The present article will contribute to the developing area of research dedicated to spoken language on the Internet, and will constitute one of the few attempts, to date, to examine the phenomenon in three different languages and across three different cultures.
While the videos share a number of similarities at the linguistic and extralinguistic level across the three cultures of interest, the creation of what the author calls personal storylines is the most salient distinguishing factor in the videos of particular vloggers. The author of the present article, by looking at selected gaming videos on YouTube in three languages, namely American English, Italian and Polish, attempts to demonstrate that this repetitiveness is in fact creative recontextualization which brings into prominence the personality of the YouTuber, their idiolect included. The stylistics of recontextualization in selected American, Italian and Polish gaming videos on YouTube One striking aspect of the popular video sharing platform YouTube is that it appears to allow for a great number of repetitive content to co-exist and still enjoy a high viewer count. It will show how the horror game genre and related media, including “Let’s play” videos, animated fanvids, and “creepypasta” stories have influenced prominent YouTuber personas and resulted in some changes in the common processes of persona formation on the platform. This paper retraces the evolution of the relationship between horror games and YouTube personas, with attention to in-game characters and gameplay mechanics on the one hand and the practices of prominent YouTube personas on the other. The games are strongly focused on horror tropes including jump scares and defenceless protagonists, which lend them to displays of overemphasised emotional reactions by YouTubers, who use them to build their online personas in a certain way. The indie survival horror game genre has given rise to some of the most famous game streamers on YouTube, especially titles likes Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games 2010), Slender: The Eight Pages (Parsec Productions 2012), and Five Nights at Freddy’s (Scott Cawthon 2014).
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