=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-2637/paper13 |storemode=property |title=Snapchat streaks: How adolescents metagame gamification in social media |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2637/paper13.pdf |volume=Vol-2637 |authors=Dayana Hristova,Joseph Dumit,Andreas Lieberoth,Thomas Slunecko |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/gamifin/HristovaDLS20 }} ==Snapchat streaks: How adolescents metagame gamification in social media== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2637/paper13.pdf
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                              Snapchat streaks: How adolescents metagame
                                      gamification in social media

                         Dayana Hristova1, Joseph Dumit2, Andreas Lieberoth3 and Thomas Slunecko1
                                                    1 University of Vienna, Austria
                                                2 University of California, Davis, USA
                                                   3 Aarhus University, Denmark

                                               dayana.hristova@univie.ac.at



                            Abstract. This paper presents strategies that Viennese adolescents use to up-
                            hold snap streaks – a gamified challenge on Snapchat inviting users to exchange
                            at least one snap each 24 hours to keep the score. This gamification feature
                            strongly impacts the communication practice of adolescents, both with regard to
                            its temporality and its content. In order to secure the timed reciprocal exchange
                            with their streak partner, adolescents would resort to so called streak snaps –
                            impersonal pictures with reduced content that are sent solely for the purpose of
                            upholding the streak. Three partially overlapping subcategories of streak snaps
                            are outlined: mass snaps, “good morning” or “good night” snaps, and black pic-
                            tures. Their main characteristics and role in perpetuating the gamified challenge
                            on Snapchat are discussed with regard to reciprocity and metagaming. More
                            specifically, the impact of these metagaming strategies on adolescents’ commu-
                            nication, as well as their relevance for social media design, is discussed in de-
                            tail.

                            Keywords: Snapchat, Snap Streaks, gamification, social media, reciprocity,
                            mass snaps, black snaps, metagaming


                     1      Introduction

                     Gamification elements have been gaining influence in a broad variety of domains
                     [1,2], their presence also shaping the face of online media [3,4]. Notably, social media
                     have been dynamically evolving towards interface elements that could be classified as
                     gamification. This has been particularly relevant in the case of Snapchat – a social
                     media based on ephemeral content that allegedly enables a more private and personal
                     communication [5,6] than other platforms. In practice, users send images and videos,
                     which immediately disappear from recipients’ devices after being viewed. Recent
                     analyses indicate that Snapchat, which has over 203 billion daily active users as of
                     2019 [7], has become ever more heavily gamified [3] including features such as
                     points, rewards, feedback and challenges among others.
                        One of the most influential features of Snapchat are “Snap Streaks”: a relational
                     score that signifies how many days in a row two users have been sending each other
                     snaps (pictures or videos). Hristova and colleagues [3] have pointed out that streaks




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                     are a variation of the gamification element, i.e. points, adapted to thrive in the novel
                     context of ephemeral social media. In other words, this form of gamification quanti-
                     fies the regular online interaction of two users despite the fact that its content has
                     disappeared. In essence, streaks are used to gamify Snapchat’s “core loop” [8]: users’
                     reciprocal exchange of snaps that is here understood as a symbolic exchange [9,10].
                     Once a streak has been established, a series of well-known psychological processes
                     including a wish to reciprocate [11] and loss aversion [12] are likely to increase its
                     cognitive and emotional salience. Pelaprat and Brown argue that “online life is replete
                     with […] exchanges through digital objects” [10] that manifest reciprocity and there-
                     by transform individual users into constituents of social relations. As a result, this
                     relational score has been hailed by user communities, and especially by adolescents
                     [13] for whom “even mundane networked experiences may exert meaningful influ-
                     ences on well-being” [14].
                        Streaks also impose a temporal constraint on reciprocity: exchanging at least one
                     snap each 24 hours. Keeping a streak alive requires ongoing effort on both partners’
                     sides: daily attention and time devoted to it which may foster solidarity and intimacy
                     based on the shared responsibility to reciprocate the relation [10]. Furthermore, since
                     users cannot fake the achievement and it only takes one mistake to lose a streak,
                     streaks can be understood as a costly signal [15]. Research has found that reciprocity
                     decays over time [16], hence, as a gamification element, streaks will probably always
                     be at odds with the natural processes of human interaction. The difficulty of uphold-
                     ing a streak together over long periods crucially adds to the perceived value of unusu-
                     ally long streaks creating a sense of “mutuality and pride” [10].
                        While the streak rules are rather simple, they have spawned a complex net of inter-
                     action practices that has not initially been foreseen. Slunecko [17] argues that any
                     media can only be understood in the context of the actual practice with it. The specific
                     ways of engaging psychologically and behaviorally with the predesigned set of con-
                     straints can find different expressions: e.g. re-thinking and tweaking predesigned
                     affordances, challenging them or opening new ones. This paper presents an analysis
                     of Viennese adolescents’ social practices with streaks as they unfold in the daily in-
                     volvement with others. We present three strategies adolescents use in response to the
                     gamification element that allow them to sustain a streak and analyze these strategies
                     in the context of reciprocity and metagaming [18].


