research-article

Speedrunning for Charity: How Donations Gather Around a Live Streamed Couch

Authors:

Stephen Tsung-Han Sher,

Norman Makoto SuAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Article No.: 48, Pages 1 - 26

https://doi.org/10.1145/3359150

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Games Done Quick (GDQ) is both a week-long video game speedrunning marathon and a successful charity event, raising more than $1.5 million USD in each of its past five events. To understand GDQ's success as an online charity event, we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with GDQ speedrunners, attendees, hosts, and online viewers, analyzed past donation data, and conducted 72 hours of in-person participant observations at a live GDQ event. We found that central to every GDQ event is "the couch" which reconstructs the environment of a living room. Viewers do not simply donate to support the charity or in response to the technical prowess and ingenuity of speedrunners, but to actively interact with and be part of the couch experience, the ideal social milieu of speedrunning. Building upon previously identified motivations of why viewers donate to online live streamers, our work contributes to understanding how collocated gatherings can reinforce and amplify the cultural and social aspects of online subcultures (even heterogeneous ones) to encourage charitable giving. This opens opportunities for design that evoke a visceral level of engagement with charity events similar to that observed at GDQ.

References

[1]

Tim Althoff and Jure Leskovec. 2015. Donor Retention in Online Crowdfunding Communities: A Case Study of DonorsChoose.Org. In Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '15). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland, 34--44. https://doi.org/10.1145/2736277.2741120

Digital Library

[2]

Christopher Brewer. 2017. Born to Run: A Grounded Theory Study of Cheating in the Online Speedrunning Community. Master's Thesis. University of Southern Mississippi. https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/311

[3]

Kelly Caine. 2016. Local Standards for Sample Size at CHI. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 981--992. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858498

Digital Library

[4]

Ruoxun Chen, Aditya More, Marshall Robbins, and Dou Tian. 2018. Small Donation - Big Impact: Visualizing Charitable Donations. In Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, SDC07:1--SDC07:6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3180644

Digital Library

[5]

Lucas Cook and Sean Duncan. 2016. "Any% No Sketch Glitch": Speedrunning Final Fantasy VI and Expanding "Well Played". Well Played Journal, Vol. 5, 2 (2016), 173 -- 189. http://press.etc.cmu.edu/index.php/product/well-played-vol-5-no-2/

[6]

Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2014. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory 4 ed.). SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, CA.

[7]

Luke Cuddy. 2011. Halo and Philosophy: Intellect Evolved .Open Court Publishing, Chicago, IL.

[8]

Kathleen M. DeWalt and Billie R. DeWalt. 2011. Participant Observation: A Guide for Fieldworkers. Rowman Altamira, Lanham, Maryland, USA.

[9]

Discord. 2018. Discord - Company. https://discordapp.com/company

[10]

Travis Faas, Lynn Dombrowski, Alyson Young, and Andrew D. Miller. 2018. Watch Me Code: Programming Mentorship Communities on Twitch.Tv. Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, Article 50 (2018), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274319

[11]

Facebook. 2019. Create a fundraiser for yourself or someone else, or another cause that's important to you. https://www.facebook.com/fundraisers/

[12]

Bernadette Flynn. 2003. Geography of the Digital Hearth. Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 6, 4 (Dec 2003), 551--576. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118032000163259

[13]

Bent Flyvbjerg. 2006. Five Misunderstandings About Case-Study Research. Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 12 (2006), 219--245. Issue 2. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800405284363

[14]

Jeremy Goecks, Amy Voida, Stephen Voida, and Elizabeth D. Mynatt. 2008. Charitable Technologies: Opportunities for Collaborative Computing in Nonprofit Fundraising. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 689--698. https://doi.org/10.1145/1460563.1460669

[15]

Oliver L. Haimson and John C. Tang. 2017. What Makes Live Events Engaging on Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 48--60. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025642

[16]

William A. Hamilton, Oliver Garretson, and Andruid Kerne. 2014. Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play Within Live Mixed Media. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1315--1324. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557048

