Livestreaming past the barriers
Research shows gamers with disabilities find acceptance and income by sharing gameplay online
Justin Cooper would love to Twitch for a living, but for now, he’ll settle for putting a smile on someone’s face.
Since about 2016, the 24-yearold gamer has been broadcasting on twitch.tv, an online platform that allows users to livestream their gameplay for viewers, who can interact with streamers through a text-based chat, and even reward content creators with donations. An admitted small-time streamer, Cooper said he has only made about $100 since he started, but doesn’t do it for the cash so much as the sense of community streaming affords.
Interacting with a digital audience that shares his passion gives him a platform to tell his story and make friends — achievements that have been harder to unlock in other arenas.
“In real life, I would say I have trouble making friends or doing stuff because I feel people are going to see me as being in a wheelchair,” he said. “But online, people treat me as they would treat anyone else, because they don’t know that I’m disabled.”
Paralyzed from the waist down and living with neurofibromatosis, a nerve disease that sees tumours form throughout the body, Cooper starting gaming at the age of 7, using it to cope with his condition, meet new people around the world and kill time during long hospital stays.
But it wasn’t until he caught a clip of a streamer with no arms doing just that, while engaging with an audience and garnering support in kind, that Cooper decided to start broadcasting on Twitch himself.
Mark Johnson, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, has been studying the digital economy, and specifically Twitch’s role in it. In his research, he found that the service offers an environment for inclusion — and in some cases, income — to a significant proportion of users living with mental and physical health conditions.
Between 2016 and 2017, Johnson studied Twitch’s streaming culture online and offline by attending several live gaming events around the world, interviewing over 100 streamers and observing interactions on more than 200 of the platform’s channels.
He learned that successful Twitch users — professionals who could earn an income through streaming — found acceptance and inclusion from their online audiences, and appreciated the ability to work from home in a self-driven job that, at the highest levels, can bring in a six-figure income, but not easily.
“Making a living, or making any kind of decent money at livestreaming, is still incredibly hard and takes a huge amount of time,” he explained, adding it takes most people years of steady broadcasting for multiple hours a day to reach that level of success. “Lots and lots of people, whether they’re perfectly healthy or not, simply don’t have that kind of time and that kind of energy to invest in something before it starts to pay off.”
Since January 2018, Cooper said he has had to cut back his Twitch time to recover from a couple bouts of pneumonia. At his peak, he had about 30 followers, which has since dropped to17. His condition has kept him in and out of hospitals for about a fifth of his life, but having an audience to hear about his challenges gives him solace, and, he hopes, an opportunity to give back.
“It’s very therapeutic,” he said. “Just talking about it and getting it out. Some people are shy speaking about their disability. I love talking about it. Sometimes it inspires other people to do what inspires them in some way.”
Currently living on Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, an income support and services program for Albertans with medical conditions that keep them from earning a living, he’s not in the streaming game to make it big just yet. In the coming months, he plans to share a podcast on the platform, another option for content creators on Twitch, that gets gamers with disabilities to share their stories and struggles.