                     2      Methods

                     We conducted two series of qualitative interviews at three Viennese high schools in
                     2018 and 2019 (n=26) as a part of a research project1 on adolescents’ use of social
                     media [19, 20]. The analyzed data is a subset (n=7, 14-18 years old, female = 4) of
                     this larger set and includes individuals who have experience with streaks to the date
                     of the interview or in the past. Informants were recruited through school teachers who
                     allowed for the individual interviews (60-90 minutes) to be carried out in a separate


                     1 Funded by a DOC-team scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.




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                     school room during their class. Participation was voluntary and a signed parent con-
                     sent form was collected from each informant. Adolescents were asked about their
                     knowledge, techniques and experience with social media using a semi-structured ap-
                     proach. All subjects were anonymized using pseudonyms. The interviews were coded
                     and analyzed in Atlas.ti [21] using a modified grounded theory approach [22,23]. This
                     method is limited in its reliance on reported experience, but allows for similar state-
                     ments to be located across subjects. In this manner we were able to identify individual
                     attitudes and strategies related to specific social media uses which were then used as
                     the basis for iterative thematic grouping. The interviews were carried out in German
                     and relevant quotes were translated to English for the purposes of this publication.


                     3      Results: “Streak snaps”

                     The practice of maintaining streaks has or had been a part of the daily routine of our
                     informants. Although most adolescents were reluctant to admit the importance of
                     streaks for their social life, the in-depth interviews about their daily streak practice
                     revealed their active and emotional involvement with this gamification element. Snap
                     streaks seem to polarize the opinions of our informants, some of whom held contra-
                     dictory feelings toward their own involvement. For example, Benny (15, m) claimed
                     that despite of him actively keeping streaks (as high as 400-days-long), they are “not
                     important” for him. However, later he called the case of almost losing his streaks
                     when banned from the phone by his parents an “emergency”.
                        Central to our discovery of “metagaming” [18] – used here in the sense of “tricking
                     the game” - in streaks, the interviews revealed a pool of daily strategies helping ado-
                     lescents to play and to game the streak game. This paper focuses on a major set of
                     techniques that our informants label “streak snaps” (Petra, 18, f). Elise (15, f) defines
                     them as snaps sent “just in order to build up streaks”. Since the primary goal of these
                     snaps is to uphold a streak, the content (or the lack of it) shared through them is often
                     not informative or exciting. Informants commonly see “streak snaps” as opposed to
                     normal snaps that build up an authentic personal conversation that is about something.
                     Anna (16, f) was offended by her streak partner only sending her streak snaps and
                     never involving in a personal communication, e.g. by asking her how she is feeling.
                     Filip (15, m) also prefers to snap with his friends “back-and-forth for hours rather
                     than just for the streak”. It is a wide-spread opinion among our informants that they
                     are motivated to keep streaks just with people with whom they enjoy communicating
                     otherwise, too. In other words, the gamified content by itself represents a diluted psy-
                     chological experience of a snap that attains a new valorization in the context of nu-
                     merical streaks, but only makes sense as an addition to genuine personal snap-
                     relationship with the collaborator others.
                        The interviewed adolescents commonly keep streaks with several persons (often 10
                     and more) which, in practice, means that they receive multiple streak snaps with lim-
                     ited content daily. For this reason, another informant - Petra - stopped maintaining
                     streaks. She was irritated that streaks have a negative impact on the communication
                     with her friends: “actually, we still snap every day: what we do is sharing funny pic-




