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How Twitch Streamers Balance Chat and Gameplay

Learn more about streamer communities at Streaming Media's next event.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Katherine Bowe: The relationship that you have with the audience is super important to understand, especially when we tie it back to a brand perspective, because, again, it's entering that conversation with your audience, especially if you have a brand partnering with you--

Brooke "Dodger" Thorne: Right.

Katherine: And they can understand how you interact, because, you have your own style as a streamer, right? Not everybody, probably, acts the way you do when they're streaming--

Dodger: Right.

Katherine: There's probably people that don't talk to Chat at all for a little bit--

Dodger: Absolutely.

Katherine: How do you balance the need of the community versus the need to entertain, while you're streaming?

Dodger: Admittedly, I get way too wrapped up in the game sometimes. There are a lot of times where I'm playing something and I look over at chat and they're like, "You missed a raid, you missed a sub bomb," which is where somebody can gift out a bunch of subscriptions to people, like, "You missed all of this stuff, 'cause you were so invested." And I do feel bad about that. Honestly that's one thing that I really need to be better about, is, I'm trying to figure out the balance of, you can have words pop up on your screen, when different things happen. So, there could be a big soundbite, and then a picture that pops up, when somebody subscribes, right? And some people use a ton of them, some people don't use any of them. Again, some people talk to their chat constantly, some people literally ignore their chat. So me trying to figure out the balance of, "Well I don't wanna be shouting stuff out constantly. "But I also don't want to ignore it." I've found that for me it's worked best to prioritize interacting with chat, versus paying attention to the alerts. Because I want us to be having a conversation. But I also want the conversation to be about the game.

Katherine: Right.

Dodger: So figuring out that whole balance is also difficult, yeah.

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