Digital Library

[17]

Kaitlin Elizabeth Hilburn. 2017. Transformative Gameplay Practices: Speedrunning Through Hyrule. Master's Thesis. University of Texas at Austin. https://doi.org/10.15781/T2707X496

[18]

Gary Hsieh and Rafał Kocielnik. 2016. You Get Who You Pay for: The Impact of Incentives on Participation Bias. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 823--835. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819936

Digital Library

[19]

Jialun "Aaron" Jiang and Svetlana Yarosh. 2016. Why Do Teammates Hate Me? Cross-Cultural Tensions and Social Dynamics in Online Games. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing Companion (CSCW '16 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 301--304. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818052.2869087

Digital Library

[20]

Lucas Kempe-Cook, Stephen Tsung-Han Sher, and Norman Makoto Su. 2019. Behind the Voices: The Practice and Challenges of Esports Casters. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3290605.3300795

Digital Library

[21]

Jennifer G. Kim, Ha Kyung Kong, Karrie Karahalios, Wai-Tat Fu, and Hwajung Hong. 2016. The Power of Collective Endorsements: Credibility Factors in Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4538--4549. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858289

Digital Library

[22]

Yi-Chieh Lee, Chi-Hsien Yen, Po-Tsung Chiu, Jung-Tai King, and Wai-Tat Fu. 2018. Tip Me!: Tipping is Changing Social Interactions on Live Streams in China. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article LBW533, 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188543

Digital Library

[23]

Games Done Quick LLC. 2019. Speedrunning Marathons for Charity. https://gamesdonequick.com/

[24]

Danielle Lottridge, Frank Bentley, Matt Wheeler, Jason Lee, Janet Cheung, Katherine Ong, and Cristy Rowley. 2017. Third-wave Livestreaming: Teens' Long Form Selfie. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3098540

Digital Library

[25]

Zhicong Lu, Michelle Annett, Mingming Fan, and Daniel Wigdor. 2019. "I Feel It is My Responsibility to Stream": Streaming and Engaging with Intangible Cultural Heritage Through Livestreaming. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 229:1--229:14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300459

Digital Library

[26]

Zhicong Lu, Seongkook Heo, and Daniel J. Wigdor. 2018. StreamWiki: Enabling Viewers of Knowledge Sharing Live Streams to Collaboratively Generate Archival Documentation for Effective In-Stream and Post Hoc Learning. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, Article 112 (Nov. 2018), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274381

[27]

Grant McCracken. 1988. The Long Interview 1 ed.). SAGE Publications, Inc, Newbury Park.

[28]

Jonathan Meer. 2011. Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? Peer Pressure in Charitable Solicitation. Journal of Public Economics, Vol. 95, 7 (2011), 926--941. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpubeco.2010.11.026

[29]

Yelena Mejova, Venkata Rama Kiran Garimella, Ingmar Weber, and Michael C. Dougal. 2014. Giving is Caring: Understanding Donation Behavior Through Email. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1297--1307. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531611

[30]

Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert. 2014. The Language That Gets People to Give: Phrases That Predict Success on Kickstarter. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 49--61. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531656

Digital Library

[31]

Michael Muller, Mary Keough, John Wafer, Werner Geyer, Alberto Alvarez Saez, David Leip, and Cara Viktorov. 2016. Social Ties in Organizational Crowdfunding: Benefits of Team-Authored Proposals. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1246--1259. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819955 event-place: San Francisco, California, USA.

Digital Library

[32]

Christena Nippert-Eng. 2015. Watching Closely: A Guide to Ethnographic Observation 1 ed.). Oxford University Press, New York, NY.

