Game streaming is emerging as an increasingly popular form of social gaming even among non-professionals. As such, players have to adapt to the presence of a digital gaming audience consisting of people who are either synchronously or asynchronously participating in their performance and engaging with them remotely via digital media. While individuals’ experiences with physically collocated (non-digital) audiences is well-studied, it is still unclear whether digital audiences trigger similar socio-cognitive mechanisms or whether individuals process such audiences differently. The current research examined the potential impact of both synchronous and asynchronous digital gaming audiences on players’ feelings of closeness, as well as the social demand these audiences elicit, across both US and German players in two separate studies. The second study was designed as an exact replication of the first, as a robustness check. Results indicate that while players could recall details of the conversations, synchronous streaming had no impact on feelings of propinquity with, or social demand from, the audiences.

游戏流媒体正在成为一种日益流行的社交游戏形式，即使在非专业人士中也是如此。这样，玩家必须适应数字游戏观众的存在，该观众由同步或异步参与其表演并通过数字媒体与他们进行远程互动的人们组成。尽管人们对身体上并置的（非数字）受众的体验进行了充分的研究，但仍不清楚数字受众是否会触发类似的社会认知机制，或者个体对此类受众的处理方式是否不同。当前的研究在两项单独的研究中考察了同步和异步数字游戏观众对玩家亲密感的潜在影响，以及这些观众引发的社会需求。第二项研究被设计为第一个研究的精确复制，作为健壮性检查。结果表明，尽管玩家可以回忆起对话的细节，但是同步流对听众的自觉感或听众的社会需求没有影响。