Twitch streamer Alyska and the female gamers defying stereotypes

Alyce Rocha makes her living working from home – but she doesn’t have a normal nine to five.

Forget endless Teams meetings, she’s spent recent weeks living the (virtual) life of an ambitious Mafia upstart in 1900s Sicily.

Such is life as a video game streamer.

Known online as Alyska, she has made gaming her full-time career, by broadcasting herself playing games live, to her combined 585,000 followers.

The appeal, she says, is “sharing an experience together”.

“If you’ve played the game yourself then you want to see someone else’s reaction,” she tells the BBC’s Woman’s Hour.

Once thought of as a male-dominated pastime, today women make up around half of the game-playing public, according to the UK Games Industry Census.

Alyce says part of her role is challenging perceptions over the types of games women enjoy.

Statistics suggest women mostly play puzzle and strategy-style games. These non-violent titles, including life simulators The Sims and Animal Crossing, are often grouped under the label of “cosy gaming”.

But Alyce says she, like many women, also enjoys role-playing action and fantasy-adventure games.

“I used to hate horror games,” Alyce explains. “However, my audience loved to see me suffer, so I would play more and more, to the point I actually love them now”.

The make-up of her audience reflects this. While still predominantly male, she’s seen female viewership jump to around 10% in recent years – a small but significant increase.

Alyce earns what she describes as a “respectable” wage – even as one of the smaller names in the scene.

Not that it’s easy work. Gaming may be fun, but the challenge to not only grow, but maintain, an audience is relentless.

“I’m always grinding,” says Alyce, only recently cutting down from 12-hour days to six-hour streams, alongside morning admin, seven days a week.

She needs to juggle multiple accounts streaming on popular platforms like Twitch and YouTube, to make enough income from things like paying subscribers, revenue and partnerships.

It’s a task complicated by many platforms requiring a cut of broadcast earnings. Twitch, for example, takes half as standard.

This competitiveness reflects an industry that is now worth more than music, TV and film combined, with revenue this year projected to reach £13.7bn in the UK alone.

Although figures show young women now play games just as much as men, the streaming sector audience is still predominantly male according to YouGov. Blockbuster titles like Fifa and Call of Duty mirror this.

Frankie Ward, an eSports gamer and presenter, says this is a lot about who games are being marketed to.

“In the past gaming has kind of been this protected identity that men have held on to very strongly.

“Women are being a lot more vocal about the fact that they’re gamers, and they’re becoming a lot prouder to say so.”

In the industry, there’s also been a noticeable departure from the over-sexualised, female characters of yesteryear, toward more rounded portrayals.

Games like The Last of Us, partly moulded by writers like Halley Gross, boast layered female characters at their core. Elsewhere, Life is Strange and Bloom and Rage have woven the realities of teenage life and womanhood – from periods to sexuality and body image – into their wider narratives.

Reflecting on the shift, Alyce says there have always been women gamers, but they’ve just been “quieter about it” – until now.

“I’ve been gaming since I was a child.” she says. “I didn’t know anyone in my school who was a girl who played games, whereas now it’s so easy to find communities and streamers who are women who you can talk to and game with.”

Black Girl Gamers are one group that are bringing women together through gaming. What started out as a small Facebook group in 2015 has grown into a community of over 10,000 black female players worldwide.

Speaking to BBC Woman’s Hour, community member Iesha says that gaming with the group has helped her meet like-minded people who share her background – some of whom have become her closest friends.

“When I was younger… I didn’t know there were other black female gamers like me.

“I thought I was a bit of an anomaly. I like the fact that I’m not.

Fellow member Deanne has become a close friend. She playfully compares meeting lesha online to a “try before you buy” situation. Hours spent chatting while gaming meant they got to know each other so well that their first in-person meeting felt entirely natural.

Deanne says that gaming with the group offers her “an escape” from daily struggles, including those unique to black women. “It’s a whole universe of people who just get it; everybody understands – it gives you a calmer mindset,” she says.

This can help when dealing with the toxic elements of the wider online gaming community that persist more than a decade on from GamerGate.

Adaobi, another Black Girl Gamer, says the camaraderie buffers the times when she joins public online game sessions outside the group and faces misogynistic or racist abuse.

“I know if I turn on my mic and I open my mouth [to talk during an online game], somebody’s not going be happy with it,” she says. In response, she’s begun telling men who abuse her to simply “do better”.

Others, like Deanne, opt to mute interactions. “I just turn it off. I don’t listen to them. The scoreboard will tell everything,” she quips.

To help combat these shared negative experiences, the community has launched a ‘venting’ channel on its Discord social media platform. A safe, member-only space for discussion and support.

Gaming then, is no longer a solitary experience, but an online world that can be a positive gateway to real-world understanding and connection.

For Iesha, be it playing online with others or watching a stream, gaming has also become an emotional refuge to navigate feelings.

“Gaming has helped me through some tough times, including family loss and grief,” she says. “Some of these games allow you to experience these emotions in gentle ways.”

And, as she emphasises, the shared journey makes all the difference. “I’m going through stuff…they’re going through stuff – but we can get through it,” she says. “That’s gaming”.