[33]

Matthew Patrick and Stephanie Cordato. 2019. What They WON'T TELL YOU About Your Favorite Channels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB7C7o920zE

[34]

Anthony J. Pellicone and June Ahn. 2017. The Game of Performing Play: Understanding Streaming as Cultural Production. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4863--4874. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3025854

[35]

Lee Rainie. 2017. About 6 in 10 young adults in U. S. primarily use online streaming to watch TV. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/13/about-6-in-10-young-adults-in-u-s-primarily-use-online-streaming-to-watch-tv

[36]

Gregory D. Saxton and Lili Wang. 2014. The Social Network Effect: The Determinants of Giving Through Social Media. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Vol. 43, 5 (2014), 850--868. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764013485159

[37]

Rainforest Scully-Blaker. 2016. Re-curating the Accident: Speedrunning as Community and Practice. Master's Thesis. Concordia University Montreal. https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/982159/

[38]

Marcia Sharp. 2004. De Tocqueville Meets eBay: Giving, volunteering, and Doing Good in the New Social Sector. New Directions for Philanthropic Fundraising, Vol. 2004, 45 (2004), 85--93. https://doi.org/10.1002/pf.75

[39]

David Snyder. 2017. Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers .McFarland, Jefferson, NC.

[40]

Jacob Solomon, Wenjuan Ma, and Rick Wash. 2015. Don't Wait!: How Timing Affects Coordination of Crowdfunding Donations. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 547--556. https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675296

Digital Library

[41]

Todd Spangler. 2019. Twitch Will Let More Streamers Earn Money, After Users Spend Over $12 Million on Cheering Emoji. https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/twitch-affiliate-program-cheering-12-million-dollars-1202392024/

[42]

Samantha Stahlke, James Robb, and Pejman Mirza-Babaei. 2018. The Fall of the Fourth Wall: Designing and Evaluating Interactive Spectator Experiences. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, Vol. 10, 1 (2018), 42--62. : 10.4018/IJGCMS. 2018010103 https://doi.org/10.4018/IJGCMS.2018010103

Digital Library

[43]

Norman Makoto Su and Patrick C. Shih. 2011. Virtual spectating: hearing beyond the video arcade. In British Computer Society Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (BCS HCI'11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 269--278.

[44]

Kohei Tanaka, Murao Kazuya, Shojiro Nishio, Satoshi Tanaka, Kohei Kinoshita, Yasuhiko Minami, Tsutomu Terada, and Masahiko Tsukamoto. 2009. IT-enabled Donation Boxes to Promote Donation. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 400--403. https://doi.org/10.1145/1690388.1690471

Digital Library

[45]

Katie G. Tanaka and Amy Voida. 2016. Legitimacy Work: Invisible Work in Philanthropic Crowdfunding. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4550--4561. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858110

[46]

John C. Tang, Gina Venolia, and Kori M. Inkpen. 2016. Meerkat and Periscope: I Stream, You Stream, Apps Stream for Live Streams. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4770--4780. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858374

[47]

Twitch Tracker. 2017. Twitch Statistics and Charts. https://twitchtracker.com/statistics

[48]

SMK UraniumAnchor and jdeng. 2018. Games Done Quick Donation Tracker. https://gamesdonequick.com/tracker/

[49]

Amy Voida and Saul Greenberg. 2009. Wii All Play: The Console Game As a Computational Meeting Place. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1559--1568. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518940

Digital Library

[50]

Amy Voida, Ellie Harmon, and Ban Al-Ani. 2012. Bridging Between Organizations and the Public: Volunteer Coordinators' Uneasy Relationship with Social Computing. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1967--1976. https://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208341

Digital Library

[51]

Rick Wash and Jacob Solomon. 2014. Coordinating Donors on Crowdfunding Websites. In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 38--48. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531678 event-place: Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Digital Library

[52]

Donghee Yvette Wohn, Guo Freeman, and Caitlin McLaughlin. 2018. Explaining Viewers' Emotional, Instrumental, and Financial Support Provision for Live Streamers. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 474:1--474:13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174048

Digital Library

[53]

Adam Wojciechowski. 2009. Models of Charity Donations and Project Funding in Social Networks. In OTM Confederated International Conferences "On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems" (OTM '19 Workshops), Robert Meersman, Pilar Herrero, and Tharam Dillon (Eds.). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 454--463.