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                     tures and even funnier videos but when we had a streak, we partially used to take
                     pictures of the table and send them”. Petra explains that her main motivation for giv-
                     ing up streaks is that she would otherwise be receiving many more routine streak
                     snaps bereft of meaning.
                        According to our emerging analysis, the streak snaps that our informants use daily
                     to “game the streak game” can be grouped into the following partially overlapping
                     themes: mass snaps, “Good morning” or “Good night” snaps, and black pictures.

                     3.1    Mass snaps
                     “Mass snaps” are streak snaps sent to multiple users - commonly to all streak partners,
                     be them one’s friends or just acquaintances. The strategy of creating just one snap and
                     sending it to multiple others significantly reduces the time and effort of maintaining
                     streaks. Mass snaps usually hold impersonal and trivial content, typically featuring
                     pictures of shoes and the floor, food or the surroundings though their visual content is
                     not fixed. When adolescents receive a picture that contains no personal message, it is
                     often suspected of being a mass snap that, hence, does not require a specific answer.
                     If one holds a streak with the sender of such a snap, the seemingly meaningless digital
                     item is made sense of as a token of gamified exchange. As such, mass snaps are read
                     as a sign that one further wishes to reciprocate the streak relation.
                        Yet, in some cases there may be ambiguity as to whether the snap is supposed to
                     deliver information or whether it is simply a streak snap. To address this issue, some
                     adolescents, like Nina (16, f) and Filip, would write “streak” or “mass snap” on their
                     snap to define the intended function of the digital item sent. This meta-comment is to
                     establish the nature of the snap as just upholding the gamification function: the mes-
                     sage is deprived of content apart from a self-referential remark about its intended
                     medial function. It grants the sender’s action legitimacy “so that he [the recipient]
                     knows it’s a mass snap and does not think that it’s just some weird snap” (Filip). This
                     allows for a shared meta-awareness of involving with each other in a gamified manner
                     instead of through a content-oriented communication.
                        Despite the fact that our informants create and broadcast mass snaps on a daily ba-
                     sis, they often report perceiving them as “unnecessary” (Petra) and “pointless” (Nina).
                     Filip also complains that mass snaps are “so not creative“, but he integrates this
                     recognition in his own practice of composing. He attempts making them more inter-
                     esting through GIFs, jokes or funny stickers. His reported goal is to avoid sending
                     mass snaps that would “bore” him if he would be the receiver. In this, Filip composes
                     them with pride and a reciprocal sense of mutuality. Indeed, while mass snaps reduce
                     the complexity of streak maintenance, they often turn into a stream of “unnecessary”
                     spam for the recipient.

                     3.2    Good morning/ good night snaps
                     According to our informants, these snaps have a nearly fixed text content - “good
                     morning” (“GM”) and “good night” (“GN”/ “GN8”) (fig. 1a,1b) - and temporality. As
                     the names suggest, they are sent in the morning or in the evening and can be e.g. pic-
                     tures taken from bed or black pictures adorned with stickers, time stamps or augment-




