction

Using a research approach that emphasizes ‘seeing’ new digital practices in depth, we hope to have illuminated some of the literacies associated with LPs, as well as some of the novelty, originality and cultural influence of this emerging media form. In this final section, we briefly explore how LP practices might inform literacy curriculum and instruction. We consider LPs from three vantages: as texts that invite close analysis; as focal points for conversations about the game industry; and as models for student media production. The ideas we put forward here are meant to provoke contemplation about the possible roles of games and gaming paratexts in the classroom, rather than pin down exact strategies.

For young people and their teachers, LPs provide an accessible medium for the analysis of games. By taking away the element of interactivity, LPs convert the immersive experience of game play into a series of representations. While this conversion may seem like a serious diminishment of the game experience, it nonetheless gives viewers a unique opportunity to reflect, at a distance, on games and gameplay. Image, action and narrative all come into view. On platforms like YouTube where LPs are pre-recorded rather than live-streamed, videos can easily be viewed, reviewed and analyzed. Games in this form can be readily understood as cultural artefacts, and their ideologies uncovered in observations about their aesthetics, their interpellation of players, and the kinds of actions they invite (Apperley and Beavis, 2013 ).

The LP video also solicits more personal kinds of discussions and comparisons. The proposition implied in the phrase ‘let us play’ is not just an invitation to shared play – in many cases it is also an invitation to share interpretation, as we saw in the comments around Mr Odd’s LP of Journey. The LP asks: How do you play and understand this game? How do others play and understand it? And how can we account for the variations? Participating in these kinds of discussions can help students to recognize meaning in games (and elsewhere) as complex, situated and context-specific, and encourage them to see games they know well with ‘fresh eyes and different ideas.’

Classroom conversations focused on the LP text can also be expanded outwards to include critical questions about the complicated contexts in which LPs are produced, consumed and circulated. LPs serve as an excellent focal point for investigations into the shifting power relations between media users and producers (and the blurring of those two roles), with a particular focus on the global game industry. Students and teachers might consider the role LPs and other gaming paratexts play in the promotion of games. They might compare various game publishers’ positions on user activities such as appropriation, modification and live-streaming, and consider the implications of each. Or they might also inquire into the ethics of appropriation and the related concepts of IP, fair use and user rights, increasingly important topics for literacy classrooms in an age of remixed media (Burwell, 2013; Palfrey et al., 2009). These sorts of classroom-based inquiries into ‘uses in context’ (Willis, 2003) make it clear to young people that their ‘everyday cultural practices are not disconnected from pressing economic and political issues’ but rather are a ‘force in shaping and reshaping the world’ (Dolby, 2003: 272).

Finally, while such critical reflections are helpful in themselves, they also serve as a first step towards using LPs as models for media production in the classroom. An expanding body of research (e.g., Jenkins et al., 2006; Jocson, 2013; Peppler and Kafai, 2007) suggests that student participation in media production supports both digital and traditional literacies, leads to more critical stances in understanding media texts, and assists youth in becoming ‘active members of today’s media-rich society’ (Jenson et al., 2014: 216). Certainly we can see the potential for relevant skills acquisition, critical analysis of texts and creative meaning-making through the production of LPs. Making an LP (whether a full walkthrough or commentary on a single scene) requires technical skills related to recording gameplay, editing video and uploading to an external site. It requires digital literacies connected with knowing how to play a game and how to analyze gameplay elements such as narrative, image, action and ideology. It means approaching game texts with a critical eye, as cultural artefacts worthy of commentary and reflection. It also requires the making of decisions about audience, purpose, narration, tone and genre. Interestingly, these are the same kinds of stylistic decisions that are made regularly in composing and performing written and oral texts in an English classroom. In this way, LPs, like other paratexts, provide a bridge between traditional and game literacies (Apperley and Beavis, 2011), opening the possibility for learning about effective communication through a medium that is relevant to many young people.

Including media production as a key component of digital literacy is not simply about the acquisition of skills, knowledge or even critical dispositions. It is also about a commitment to social analyses and change. In an age in which the ability to participate in creating, critiquing, and manipulating digital texts is a means of belonging and social power, literacy education committed to equity needs to educate students in the practical aspects of symbolic meaning-making. Fortunately, the open invitation extended by LPs means that even students with little experience of gaming can produce videos that showcase the valuable observations of beginning gamers, while more experienced players can provide reviews of games that draw on a deep, intertextual knowledge of games and gaming.

Conclusion

Let's Play videos are one of many imaginative and social ways through which players acquire gaming capital, share interests and participate in learning, dialogue and play. As we have shown through our detailed descriptions, LP practices mobilize significant literacy practices. Through their unique combination of oral commentary and visual gameplay, they reveal the complex, multimodal and situated ways that meaning is created in games; in doing so, they launch productive conversations in which participants share interpretations of games and reflect on the nature of interpretation itself. As a form of media that appropriates and transforms another medium, LPs also activate a host of remix literacies. These remix literacies apply to the capacities required to produce effective LPs by (re)combining materials and modes in ways that are recognized by participants in the LP community. They also apply to the critical awareness that is required to produce and circulate appropriated game content at a time when conceptualizations of copyright, fair use and ownership are in flux. Based on these observations, we suggest that the range of practices associated with LPs (online discussion, shared and personal meaning-making, multimodal production, appropriation and critical decision-making) provide useful models for critical and creative engagement with games in literacy instruction.

It is our hope that some of these insights might prompt further research into the LP phenomenon. Digital ethnographies of meaning-making practices in LP communities, cultural studies analyses of the role young LP producers play in the economies of the game industry, and classroom-based research into the potential of LPs in literacy instruction are just a few of the ways that the Let’s Play invitation might be taken up. Such analyses would add to our understanding of the pedagogical potential of gaming paratexts, and take seriously the significant role of games in young people’s everyday lives, learning and literacies.