As a girl who streams on twitch and also play games with voice chat, I’ve gotten a lot of these comments from male gamers.

I have now been active on twitch for a few years and have noticed some recurring things that affect emotes, during different times of the year twitch makes special emotes, such as pride month and christmas time. Some streamers have taken on from this and also make special emotes that replace their original ones for these periods of time. The only other emote that brings awareness to something that I’ve seen is the one for black lives matter.
It is amazing that twitch and streamers on the platform are bringing awareness to the LGBTQIA+ community and the one for black lives matter, but I have recently started to wonder why these are the only topics they are bringing awareness to through emotes. Is there a way to bring up more issues through emotes?
So with all of the different comments I’ve gotten for being a female and the passion to make the gaming community more inclusive I asked myself:

Can emotes contribute to a more inclusive gaming community?

Since a big part of the gaming community hangs out on twitch and uses emotes everyday, I see emotes as a great way to communicate a lot of different topics. Emotes make it easy to express something in a fast and simple way. We have all heard the old saying “a picture says more than a thousand words” and I think it fits in well with how I want to use emotes to communicate. 

Early on I got in contact with the twitch streamer @Dodorododo, also known as Dodo. She is also very passionate about this topic and openly shares and talks about the issue in her streams and on social media. By collaborating with her and people in my own streaming community I’ve been able to have a good discussion about what emotes are missing on twitch on this topic and what “normal emotes” are used when the topic is being discussed.
With the help of my collaborators I have managed to make a collection of ten Femotes, feminist emotes to use on twitch to support minority groups of gamers, who have to deal with that kind of toxic behavior everyday.

The emotes I’ve created ended up showing a lot of important messages and have received good responses from the gaming community. For anyone to be able to add them to their twitch channel I uploaded them on BetterTTV which is an extension to your web browser. This extension is very popular and used by most users on twitch.

Emotes turn out pretty small in the chat so some of them work better than others. There are also different trends to emotes so the one that has been most popular is the ban hammer which is a common thing on twitch.

I hope my project can inspire others to make their own emotes about a subject they are passionate about. I believe that together we can make a difference through these small pictures, that get spread around on the internet.

If you have a twitch channel and want to add these emotes to your BetterTTV you can do that here.