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                     ed-reality (AR) items. This more fixed rhythmic and content structure makes it easier
                     for our informants to uphold streaks as it reduces the complexity of remembering to
                     snap for streaks. For example, among our participants Nina prefers sending GN snaps,
                     and Elise - GM snaps, though she shared that she occasionally also sends GN snaps in
                     addition to her normal snap communication with her friends.
                        On the receiver’s end, GN and GM snaps commonly build up large portions of the
                     content users daily receive on Snapchat and can be best described as impersonal
                     greetings, sent to multiple users, that require no direct answer. For streak holders,
                     GM/ GN snaps are not merely anticipated but rather expected on a daily basis. Ado-
                     lescents reveal knowing about others’ routines and when to expect snaps from differ-
                     ent people. For example, Elise says: “when it comes to most of my contacts, I know
                     when they snap”. Her routine is to snap in the morning but she says about her contact
                     that “some snap only around noon”. Elise also explains that “some [friends] sleep
                     much longer than [her] on the weekend”. Her statement hints at her familiarity with
                     others’ daily routines and at her awareness of their impact on streak snaps’ temporal
                     signatures. In this manner, despite their impersonality, they form the basis of recipro-
                     cal intimacy.




                           Fig. 1. Streak snaps: a) Good night snap, b) Black picture GN snap, c) Black picture

                     3.3    Black snaps
                     Black snaps are a specific common strategy to quickly produce and send a streak snap
                     without visual content. Adolescents make them e.g. by covering the phone camera
                     with a finger and then taking a picture (Nina). User can then leave the “black camera
                     picture” (Filip) blank (fig. 1c) or add ornamentation such as text or stickers (fig. 1b).
                     Black snaps may be sent to multiple people or to single contacts. For example, Nina
                     who strongly dislikes black pictures says that she would send one to a single streak
                     partner if the time was running out and the streak is endangered. Similarly, Petra
                     states that it is only appropriate to send a black picture “within a conversation” when
                     both users are aware that the black picture is for the purpose of streak maintenance.




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                        When asked about black snaps, Petra reports having used them because she had
                     “tried everything” in order to keep her streaks. She also shares making black pictures
                     when she had to snap for her streak but “had no good photo, or was in the bathroom,
                     or didn’t want to send a photo right now”. In other words, she resorted to black pic-
                     tures when she either did not have good content or did not want to share content but
                     had to snap to uphold the gamification challenge. Black snaps commonly come across
                     as “not creative” (Filip) and may be perceived as annoying by recipients as in the case
                     of Nina, Filip and Petra. Adolescents report that they dislike receiving black pictures
                     too often and hence resort to “quickly clicking [them] away” (Filip). This response is
                     common as they are impersonal and require no specific answer. Furthermore, when
                     the user has streaks with many others she commonly receives and has to view a wave
                     of black pictures on a daily basis. The fact that the user continues to send and goes
                     through these black snaps is itself form of reciprocal solidarity.


                     4      Discussion

                     To sum up, all of the aforementioned subtypes of streak snaps: reduce the time and
                     effort for keeping streaks; have limited content; are impersonal and often sent to mul-
                     tiple others; require no specific answer; are understood as a gamified item rather than
                     as a message; are perceived as not creative and annoying if overused. They differ in
                     the degree to which they are unambiguously recognized as gamified items or can still
                     be confused for a content-carrying message. These results will be discussed in the
                     context of reciprocity, gamification and metagaming.

                     4.1    Metagaming gamification
                     Viewing streak snaps as the inventive response to the gamification’s daily require-
                     ment to snap can be seen via Goodhart’s Law [24,25], by which any index that is
                     subject to pressure (regulatory, or here, gamification), quickly no longer functions as
                     a meaningful sign in its original capacity. The length of a streak no longer signals the
                     quality of a relationship between two users, but the extent to which they reciprocally
                     care about streaks and their ability to use hacks to metagame it [18].
                         Streak snaps, as opposed to regular communication, are one approach to “gaming
                     the system” by making snaps that are game-thinking and exchange placeholders rather
                     than content carriers. Our data shows that this active response to the time pressure
                     introduced by the gamification element is the users’ attempt to reduce the time and
                     effort needed for streak maintenance. In other words, streaks’ having-to-snap (as op-
                     posed to wanting-to-snap) every day introduce a challenge that the users decide to
                     simplify by reducing the time and effort needed for keeping the streak using various
                     strategies that are learned and recognized within the community of practice.
                         Mass snaps reduce the time for streak maintenance since the user needs to invest
                     time into making one snap (of a better or poorer quality) and send it to multiple users,
                     rather than producing 20 individual snaps each day. The “good morning/ night” snaps
                     (if used as mass snaps) can reduce the effort even further as the approximate time of
                     snapping as well as the text aspect of their content are pre-defined. Both, the text and




