‘Everyone encounters some kind of abuse’: Stephen ‘Jorbs’ Flavall speaks out on the dark side of Twitch streaming

In his new memoir, Before We Go Live, the Twitch and YouTube star pulls back the curtain on the world of pro game streaming – and details some of the toxic behaviour he says he has witnessed

Stephen Flavall – or Jorbs as he is known on YouTube and Twitch, where he has more than 100,000 followers – rose to fame streaming strategy games such as XCOM and Slay the Spire, a game in which he has achieved several world records. He’s considered a high-ranking Twitch streamer, with a soothing monotone voice and an infectious laugh. He’s very consistent. When you watch Flavall’s Twitch channel, you know exactly what to expect: funny and cerebral anecdotes, informative strategy tips and a supportive community.

But his new memoir, Before We Go Live, does something unexpected: it pulls back the curtain on the back end of professional game streaming – which, as anyone who follows online gaming culture knows, is rife with rampant toxicity, abuse and harassment. It’s a chilling wakeup call for the industry, from the top down.

Achieving solvency as a professional streamer is no easy task. For every person on Twitch pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are hundreds of thousands of people barely making a dime. Flavall knew this when he took the leap of faith to become a pro streamer, but he pursued it anyway. “I knew that I was good at breaking things down and analysing them in ways that people could understand,” he tells me when we meet via video call. “I knew I could make content that people would enjoy if I could find an audience for it.”

Flavall has been playing games and offering commentary on them since he was a child. Growing up in New Zealand, he learned how to play chess at age three, and watched a lot of cricket – with televised commentary and stories from his father, who worked for the national cricket team. At six, Flavall was playing games of solo cricket in the back yard, commentating the whole time. He studied Classics, learning Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, reading ancient texts that are still being translated, analysed and interpreted. “I was attracted to it because it’s messy data about humanity. Those are things that I’m interested in: stories about humans and trying to make sense of it all,” he says. On his way to becoming a streamer, he found success as an online poker player, playing 3.5 million hands in three years.

In his early 20s, he posted a few YouTube videos about the notoriously difficult alien-invasion PC strategy game XCOM. Developers working on a mod for the game called Long War 2 took notice, and he was offered the chance to play an early version as a design adviser before it came out. “When [the mod] was released, all of a sudden, there was a reason for people to watch me: I was the person who knew about this new game,” he says. “I had all the strategies and understood how it was coded. That was the moment I knew I would be able to stream for a living.”

Flavall hit it big as a streamer after he began streaming Slay the Spire, a popular strategy card game from 2018 that was recognised on many game-of-the-year lists, and has been credited with launching an entire sub-genre. It’s a tricky game to play, even without self-narrating or conversing with viewers in Twitch chat: the player collects cards, potions and relics, and combines the powers they grant in order to kill a rotating slate of enemies while climbing a demonic spire to reach its toxic heart, the ultimate boss. This strategy game offers a metaphor for professional streaming: if, by chance, you can amass just the right combination of powerful resources and deploy them skilfully, you can avoid death by enemies, bosses and unfortunate events.

As he navigated the tricky economics of streaming, Flavall joined a pro esports team. In his book, he explains how such teams capitalise on the popularity of many streamers working together to “leverage collective bargaining power, hire staff who understand the space, and ideally find [their] streamers better deals for better money and from better companies. A great team might even be able to help your channel grow by throwing its brand behind it.”

But in the three years he spent with the team, Flavall was alarmed by what he perceived to be problematic behaviour he encountered from business partners, promoters, sponsors and other streamers. In one incident described in his book, Flavall was invited to the Tyson Ranch near Los Angeles for conversations about investments and sponsorships, only to discover, he alleges, an executive spending the weekend creepily isolating and hitting on a young female streamer on the company’s dime. While he was spared the worst of the it, Flavall nonetheless dealt with what he believes was boundary-crossing behaviour: “I’d have no idea whether he wanted to tell me about a new sponsor, or he was firing me, or he was upset with someone, or he needed to vent … I felt that disagreeing with any of his personal behaviour risked repercussions for my professional success.”

Something finally snapped when he says he was not paid for three months of work. He was furious. Discussing the situation with a friend and colleague, she alleged that she had endured an endless litany of sexism, disparagement and harassment from individuals within the team, as well as other streamers. This conversation became the foundation for the book. “What struck me – what made me write the book – was that these people had just treated her absolutely awfully, and they did so while treating me fairly respectfully, at least on a surface level.”

While writing his book, Flavall interviewed 30 other streamers, testing his hypothesis that however bad he’d had it, it was worse for women in the gaming world. It was, by far. “Every single woman I talked to had encountered some form of abuse,” Flavall says, “whether it was a microaggression at a tournament when they went to collect their prize money, or being threatened or sexually harassed when they streamed.”

Misogyny in the gaming world is a longstanding problem, stretching back to 2014’s Gamergate harassment campaign and far beyond. Female streamers and competitive players have shared many stories about it in recent years; some base aspects of their streaming personality around fighting back against the sexism they encounter, and some let their skills speak for them. Before We Go Live implicates the whole industry. Along with his friend’s allegations, it also recounts the stories of Hearthstone players Pathra and Nicholena, who experienced barrages of insults during tournaments, threats on social media and being shunned after rejecting romantic advances by managers.

With all of this rampant abuse, what would Flavall want to tell a young, naive would-be streamer before they dive into this difficult world? “Being a streamer – or a ‘content creator’ – is an idea that has been created by companies like YouTube,” he says. “If something’s just ‘content’, then you can put ads on it, and you don’t have to think about what the content actually is. I’ve never really been a streamer. I am a strategy gamer and a storyteller. If Twitch went down overnight, I would still be a strategy gamer and a storyteller. I’d find a different job doing something to do with strategy, games and storytelling. Twitch TV … just happens to be somewhere where I create my work right now.”

Ultimately, Flavall does not fear retaliation from the bad actors called out in his book. He wanted to use his platform to make the world of streaming a better place. “The story felt like it had to be told,” he says. “If someone wants to come after me, they’re not going to break me down more than other people have. I have my community behind me. I was in a situation where I felt like I had to stand up for myself, and for my friends.”

In some ways, writing a book offered closure. “There was a separation of the psyche that started to happen when I was in front of an audience for so many hours a week, pretending that everything is OK, when it obviously wasn’t,” he says. “During the pandemic, that separation of my psyche was genuinely difficult. I had to repair that for myself, and healing was more important than the idea that other people might hurt me if I spoke out.”

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