Toward a Twitch Research Toolkit: A Systematic Review of Approaches to Research on Game Streaming

The rise of game streaming services has driven a complementary increase in research on such platforms. As this new area takes shape, there is a need to understand the approaches being used in the space, and how common practices can be shared and replicated between researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds. In this paper, we describe a formal literature review of game streaming research. Papers were coded for their research focus, primary method, and type of data collected. Across the prior work we found three common themes: (1) work that is readily supported by existing technical infrastructure, (2) work that does not require explicit technical support, (3) and work that would benefit from further technical development. By identifying these needs in the literature, we take the first step toward developing a research toolkit for game streaming platforms that can unify the breadth of methods being applied in the space.