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                     the time for snapping may vary slightly from day to day but it provides a rhythmic
                     and formalized form of upholding one’s streaks and performing solidarity. Black
                     pictures are an even more significant content reduction since the visual content, pos-
                     sibly with the exception of text or stickers, is reduced to almost to the minimum of
                     metadata generated.
                        The three types of streak snaps identified here can be seen as examples of met-
                     agaming in the sense used by Boluk & Lemieux [18], in which players invent new
                     ways of playing the game within the games affordances. Furthermore, individual
                     “players” approach the streak challenge in different ways such as introducing new
                     goals, meaning or metagames. Streak snaps are emergent techniques for daily “suc-
                     cess in the streak game” and maintenance of reciprocal relationship by using the tech-
                     nology’s core affordances but not exactly playing by the rules.

                     4.2    Communication vs. gamification
                     In the case of the aforementioned strategies, streaks’ gameful nature is gaining an
                     increasing value, potentially, at the expense of the content exchanged through snaps.
                     In other words, the designed medium gamification, sometimes, expands at the ex-
                     pense of Snapchat medium’s “core loop” of sending content-based messages. Petra
                     sums up: “In my opinion, when it comes to streaks it is important that we snap and
                     not what we snap about. That’s why it doesn’t matter what’s in the snap – if it’s per-
                     sonal or impersonal, or a mass snap, or you name it. Main thing is that we keep the
                     streak”. At this point, McLuhan’s [26] probably most notorious argument comes to
                     mind: “the medium is the message”. In the case of streak snaps, the exchanged con-
                     tent is reduced to a minimum and, as a result, users’ metagaming response to gamifi-
                     cation becomes the main token of communication. Streak snaps also waive some
                     basic communication rules, such as sending a content-specific answer in a timely
                     manner, because the sent item contains no personal message and was probably sent to
                     multiple others. However, while a black picture might at first occur contentless, with-
                     in the context of gamified communication, similarly to backchannels (such as “uh
                     huh” or nodding among conversation partners [27]), it signals a general desire to con-
                     tinue involving with the partner. The reciprocal relation of streak maintenance, hence,
                     seems to be primarily based not on sharing content, but on the gamified exchange of
                     digital items.
                        According to Pelaprat and Brown, introducing virtual rewards can potentially dis-
                     rupt systems of online reciprocity and appreciation exchange between users […]. In
                     the case of streaks, if a person identifies that their streak partner is more interested in
                     the point reward (the streak counter) than in the relation between the two users, the
                     gamified exchange may start to be perceived as pointless. Some of our informants
                     actively stopped keeping streaks with individuals who seem to care just about the
                     streak count and not about the relation to the person. Among friends, streak snaps are
                     sent in addition to non-gamified communication, rather than instead of it. Petra re-
                     ports: “I would send mass snaps partially for the streaks, and if it is a friend of mine, I
                     would also send the videos that I am sending now anyway. So I’d do both”. While
                     gamification can be an intriguing way to relate to others if practiced as an expansion
                     of symbolic exchange and interpersonal relations, a stand-alone gamified exchange




