| Summary: | This article focuses on video game live-streaming on Twitch and proposes to define and analyze the pragmatic functions of the chat, considered as a form of videogame noise, to show how these communication dysfunctions participate in the spectacularization of the game experience. Based on a corpus of performances originating from Antoine Daniel’s channel, the paper is divided into two parts. The first part – quantitative and methodological – mobilizes automatic language processing (NLP), more precisely a temporalized lexicographic analysis of the chat, to automatically detect and differentiate three noise profiles: ritualized forms of participation (background noise), moments of interaction between streamer and viewers (echo) and peaks of activity in the chat unlinked from the streamer’s discourse (commotion). Based on the observations permitted by this processing, a second part – qualitative – formalizes the different pragmatic functions that the chat’s noise can serve according to its contexts of appearance. Four categories are detailed: its communicative functions (to amplify, to the point of dissonance), performative functions (making community and modalizing the performance), playful functions (generating contingency) and spectacular functions (short-circuiting and preserving).
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