Needy Streamer Overload, a 2022 visual novel (or text-based adventure game) created by Japanese developer Xenomo, offers a rare look behind the scenes of a typically glamorized industry: Internet live streaming ( Gematsu, 2022). The game focuses on the main character, a mentally unstable female streamer named Ame, while the player takes the role of her significant other and manager “P-chan.” They guide her toward streaming greatness by meticulously curating her schedule, content, and lifestyle to reach one million subscribers over the course of 30 days; however, success comes at a price, for not only does the player manage Ame’s star persona, “KAngel,” but they’re also saddled with her emotional baggage. Every decision they make results in quantifiable changes to volatile metrics like “Mental Darkness” and “Stress” as well as Ame’s follower count, forcing the player to attempt to strike a balance between marketing their talent as a product and managing her as “human capital” (Oh 108); these choices ultimately have drastic consequences for Ame’s future. In this manner, Needy Streamer offers incisive and rousing commentary on the capitalist underpinnings of streaming as a career, the artificial construction of celebrity, and in turn, the dark reality of mental health issues that permeate the Internet live streaming community (but are rarely discussed). Through its visual aesthetics and game mechanics, Needy Streamer exposes the plight of streamers as individuals struggling under a deeply clinical, profit-centric system to overturn the ideologies that have become normalized and perpetuated by digital capitalism.
Firstly, through its visual design, Needy Streamer vividly portrays the cunning process by which the streaming industry manufactures celebrity figures as commodities. The game begins by adopting a light and airy pastel color palette in its background art and icons, which parallels the vivacity of KAngel’s streamer getup: a white wig with purple highlights, blue and pink twin pigtails, multiple bows adorning her hair, and an extravagant bow on her chest ( Needy Streamer Overload ). In contrast, Ame’s casual appearance off-camera is dark-haired with far more simple and muted attire; the juxtaposition of these images, then, explicitly reflects the facade of constructed celebrity, deliberately separating Ame and KAngel as distinct entities off and on-screen. Furthermore, the visual association of darkness with Ame’s real self hints at the less-than-cheerful reality of streamer life, in which heavily stigmatized issues like depression and anxiety are often concealed by the streamer’s formation of a hyper-exaggerated false persona. This connection exemplifies how celebrities often feel pressured to fit certain images, whether physical or mental, according to the strenuous standards of the entertainment industry; such a system encourages them to “impose and implant such a definition of [themselves] as fit[s] more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture” (Hall 187), encouraging participants to conform to the paradigm – and hegemonies – of their respective industries to succeed within them. In application to Needy Streamer, careers in the live streaming industry are notoriously volatile for their reliance on a clean reputation, unrelentingly positive attitude, and impossibly high energy to generate consistent viewers and engagement; full-time streamers, especially those without an established audience, hold no hope of putting food on the table if they don’t adhere to these conventions. When given no other choice, then, streamers like Ame are pigeonholed into building an appealing – artificial – appearance as their very means of survival.
In this manner, aesthetics play an important role in Ame’s identity not only as a streamer but a female streamer: besides adjusting her appearance for commercial benefit, she constructs other elements of her celebrity persona in response to the implicit patriarchal stereotypes that surround Internet culture. For instance, in online fan bases – especially those of streamers – audiences may develop obsessive and one-sided, or ‘parasocial,’ relationships with their idol while the person in question has no idea that they exist. Visually, KAngel’s behavior feeds into such parasocial expectations of intimacy which interpolate– or welcome – her audience as a cherished part of the community. In the way that “K-Pop idols appeal to consumers by developing desirable images and building intimacy” (Oh 105), KAngel panders to her (likely teenage and male) fans’ imaginable desperation and loneliness through endearing body language and facial expressions that fit into archetypes of idol behavior. Whether blushing and bashfully covering her mouth, pointing directly at the camera with an ecstatic smile, winking and raising a peace sign over one eye, or holding an inquisitive finger to her lips ( Needy Streamer Overload ), KAngel replicates specific mannerisms that typify idol culture to build up her reputation as an innocent and lovable figure in the eyes of her demographic; thus, she capitulates to the collective imaginary of the patriarchy within the capitalist arena of streaming.
In terms of game mechanics, Needy Streamer exemplifies the streaming industry as a site of struggle between capitalism and humanity through how P-Chan constructs Ame’s reality. Specifically, the player’s role as manager of Ame’s activities – comparable to how the Korean “ gihoeksa [management agency] controls every aspect of the idols’ public image and career, including the coordination of artistic and media content” (Oh 106) – sees how P-Chan struggles between maximizing views and maintaining Ame’s mental stability. This process manifests itself through the nuanced methods of exploitation that inform the process of content creation within Needy Streamer. At any given point, the player can instruct Ame on how to spend her day, but each task she performs, including streaming, possesses an inherent exchange value that affects four key metrics of her existence: followers, “Stress,” “Affection,” and “Mental Darkness.” Making her browse social media, for example, could decrease affection (her attraction toward P-Chan) and increase mental darkness ( Needy Streamer Overload ). Overall, then, this system immediately establishes Ame’s mental health statistics as inversely related to her streaming success and communicates the perennial conundrum of creativity on the Internet: should a streamer make what is best for them, or what is best for their audience?