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                     may resemble trade-like transactions and, hence, lose its relational value. As previ-
                     ously mentioned, some adolescents stopped keeping streaks with their friends because
                     they perceived that a gamification-focused goal-oriented mindset had highjacked the
                     quality of their online communication.
                        The imperative and shared responsibility to snap daily produces numerous met-
                     agaming items with reduced content. Although these “metagaming snaps” are place-
                     holder signals for the continuation of gameful exchange and the mediated social rela-
                     tionship, they are commonly perceived as less valuable than “real snaps”. However,
                     inversely, the streak snaps “inflation” increases the value of “real snaps” that are sent
                     between friends. Gamification, hence, paradoxically prompts more appreciation for
                     playful (but not gameful or goal-oriented) communication among users. While our
                     informants discussed their differentiation of the two types of snaps, social communi-
                     cation always remains tricky. They sometimes have trouble deciding if a snap is just a
                     gamification item or not. In turn, they sometimes take care to make sure that their
                     streak snaps are received as such: writing “streak” on a black picture so that it is un-
                     derstood as coming from an expedient need, and can serve as metacommuncation.


                     4.3    Metagaming by design
                     As discussed in previous literature [3,4], gamification elements are used in social
                     media to involve users to spend more time and to generate content on their platforms.
                     Metagaming offers an entry into understanding how users interact with and redefine
                     the behavioral affordances offered by social media designers. This is crucial for user
                     agency and recognizing their role in not simply “playing by the rules” but in re-
                     inventing them in interaction with the design elements offered by social media.
                        However, even as the players find metagaming pleasant (in reducing time and ef-
                     fort) or frustrating (in receiving “meaningless” snaps), the gamification designers can
                     be said to have succeeded in intensifying involvement. Streaks can be understood as a
                     “game format as means to achieve economies of action” [28] that attempt to steer
                     users towards specific behaviors benefiting attention economy players. For example,
                     Streaks encourage users to both generate content daily and to spend more time with
                     Snapchat, thereby also increasing the app’s stickiness [29]. Streaks tie series of small-
                     er “game atoms” or “core loops” together in order to prolong “game” play [8]. As
                     Lieberoth and collegues [30] have discussed, rather than inventing core behaviors (in
                     this case, the sharing of ephemeral content), inserting streaks into the Snapchat inter-
                     face adds a metagame structure running across instances of snapping, in order to get
                     people to repeat certain behaviors. Adolescents may ‘play’ with the app in unforeseen
                     ways, but at the same time the app still ‘plays’ with them – a principle coined by
                     Slunecko [17] as ‘dynamic constitution’ – in that it is further expanding its penetra-
                     tion and ‘air time’ rate. In other words: even the exchange of pictures with a reduced
                     content is in the interest of the gamification designers who are commissioned to create
                     digital infrastructure serving global attention economy stakeholders. Metadata (e.g.,
                     the sender and recipient, the time or location of sending or viewing content) is a valu-
                     able resource for the “extraction” [28] objectives of social media companies. It is,




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                     hence, important to note that the metagaming described in this paper does not indicate
                     that thereby agency is totally transferred to the side of the adolescents but instead
                     unfolds in the interplay between users’ practice and the social media companies seek-
                     ing to engage their attention for as long as possible.


                     5      Conclusion
                     The streaks gamification feature has a strong impact on the ways our informants
                     communicate, both with regard to the temporality and the content of their exchange.
                     In particular, Snapchat streaks create specific temporal demands on reciprocity and
                     these constraints prompt adolescents to reshape their peer-to-peer-communication and
                     the manner in which they seize the gamification affordances of the app. The most
                     striking ‘solution’ are the so-called streak snaps – a type of snaps exchanged to up-
                     hold streaks with less effort and time at the expense of being largely bereft of content.
                     We would suggest for future research to observe interaction patterns over time and to
                     investigate streaks’ impact user experiences and reciprocal relations. We also encour-
                     age designers to use research on metagaming practices within social media – in their
                     resilience, creativity and versatility as documented in this work – to create ethically
                     sound social media affordances that enable reciprocal relations based on recognition
                     between users [10].


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