Cited By

Wang S(2024)Streaming for good: Streamer‐viewer interaction, beneficiary focus, and donation progressJournal of Philanthropy and Marketing10.1002/nvsm.184929:2Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1849
Shi YWu C(2023)The influencing factor model and empirical research of TikTok charity live streaming impact users’ online charitable donationPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.029418618:11(e0294186)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294186
Wu QSang YWang DLu Z(2023)Malicious Selling Strategies in Livestream E-commerce: A Case Study of Alibaba’s Taobao and ByteDance’s TikTokACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/357719930:3(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3577199
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Speedrunning for Charity: How Donations Gather Around a Live Streamed Couch
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications
      1. Computer games
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

Recommendations

Charity Streaming: Why Charity Organizations Use Live Streams for Fundraising
CHI PLAY '19 Extended Abstracts: Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts

Charity streaming is a novel and increasingly popular form of fundraising where content creators stream content during a fixed period of time to raise money and awareness. Many charity streams involve people playing games for a prolonged period of time. ...
Live-streaming changes the (video) game
EuroITV '13: Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Interactive TV and Video

Video games are inherently an active medium, without interaction a video game is benign. Yet there is a growing community of video game spectating that exists on the Internet, at events across the world and, in part, as traditional television ...
Making the Wii at Home: Game Play by Older People in Sheltered Housing
6th Symposium of the Workgroup Human-Computer Interaction and Usability Engineering on HCI in Work and Learning, Life and Leisure - Volume 6389

Games such as the Nintendo WiiTM are being promoted for use by all ages but there is little experience with how groups of older people integrate Wii playing into their physical and social spaces. This paper focuses on WiiTM game play by older people in ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 3, Issue CSCW

November 2019

5026 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3371885

Editors:
Airi Lampinen
Stockholm University, Sweden
,
Darren Gergle
Northwestern University, USA
,
David A. Shamma
FXPAL, USA

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 November 2019

Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
709
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)142
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)18

Reflects downloads up to 22 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wang S(2024)Streaming for good: Streamer‐viewer interaction, beneficiary focus, and donation progressJournal of Philanthropy and Marketing10.1002/nvsm.184929:2Online publication date: 8-Apr-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/nvsm.1849
Shi YWu C(2023)The influencing factor model and empirical research of TikTok charity live streaming impact users’ online charitable donationPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.029418618:11(e0294186)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0294186
Wu QSang YWang DLu Z(2023)Malicious Selling Strategies in Livestream E-commerce: A Case Study of Alibaba’s Taobao and ByteDance’s TikTokACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/357719930:3(1-29)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3577199
Bartolome ANiu S(2023)A Literature Review of Video-Sharing Platform Research in HCIProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581107(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581107
Cote ADal Cin SExelmans LMustafaj M(2022)Philanthropic, prosocial players: How game-related charity events motivate unlikely donorsNew Media & Society10.1177/1461444822113073826:8(4867-4884)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221130738
Drosos IGuo P(2022)The Design Space of Livestreaming Equipment Setups: Tradeoffs, Challenges, and OpportunitiesProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533489(835-848)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533489
Lu ZShen CLi JShen HWigdor DKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)More Kawaii than a Real-Person Live Streamer: Understanding How the Otaku Community Engages with and Perceives Virtual YouTubersProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445660(1-14)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445660
Bidwell NElsden CTrotter LHallwright JMoore SJeite-Delbridge KHarding MShaw PDavies NSpeed CVines JKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)A Right Time to Give: Beyond Saving Time in Automated Conditional DonationsProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445371(1-20)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445371
Drosos IGuo P(2021)Streamers Teaching Programming, Art, and Gaming: Cognitive Apprenticeship, Serendipitous Teachable Moments, and Tacit Expert Knowledge2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576481(1-6)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576481

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents