Abstract
This paper evaluates how live-streaming content creators use debate to hail their audience into "gamer publics," deliberative spheres shaped by the practices of gaming culture. In the wake of reactionary currents like Gamergate, dominant gaming spaces traffic racist and sexist ideation. Some live-streamers host debates using gamer vernacular in an effort to challenge that hegemony. To evaluate their content production as public practice within gaming culture, I situate my rhetorical analysis of a diverse selection of live-stream debate content within the digital attention economy of live-streaming platforms. I argue that live-stream debate content reinforces the reactionary hegemony of gamer culture by taking its politics of attention for granted. By comparing different techniques of moderation, I explain why formal systematization fails to establish sustainable deliberation among gamers. Placing content creators' arguments and chat reactions in conversation, I find that gamer publics face limitations upon their public imagination imposed by the symbolic constraints of gamer culture and the infrastructural impositions of live-streaming platforms in the attention economy. I elucidate how rhetoric should modify its appreciation of the multiple public sphere by scrutinizing the means by which participants construct, accumulate, and retain attention on digital media.