As P-Chan, the player chooses what content Ame will stream, and in order to reach her goal of one million subscribers as quickly as possible, they will likely be inclined to cater to trends rather than Ame’s interests solely because of the massive benefits offered by specific types of content. More sensational media, like “sexy” streams or deep dives into conspiracy theories, are more detrimental to Ame’s emotional state but also garner far more views and subscribers ( Needy Streamer Overload ). In this manner, Needy Streamer circumscribes the player within a realistic simulation of the streaming industry; their sole objective is to guide the streamer to a quantifiable goal by any means necessary, just as how real-life content creators are presented with the choice of sacrificing their dignity and sanity to achieve success. The arena of digital content creation, then, subsists as “a [cultural] battlefield where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always strategic positions to be won and lost” (Hall 187); the tension between industry and individual on the Internet manifests through the volatile nature of the streamer’s career, which expects utter self-abnegation in exchange for meaningful advancement.
Similarly, the results of maxing out specific categories of the stat system evidence streamers’ dire absence of self-worth as produced by the relentless standards of the industry. For instance, raising the stress meter to its highest level at 80 points eventually results in a visceral scene of Ame committing self-harm, and the game doesn’t end there; the stat bar receives a new cap, increasing its maximum level by 40 points ( Needy Streamer Overload ). Rather than reprimanding them, then, the game itself raises the player’s threshold for violence and egg them on into harming Ame even more, symbolizing how streamers’ self-worth is gradually dissolved by the pursuit of arbitrary numbers, and in turn, profit. In other words, the mitigation of Ame’s psychological trauma through the seemingly indefinite expansion of her ability to handle stress metaphorically parallels how streamers often push themselves beyond healthy emotional boundaries – utterly trapped by the system – while failing to see the reality of their situation. Consequently, the industry of streaming cements such a career as a livelihood while simultaneously being a catalyst for mental distress: adverse mental trauma is normalized as a necessary part of developing a following. If Ame’s stress is maxed out again at the new threshold of 120 points, she deletes her social media permanently and the game promptly ends ( Needy Streamer Overload ), further exemplifying the process by which the capitalistic motivations of the industry encourage streamers to push themselves until they break in the pursuit of growing their audience. In turn, the harmful consequences and massive emotional strain of streaming are labeled as a mere side effect, one which is diminished, if not entirely invisible.
Needy Streamer’s multiplier also expresses how the streaming industry sacrifices individual well-being by quantifying every aspect of a streamer’s existence as a mode of profit in a capitalist system. In keeping with the concept of the measurable subscriber goal as something to aspire to, the player finds themselves pushing Ame further and further to her limits in pursuit of this mission, a point especially exacerbated by the existence of the stream multiplier. When streaming for consecutive days, Ame’s streams receive a combo that exponentially boosts her subscriber count, invoking an intrinsic pressure to continue streaming; but in doing so, her stress levels and mental darkness drastically escalate as well ( Needy Streamer Overload ). Thus, the explicit presence of the multiplier parallels the real-world pressure placed on content creators by digital capitalism; a streamer’s regular work ethic can surge into an unhealthy obsession with the quantitative minutiae of their online existence as ingrained by their place in the industry. In other words, their internalization of the cultural values of the streaming realm – essentially, the destructive perseverance of fame – results in an all-around disregard for their health.
Of course, while operating against the commodity-focused ideologies produced by the hegemony of the live-streaming world, it’s important to acknowledge that Needy Streamer as a product itself may potentially perpetuate various hegemonies, or at least fail to communicate its significance in context. For example, the medium specificity of the product emphasizes it as a potentially hegemonic force in helping to gloss over the underlying issues at hand, rather than expose them; Needy Streamer’s revelations of mental health awareness and streamer exploitation could be subdued by the fact that it, itself, is a game. In this vein, the product could fall into the very cycle it seeks to break, wherein, for example, the streamers who suffer from the issues depicted in the game could themselves stream the game and profit off it. In turn, this hypothetical muddles Needy Streamer’s role as an agent of change due to its inherently capitalistic relationship with the industry. Put differently, what revolutionary message may be encoded within the game runs the risk of never being decoded by its audience due to the medium through which it is communicated. However, on the contrary, the fact that the game is likely to be consumed largely by an audience familiar with Internet culture means that its message will likely resonate in the way that the developers intended: as an “arena of… resistance” (Hall 192) to the streaming industry rather than an avenue for its hegemonic ideals.
So, ultimately, while Needy Streamer is a product and to some degree operates within the inherent power structures of its realm, it undeniably functions as a site of struggle exposing the capitalistic underbelly of live streaming and its adverse effects on the live streaming community. As a meta-commentary, Needy Streamer fights on the front lines of the “battlefield” (Hall 187) of culture in exposing the toxic construction of the streaming sphere, including the sacrifice of emotional well-being in the name of profit. As a piece of popular culture, the game communicates the necessity of generating awareness around issues that plague the streaming community through its efforts to defamiliarize players with the unconscionable conventions of Internet streaming culture. Whether by its exploration of visual aesthetics through color palette, character design, and behavioral animations, or its dive into gaming mechanics like stream content, the system of quantified emotion, and the stream multiplier, Needy Streamer Overload decisively conveys the coerced construction of streamers as industry players under digital capitalism and inspires gamers to see past the facade the next time they watch their favorite Internet personality.
Works Cited
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular.’” Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies. Edited by David Morley, Duke University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478002413-018.
Needy Streamer Overload. Windows PC version, WSS Playground, 2022.
Oh, Youjeong. “Image Producers: The (Re)Production of K-Pop Idols.” Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place. Cornell University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501755538.003.0004.
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