The focus of this writing project is to look at the role of women in gaming communities, may it be from playing video games, watching gaming streams, or competing in professional video game competitions. This experiment will look at women watching gaming streams, because this community is easily accessible.
In this experiment, I want to look at community engagement between female and male game streamers on twitch.tv. In order to run this experiment, I need to have a relationship with the streamers (which I do not have, so I cannot actually run this experiment). I will create a twitch extension that polls the users for their basic demographics, and also build a chat scraper to see how often a given user engages in that community, may it be through donating, subscribing, or simply posting on twitch chat.
I want to run this experiment on top streamers in order to have a lot of data, and potentially variation in that data as well. I will select four streamers, two male and two female, and ask them to run the survey and run the scraper at the same times, where one pair of male and female will be running it in the mornings, and the other will be running it in the evenings. This is to ensure that there is variation in viewership, since most students are in school during the day. I will run this experiment for an entire week to also look at the difference between working hours and non-working hours.
My hypothesis is that female streamers will have more female viewers on average, and male streamers will have more younger viewers on average. From the female viewers that I have viewed, they tend to not only focus on the game play, but sometimes also talk about other things such as relationships and have a more welcoming community. On the other hand, the male streamers focus on having game play on their stream all the time, and play with fellow male streamers as well, which creates a sense of a bro-centric-culture. There is also the issue of male players being afraid of playing with female players because of potential controversies and potential rifts in their current relationships.
After gathering basic demographics and scraping community engagement, I will simply run data analysis such as a hypothesis test to see whether or not there is a significant difference in the groups of people engaged in these two different communities.

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